Its headlong outdoor staircases suggested Old Edinburgh, the abuttal everywhere of man's ugliness on Nature's beauty reminded me of the mining towns in South Wales where I had gone bicycling during the Cambridge vacations. The river banks were settled by weavers in the eighteenth century, their linen yarn covering the green fields like snow, and its only event to impinge on the outside world was the birth there in 1820 of Friedrich Engels. Wuppertal was synthetic, like the compounds which I created from elements in my chemist's test-tubes. It had been formed from six Rhineland towns breathing the same acrid air-Elberfeld, Barmen, Cronenberg, Ronsdorf, Beyenburg and Vohwinkel-like Arnold Bennett's Potteries. That was three years before my arrival. I came to work there on January 1, 1933, a perfectly ridiculous moment for a particle of the British Empire to settle on the feverish face of Germany.

In Elberfeld-everyone of course still used the old names-which formed the north-west corner of Wuppertal, the Schwebebahn bisected the factory of I. G Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft, the huge chemical combine which made dyes and anything else profitable to come out of a test-tube. It was a vast, straggling disarray of red-brick buildings the size of warehouses and long wooden sheds, the river a squalid ditch canalized by the factory walls, rain-bowed with oil and overhung with a web of cables and pipes, smoke pouring from a dozen tall brick chimneys and steam escaping from myriad valves. The conscience of the world had not yet stepped so inconveniently between a manufacturer and the cheap disposal of his waste. I worked at the far side of Wuppertal in the old district of Barmen, but that morning I had an appointment at I G Farben. The Schwebebahn was crowded. It was eight-thirty on the last Saturday of January, in an age when men got up six days a week for work-if they could find it. From the factory station, a floorless shed suspended in mid-air, I retraced my route to the gates off the main road leading west towards Dusseldorf. It was a bitter day, the grey sky threatening imminent reinforcement for the black-speckled, iron-hard snow swept into gutters and corners.