Mrs Armstrong
&

The Trap of
Technology.

The first  GreenScarf  novel –  seeking trade publication.

© copyright J. Francis Gladstone, London, July 2024

    Technology can become a trap. We invent something, want it to improve life only to find it has side-effects we don’t want.

    Ask this – I’m writing within months of them being dropped.

Was it? Or was it not? A great new invention… The A bomb, well two of them which brought the ghastly war with Japan to a close.

Were the A bombs a good thing?

These ‘bombs’ were alternative forms of hell to the previous mass bombing with firebombs and high explosives….the dropping of napalm which stuck to people and buildings below the planes up high and was highly flammable.

I was on the edge of the flammable Napalm being developed in a secret project in the Harvard University chemistry labs.

I was on the edge of scientists who lied and justified mass bombing of civilians.

     The A bomb was the big step. Yes? We broke the rules, flew too close to the sun, will never be the same as humans again… yes?

    Can you answer? Good or bad? Should we not have worked on the bombs? Or is it impossible to stop human invention? In which case, are we trapped in our own greed for more and the new? Can you answer?

And penicillin? Life changer…the first true antibiotic. That was developed by the US government from the same funding source as the atom bombs… it saved the lives of soldiers with infected wounds which was the case of most battlefield wounds… it was  so obviously a good thing… Right? How not a good thing?

I knew an elderly pathologist who said that we steal life from death with such drugs. We defy old father death.

Yes? If it changes human life and death, expands population hugely, might it be a trap?

Yet you can’t say that, can you? Say you won’t save lives…? Outrageous.

We can’t stop medical inventiveness.. right?... Yet more lives equate to more stress for the earth. Same question as the two effective A bombs: are we trapped in our own greed for more and the new? Trapped by inventiveness which seems so good? Can you answer? I can’t.

I think this. We made science God. Scientists are his church. As in the middle ages the church can do no wrong in its interpretation of what God wants – more and more science.

I’m part of it, a biochemist. I’m not soppy and think we should all eat grass and sleep in the open. I’m just worried. I was close to this work. I put together atomic scientists. I was a major figure in secret penicillin work. I just shudder a bit. Too much, too much? Is there ever too much when it comes to technology?

[Editor: from now on her narrative switches to the 3^rd person.]

From 1914 --

When she was seven in south London in 1921 she liked to explore along the banks of the River Wandle about which most Londoners said ‘River What?’.

The small Wandle ran north into the Thames and its clean waters had been abused over time with pollution from factories and mills along its way. In spite of this view of the modern inventive nation – that water exists to be used, which often means polluted – in  1921 when she was seven there were still some nice sections with fish in the steam and clear water with long hairs of waterweed and frogs and water rats and… moorhens. She wore her old plimsolls so as not to get the new ones muddy. Maman was short of money.

          She wanted to be the Moorhen. This was in 1921.

          Wanted? She was as determined – a child personality angry that the war took her father’s life and that her mother was silly. She found early that solitude helped and that being absorbed in nature helped to keep her demons of anger at bay.

          A neighbour. Mr Partridge, who was  a local solicitor met  the  tall girl with the quizzical look. She was alone down by the river and watching birds and she had a butterfly net. Wilfred Partridge knew her father had died in the war.  He lived a few doors down from her and he did not know she liked birds,

          He did know that the mother who was as small and dark as the growing girl was tall and fair… the mother was Swiss and spoke French and bad English which, he wondered, was a rebuke to her lively daughter who had to explain the mother’s words in the local shops. Local people mocked the two of them as foreign. It cannot have been easy.

          ‘Do you need binoculars?’ he asked.

          ‘No. I’ve got this,’ she said of the butterfly net. It was March. There were no butterflies.

          She looked at him and stared in defiance. She had no binoculars and would like them. Even if it was summer, the butterfly net carried the risk of damaging butterflies and was no use for seeing details of birds at a distance.

