Quicksilver

 

When I was at school in the sixties I had a wonderful science teacher. His name was Mr Weigh. (I’m not sure if that was how his name was actually spelt.) He was elderly, very softly spoken and had a mischievous sense of humour. I thought he was wonderful.

One day he showed the class mercury.

He gave us all a blob of mercury to play with and we sat at our rough benches that were cracked with age and touched these strange blobs with our fingers. Then we rolled the blobs along the bench like strange bouncing ball bearings.

Mercury was a wonderful exciting discovery for us.

Then he took a coin from each of us, dipped it in the mercury and handed it back. My old penny now gleamed like silver. It was alchemy that worked: copper into silver.

All that day at school I felt for this silver coin in my pocket and rubbed it against my thumb. I wanted to show it to my mum.

Once home, I did show her the coin. But the shine had gone. I tried to remember something about the experiment that day, there had been heat. I switched on the gas stove and held the coin above the heat. To my dismay all the mercury vanished. My mother then lost interest, and I was left disappointed. Where had the mercury gone?

Looking back, knowing so much more about the harmful effects of mercury I am horrified that such an experiment was ever once allowed. And I’m appalled that so many of my contemporise were exposed to mercury vapours in that classroom and that I’d even done the same to my mum at home.

A few years before I took my ‘O’ levels Mr Weigh died. He never reached his retirement and I wonder now if mercury vapour played a part in his untimely death.

It can be so very, very frightening, when you look back.