Book contents
5 - Religions and sciences
III The selfless gene: Genetic determinism and human freedom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2015
Summary
The North Sea Camp was built in the period between the two World Wars as an institution, a Borstal, for young offenders. It was built in Lincolnshire on the edge of the North Sea in order to provide demanding occupation not altogether unlike that of a treadmill: the main work each day was building a long sea wall in order to reclaim land for agriculture.
When I started work on the wall it had reached about 2 miles in distance from the Camp, and about 320 acres had been reclaimed for agriculture. As we worked towards what seemed like Scotland, there were many more miles yet to build. Two men and a digger might have finished it, I guess, in a few months. We still had ‘miles to go before we slept’ or were released because we were building the wall mainly by hand: we dug mud from the seaward side, shovelled it into a small tipping wagon that was set on rails. We then pushed the wagon to the foot of the wall where a winch pulled it up to the top. Having tipped it out, we then pushed it back to the point where we were digging.
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- Why Religions Matter , pp. 105 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015