          ‘You would like to borrow these?’ he asked of his chunky pair of Zeiss binoculars. She stood there, a few feet away, shrugged, looked at him and then stepped forward and took them.

          He could see she was startled by the vivid effect of the close up vision.

          She looked intensely, her left hand on the binoculars, only one hand and it was small. Even for a child she had a small hand – that hand. She looked from sparrows on a tree to a pair of mallard ducks in the river. She handed the binoculars back.

          ‘Thank you Mr Partridge,’ she said. ‘I did not mean to be rude. My father’s were not returned. Well, I don’t have a father any longer.’

          ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

          ‘These things happen to people,’ she said.

          She was seven. Yet she seemed to have the equanimity and balance of an adult. It turned out that her  British officer father took his binoculars to war and, when he died, they did not come back. His blood stained bible with the prayer book in the same volume came back.

          Papers sent to the mother listed his binoculars as among his few possessions to be repatriated. His last sketch book and tiny watercolour tin did come back.

          ‘Some bastard’ stole the binoculars which should be hers. Some bastard stole them.  

He found out – by not asking questions – that other bastards stole – the late father’s family – stole her younger brother. They said her foreign Maman was a bad influence. These other bastards – her father’s family – did not care for the brother to be influenced by the foreign mother. They did not care about the girl.

After that, when she knew he was home from work, she asked him to come and look for birds with her.

          He came to know that, even as a child, Nathalie seethed inside. Yet, what marked her personality all through life was a Christian sense not to be over-demonstrative, not to draw attention to her so-called troubles.

          When, occasionally, she was angry and cried, there was a storm and it was hard not to be involved in trying to make things better – you felt this beauty in her, and restraint. If she broke out it must be bad. She was bullied at school and he then realised that her left arm was deformed. She wore it in a sling and managed with one hand so naturally he had not noticed. She had been born with a lower joint to her right arm shorter than it should be and without much muscle and the hand had only a thumb and two fingers. He never saw. She was taunted for this and for being a Frenchie. He could see she was tough from the start. Even so, she was vulnerable.

          Wilfred Partridge soon bought her a lightweight set of Bausch and Lomb binoculars and she was profoundly grateful. She had a good working knowledge of species and could tell Great Tits from Coal Tits from Long Tailed Tits. She had seen a Great Northern Diver, something of a rarity, on the Thames. Along the river and by the big London reservoirs which attracted many birds, she appeared to wander far and alone.

          She was the Moorhen, she declared, and he was the Partridge. At his home Mr Partridge had a small folio copy of Thorburn’s British birds. This thrilled her, the red leather binding and the colour illustrations and the way the birds were painted by Mr Thorburn so naturally in their environment.

          All thin legs and arms, exceptionally tall and lanky she had a long neck yet a small head and small features, mouth and nose, a dusting of freckles and grey searching eyes. She usually had short fair hair, not blond, what was called ‘mousey’. Nathalie Sykes explained why she wanted to be the Moorhen of which there were a number in and around the River Wandle.

          The Moorhen was one of two British species – the other the Hen Harrier – where the species was named after the female.

          There was no Moor cock, just Mr. Moorhen.

          And….and…. and he was smaller than the female. And he did a lot of work, sitting on eggs, nest building, gathering food. And Mrs Moorhen was not entirely regular – the plain speaking girl said ‘regular in grown up things’. A moorhen might have more than one brood in a year and more than one Mr Moorhen. 

          She liked the idea that the female was larger, got the male to do a good deal of the chores and was independent when it came to which Mr Moorhen was right for them. Mr Partridge could see that young Miss Sykes empathised with these birds.

          More than that: while he never saw her smile, she noted that moorhens had, dark, oval-shaped bodies,  necks they thrust forward and down to the ground and long yellow legs. She said that like her, who had been born with a deformed right arm and hand, they were gawky, not wrongly formed but never quite right.  The essence of the irony – she used that term ‘the essence of the irony’… it might be unusual English but it was well developed vocabulary… the essence of the irony about she, the Moorhen and the bird the moorhen were not apparently alike, indeed quite different.  She was tall and fair and these birds the opposite, squat and dark.

