Peter and I attended a Communist Party student summer school one week. Professor Haldane was there. He was a funny fat man who wore long shorts and short socks held up by suspenders, and boots. His high pitched voice, rather like that of H.G. Wells, made him a rotten public speaker, but in ordinary conversation he was fascinating.

A British submarine, the Thetis, had recently sunk, killing all but two of its crew. Haldane had been experimenting to discover why the rest of the crew had died. He was well known for doing all his experiments on himself. He described the airtight chamber he had constructed in which he sat, watched by a small boy, while he turned on a pump to remove oxygen and replace it with carbon dioxide. Once he fell down unconscious the boy’s task was to turn off the pump and open the chamber to release him. Thus he had been able to find out at what concentrations the mind was unable to act rationally so that in a submarine the crew would be unable to take the simple steps needed to escape.

A blond young man, Dr. Paddy Fisher, who became a close friend later on, sang and played the guitar. He had a very beautiful Irish tenor voice and played us the folk song he had recently written:

I’m the man, the very fat man
That waters the workers’ beer
I’m the man, the very fat man
That waters the workers’ beer
And what do I care if it makes ’em ill
If it makes them terribly queer
I’ve a yacht and a car and an aeroplane
And I waters the workers’ beer.

Each evening he was in demand for a repeat performance.

[In 1998, 61 years later, our son-in-law attended a session in a Maldon pub with a group of American folk dancers and folk singers and suddenly found himself listening to Paddy’s song, still popular in folk circles in the USA. As Paddy had later become one of our family friends Mike was able to boast of having known the author.]

Peter and I, with a small group, sat up all night and watched the sun rise at dawn.
We now set off on a week’s walking tour of the Pusey Vale to research Peter’s Uneducated Poets. One of the more important was Stephen Duck, the only English poet other than