The by-now-not-so-little Bertie once again fell prey to his mother’s obsessions. She deflected him from his true destiny by sending him off on another mistaken path. Aged just fourteen, Wells began work in the pharmacy run by Mr Cowap, who was instructed to train him as a chemist. However, the pharmacist soon realised the boy was far too gifted to be wasted on such an occupation, and placed him in the hands of Horace Byatt, headmaster at Midhurst Grammar School, who was on the lookout for exceptional students to imbue his establishment with the academic respectability it needed.
Wells easily excelled over the other boys, who were, on the whole, mediocre students, and was instantly noticed by Byatt, who contrived with the pharmacist to provide the talented boy with the best education they could. Wells’s mother soon frustrated the plot hatched by the pair of idle philanthropists, whose intention it had been to lead little Bertie astray, by sending her son to another bakery, this time in Southsea. Wells spent two years there in a state of intense confusion, trying to understand why that fierce wind insisted on blowing him off course each time he found himself on the right path.
Life at Edwin Hyde’s Bread Emporium was suspiciously similar to a sojourn in hell. It consisted of thirteen hours’ hard work, followed by a night spent shut in the airless hut that passed for a dormitory, where the apprentices slept so close together that even their dreams got muddled up. A few years earlier, convinced that her husband’s fecklessness would end by bankrupting the china-shop business, his mother had accepted the post of housekeeper at Uppark Manor, a rundown estate on Harting Down where, as a girl, she had worked as a maid. It was to here that Wells wrote her a series of despairing, accusatory letters – which, out of respect, I will not reproduce here – alternating childish demands with sophisticated arguments in a vain attempt to persuade her to set him free.
As he watched his longed-for future slip through his fingers, Wells did his utmost to weaken his mother’s resolve. He asked her how she expected him to help her in her old age on a shop assistant’s meagre wage: with the studies he intended to pursue he would obtain a wonderful position. He accused her of being intolerant, stupid, even threatened to commit suicide or other dreadful acts that would stain the family name for ever. None of this had any effect on his mother’s resolve to turn him into a respectable baker’s boy.
It took his former champion Horace Byatt, overwhelmed by growing numbers of pupils, to come to the rescue: he offered Wells a post at twenty pounds for the first year, and forty thereafter. Wells was quick to wave the figures in front of his mother, who reluctantly allowed him to leave the bakery. Relieved, the grateful Wells placed himself under the orders of his saviour, to whose expectations he was anxious to live up. During the day he taught the younger boys, and at night he studied to finish his teacher-training, eagerly devouring everything he could find about biology, physics, astronomy and other science subjects. The reward for his titanic efforts was a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where he would study under none other than Professor Thomas Henry Huxley, the famous biologist who had been Darwin’s lieutenant during his debates with Bishop Wilberforce.
Despite all this, it could not be said that Wells left for London in high spirits. He did so more with deep unhappiness at not receiving his parents’ support in this huge adventure. He was convinced his mother hoped he would fail in his studies, confirming her belief that the Wells boys were only fit to be bakers, that no genius could possibly be produced from a substance as dubious as her husband’s seed. For his part, his father was the living proof that failure could be enjoyed as much as prosperity. During the summer they had spent together, Wells had looked on with dismay as his father, whom age had deprived of his sole refuge, cricket, clung to the one thing that had given his life meaning. He wandered around the cricket pitches like a restless ghost, carrying a bag stuffed with batting gloves, pads and cricket balls, while his china shop foundered like a captainless ship, holed in the middle of the ocean. Things being as they were, Wells did not mind having to stay in a rooming house where the guests appeared to compete in producing the most original noises.
He was so accustomed to life revealing its most unpleasant side to him that when his aunt Marie Wells proposed he lodge at her home on Euston Road, his natural response was suspicion, for the house was warm, cosy, suffused with a peaceful, harmonious atmosphere, and bore no resemblance to the squalid dwellings he had lived in up until then. He was so grateful to his aunt for providing him with this long-awaited reprieve in the interminable battle that was his life that he considered it almost his duty to ask for the hand of her daughter Isabel, a gentle, kind girl, who wafted silently around the house.
But Wells soon realised the rashness of his decision: after the wedding, which was settled with the prompt matter-of-factness of a tedious formality, he confirmed what he had already suspected, that his cousin had nothing in common with him. He also discovered that Isabel had been brought up to be a perfect wife, that is to say, to satisfy her husband’s every need except, of course, in the marriage bed, where she behaved with the coldness ideal for a procreating machine but entirely unsuited to pleasure. In spite of all this, his wife’s frigidity proved a minor problem, easily resolved by visiting other beds. Wells soon discovered an abundance of delightful alternatives to which his hypnotic grandiloquence gained him entry, and dedicated himself to enjoying life now that it seemed to be going his way.
Immersed in the modest pursuit of pleasure that his guinea-a-week scholarship allowed, Wells gave himself over to the joys of the flesh, to making forays into hitherto unexplored subjects, such as literature and art, and to enjoying every second of his hard-earned stay at South Kensington. He also decided the time had come to reveal his innermost dreams to the world by publishing a short story in the Science Schools Journal.
He called it The Chronic Argonauts and its main character was a mad scientist, Dr Nebogipfel, who had invented a machine he used to travel back in time to commit a murder. Time travel was not an original concept: Dickens had already written about it in A Christmas Carol and Edgar Allan Poe in ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’, but in both of those stories the journeys always took place during a dream or state of trance. By contrast, Wells’s scientist travelled of his own free will and by means of a mechanical device. In brief, his idea was brimming with originality. However, this first tentative trial at being a writer did not change his life, which, to his disappointment, carried on exactly as before.
All the same, his first story brought him the most remarkable reader he had ever had, and probably would ever have. A few days after its publication, Wells received a card from an admirer who asked if he would accept to take tea with him. The name on the card sent a shiver down his spine: Joseph Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man.
Chapter XII
Wells began to hear about Merrick the moment he set foot in the biology classrooms at South Kensington. For those studying the workings of the human body, Merrick was something akin to Nature’s most amazing achievement, its finest-cut diamond, living proof of the scope of its inventiveness. The so-called Elephant Man suffered from a disease that had horribly deformed his body, turning him into a shapeless, almost monstrous creature. This strange affliction, which had the medical profession scratching its heads, had caused the limbs, bones and organs on his right side to grow uncontrollably, leaving his left side practically unaffected. An enormous swelling on the right side of his skull, for example, distorted the shape of his head, squashing his face into a mass of folds and bony protuberances, and even dislodging his ear. Because of this, Merrick was unable to express anything more than the frozen ferocity of a totem. Owing to this lopsidedness, his spinal column curved to the right, where his organs were markedly heavier, lending all his movements a grotesque air. As if this were not enough, the disease had also turned his skin into a coarse, leathery crust, like dried cardboard, covered with hollows and swellings and wart-like growths.
To begin with Wells could scarcely believe that such a creature existed, but the photographs secretly circulating in the classroom soon revealed to him the truth of the rumours. The photographs had been stolen or purchased from staff at the London Hospital, where Merrick now resided, having spent half his life being displayed in side-shows at third-rate fairs and travelling circuses. As they passed from hand to hand, the blurred, shadowy images in which Merrick was scarcely more than a blotch caused a similar