The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things

The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things
Tim Radford

Over the years, millions of school children must have written out their address in the same way – their house number and street, their town, their country, their continent, planet Earth, the universe…

Following this simplest of patterns, taking each line of the address as a starting point, Tim Radford explores our place in the scheme of things – why we are attached to a particular geographical place and what significance do we have when faced with the realms of astronomy and astrophysics.

Fascinating, entertaining and completely original, The Address Book tackles some of the most fundamental questions facing us, and allows us see ourselves completely afresh.

The Address Book

Our Place in the Scheme of Things

TIM RADFORD

To my family

Contents

Cover (#ud659aa30-b167-5a00-a7f9-1b6c0c6c9d89)

Title Page (#u70e546a7-58ce-5dd5-8e5a-ee37b50a9148)

Chapter One: The Number and the Street - Whose House is it Anyway?

Chapter Two: The Town - The Man from Somewhere

Chapter Three: The County - A Piece of Chalk

Chapter Four: The Country - England, Their England

Chapter Five: The Nation - How to Unite a Kingdom

Chapter Six: The Continent - An Attempt to Join Europe

Chapter Seven: The Hemisphere - A Divided World

Chapter Eight: The Planet - Down to Earth

Chapter Nine: The Solar System - Places in the Sun

Chapter Ten: The Galaxy - There Goes the Neighbourhood

Chapter Eleven: The Universe - All There is

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The Number and the Street

Whose House is it Anyway?

I miss my little midnight companion, the death watch beetle. Years ago, in the study late at night, in the spring or the autumn, I would sometimes hear him tick, three or four times in a row, like a tiny clock, calling vainly for a potential mate. Right now, it is high summer. I sit in an old study with brick floors, a rough plaster-and-beam ceiling and oak-panelled walls, obscured before me and to my right hand by oak shelves of books, journals, collections of magazine cuttings and bundles of notes; and for the most part I sit in silence. Through a window to my left hand, divided by little diamonds of lead, I can see an unruly rose, some assertive honeysuckle and some leaves of a spiky Mahonia japonica, and a few yards beyond these warring shrubs the conical tip of a clipped yew, and beyond that again, the highest branches of a silver birch, and beyond those, only a clear blue sky.

In spring, or in the early morning, I could expect to hear the clamour of a wren, the song of a blackbird or thrush, the chatter of a magpie, the murmuring of wood pigeons and collared doves or the mewing of herring gulls. But right now, this minute, with the late morning sun making patterns on the linen curtain over the window to the left of my desk, the only noise is the muted clatter of the keyboard.

The trees are mine, or rather ours, in a limited sense: for many years we nursed them in pots in the tiny garden of an outer-London home, and then carried them to this house in the snowbound winter of 1985, to plant them at the first thaw and watch them begin their push towards the sky. The room in which I sit and the house and gardens beyond it are mine – or rather ours – in the technical sense that a mortgage has been cleared, and the deeds that indicate our possession rest in the vault of a solicitor. These bits of paper establish this address, and my place in it, and seem to answer a very old and intermittently troubling question: where am I?

At the start of each school term, at the age of about ten, I did something that I suppose a million other ten-year-olds have done: I wrote my name in an exercise book, along with my house number and street. I then added the name of the suburb, and the city. Then, for good measure, I named the administrative region in which my city stood, and just to make sure, the country. And then – where did I imagine I might lose this book, and who would find it? – I wrote ‘the Earth’, and just in case that wasn’t precise enough, I added ‘the solar system’. At some point in the performance of this ritual, I decided I had better make absolutely sure, and appended the triumphant conclusion ‘the universe’. Later on – much later on – I realised that to be truly pernickety I should have also included the continent in which my country counted itself, the hemisphere I happened to be in, and the galaxy of which the Sun is but one mild little spark, before concluding with the cosmos itself, the whole bag of tricks.

Even at the time, it seemed an obsessive little ritual, but ten-year-olds are embarrassed about neither obsession nor rite. Across the interval of the decades, however, it occurs to me that it might have been my first independent search for answers to questions posed consciously and unconsciously by everyone in every culture, and in every generation: who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? To answer questions like that, you have to start somewhere. You start with the question: where am I now? Where I come from is a clue to who I am, and where I find myself is a point on a trajectory through space and time. Place is a powerful part of identity.

