We did have classes in physics and chemistry at the school and there was a good physics teacher who was very pedestrian, but still I mean quite sound; and a chemistry teacher who was a genius, who never taught us any chemistry but read poetry instead, because he said you get the chemistry out of books and we didn't really have enough apparatus to do real chemistry. I mean the kind of the experiments we could do would be only Mickey Mouse experiments. So he decided just to use the time to read us all the modern poetry which he was in love with, and I remember especially he was in love with Cecil Day Lewis and he read us the poems of Day Lewis which I still love. His name was Eric James, and it was extraordinary luck to have him as a teacher, because he afterwards became a great man and in fact he ended his life in the House of Lords as Baron James of Rusholme and he was the founder of the University of York and did enormous public service. But at that time he was a humble schoolmaster; because of the Depression, no doubt, he couldn't get an academic job, but he loved teaching and he gave us everything he had, which was poetry. And so my taste for literature comes very largely from him. And in the meantime, I learned chemistry from Christopher Longuet-Higgins who was already much more of an expert and more excited about chemistry than Eric James. And I remember Christopher bringing to Winchester some crystals of stannic iodide which he had made, which is the most marvelous stuff. It is a brilliant scarlet colour and it makes these beautiful scarlet crystals, and they're also extremely heavy. If you have a little bottle full of it, it feels like lead. So that kind of chemistry I found delightful, just the sort of details of the actual stuff, rather than the theory that lay behind it. I remember the joy when, here in Princeton, Willard Libby came on a visit once and brought along another little bottle of chemicals, which also was very heavy, and that was barium xenate, which was barium xenon oxide, which of course was an absolute revelation because nobody imagined that xenon could have compounds, being an inert gas. And it was sometime in the 1950s these compounds were discovered, and barium xenate is just such an ordinary stuff. It's a sort of heavy white crystals which are completely stable, they don't show any signs of anything strange and there it is. If you heat them up of course the xenon comes bubbling off.
