all that, in conversation, Ponting made many gratifying references to “Florence and you” or “you young ones.” He was the one, rather than Violet, who became excited by the news of the engagement and arranged the lunch at the Randolph and proposed half a dozen toasts. It crossed Edward’s mind, barely seriously, that he was rather too keen to give his daughter away.
It was around this time that Florence suggested to her father that Edward might be an asset to the firm. Ponting drove him one Saturday morning in his Humber to his factory on the edge of Witney, where scientific instruments filled with transistors were designed and assembled. He did not appear at all troubled, as they passed between the tangled benches, through the homely smell of molten solder, that Edward, reliably stupefied by science and technology, could not think of one interesting question to ask. He revived a little when he met, in a windowless back room, the bald, twenty-nine-year-old sales manager, who had a history degree from Durham and had written his doctoral thesis on medieval monasticism in the northeast of England. Over gin and tonics that evening, Ponting offered Edward a job traveling for the firm, securing new business. He would need to read up on the products and a tiny bit about electronics, and even less about contract law. Edward, who still had no career plans and who could easily imagine himself writing history books on trains and in hotel rooms between meetings, accepted, more in the spirit of politeness than of real interest.
The various household jobs Edward volunteered to do tied him yet more closely to the Pontings. In that summer of 1961 he mowed the various lawns many times—the gardener was away sick—split three cords of logs for the woodstove, and drove the second car, an Austin 35, regularly to the dump with junk from the unused garage, which Violet wanted to convert to an extension library. In this same car—he was never permitted the Humber—he delivered Florence’s sister, Ruth, to friends and cousins in Thame, Banbury and Stratford, and then collected her. He chauffeured Violet around, once to a Schopenhauer symposium in Winchester, and on the way she grilled him about his interest in millenarian cults. What part did famine or social change have in providing followers? And with their anti-Semitism and attacks on the Church and the merchants, couldn’t the movements be seen as an early form of socialism of the Russian type? And then, also provocatively, wasn’t nuclear war the modern equivalent to the Apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, and were we not always bound by our history and our guilty natures to dream of our annihilation?
He answered nervously, conscious that his intellectual mettle was being tested. As he spoke, they were driving through the outskirts of Winchester. At the edge of his vision he saw her take out her compact and powder her pinched white features. He was fascinated by her pale, polelike arms and sharp elbows, and wondered again whether she really could be Florence’s mother. But now he was obliged to concentrate, as well as drive. He said he believed the difference between then and now was more important than the similarity. It was the difference between, on the one hand, a lurid and absurd fantasy devised by a post–Iron Age mystic, then embellished by his credulous medieval equivalents, and, on the other, the rational fear of a possible and terrifying event it was in our power to prevent.
In tones of crisp reprimand that effectively closed the conversation, she told him he had not quite understood her. The point was not whether the medieval cultists were wrong about the Book of Revelation and the end of the world. Of course they were wrong, but they passionately believed they were right, and they acted on their convictions. Likewise, he himself sincerely believed that nuclear weapons would destroy the world, and he acted accordingly. It was quite irrelevant that he was wrong,
It was around this time that Florence suggested to her father that Edward might be an asset to the firm. Ponting drove him one Saturday morning in his Humber to his factory on the edge of Witney, where scientific instruments filled with transistors were designed and assembled. He did not appear at all troubled, as they passed between the tangled benches, through the homely smell of molten solder, that Edward, reliably stupefied by science and technology, could not think of one interesting question to ask. He revived a little when he met, in a windowless back room, the bald, twenty-nine-year-old sales manager, who had a history degree from Durham and had written his doctoral thesis on medieval monasticism in the northeast of England. Over gin and tonics that evening, Ponting offered Edward a job traveling for the firm, securing new business. He would need to read up on the products and a tiny bit about electronics, and even less about contract law. Edward, who still had no career plans and who could easily imagine himself writing history books on trains and in hotel rooms between meetings, accepted, more in the spirit of politeness than of real interest.
The various household jobs Edward volunteered to do tied him yet more closely to the Pontings. In that summer of 1961 he mowed the various lawns many times—the gardener was away sick—split three cords of logs for the woodstove, and drove the second car, an Austin 35, regularly to the dump with junk from the unused garage, which Violet wanted to convert to an extension library. In this same car—he was never permitted the Humber—he delivered Florence’s sister, Ruth, to friends and cousins in Thame, Banbury and Stratford, and then collected her. He chauffeured Violet around, once to a Schopenhauer symposium in Winchester, and on the way she grilled him about his interest in millenarian cults. What part did famine or social change have in providing followers? And with their anti-Semitism and attacks on the Church and the merchants, couldn’t the movements be seen as an early form of socialism of the Russian type? And then, also provocatively, wasn’t nuclear war the modern equivalent to the Apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, and were we not always bound by our history and our guilty natures to dream of our annihilation?
He answered nervously, conscious that his intellectual mettle was being tested. As he spoke, they were driving through the outskirts of Winchester. At the edge of his vision he saw her take out her compact and powder her pinched white features. He was fascinated by her pale, polelike arms and sharp elbows, and wondered again whether she really could be Florence’s mother. But now he was obliged to concentrate, as well as drive. He said he believed the difference between then and now was more important than the similarity. It was the difference between, on the one hand, a lurid and absurd fantasy devised by a post–Iron Age mystic, then embellished by his credulous medieval equivalents, and, on the other, the rational fear of a possible and terrifying event it was in our power to prevent.
In tones of crisp reprimand that effectively closed the conversation, she told him he had not quite understood her. The point was not whether the medieval cultists were wrong about the Book of Revelation and the end of the world. Of course they were wrong, but they passionately believed they were right, and they acted on their convictions. Likewise, he himself sincerely believed that nuclear weapons would destroy the world, and he acted accordingly. It was quite irrelevant that he was wrong,
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