          ‘They’re delicate in their movements,’ Wilfred Partridge noted.

          ‘But I’m clumsy,’ she said.

          He could see that she was not. Not in her movements and she had impeccable manners. He did not persist arguing she was not clumsy because she had her own logic. If he pushed he might loose her trust. Most touchingly she took his hand and said ‘I don’t have a daddy.’

          Life was not dangerous, yet not entirely safe for leggy and nubile girls of such prettiness in south London. His sense of privilege came from feeling she chose him who could love her as a daughter or niece.

Then she did admit that moorhens were delicate. She said, ‘well, Mr. P… Yes… compared to the bigger species like them, coots, moorhens are positively delicate.’

‘I’m not too tall, am I?’ she asked on another occasion. She was nice being so tall and lanky, all arms and legs, or one good arm and two good legs.

She told him that her Maman had warned her that she might be too tall to find a husband although she did not think that putting stones on her head would stop her growing.

It was not exactly a joke, this ideas of stones on her head stopping her growing. It was, he thought, an odd and amusing image. No matter: she never smiled.

Tall? He showed her a bird book that reproduced some of John J Audubon’s Birds of America., There was a picture of an elongated pink flamingo. ‘She is not too tall to marry,’ she said of Mrs Flamingo. ‘Why does Maman say I might be too tall to find a husband?’

‘Well you might,’ Mrs Partridge chipped in. Claire Partridge read voraciously, had no children, was a sophisticated woman yet did not like Mr Partridge paying anyone else attention. She was a dense and lonely. She had been ejected from a teaching job when they married and they had no children.  Women teachers where she taught had to be single.

          Miss Sykes, the lanky girl who wore clothes so nicely said to herself: ‘ hard cheese, Mrs P. Long legs are the loveliest attribute in a woman and mine are long indeed.’

In summer the two took the train to Hampton which was upriver where it was not tidal. There were woods here and they found most of the species of British finch and warbler. She had an acute eye for fast moving birds in places where there was no chance to use the binoculars.

He thought he was good at identifying birds when you could not get a clear view. You classified them by their movement and their habitat. She was better than he when she was thirteen.

 Even as she grew up she took his hand and he felt fulfilled and trusted. Their bird list grew longer and he showed her some scientific studies of bird behaviour and also genetics, how sub-species evolved and  how all species were classified.

          Then they had a long discussion. What did Moorhens want?  Moorhens could fly, run and swim.

          ‘The place of humans since we invented fire and expanded in numbers seems to dominate other humans and the whole of nature.’ She said that to him aged fourteen and it startled him for its erudition. The idea was obvious, yet it was not one much discussed, certainly by children. How did humans evolve to their modern form? How did we push and push to make machines?

          What drives moorhens? She also asked. They flew only when frightened, ran only when frightened and swam and dived for food with an odd wag of their little tails. Whenever they moved by one of these means of locomotion, they seemed to want to try the other. Nor did they seem very good at any of them.

          ‘So, Miss Moorhen?’ he asked.

          ‘Sooooo….’ She said…. ‘So, Mr. Partridge, they have evolved to see what other birds do not see. Their efficiency of locomotion is not that important. They find morsels to eat in the mud under the water or in dark reed beds. They can dive and they can support themselves in mud that is almost water. I, too, want to evolve to see what others do not see.’

          It pained him when she was mocked. Yet, as she grew up it appeared to Mr Partridge that the fair and so serious girl got over being teased for her deformed arm and hand; and for being foreign which he could not understand as mother and daughter seemed so sophisticated.

          When she was fifteen he took her to the library of the Natural History Museum which was not normally open to children. She wore a suit her mother had tailored and a grey flannel sling to match. She carried with dignity the disability she had been born with. She now carried in her head better than he did the Latin names of birds and their classification into genus, family and species.