I have a precise postal address, but I do not know where I am. I am sitting still, but I am also hurtling eastwards at an estimated six hundred miles – more or less 1,000 kilometres, to use the internationally agreed scientific unit – an hour. On the Equator, I would be going even faster than sound: towards the dawn at a thousand miles an hour. So even when I sit at home, I am a moving target. The house in which I live is built upon solid rock, but sandstone crumbles perceptibly, and the coast upon which I live is eroding. It is also sinking. I am going down in the world. One day, the ruins of this house will ooze into the sea. The ground beneath my feet sinks and heaves and distorts with episodes of drought and flood and frost. I do not see it, but over the years I observe house doors and garden gates that almost jam, or bolts that don’t quite fit their hafts, and I conclude that the surface that underpins them has shifted again. So not only do I not know where I am, I do not always know whether I am up or down. The county in which I have made my home is a byword for respectability and order, at the southern edge of a small and densely populated temperate island in which the water runs hot and cold and the trains quite often run on time. But only a few thousand years ago, this county was part of a continent, and a few tens of thousands of years ago it was near the frontier of vast, approaching glaciers, and a few hundreds of thousands of years before that, lions and rhinoceroses roamed its grassy plains.

The climate is not the only thing that has changed: the mainland of Europe is also moving, and Britain is inching away from America at the rate that fingernails grow, and taking my home with it. I move towards the dawn because the planet is rotating on its axis, but it is also doing something else: it is whizzing around the Sun in a huge ellipse, at very roughly thirty kilometres a second. The Sun, too, is moving: it is after all a modest main sequence star – a star like billions of others, and with billions of years of life left in which to burn steadily – near the rim of a galactic disc which is itself spinning on a central axis, so the Sun proceeds around the centre of the galaxy, moving up and down like a horse on a fairground carousel, at a stately two hundred kilometres a second. The galaxy is moving too, but how fast and in which direction depends upon which other galaxy you choose to measure from.

So when I sometimes say I don’t know where I am, I am not kidding. I do not have an answer. Nor do I feel alone in asking the question. ‘Where am I?’ could be the oldest question in history. For the moment, at least, I have an answer of sorts. I am in a house that has a very precise geography, over which I have some temporary control. Desk and chair, the books on the shelves, the rug on the floor, the calendar on the wall, are there because I put them there, and I am at liberty to move them. They are intimate landmarks, places from which, unconsciously, I may take a bearing. I can place myself in relation to the walls, to the rooms, to the floors and ceiling. In this house, I know where I am. There is a ‘here’ in which I can locate myself. It is a place in which I may choose to stay for hours, or days, without running the risk of being moved on by the police. It is, at the moment of writing, my home. There is a legal document that describes the property, and names me as a joint owner.

But I do not feel as though I own the place. I feel as though I have been given the job of looking after it. That is because I had no part in its design, or its construction, or its extension, or its most recent alteration; nor can I change its exterior or substantially redesign its interior, to make it mine, because the building is listed, Grade II, and the death watch beetle has more right to tenure, and potentially more freedom to amend its structure, than I have. His natural habitat is stained oak and old panelling, and mine is not. If he survives, he deserves his home behind my dictionaries and reference books not just because that is his ecological niche, but also because he withstood the fiercest chemical assault to maintain his place in my study, if not in my heart. The house was drenched with woodworm, furniture beetle and fungal killers when we moved here early in 1985, and the study was attacked again, in a second intense chemical foray, when it became clear that the first assault had left survivors. Ironically, for weeks afterwards, I could not tolerate more than a few seconds’ exposure to the fumes that lingered in the room. But Xestobium rufovillosum made it through: he clung on in a bunker deep in some timbers where the murderous chemical cocktail could not reach, and for some time afterwards I would occasionally hear him beating his head against the wood. And then finally his tick fell silent.

His links with the house predated mine. His ancestors may have moved in with the first lumps of green heartwood – probably already fungus-enfeebled – when some eighteenth-century artisan began to build a cottage that is now the kitchen, almost three hundred years ago. Or perhaps the death watch beetle migrated, involuntarily, from a church in France or a dismantled folly somewhere in England around 150 years ago, when some ambitious tenant converted an old mill or coachman’s cottage into a gentleman’s residence, complete with higgledy-piggledy, hand-me-down panelling that varies from room to room, stained glass, beams, tiled and carved fireplaces and distinctive windows of the kind sometimes called Victorian gothic. The study, with its imperfectly fitted wooden panels and uneven plaster, is a kind of untidy rehearsal for the entire house. You step in through the front door into a modest porch. Two doorways open off the porch: one into the study. You have been there already. The other leads immediately into a hall floored with old brick and lit by a huge Victorian window.

From this roomy half-panelled hall, a staircase leads to an assortment of bedrooms, a bathroom, a library and the attic. A winding corridor leads away to the front of the house and a large drawing room and a music room. The curve of this corridor suggests that the original property may have been associated with something round, perhaps a windmill, in the eighteenth century. One thick oak door opens onto a panelled dining room. Another thick door opens into yet another small lobby and a bathroom and then to what would once have been the stable yard. Another passageway winds down a cramped staircase into a large and partly subterranean kitchen that in turn has doorways into a pantry, a larder and a large cellar. I have an auctioneer’s poster dating from 1872 which describes the house as a

very valuable and desirable villa residence in the Parish of St Clement, Hastings, delightfully and romantically situated on the West Hill, in a well sheltered position, about 360 feet above the level of the sea; the house faces west and commands unrivalled and extensive sea and inland views of great beauty.

