When I received this pocket-sized book, with its elegant blue-green cover illustrated by an impressive picture of a magnolia acuminata tree, I was anxious to discover why Peter Day, an internationally recognised materials scientist, was leaving the scientific field that we had had in common for 30 years (molecular magnetism) to explore new frontiers in botany ‘On the Cucumber Tree’.¹ The subtitle provides a quick answer: ‘scenes from the life of an itinerant jobbing scientist’. But it is not before reading the title page with a quotation from ‘Memoirs of a New Man’, a novel by William Cooper (alias Harry S. Hoff),² that I began to understand that something other than botany was involved:

In this memoir, Peter Day draws together his personal experience on laboratories, institutions, cities, countries and borders, the way they come to birth, develop, live and die, with as the main thread a sincere and critical self-portrait.

The 221 pages of the book are clearly structured into 18 chapters, with 63 black and white illustrations, a table of illustrations, and an index. The reader is invited to join Journeys in Science (Chapter 1) and to follow the author, from a little Kentish boy (Chapter 2) to a Fellow of the Royal Society, in his climb onto the first branches of the Cucumber Tree (Chapter 3) and his journeys across national frontiers (Oxford, Chapters 5, 6, 8 and 9; Geneva Chapter 7; Bell Labs at Murray Hill, USA, Chapters 10 and 11; and Grenoble and the old Continent, Chapter 12), and disciplinary boundaries. The book’s first purpose, however, is to record the author’s experiences and opinions on his journeys through modern laboratories and institutions, how the latter come into existence and how they work. Most of our everyday journeys imply frontiers (intellectual, institutional, geographical, and so on) and the book is all about exploring, and dissolving, frontiers. ‘ “Bringing together” would not be a bad slogan to encapsulate much of what I have tried to do’ confesses the author on the final page, when he proposes to ‘– as the French say – “faire le bilan” ’.

The memoir’s interest rests in the original route travelled by the author at a very special period, when contemporary science and society were undergoing spectacular modifications. Born in a small Kentish village and from a modest family background, Peter Day was the first of his family to go to university. His description of the life of a small boy in a modest house far from present-day comfort reveals a fabulous memory, along with a true writer’s talent. His experiences are indeed remarkable: an Oxbridge College’s educational product (and then teacher); head of a research group in the Inorganic Chemistry laboratory at Oxford University; head of one of the most famous European laboratories, the Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble – an indispensable neutron source for a wide scientific community (physicists, chemists, biologists); and, finally, head of one of the most respected of British Institutions, deeply rooted in historical British science, the Royal Institute (RI). Along the way we learn much about how people reach decisions (often in a contradictory manner at different moments). For example, we discover the reasonable or fallacious arguments produced to decide how to construct and improve an Oxford College, how to renovate the 21 Albemarle Street Royal Institute building, or how to repair the damaged nuclear reactor in Grenoble.

Sometimes friendly sometimes ferocious, the author’s pen sketches characters found in the traditional fauna of Oxford’s colleges (Chapter 5, Bowra’s Wadham, has some really irresistible descriptions), including the portrait of the author’s ‘long-suffering’ thesis supervisor, R.J.P. Williams, the teaching talents of Nobel Prize winners and famous scientists (D. Hodgkin, R. Mulliken, C. Hinshelwood, N. Mott), his untypical scientific neighbours at the Cyanamid European Research Institute (CERI) near Geneva (‘eccentric’ or ‘remarkable’ individuals: C.K. Jörgensen, R.G. Pearson), the French trade union leader at the Institute Laue-Langevin in Grenoble (Mollier, ‘a short muscular loquacious member of the team of reactor technicians who played a prominent part in the ILL football team’), the civil servants brimming with self-satisfaction and inefficiency in some of the higher branches of the British, French or European scientific bureaucratic Cucumber Trees, or the Mayor and figures of a small village in the Roussillon, ‘M. Bourquin’s Socialist Republic of Pyrenées Orientales’. Nobody is spared, neither Paul Getty, the oil billionaire, who was visited to get funding for the RI (‘Thus did this (to paraphrase the Noel Coward song) “poor little rich boy” spend its solitary afternoon marooned in his opulent prison’) who revealed himself as quite generous after all (‘Some weeks later, the post brought a substantial cheque – not quite the five figures sum I had hoped for, but not far short’), nor the Royal Patron of the RI in Buckingham Palace (‘Sir Robert Fellowes, her Majesty’s Private Secretary had been commanded to inform me that Her Majesty would indeed be graciously pleased to head the list of contributors but with the condition that the sum donated should remain confidential. When I looked to the enclosed cheque, the reason for such a condition became clear: the sum was on a par with what one might donate to a Village Fête.’). In many cases, it is impossible not to have in mind the Gillray cartoons of the Royal Institute.

