The morning of Elizabeth's visit. I fell in with Florey as he was walking across the tree-dotted Parks, in sight of the jubilantly Tractarian red brick of Keble College. He always walked to the Dunn labs from his home in Parks Road.
'If the Germans do get as far as Oxford, which God forbid,' he said sombrely, 'we'll destroy everything to do with penicillin in the Department, except just enough mould to smear on our jacket linings. A few of us might escape to carry on the good work.'
'Escape to where?'
'That's the question. Perhaps to Canada. I've heard that the Fleet and the King and Queen are ready to go there in the last resort.' Florey's face lightened under the curly brim of his trilby as he began to talk about his successful experiment with mice during the week of Dunkirk. 'It was really most conclusive. I used eight mice, and you wouldn't have imagined that the ones injected with penicillin had ever been infected. Our untreated controls all died within twelve hours. The problem now is production. We've only enough penicillin for another twenty-five mice, and when I ask the big drug manufacturers for help they explain they're busy on war work. It's most infuriating.'
'What's the chance of being able to use penicillin on humans one day?'
'The step from mouse to man is a big one,' Florey said warily. 'Literally-a man is three thousand times mouse-sized. At this rate, I don't know when we'd ever have our hands on enough to treat a single case.'
'Have you written your work up yet?'
'There's a short preliminary paper appearing in the Lancet next month.' I missed at the time the significance of this casual exchange. We had reached the gate leading from the Parks to the rear of Florey's Pathology Department. 'Would you like a look at the national penicillin factory?' he invited. 'I've ten minutes before lecturing. The medical students still have to be taught, and the rest of my time seems to be absorbed filling in forms.'
He led me to a smaller building against the main laboratories. 'The animal house,' Florey explained. 'We're making use of its post mortem room.'
It was small and filled by an extraordinary apparatus the height of a man in the middle. Four large upturned bottles on the top were connected by rubber tubes and glass pipes to half a dozen smaller ones below, the whole cased in an open-fronted stand of polished mahogany. It resembled one of the preposterously logical drawings of Heath Robinson's-perhaps a machine for getting quarts into pint pots.
'It's the brain child of my ingenious young assistant, Norman Heatley.'
Florey explained how it worked. 'We suck out the broth-which of course has all the penicillin juice in it-from under the growing mould, replacing it with a fresh supply. You can do that a dozen times, the mould doesn't seem to mind. Then we cool the broth with ice, acidify it with phosphoric acid, and let it drip from those inverted lemonade bottles on top through the glass columns of amyl acetate. That's a good solvent for penicillin. Our final result is a few grains of brown powder.'
An electric bell rang and a light flashed on a makeshift panel to the right of the machine. 'One of the lemonade bottles needs replenishing,' observed Florey mildly.
'That's a beautiful piece of woodwork.'
'Yes, it's one of the shelves from the Bodleian Library.'
I asked him if he was still growing the mould on Fleming's original nutriment of meat broth. 'We tried all manner of chemicals to increase the yield,' Florey told me. 'Glucose, glycerol, thioglycolic acid. In the end, we found brewer's yeast did the trick. Then we needed something bigger than the ordinary lab flask for growing the fell of mould, but fortunately the right sort of receptacle was in good supply and near at hand.'
'Pie dishes?' I guessed.
'No, bedpans.' He gave his slight smile. 'It's very improvised, isn't it? And very British.'
It was largely improvisation, from one end of the country to the other, which that summer of 1940 saved our skins.
Elizabeth's train was as usual half an hour late. She was in uniform, running down the platform like a schoolgirl. 'Darling Jim, how wonderful, how absolutely wizard! I'd almost forgotten what you looked like. I really must see round the colleges, Christ Church and Balliol and places, I'd never been to Oxford in my life.'_
'The colleges are full of Civil Servants, who were evacuated from London with the children and expectant mothers.'
'And the river, I must see the river. Do you suppose we can still hire a punt?'
'I expect so.'
'Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?'
'That was Cambridge.'