          In the library she noticed a new compendium of British birds, by Alfred Swaine. Outrageously the author considered the assertion that the female moorhen was bigger than the male to be prejudice.

          The evidence cited by Swaine seemed shaky. Some male moorhens might be larger than some females. That was picking holes in what was generally agreed.

          Wilfred Partridge might have made light of this. He saw she was furious, blind furious with anger.

          ‘One does not consider the twisting of science,’ she said. ‘It happens’.

          One does not consider.. was another example of her archaic phrasing. That, in part, masked the depth of her anger at this prejudice. She really means what she says, he thought. She knows the world can be a bad place.

1930 –

          She was sixteen and fully grown in 1930 --disappointed in the way she could be disappointed to be 5 foot 11 ¾.—not her coveted six foot tall.

          Now studying for advanced school certificate in a school where, rarely girls could study science, she looked even more grave and fully adult than she had aged eight. Wilfred Partridge continued to take her on bird watching expeditions in his small car. He realised that she was something of a prodigy when she said she had been awarded an internship at the famous Institute Pasteur in Paris. He looked this up in the Library – the Institute was for the advanced application of microbiology to medicine.

          After that the bird watching expeditions stopped. When home she would always come to have tea with him. Claire Partridge left the room, a puzzle to her husband. He had said to his wife that, in spite of being female, she could probably read for a solicitor’s qualifications. She bristled about Nathalie.

          Yes: the girl was in some ways exceptional, for looks and directness and the way she held herself upright. She was always, except when ruffled or failing in an ambition, impeccably polite and good mannered, particularly in the Partridge home. And while beautiful in certain lights, she was said locally to be much too tall or too thin or too bookish. He could never understand why she represented such a challenge to his unhappy wife.

          Something happened to his friend. After Nathalie was in Paris, he sensed that she went through a difficult period. Instead of wearing the attractive, although never showy clothes her mother made for her, she became drably dressed and wore school girl plaits.

          She did not even polish her shoes any more and her clothes were darned and darned. Mother and daughter were not that well off but they now had compensation for her father which they had earlier been denied.

          He did not ask -- why she decided to be so scruffy. She said that men in lectures at Cambridge University banged their feet when the one or two girls came in to the hall. I hate men.

          She was at Cambridge university and, almost unheard of for a girl, she was, in 1936, selected for a doctorate in biochemistry. Then she was engaged to an Oxford professor who specialised in the rise and fall of empires. David Armstrong was a 1914-18 war veteran, handsome, twice her age. If he had lived, Nathalie’s artist and officer father would have only been a few months older than this man.

          Engaged, her drabness of look was gone.

          The Partridges were invited to the wedding. It was to be at Professor Armstrong’s home as the Swiss mother had only a small row house like the Partridges. Meanwhile Claire Partridge had found a page of a French magazine. The picture was on newsprint, not of good quality.

          ‘Look at this,’ Claire Partridge said. ‘I told you about the French.’

          Yes, Nathalie’s widowed mother, as the spelling of Nathalie with a ‘th’, was ‘French’. His wife spoke and read French. What was this?

          He looked and was startled. He could not find an adjective for what he was seeing. ‘Questionable’ was what he settled on.

          He was looking at a photograph of his cherished Miss Sykes in a French paper. She wore a cotton skirt and sandals and her full breasts were exposed.

          The badly printed picture showed four men and four girls at a country picnic. The girls were bare above the waist and Nathalie was one of them. She wore a shirt to cover her bad arm but was otherwise exposed.

Mr Partridge looked carefully and the caption read  Avant Garde Indeed!, -- this in French.  The names of the men were Paul Eluard who the library told him was a poet, Jean Cocteau, poet and playwright and film maker, master of the strange, the American photographer Man Ray described as a surrealist and Laurent Labourde, older than the other men, surgeon and also avant garde photographer.

