Lesson 1
We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where
people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even
now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to
recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers
to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about
migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they
did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian
peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people
explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.
But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their
sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor
legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.
Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, be-
cause this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood
and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of
long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.
Lesson 2
Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends ? Because they destroy so
many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human
race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would
devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection
we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat
insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed
by spiders. Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eaters, spiders never do
the least harm to us or our belongings.
Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them.
One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs
and an insect never more than six.
How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf ? One authority on
spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England, and
he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre, that is something
like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for
at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more than the
wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content
with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the in-
sects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total
weight of all the human beings in the country.
T. H. GILLESPIE Spare that Spider from The Listener
Lesson 3
Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good
sport, and the more difficult it is, the more
highly it is regarded. In the pioneering
days, however, this was not the case at all. The early climbers were looking for
the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought, especi-
ally if it had never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations
they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped
in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought, but
they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim,
a solitary goal--the top!
It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers. Ex-
cept for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly
become popular, Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off
from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were were generally
dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often
twelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no
inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the
local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shep-
herds or cheesemakers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and
poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course
dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change to the Alps
must have been very hard indeed.
Lesson 4
In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who
can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors
and walls. One case concerns an 'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who
has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her
skin, and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father. One
day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a
locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers
shudderlocked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles.
Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute
in the town of UIyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April she was given a
series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian
Federal Republic. During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through
an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of
Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in an-
other instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the
outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments
showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these
tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed, except when blindfold she lacked the
ability to perceive things with her skin. lt was also found that although she
could perceiv
e things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands
were wet.
Lesson 5
The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one
knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured,
and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history
museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scien-
tists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and
the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) link
with our ancestral past.
Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photo-
graph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid,
has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the
dark jungles in which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two
expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals he
loved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or
how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the
family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many
other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French
explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century
ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the
Himalayas is hardly more elusive.
Lesson 6
People are always talking about' the problem of youth '. If there is one--which
I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it, not the young them-
selves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all
human beings--people just like their elders. There is only one difference be-
tween an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before
him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where
the rub is.
When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was
a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded
as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives
you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged
in seeking.
I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a
dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious
social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems tO
me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some
sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.
All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited, ill-
mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary
cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect. I
accept that we
are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he
is wrong.
Lesson 7
I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill be-
tween the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet
one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on
the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936
Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies
of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.
Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win,
and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village
green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it
is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of
prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be dis-
graced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who
has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level
sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of
the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the
nations. who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously
believe--at any rate for short periods--that running, jumping and kicking a ball
are tests of national virtue.
Lesson 8
Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do, and
home has become much less of a workshop. Clothes can be bought ready made,
washing can go to the laundry, food can be bought cooked, canned or preserved,
bread is baked and delivered by the baker, milk arrives on the doorstep, meals
can be had at the restaurant, the works' canteen, and the school dining-room.
It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home,
and his children rarely, if ever, see him at his place of work. Boys are therefore
seldom trained to follow their father's occupation, and in many towns they have
a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls. The young wage-earner often
earns good money, and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence. In
textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work, but this
practice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not un-
usual factor in a child's home life, the number of married women in employment
having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. With mother earning
and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant
figure that he still was at the beginning of the century. When mother works
economic advantages accrue, but children lose something of great value if
mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they
return from school.
Lesson 9
Not all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we hav
e only to turn to
that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the
voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.
To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent
human inventions. Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or
a mountainside, an echo will come back. The further off this solid obstruction
the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping
on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom, and by measuring the
time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of the
sea at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus,
now in general use in ships. Every solid object will reflect a sound, varying ac-
cording to the size and nature of the object. A shoal of fish will do this. So it is a
comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating a shoal of
fish. With experience, and with improved apparatus, it is now possible not only
to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring, cod, or other well-known fish, by the
pattern of its echo.
A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving
the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects
on which they feed. This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar, the
principle of which is similar.
Lesson 10
In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The mani-
pulated do not understand them; the manipulators fear them. The tidy com-
mittee men regard them with horror, knowing that no pigeonholes can be found
for them. We could do with a few original, creative men in our political life--if
only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy--but where are they? We
are asked to choose between various shades of the negative. The engine is falling
to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the
handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without
ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society,
capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them.
Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appoint-
ments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them. Between mid-
night and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache,
I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of
people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not
an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe. The twin ideals
of our time, organization and quantity, will have won for ever.
Lesson 11
Alfred the Great acted as his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as a
minstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere. They
were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Al
fred had learned
many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic
tricks and simple conjuring.
While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himself
set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum, the commander of the Danish in-
vaders. These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred
went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the self-
confidence of conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. They lived
well, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collected
women as well as food and drink, and a life of ease had made them soft.
Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force
there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde. But Alfred had
deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle : and that their
commissariat had no organization, but depended on irregular raids.
So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred did not risk open battle but harried
the enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes after him. His
patrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfred
began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had sur-
rendered. The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!
Lesson 12
What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness. This
is compensated for by an outer impressiveness. Such impressiveness usually
takes the form of truly grandiose realism. Nothing is spared to make the setting,
the costumes, all of the surface details correct. These efforts help to mask the
essential emptiness of the characterization, and the absurdities and trivialities of
the plots. The houses look like houses, the streets look like streets; the people
look and talk like people; but they are empty of humanity, credibility, and moti-
vation. Needless to say, the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor
in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb
the profits, nor the entertainment value of the films; it merely helps to prevent
them from being credible. It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear.
In addition to the impressiveness of the settings, there is a use of the camera,
which at times seems magical. But of what human import is all this skill, all this
effort, all this energy in the production of effects, when the story, the representa-
tion of life is hollow, stupid, banal, childish ?
Lesson 13
Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry. The peace which Oxford once
knew, and which a great university city should always have, has been swept ruth-
lessly away; and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the
change in character which the city has suffered. At six in the morning the old
courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed
Steel, gre

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