We went to a pub. There was only beer and sloe gin to drink. We sat at a table in a dark beamed nook. 'Did you get court-martialled or anything about the car?' I asked.
'What car?'
'The one we abandoned at Angoulкme.'
'Oh, that! The whole French adventure seems just like a dream to me now. Doesn't it to you? Do you suppose they've got any cigarettes? It really did bring the war home to me, not being able to buy a packet of fags when I felt like it.'
I returned from the bar with ten Woodbines. Elizabeth was slightly pink and staring straight ahead of her. 'Jim, darling, I was intending to be ever so flippant and stupid, and pass off everything in France as a trivial joke which of course neither of us could possibly be expected to take seriously.' She paused. She continued in a crushed voice, 'But I can't. It couldn't possibly be a joke to you, I know. It doesn't look very funny to me, however hard I try.'
I had already suspected her cursing herself as a bigger fool for giving me her hand after giving me her body. 'Are those your own feelings? Or are your mother and your father behind it?'
She shook her head vigorously. But I insisted, 'I'm still the butler's boy. God!' I exclaimed. 'With Hitler just across the Channel. Nothing in this country is quite so indestructible as its snobbery. We'll go down with the ermine ensign fluttering bravely on our stern.'
'Jim-! It's nothing to do with that. I can't marry you because I'm going to marry Archie.'
'Archie!' I sat bolt upright, almost cracking my head on a beam. 'But you can't possibly marry Archie.'
'I can,' she said meekly.
'But Archie's a fool.'
'He's a very intelligent writer.'
'That doesn't make him more intelligent than I am. You told me so yourself.'
She made no reply, but performed the extravagantly wasteful gesture of stubbing out her half-smoked cigarette. 'Well, I'm going to marry him, and that's that,' she concluded in a matter-of-fact voice. 'I'm sorry. Jim. That's absolutely all I can say, isn't it?'
'It's his title, I suppose?'
'It helps,' she answered frankly.
There was a long silence. 'Well, if you love Archie-'
'I do, I do,' she said quietly. 'Ever since you first introduced him, I think.'
'And if you've arranged to marry him-'
'Soon, now he's likely to be posted overseas any minute.'
'Overseas? There's nowhere left to go.'
'It's terribly secret. Somewhere hot.'
'Then there's nothing whatever I can do about it, is there?'
She laid a hand on the arm of my tweed jacket. 'Darling Jim! I knew you'd understand.' I have never heard words uttered with more intense relief.
I was invited to the wedding. I decided that my absence would afford Archie more gratification than my presence embarrassment. We gathered together in the sight of God in St Giles, Belgrave Square, on the Saturday of September 7. It was an unhappy choice of wedding-day. Hermann Gцring had failed by a hair's breadth to eliminate the fighter stations amid the fair fields of Kent, and lost 225 of his aircraft to the Hurricanes and Spitfires the previous week. The feared Stuka dive-bomber was a flop, needing ten thousand feet of clear visibility, with which the skies of Britain were not generous. Gцring had not planned the Luftwaffe for night bombing, but to work with the Army as the tanks came rolling over the rubble. So he sent his Heinkel Dornier and Junker bombers with swarms of protective Messerschmitts to attack London in broad day
light.
The air-raid warning sounded. After a whispered discussion with the happy couple at the altar, the vicar announced in canonical tones that the ceremony would continue. Archie declared that he would have Elizabeth as his wedded wife. The Vicar asked her, 'Wilt thou have this man-' and a stick of bombs fell nearby, I thought right on Buckingham Palace. 'We shall adjourn to the crypt,' he said hastily.
In the stone-vaulted crypt with Sir Edward and Lady Tiplady and a hundred people I did not know, I found myself on a bench against the wall next to Archie with Elizabeth. He was still a sergeant in the Brigade of Guards.
'I honestly didn't expect you to come,' he said to me, sounding offended. Leaning away from Elizabeth, he added in a lower voice, 'I'm sorry about all this.'
