It was all straightforward and simple.
I resigned from the university and so did Yasmin.
I found and bought a house not far from where A. R. Woresley lived. It was a plain red-brick affair with four bedrooms and two fairly large living-rooms. Some retired empire builder in years gone by had christened it, of all things, Dunroamin. Dunroamin would be the headquarters of the Home. It would be where Yasmin and I lived during the preparatory period, and it would also be a secret laboratory for A. R. Woresley. I spent a lot of money equipping that lab with apparatus for making liquid nitrogen, with mixers, microscopes, and everything else we needed. I furnished the house. Yasmin and I moved in. But from then on, ours was a business relationship only.
Within a month, A. R. Woresley had constructed our portable liquid nitrogen container. It had double vacuum walls of aluminium and all manner of neat little trays and other contraptions to hold the tiny straws of sperm. It was the size of a large suitcase and what’s more it looked like a suitcase because the outside was sheathed in leather.
A second smaller travelling case contained compartments for ice and a hand-mill and bottles for carrying glycerol, egg yolk, and skimmed milk. Also a microscope for testing the potency of newly collected sperm in the field. Everything was got ready with meticulous care.
Finally, A. R. Woresley set about building The Semen’s Home in the cellar of the house.
13
BY EARLY JUNE 1919, we were almost ready to go. I say almost because we still had not yet agreed upon the list of names. Who would be the great men in the world to be honoured by a visit from Yasmin–and lurking in the background, me? The three of us had many meetings in Dunroamin to discuss this knotty problem. The kings were easy. We wanted all the kings. We wrote them down first:
KING ALBERT OF THE BELGIANS present age 44
KING BORIS OF BULGARIA “ “ 25
KING CHRISTIAN OF DENMARK “ “ 49
KING ALEXANDER OF THE HELLENES “ “ 26
KING VITTORIO EMANUELE OF ITALY “ “ 50
KING HAAKON OF NORWAY “ “ 47
KING FERDINAND OF RUMANIA “ “ 54
KING ALFONSO OF SPAIN “ “ 75
KING GUSTAV OF SWEDEN “ “ 61
KING PETER OF SERBIA “ “ 33
The Netherlands was out because it had only a queen. Portugal was out because the monarchy had been overthrown in the revolution of 1910. And Monaco was not worth fooling with. There remained only our King George V. After much debate, we decided to leave the old boy alone. It was all just a little bit too much on our own doorstep for comfort, and in any event I had plans for using this particular gentleman in quite another way, as you will see in a moment. We decided, though, to put Edward, Prince of Wales, on the list as a possible extra. Yasmin plus Blister Beetle could roll him over anytime she wished. What’s more, she could hardly wait.
The list of great men and geniuses was more difficult to compile. A few of them like Puccini and Joseph Conrad and Richard Strauss were obvious. So were Renoir and Monet, two rather ancient candidates who must clearly be visited pretty soon. But there was more to it than that. We had to decide which of the present-day (1919) great and famous men would still be great and famous ten, twenty, and even fifty years thence. There was also a more difficult group, the younger ones who were at present only moderately famous but who looked as though they might well become great and famous later on. This part of it was a bit of a gamble. It was also a matter of flair and judgement. Would the young James Joyce, for example, who was only thirty-seven years old, come to be regarded as a genius by later generations? I voted yes. So did A. R. Woresley. Yasmin had never heard of him. By a vote of two to one we put him on the list.
In the end, we decided to make two separate lists. The first would have top priority. The second would contain the possibles. We would get round to the possibles only after we had polished off the top priority boys. We would also pay attention to age. The older ones should, whenever possible, be attended to first in case they expired before we got to them.