IT still did not seem significant. That winter, one or two of us who were in the secret discussed it, but, although we looked round the room before we spoke, it did not catch hold of us as something real.
Once Francis Getliffe, whom I had known longer than the other scientists, said to me: ‘I hope it’s never possible.’
But even he, though he did not want any men anywhere to possess this power, spoke without heaviness, as if it were a danger of the future, a piece of science fiction, like the earth running into a comet’s path.
All the arrangements of those first months of Mr Toad were on the pettiest scale – a handful of scientists, nearly all of them working part time, scattered round three or four university laboratories; a professor wondering whether he might spend three hundred and fifty pounds for some extra help; an improvised committee, meeting once a month, sending its minutes to the Minister in longhand.
In the summer of 1940, on one of those mornings of steady, indifferent sunshine that left upon some of us, for years afterwards, an inescapable memory, I was walking down Piccadilly and noticed half a dozen men coming out of the Royal Society’s door in Burlington House. I knew most of them by sight. They were scientists, nearly all youngish men: one or two were carrying continental briefcases; they might have been coming from an examiners’ meeting. In fact, they were the committee, and the sight of them brought back the Minister’s pet name, which, with the war news dragging like an illness, did not seem much of a joke.
Soon afterwards, in the Minister’s office we received intelligence that the Germans were working on the bomb. Although we had all assumed it, the news was sharp: it added another fear. Also it roughened the tongues of those who were crusading for the project. Step by step they won for it a little more attention. By the spring of 1941 they obtained sanction for a research establishment – not a grand establishment like those working on radio and the immediate weapons of war, but one with perhaps a hundred scientists to their thousands. For a site, they picked on a place called Barford – which I had not heard of, but found to be a village in Warwickshire, a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon.
It became one of my duties to help them collect staff. I could hardly have had a more niggling job, for almost all scientists were by this time caught up in the war. Even for projects of high priority it was difficult enough to extract them, and so far as priority was concerned, the Barford project still had none at all. The only good scientists not yet employed were refugees, and it was clear that they would have to form the nucleus of Barford.
Accepting those facts, the Barford superintendent and his backers still made a claim, a modest claim, for at least one or two of the better young Englishmen. It was thus that I was asked to sound Walter Luke; if we could get him released from his radio work, would he be willing to move to Barford?
Then I wondered about Martin. I had heard little from him. I should have heard, if things had been going well, if like a good many scientists of his age, he had fallen on his feet. For eighteen months he had been doing a piece of technical routine. He seemed to be doing it just as competently, neither less nor more, than a hundred other young men in the naval ports. From a distance I had been watching, without being able to help.
I could not say much about Barford; in any case I knew that in this matter his temperament would work like mine; we said yes, but we did not like to be managed. Nevertheless, I could drop a hint. He could see for himself that it might give him a chance.
Later, my memory tended to cheat; it made me look as though I had the gift of foresight. That was quite untrue. In the spring of 1941, there were several other projects on Bevill’s files which seemed to me of a different order of importance from Mr Toad. As for Barford, I did not believe that anything would come of it, and my chief interest was that it might give Martin a better chance.