'Do you think we should shake hands like gentlemen?'
'No, no, not now!' he said in alarm. Another bomb fell. 'I suppose this old church is safe?'
'You're not afraid, are you?'
'Of course I am.'
'I'm not.'
'Then I congratulate you on your courage.'
'It's not a matter of courage. I don't care any longer if I die.'
The reception was in a restaurant in Sloane Square. There was an iced cake and champagne. Sir Edward talked archly to me about fungi. Lady Tip pointedly avoided me. It came time for the happy pair to leave. There was a hired limousine, even confetti. At the door I found myself in a knot of guests and relatives close to Elizabeth. She looked up at me with bright eyes. 'It was because of the butler's boy,' she whispered. 'I'm telling you that because it's cruel, but not nearly as cruel as…as the other. Jim, darling, I love you.'
They left for Llandudno. That was Elizabeth.
29
My own wedding day was Wednesday, February 12, 1941.
I realized that I was getting on. I had turned thirty in the New Year. We had only a few air-raids on Oxford, but the previous summer, after Elizabeth had thrown me over, we were taking the warnings seriously enough to troop down to the lodging-house cellar at night. In such informal, half-dressed intimacy I made the acquaintance of Jean. She was a medical registrar at the Radcliffe Infirmary, like David Mellors. She had qualified in Scotland, she was slim and sandy, with delicate skin and freckles, she had blue eyes and wore tweed skirts with a silver thistle brooch on her blouse. She radiated homely comfort like prewar Mr Therm of the Gas, Light and Coke Company.
'How did you come to meet Sir Edward Tiplady?' she asked.
We were engaged. We were walking through the grounds of the Radcliffe Infirmary, one of the most beautiful places to lie sick in. It was built in the eighteenth century with a bequest from Dr John Radcliffe, and a little on the side from the Duke of Marlborough. You could still recognize the original country infirmary of thirty beds, one operating theatre and its own beerhouse, in the grey stone Georgian building facing a quad with a chapel, like a college.
During the war, Lord Nuffield from Cowley was following the Duke of Marlborough from Blenheim by pouring his profits from motorizing the nation into its wards. Jean and I were passing Wren's Radcliffe Observatory, built to resemble the Athenian Temple of the Four Winds, and providing the most charming view from any operating theatre in the world.
'My father was his butler.' She stared at me. 'Why are you so surprised?' I asked.
'I suppose one never thinks of butlers as having sons, somehow,' she replied, flustered.
'I assure you they breed, like other mammals.' She said nothing to this, seeing that she had hurt me. I added, 'Don't worry, I was long ago reconciled to the butler's supreme unimportance in the society he moves among. I suppose that's a quality he shares with the eunuch.'
'It doesn't mean a thing to me, honestly.' She did not see how uncharitable this was. 'I'm not a snob, you know that. And anyway, nobody in Scotland has a butler, except the dukes.'
I thought I should mention something I had overlooked. 'By the way, I was married once before.'
She made an angry response. 'This is a fine time to tell me.'
'I'm sorry. It's always rather embarrassing to bring out. I was waiting for the right moment, but of course right moments never arrive. When we were laughing it was too serious, and when we were glum it would only have deepened the gloom.'
'You seem to take a rather light-hearted view of matrimony.'
'It was over six years ago,' I excused myself. 'It seems longer, because the war's broken the perspective.'
'What happened to her?' Jean began to recover her temper and enjoy a womanly interest.
'She died.'
Jean looked shocked. 'Oh. I'm sorry,' she said apologetically. 'What was it from?'
'My wife died in childbirth at the beginning of 1935. She was the very first patient Leonard Colebrook treated for puerperal fever with sulphonamide. But it didn't do the trick. I had only a few tablets which I'd smuggled out of Germany, and when they ran out we just had to watch her die.'
'What about the child?'
'She survived all right. I had her adopted.'
'So you've a daughter aged six about the place somewhere?'
'Yes.'