These men were the top of the French modern art world and the four lovely girls their muses. His Moorhen, seventeen had been in this world.

Instead of being aroused or horrified, Wilfred Partridge was fascinated. People behaved like this? The artistic avant garde and the living bohemians? He thought  she looked integrated with this prestigious, convention-challenging group.

Yes? Or did they hurt her? The grizzled, sixty year old Labourde was at the Institute Pasteur although also a photographer. This goat had had his treasured friend?

The female moorhen may be taller than the male. She is vulnerable to pressures. He remembered that it was in the years after this photograph that Miss Sykes seemed to have made attempts to make herself unattractive. Of Cambridge university, she said ‘I hate men’.

She had perhaps been hurt by these prestigious and artistic men in Paris. Well, with her prestigious engagement, she had bounced back as she had bounced back from black moods in her childhood. She once stepped into the river to try to catch an iridescent kingfisher with a broken wing that was struggling in reeds and he told her not to and she got her legs badly stuck in gooey mud, did not catch the bird and lost one of the shoes her mother could not so well afford. He had been right to tell her not to step there. The bird tried to escape and drowned itself in the open water.

She was not one to fail. Now with the prestige of being with people at the top of the modern art world and this marriage, he felt more than ever privileged to know her. And he felt more than ever fearful for her. He imagined a wild and beautiful fecundity in her and also danger. He hoped the much older Armstrong would never exploit her.

Claire Partridge would not go to the wedding of a girl who undressed in public. He did so. It would be too nice to miss. And she wanted him to come. The reception was on the lawn of an old farm house with river frontage north of Oxford, Armstrong’s house – he was a distinguished historian.  The wedding reception was hosted by a Jewish couple, Bernard and Belinda Lowenstein who had lent their chocolate and yellow Rolls Royce to be the wedding car except that the ancient bridge over the river was too narrow for the overblown car and the married couple had to walk the last quarter mile to his house which, Nathalie told him, was now half her house, a favouring of the female not common as Mr Partridge knew from his law practice.

The girl wore a silk sheath in cream colour and it billowed in the warm July wind. She had a sling for her bad arm to match the dress fabric so that it seemed part of the whole.

She was as always polite to him and made him comfortable among the thirty or so guests who he did not know. The Moorhen was a protégé of Mrs Lowenstein. The banker’s wife  was paying for the reception on the lawn. She supported y0ung women in science. 

Then Nathalie, now Armstrong, took Mr Partridge aside and led him a little up river. There, in bull rushes, was a moorhen on her nest even though this was July, late in the year for nesting.

‘It is the hen,’ she said to him, taking his arm. ‘She is bigger than the cock.’

‘I remember what you said, Nathalie,’ he said to her. ‘When we discovered that charlatan wrote on moorhens that the male was bigger than the female, you said that one does not consider the twisting of science. It happens,’ you added.’

‘How nice of you to remember,’ she said. ‘Bird watching with you and sharing your books and ideas and company really helped me.’

In the winter after the marriage, something unorthodox happened. Instead of living with her husband, she came to work in London. She lived with her mother weeknights and went home on the weekends. This was odd for a newly married woman. She had, he surmised, been recruited to something.

He used to see her in that period and, on summer evenings after work, that grim summer the war began, 1939.  They would walk by the river hoping to find rare species. They did find a grey wagtail which normally lived in upland streams and they spotted partridges that had settled in rough ground there. So often farmers smashed partridge nests when their tractors cut early grass for cow fodder.

‘Things change fast,’ Nathalie said.  Wilfred Partridge worried. She was talking of herself. He saw again that cold determination in her face. Her tone suggested that like the partridge with its lovely clutch of mottled eggs then smashed by a tractor, this might relate to her own life.

Yes, suddenly everything did change.

In January 1940, she came to say goodbye. She had been assigned to the USA to try to deal with tensions between British and American science.

‘We’re allies but quite an enemy of America,’ she said. ‘They’ll take us for a ride.’

