So far I have not said anything about my “career” . As is probably evident from the foregoing I was neither a dedicated chemist nor a well trained one; but this was wartime England, and one got drafted into the army unless one worked in an essential industry. Actually I would have very much liked to join the Army; with a university degree one could enter an officers training program and earn a commission in a relatively short time. However my father was already in pretty bad shape and my mother did not like the idea of me leaving home again.
The girls couldn’t wait until the evening when they would post themselves at the RR station under the clock, and pretend they were waiting for their dates (i.e. American soldiers , who flocked into the city for the evening). The Americans were only too happy to pick up the ditched girls. The question asked in those days was “what have the American boys got that the English don’t have” and the answer was: “”they’ve got it here”! Not only that: American dates were much more attentive than English ones, they had lots of candy and cigarettes and got much bigger paychecks! They even got preferential treatment as I can personally attest: my newspaper agent from whom I regularly bought “The Statesman and Nation” produced cigarettes for Henry, English ones, not the lousy French ones that were more often available. I was a smoker in those days, as most people working in laboratories were; in fact smoking was so prevalent that even my mother puffed on a cigarette occasionally , albeit she had no idea how to do it: she would hold a cigarette in a cigarette holder (I don’t believe these exist any more) very daintily between index and middle finger, pulled a little air in and puffed, intently watching the smoke come out. My father smoked Egyptian cigarettes which I disliked, I smoked something called “Senior Service” when I could get them; later the Americans introduced us to Camels. As tobacco supplies got scarcer and scarcer, I even smoked some French ones,”Caporal” or something like that, which were lousy. Yet I smoked relatively little, half a pack a day, the average for most smokers was 2 packs a day! The trouble was , of course, that smoking was permitted everywhere, public transportation (on a double-decker bus upstairs, on one level buses in the back like on airplanes). I restrained myself to the extent that I did not smoke before midmorning! Then one of the guys I was going out with berated me that “you don’t smoke cigarettes, you spoil them”, so that started me on inhaling! When the supply got really low, I even tried a pipe (they made cute ones for ladies), but that was awful. I did not stop smoking (Dad smoked more than I) until I was pregnant with Ralph, because I abhorred the idea of holding a baby in one arm and smoking with the free hand ; I remember the date: January 20th 1951, my father-in-law’s birthday. I had actually stopped a couple of days before, but for his birthday he had specially bought the brand I liked (in those days it was customary to offer cigarettes to guests, like candy) and I did not have the heart to refuse him. To make it easier on me, Dad stopped smoking cigarettes and switched to the pipe, so there were no more cigarettes in the house. I smoked for a total of about 8 years. A propos smoking - a little anecdote: our first apartment was in the attic of a private house, under the eaves, and there was a ledge where we kept the cigarettes; one night we observed a mouse attacking the packs, and it actually got at them, leaving tooth marks on most of the cigarettes, making them unsmokable because the paper was pierced. We brought the cat up the next day, but the cat was afraid of the mouse, so we bought a trap, and lo and behold, we trapped it! Problem was what to do with it now? So we decided to take it to the apartment house next door and have the houseman (or whatever he was called) throw the whole thing in the furnace. No more mice after that; actually it had been a rather cute picture, the mouse desporting itself on that ledge!