Sound Travel: Classroom to Cathedral via the Moon by Lucy Sheerman

The only physics lesson I recall in detail involved watching the teacher spread a metal Slinky across the huge wooden desk and explaining how sound moves in waves of compression and rarefaction. The idea of sound travelling, the speed of sound, the trajectories of light and distance were all briefly dazzlingly incomprehensible as sun swept through the high windows that looked down onto the valley, the canal basin, the flour mill. The mill whose owners funded this school which, when it opened at the start of the century, promised to teach science to girls. We took those sunlit lessons for granted of course, never imagining their radical premise or questioning the desire to escape inspired by abject boredom. We longed to leave at fourteen, just as our grandmothers had, for the grown-up world of work. There was no logic to the sense of sound travelling through a Slinky, that stretched out spiral of metal, just as there was no sense of the doors that had closed repeatedly upon the notion of girls, women even, arriving at this moment of understanding an intuitive fact as mechanical effect.

Physics was on Monday morning and coincided with a year in which I felt increasingly reluctant to force myself to go to school. Sunday evening in Brighouse in 1984, it seemed to me, was the most desolate time and place on the planet. While my father polished political speeches and prepared for his weekly trip to London, my mother broadcast to the rest of the family an increasingly urgent sense of panic about the likely onset of a nuclear war. Dad, she was convinced, would be safe in a well-organised bunker, while she would be left alone to protect and survive. On Monday morning I lingered at home with ailments, real and imagined, creating an equation of time and space balancing so imperfectly that my understanding of physics was knocked entirely off its orbit.

Not wanting to understand physics in a valley filled with factories powered by streams and the sage application of physical laws to the desire for profit was an act of wilful obstinacy. What did it mean for the inhabitants of

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