Atomic Spice

Figure 1: Mary in 1951 Atomic Spice Mary Flowers Copyright c 2009 by Mary Flowers This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. iv Editorial note: These memoirs were originally written by Gran/Ma/Mary on some obscure word-processing system during the 1980s. In the absence of any usable electronic copy, we scanned a surviving printed version and did our best { with a lot of help from Mary { to correct and re-format the result. Mary added the postscript in May 2009. Naomi Buneman Peter Buneman Brian Flowers Contents Prologue 1 1 Aliens and Atoms 7 2 The Land of Milk and Honey 17 3 The Birth and the Bomb 29 4 Travels and Tribulations 47 5 A Winter of Discontent 61 6 Friends and Fences 73 7 Harwell and Hamburg 91 8 Domesticity, Doubts and Defectors 107 9 Introspection and Apprehension 121 10 Racialism and Resolution 139 11 Fame and Notoriety 157 12 Stability and Security 173 Epilogue 189 Postscript 199 v List of Figures 1 Frontispiece . ii 6.1 Mary and Oscar, Summer 1947 . 77 6.2 The Harwell prefab in 1947 . 77 6.3 Harwell from the prefab in 1947 . 78 6.4 Mary with Oscar's relatives in Hamburg, May 1947 . 78 11.1 A press cutting from 1952 . 167 11.2 Peter, Mary, Michael and Brian in 1952 . 167 11.3 Mary and Brian in 1953 . 168 Figure 11.1 reproduced by permission of Mirrorpix. vi Prologue The train from Paddington to Didcot was slow and dirty. Every minute that passed was taking me another mile further from London, which was the only place I cared for, given that I had to live in England again. My mood was as black as the grime on the windows and a good deal less justified. I didn't even want to absorb the fact that the English countryside was at its greenest and sunniest, for the lush grass and moist new leaves seemed to have taken up the message that this was the first peace-time spring for six long years. The war had ended eight months previously. It was April 1946. I was on my way to what was to be my home, on and off, for quite a long time, and the scene of countless exciting events in both my own life and of those around me. Some were happy and many thrilling; others sad, difficult, and even shattering; but all were in some way related to the dawn of a new era, the nuclear age. Harwell was the site of the newly set up Atomic Energy Research Establish- ment, still a project under the Ministry of Supply. It was for this that my first husband, Oscar Buneman, had been made responsible for assembling a group of scientists who were to form the Theoretical Physics Division. The man who was to lead it had already been chosen. He was Dr Klaus Fuchs, and he turned out to be the most dangerous spy this country has ever known. The second head of that Division was Brian Flowers who, by that time, was my second husband. How he was to turn out I shall tell later. As for me, I was in one hell of a sulk. Why had we returned to England when we could be living in the United States? Patriotism? Nostalgia? Even though I had been married for four years and had two attractive and intelligent little sons, I was taking my time over the process of growing 1 2 ATOMIC SPICE up. Compared with the horrors suffered by so many, the war had treated me kindly, and most of the last two years had been spent in California. I had escaped from the dull, grey suburb of Manchester where I had spent most of my life. The industrial north-west became murkier as the bombs fell, food shortages worsened and small comforts harder to come by. I had also disentangled myself, or so I fondly imagined, from the tentacles of my father's and mother's influence, which, despite having a family of my own, were still wound tightly around me. Shortly after our marriage, Oscar had joined \Tube Alloys" { the code name given to the British team working on the atomic bomb project { and we were despatched to the United States at very short notice in the conditions of secrecy and subterfuge required during hostilities. The Nazis were poised for attack just the other side of the Channel; Russia and the United States had joined Britain in the fight against Germany and Italy, who between them had just conquered all of Europe. On the other side of the world Japan was devouring her neighbours. Every Atlantic crossing that was undertaken was either a large military operation or a part of one. Our recent return journey had been quite different. \This train is bugging me," I thought to myself in an American accent, carefully preserved because I thought it was smart and sophisticated. The noise of the steam-engine and the filth of the dingy moquette seats disgusted me. After all, I had travelled on the Southern Pacific Railroad. I had also boarded the \Lark", that streamlined dart that thrust its way along the Pacific coast together with the \Zephyr", its companion in luxury travel, both marvels of the New World. It wasn't so much the condition of post- war Britain. Progress had had to be sacrificed in favour of the burning necessity of winning the war. It was the backwardness of British transport compared to American TRANS- PORTATION, that had always existed and which, to my haughty frame of mind, was so exasperating. To cheer myself up I started humming the popular number of the times, \On the Acheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe", afterwards immortalized by Judy Garland in \The Harvey Girls". I had lived two blocks from this railroad's hacienda-style \depot" in Berkeley, California where the red and yellow engine pulled shiny carriages to a halt at regular intervals during the day and night, accompanied by the siren's haunting wail. It was a source of excitement and delight to my toddler son, Peter. How we had loved waiting for its arrival on that sunlit track! PROLOGUE 3 I certainly didn't love the Great Western Railway { as it was then { and its smelly, out-dated locomotives, any more than I enjoyed travelling on it. Although I sat there glowering, I felt that my appearance was the height of elegance and chic. Being tired of the grey flannel suits and Burberry raincoats, which my mother had always considered classy and ladylike, I had taken advantage of my sojourns in various North American cities to break out and acquire a wardrobe that was anything but. On this occasion I was sporting an emerald-green suit with the padded shoulders favoured by Barbara Stanwyck and other movie stars of the time. I was struggling to walk in red alligator shoes with heels that made up in height what they lacked in comfort, and wore the most ridiculous hat I have ever had on my head before or since. I had bought it on Forty-Second Street, where in those far-off days there were all sorts of little shops where prices could truly be described as \dirt cheap". (The discount radio stores and massage parlours were yet to come). This extraordinary confection had been part of my equipment for going to Manhattan night-clubs and bars, but most particularly for the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue. We were there for the first peace-time occasion of its kind since the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941. I started humming again. This time it was Irving Berlin's classic. My much- prized \Easter Bonnet" was made of shiny black straw, covered barely half my head and sported a rather tattered and squashed, but certainly full- blown rose that smelt of glue. I trailed a little opossum jacket, not because I might need it to keep warm but because Rita Hayworth had wiped the boards with a chinchilla wrap in \Gilda". I had always loved movies, but now I was \hooked" on glamour. However much I felt threatened by life in the wilds of Berkshire, I resolved to preserve a style that my new surroundings were obviously not going to provide. By this I didn't just mean tarting about like a cheap imitation of the Ziegfeld Follies, but in the way I would run my house. I had a pressure- cooker, an electric mixer and several gadgets unheard of over here, and I had made arrangements for parcels of commodities like cake-mix, canned goods and tissues, unobtainable in Britain, to be despatched by friends at regular intervals. I had had my appetite for innovation and convenience thoroughly whetted, and nothing was going to force me to regress to the dismally outmoded methods of housekeeping I had known before experiencing my taste of America. 4 ATOMIC SPICE I had left the little boys happily ensconced with their delighted grandpar- ents in Manchester, a place I had dreaded returning to. Having these con- venient baby-sitters I had lost no time in going up to London, \whooping it up" with friends, and spending more money than I should in restau- rants, theatres and shops in order to take away the acrid taste of the drab provincial city.

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