It doesn’t command extensive views any more: you can’t see the sea for all the other, more recent houses that have colonised the hill. But the advertisement provides me with a second set of coordinates: I am located in time, as well as space. The property has height, width and length, but it also has duration, and the auctioneer’s advertisement and the calendar on my wall supply two points on a temporal continuum. These two points become my starting point for a sedentary exploration, an immediate geography, an imaginary journey, and I quote these details to remind myself how little the place has changed in 140 years.

The music room is a twentieth-century addition, and so is one bathroom. A little conservatory now connects and simultaneously insulates the music room and dining room. Otherwise, the man who put the place up for auction at the Royal Swan Hotel, Hastings, on Saturday, 7 September 1872 would still find himself entirely at home. He would of course marvel at the electric lighting, he would appreciate the plumbing, he would certainly applaud the red, gas-fired Aga that heats all the household water and bakes all its food; the telephone points and broadband links would take some explaining. He would also ask about the corners in the dining room and sitting room where the oak panelling abruptly comes to an end, and I would then have to tell him about our other mutual tenant, Serpula lacry-mans, or dry rot. This little fungus is another long-term investor with a taste for old houses, and by the time we moved in, it had swelled into a science-fiction monstrosity, had spread its tendrils and had devoured the timbers on either side of an adjoining wall. But the person who owned this house in 1872 would still know the place, and recognise it as his. So, if it is his, in what sense is it mine? Did it shape him, or did he shape it? If he shaped it, then what have I done to it, and what has this house done to me? Can we both, to put it another way, really have the same address?

The answer is, of course not. His habitation was of its time, and so is mine. We all of us occupy more than one home at a time; we all of us have more than one set of geographical coordinates. British listeners and viewers go to Ambridge to keep up with the Archers, or to Albert Square to observe the EastEnders. So much, so obvious, but along with the broadcast soap operas, somewhere in our memories are thousands of other destinations imagined by someone we never met, and never thought much about: the Never-Never, South of the Border, Oz, Middle Earth, the City of Dreadful Night, the Land of Nod, the Little House on the Prairie, the Golden Road to Samarkand, Camelot, Vanity Fair, Pooh Corner, Ruritania, Shangri-la, Utopia, Barchester, Metropolis, Tuxedo Junction, Penny Lane and Blueberry Hill. Some of them have a tenuous connection with reality, and have become embedded in the global cultural canon, but for all most of us will ever know, they might also be fiction: Ur of the Chaldees and Babylon and Nineveh and the Promised Land Flowing with Milk and Honey; Troy and the walled city of Jericho; Sodom and Gomorrah; Xanadu and El Dorado. They have a ghostly reality in a disorderly index; they make up a directory or a gazetteer of places that may now have no palpable existence, but remain stubbornly addresses in imagination’s atlas.

So my forgotten predecessor inhabited the house I now live in, but in 1872 he might also have sat Under the Greenwood Tree, in Wessex, or moved to Erewhon, in the southern hemisphere, because Thomas Hardy and Samuel Butler that year each published a novel that was to become a fixed address in the imagination’s gazetteer.

Whoever now lives in Derby Street, Devonport, Auckland, New Zealand – the first lines of the address I would write in my exercise books more than five decades ago – occupies a different place in a different world. That house was, and I believe still is, a detached wooden villa with a corrugated iron roof and a front veranda and the stump of an old pepper tree in the front garden, and it is still instantly recognisable as ‘our’ house; but whoever lives there now also inhabits a different set of superimposed geographies. I lived there in 1956: I knew about, although never visited, Peyton Place, the bestseller of the year; I could have moved into the Towers of Trebizond, with Rose Macaulay, but I did not. I was fifteen at the time and I had of course, like almost every other teenager in the English-speaking world, just found a new place to dwell: it was down at the end of Lonely Street, in Heartbreak Hotel. Elvis Presley’s song that year reverberated around the planet: it also reverberated within the damp cement changing sheds excavated under the road at Cheltenham Beach, Devonport. This grimy facility – it smelt of dried seaweed, wet sand and stale urine – provided a cold-water shower and toilet for beach users, and a place to hang sandy clothes and wet towels, but more potently, it also provided an impromptu echo chamber in which one particular tiny assembly of exuberant teenagers could improvise their own stumbling versions of what was to become an anthem for gloomed youth.

