Department of Mathematics and Statistics

A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton


<<     < >     >>

5.   Work; early recognition; settling in

Aitken began work at once.

I soon learned that what passes for study and competence in N.Z. will simply not do here.34

His response was to work harder and open himself to scrutiny. He read papers at the November and December meetings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, ‘premature’ in his own estimation but both were published by the Society, the latter in its Proceedings. ‘Those earlier days, of October and November 1923,’ he wrote in a passage of considerable ambiguity,

when I was alone in Edinburgh, had a peculiar colour, deriving from a mixture of interest in the novel and strange with a marked nostalgia for the sunlit Antipodes. It is a mood not to be caught in words; the only way in which even I myself can recover it, and then only partially, is by way of certain music.35

The music was a piano sonata by John Ireland. ‘The slow movement […] the dark colours, more than Brahmsian, held the mood and fixed it.’ Despite the sombre tone of this reflection he meant it as a contrast to the anxiety that grew on him a year or so later. Music and solitude ‘held and fixed’ impressions in a pattern of meaning that removed them from the dross of accumulated experience. But what if impressions accumulated too rapidly, or fatigue or illness intervened, and no pattern made sense? Aitken began to mark out a circumscribed world, domestic in scale, within which his mental life could germinate, cohere and thrive. It may have appealed to his modesty that the ordinary, repetitive nature of his outward life gave no inkling of the operatic grandeur that lay beneath.

Alec met Winifred at Southampton on 18 November. They took a train to London and next day were in Edinburgh. Winifred’s first reaction was no different from Alec’s:

a dreadfully dirty place; it always has a pall of smoke over it.36

She was horrified by the cost of living, and the meagre attractions of Alec’s boarding house quickly palled. They took a furnished house at 15 Denhamgreen Place on a six months lease and toyed with the idea of holidaying in Europe during the summer. As it happened the lease could be extended and the holiday did not eventuate. Nor did the more modest plan of visiting the battlefields of France. Instead, Alec lamented the following June,

I seem to have been doing nothing but mathematics the whole time37

and he repeated his forlorn realization:

how little I knew about the subject in New Zealand.38

These were lonely months, another winter approaching with no intervening summer.

We sometimes have a hymn of hate at the vagaries of the climate, at the overpopulation and the lack of privacy it causes, (if N.Z. were as thickly peopled, you could not find solitude even in the West Coast sounds) and at the dismal gloom of the Presbyterian Sunday; but there are compensations. The very fact of not knowing many people frees you from the tiresome supervision of so-called friends, and releases you from hypocritical social conventions and duties.39

In New Zealand Winifred’s and Alec’s innate solitariness was immersed in family relationships in which they were valued and their idiosyncrasies respected. Alone in Edinburgh however, solitude was less satisfying. For Aitken this feeling of isolation receded after his appointment to the University in 1925, so that it is possible after a time to consider him at home in Edinburgh. But for Winifred it was never completely dispelled.

My mother said to me once: We’ve had a difficult life, but our own. Another thing she said to me a few times about coming to Britain from NZ was: We were strangers in a strange land, and we kept ourselves aloof.40

For MWA to make her life over here away from her Mother and her favourite sister, the one next to her in age, Auntie Dot, not to mention other relatives and friends, in the days when 12,000 miles was 12,000 miles — it wasn’t planned to be that way; the plan had been to go back to NZ after the two years’ study.41

Their different responses imperceptibly divided them. Other events contributed to the distance that came between them, to the absence of intimacy alluded to by their son George:

I don’t think my parents were pals,

and by Winifred’s sister Vita, who visited them twice and commented to Margaret,

“Your parents are the most reserved people I’ve ever met!” Instancing, eg, that mother, talking to Vita, referred to father as “My husband”!

But this seems to be its source.

On Christmas day they lunched with the Bakers and dined at Wilson’s, a Sunday haunt evoked in the Memoir for its ‘warmth of welcome [and] the glimpse at sunset, from the high windows, of green country over to Warriston and the Forth beyond: all far away now and changed’.42 New Year’s Eve was marked by the sound of distant revelling.


34  ACA to Kania, 23 May 1956.
35  Memoir, 80.
36  WMA to Pearl, 1 March 1924.
37  ACA to Pearl, 11 June 1924.
38  ACA to Pearl, 11 June 1924.
39  ACA to Pearl, 11 June 1924.
40  MM to the author, 29 June 1995.
41  MM to the author 22 October 1996.
42  Memoir, 80.
<<     < >     >>