A fascinating feature of the book is the critical analysis of how scientists behave in such places, how they are trained, how laboratories and scientific institutions are born, managed, how they are live, suffer from some illness and finally die. The careful description of the tutoring system in Oxford’s colleges, illustrated by telling pictures of staff and students ready to become Fellows of the Royal Society or the British Academy, helps us to understand the efficiency of the colleges’ educational system and its importance in the development, successes – and sometimes failures – of British science and society. Later, his ‘coexistence’ with the French system of organisation, especially at ILL with the peculiar constraints of public safety around and in a nuclear installation, and with very active trade unions, was clearly a very exciting, lively and … painful experience. His time as Director of the Royal Institute was obviously also rewarding, with the possibilities for spreading a love of science worldwide among children, thus following in the footsteps of glorious predecessors such as Davy and Faraday, but dulled by the need to beg for money to maintain dignity and efficiency in this illustrious house. The pages dedicated to how to deal with – and bypass – French trade unions during a conflict or how to thread a path through the labyrinth of British funding agencies are really worth the candle (paraphrasing Faraday).

In many places, history meets science. For example, Day’s analysis of the decision of the American governments to inject money in occidental science via NATO scientific conferences and schools, to recover occidental scientific and technological leadership after the appearance of the first Soviet Sputnik, is remarkable. His observations, sometimes harsh – formulated from different branches of the cucumber tree – of institutions such as the European Science Foundation (ESF) or RI or ILL at some stage of their lives and the way the author attempted to improve their situation – up to a point – are always lucid. Very valuable also are the comments on the endeavours of large multinational corporations (Cyanamid Company, American Telegraph and Telephone Company) in the field of basic research, not directly and immediately connected to innovation and application, yet which turn out to be not only very successful in harvesting new concepts, new phenomena and Nobel Prizes, but also in raising non-negligible quantities of patents and finally money. We are, today, very far from such a clever approach to the relations between basic and applied research.

The book is, of course, rich in more personal, and touching, observations: the description of the family and life of the Kentish boy; the questions about the origin of the family name ‘Day’ (Jour, Tag), common in Kent (from the Champagne town Aÿ=D’Ay, accompanying the island’s invaders after 1066?), the pleasant story of the young man meeting his future wife Frances by chance in a Geneva café. ‘I found all the window-seats already occupied except for one where the other chair was occupied by an attractive smartly-dressed English girl. I assumed (correctly as it turned out) that she was English because she was reading the Sunday Times.’ … ‘Conversation followed’, ‘… and nearly 50 years later, the conversation is still going on.’

In the final chapter, whose title is a quotation from the last verse of Stevenson’s Requiem, ‘The Hunter Home from the Hill’,³ the author returns to borders and especially social ones. Peter Day’s path will probably be recognizable to many scientists of his generation, from modest origins in primary schools where smart teachers were boosting capable pupils to higher education, and on to a respectable scientific and social recognition. But, in his local village, paraphrasing Scott Fitzgerald on the rich,⁴ the author observes – as many of us have done – that ‘they are different from us’. ‘Through the good fortunes of education and employment that particular border no longer bothers me but part of my being still lingers in that old country’ … ‘In 2010, that is one frontier still with us’, revealed by a terrible unsolved question: ‘Why is it that the proportion of state educated pupils going to Oxbridge has declined steeply over the last 40 years?’ Whatever the individual endeavours, there are frontiers more difficult than others to dissolve. May I say, by way of a French saying, as often also used in Day’s book, ‘Il reste des Bastilles à prendre’.

In my mind, this is one of the most valuable contributions of the book: starting from apparently small everyday facts (it can be the price of a bus ticket in different countries) to point out (unanswered) problems and provoke a beneficial reflexion to grasp and tackle them. This is true for our citizen’s life and for our scientist’s job, for the way we are practising it and for how we are facing professional and social constraints. The book provides some excellent answers of course, but it could also be useful to open the eyes of many of our colleagues beyond the ordinary agenda. I was lucky enough to meet the author in various places and scientific occasions in Europe, some of which are carefully described in the book. Taken overall, however, the Cucumber Tree reveals another and deeper face of the man and of a seasoned writer.

Whatever your location on your own Cucumber Tree, taste the fruits proposed by Peter Day. They are a delight.