'I'd never have thought it of you.' I wondered if she meant this as a compliment. 'What was your wife like?' she asked inevitably.
'She was Rosie the housemaid.'
'I see.'
We walked in silence until we reached the hospital rear gate leading to the Woodstock 'toad. 'Do you want to call it off?' I asked.
'Oh, no. I don't suppose it makes any difference.'
We were to marry in the Radcliffe Infirmary chapel. My mother came from Budleigh Salterton. When Hitler's Wehrmacht had appeared opposite Eastbourne, my mother's hotel closed down and she went as companion to an old lady in South Devon, though I had never thought of her as the companionable sort. My mother had grown grey, wrinkled and more religious than ever, for which the war to date had offered much encouragement.
Jean's family seemed all doctors and nurses, and looked about them with Scots severity. David Mellors was my best man. We both wore hired tail coats. The bride was late, and David himself hurried into the church only when the organist had started repeating his repertoire.
'Where the hell have you been?' I asked in an angry whisper as he joined me on the front pew.
'Sorry. I was giving a hand to Charles Fletcher.'
Dr Fletcher was working at the Radcliffe Infirmary as a Nuffield research student. 'Today he's trying some penicillin for Florey on a patient,' David whispered.
This was clearly of greater interest to David than my wedding. 'I didn't know Florey had enough to treat a case,' I whispered back.
'He may not have enough, boy. The patient's pretty sick. He's a middle-aged policeman who's been in for a couple of months already, with staphylococcal septicaemia. All from a scratch at the angle of his mouth while pruning his rosebushes.'
'None of the sulphonamides touched it, I suppose?'
'Not a hope. By now, he's got abscesses everywhere, osteomyelitis of the head of his humerus, an abscess perforating his eye. So we're risking trying penicillin on him by intravenous drip. He wouldn't have lasted much longer, anyway.'
'You mean, you're not absolutely certain that penicillin itself is non-toxic to the human?' The organist paused and changed his tune. The congregation was shuffling and coughing.
'Fairly certain. Charles Fletcher tried it on a volunteer last Monday,' David informed me, still in a whisper. 'There was panic stations over that-she threw a temperature. Luckily, it turned out the effect of an impurity.' The organist broke off, playing a triumphant chord. My bride had arrived. We stood up. I realized that David had been working with his morning suit under his white coat. 'Florey's extracting the excreted penicillin from the patient's urine, of course,' he told me. 'Every drop helps. We have to rush the bottles across to the Dunn Labs.'
'How?'
'On the handlebars of my bicycle.'
I had to turn my attention to personal matters.
The policeman died, as Rosie
had died. After five days they ran out of penicillin. A fortnight later Florey tried again, in a boy with an infected leg bone. 'It brought his temperature down to normal,' my wife told me in the small, awkward flat I had taken in north Oxford. 'Florey's going to concentrate on treating children.'
'That shows a nice humanitarian approach.'
'Oh, no. They need smaller doses.'
Between February and May, four more cases of overwhelming infection with the sulphonamide-defying staphylococcus were treated with penicillin at the Radcliffe. Three were children. One died. He had a brain infection which normally killed swiftly, but the post mortem (which my wife attended) showed that penicillin was killing off the germs. The others were cured of infected bones and infected urine. So was a labourer with a carbuncle.
The hospital did not hold its breath and look on admiringly. It was a busy place, everyone had his own work to do, and new drugs were always being tried and forgotten. Florey and the people in the Dunn Labs were anyway thought tedious academics, curers of mice and guinea-pigs, always an intrusive nuisance among the practical doctors. As the forgotten father of the mould, I was naturally interested that after 13 years in the lumber-room of science it might after all have a practical use-if Florey could produce enough of it. Apart from recovering penicillin from the patients' urine, every flask and syringe was carefully rinsed, while the Heath Robinson apparatus in the animal house was now complicated with milk churns, milk coolers and a discarded domestic bath-tub.
'A bronze letter-box comes into the process somewhere,' Florey explained to me when we met one evening in South Parks Road.
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 23