The emergence of Elvis Presley in 1956, along with James Dean’s debut in East of Eden and the worldwide introduction to Bill Haley’s soundtrack ‘Rock Around the Clock’, over the credits of the movie The Blackboard Jungle in 1955, is now presented by social historians as the moment of an epic shift in the Western cultural continuum – the birth of rock and roll. That’s what it seemed like at the time, too. But I cannot hear Presley’s version of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ without also hearing tuneless voices in a shadowy concrete chamber, a few paces from a stony square of grass ringed by evergreens that opened onto a cement promenade, and then onto a crescent of coarse sand and shell, that fell gently towards a huge expanse – at low tide – of mud and ankle-deep water, before falling away again into a shipping channel, which was bounded a few miles beyond by the seemingly symmetrical outline of the volcanic island of Rangitito, that framed the entrance into Auckland harbour.

We become more or less what we have always been, which might be why we take so little notice of the ways in which we have changed, which in turn might be why, in so many of the chambers of the museum of memory, we find some empty scaffolding, a blank wall, a pail and broom, and a laconic notice that describes the picture that must once have hung there. The unhappy, the abused, the insecure and the fearful are tormented by their memories, and want to forget. Happy people are secure, and securely unaware of their happiness, serenely enjoying each moment, without overtly wishing to remember. The changes, the disjunctions, the Alice in Wonderland moments when we tumble into a new environment, stay with us, but the intimate, physical, moment-by-moment experience of humdrum contentment blurs immediately and fades swiftly. Even so, some memories survive, with a sensual intensity that can be evoked unexpectedly by a smell, a sound, a set of words, a name, a snatch of song, or even a moment in the sun or the rain.

Such recall can happen on some hot, perfect day in the Mediterranean, one of those days when the Sun’s rays burn through the fabric of a cotton shirt and begin to caress the shoulder muscles with the force of a physiotherapist’s thumbs; because on a summer day in Auckland the Sun could hammer the city hard enough to set up a heat-shimmer on the concrete lanes at the centre of the road, and melt the tar strip on either side. It can happen halfway up Mount Fuji in Japan, at a picnic spot marked by lumps of scoria: fist-sized lumps of rapidly ejected volcanic rock so hot and so gas-filled that when it cooled and fractured it was as full of holes – the technical term is vacuoles – as a sponge, but jagged and unforgiving to the touch; because Auckland, of which Devonport was fifty years ago a poor suburb, was built on dozens of extinct or perhaps just dormant volcanoes, all of them low, conical and piled high with scoriaceous rock. It can happen in summer rain: Auckland was a rainy place – it still is – with twice the precipitation of London, and an enduring memory is of a childhood barefoot in the rain: a warm rain, all too often kept off by an uncomfortably sticky waterproof. It can happen when I stand under a pepper tree in Claremont, California – the Peruvian pepper, Schinus molle, a pungent but not particularly common ornamental species that leaves a film of resin on the fingers: my brother and two sisters and I grew up watching the world go by from the gnarled branches of an old pepper tree in the front garden.

My memories of the house at Derby Street, Devonport, are not easily separable from the memories of the little world I knew beyond the house, and this untidiness serves to illustrate the difference between a house and a home: a house is a box in which you shelter, eat, sleep, love, procreate, work and even die, but you could have done the same things in the box next door, or in the next road, or in the next suburb. A home is where you become yourself, and you may leave it, but it does not so easily leave you. The furnishings in Derby Street were – by twenty-first-century standards – modest enough, but there were maps everywhere, because we were the children of a geographer: piles of old National Geographic maps; maps of the British Empire with India and Malaya and Canada and Australasia and half of Africa in pink; maps of pre-war and wartime Europe; economic maps intended for schoolroom walls that showed Australia with little pictures of sheep, and ingots of iron, and stooks of wheat; relief maps; maps marked with contours; maps that showed only population density, or rainfall, or vegetation, or prevailing winds; maps of the world’s trade routes; and even military maps of Pacific islands printed on silk that subsequently served as scarves.

The furnishings also included bookcases, from which all four of us read indiscriminately, along with whatever we had picked up from the local lending library: on a rainy day one of our parents might enter the living room to find all four of us, cross-legged or lying on our stomachs, following the adventures of Richmal Crompton’s William, or Captain W.E. Johns’s Biggles, or Captain Hornblower, or discovering What Katy Did and why Anne loved Green Gables, or lost in the ten volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia or struggling blankly with the Everyman edition of Herodotus, or a novel by Graham Greene. It was there that we – all of us – discovered that the narrow pages of a book offered a doorway into the wider world, and through these doorways we began to explore and colonise those other places, those other domiciles, fortresses, redoubts, camps and caravanserais that make up an identity’s address book.