 ‘It’s all about the twisting of science,’ she quipped as if a joke. And, being the Moorhen, she did not smile.

Then she said that the twisting of science had become her life and she hoped to come out of it all right.

He quivered. She might not be all right? She was already leaving her marriage behind.

Wilfred Partridge never saw or heard from her again. A few months after the war, in February 1946, locals noted her mother had left without saying goodbye and soon a furniture van came to the locked house. Wilfred Partridge asked the men loading up. Some was for auction, some things to go to Switzerland.

In his practice he dealt with wills and family issues so it was  a habit to look in the Times where better off people made their announcements, births, marriages and death. Six weeks after the mother suddenly left, in late March 1946 he saw her death note in the London Times:

Armstrong, Nathalie Joanna, born 1914, wife of David Armstrong, Pillains Reader in Economic History,  Oxford University;  died suddenly when in the USA. A memorial service will follow.

            To make sure he heard about the service, he assigned a press cutting agency to look for a notice of it in the Oxford papers.

He never saw her again. Obviously he did not see her if she was dead. Wilfred Partridge did not believe it.

By May there was no announcement of a memorial service. With leaves on the trees and blossom everywhere on windy May Saturday he walked up the river from Oxford centre to where the lovely Armstrong house sat on a slight elevation just thirty yards back from the now slow flowing river Thames. Northcote was an old village on the west bank and in the 1930s a government built estate of ‘council’ houses had been built on the east bank. On this side there was a village hall to which, a plate said, David Armstrong had been a donor. He asked. One or two people remembered Nathalie, had not seen the death notice and assumed the couple had split up. One woman made a remark about Armstrong being ‘queer as a coot’ like all those Oxford men.

The wedding had not been in the church, to Nathalie’s disappointment. Even so he walked over the bridge that had been too narrow for the brown and chocolate coloured Rolls Royce. A question to a woman arranging flowers in the church elicited only a shrug. Armstrong keeps to himself, too high and mighty to come here, to church that is. In fact there had been several local people at the wedding.

In mid 1946 people in Britain were only sparingly using cars because petrol was rationed. He saw a bicycle by the extended front door to the house and he saw a door was open into a big red brick barn next to it. He had the courage to go? Yes? No.

Let things be, She died.

He opened the farm gate to the driveway and walked up past the blossoming apple and pear trees. Armstrong, gaunt and handsome, saw him, opened one of the two big doors into the barn and stepped outside.

Embarrassed, Wilfred Partridge had to walk towards this solid good looking man who waited for him, arms crossed, pipe by his mouth. What a couple they must have been, he thought. ‘I’m Partridge,’ he said. ‘I was a close local friend of your late wife when she was a child.’

‘I know who you are. I watched you go to the hall and then the church. You were special to her, perhaps the most special, more than I. Come and sit, Partridge.’

There was an oak bench and they two men sat, along side each other and not facing. Everything about Armstrong was attractive, his sinewy arms and hands, his neatly darned tweed trousers and work boots. For  a long time he did not speak. Early arrived swallows and house martins darted around to places they were building nests under the eaves of house and barn.

After a time he stood up, stood away from Partridge, seemed not happy, shrugged, took out his tobacco pouch and put it away. He stood back and turned. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘She cured me of a bad speech impediment and it has come back. I kept you waiting. But I can speak to you for her. Never, never ask questions about her. She’s no longer here. Just accept it. Never, never ask questions about her death. Go now. I’d like to shake your hand. You were more constant with her than I.’

In a country where men almost never hugged each other, these two men hugged. Armstrong meant her supposed death.

His Moorhen was somewhere. He suspected that, although he did not know. His wife took her own life when diagnosed with cancer. He died alone in 1958 at a retirement home in Bournemouth on the south coast of England. He had no children. Close relatives and friends were lost. Was he alone?  He held the Moorhen’s firm and not disabled left hand. Intrepidly, he thought, she set high standards and he feared that the pursuit of them might have damaged her.