Surgeon at Arms

4

By the first Christmas the war was still a novelty, something to expose the nation's pettiness rather than its greatness. Olympia housed not Bertram Mills' circus but Germans, Nazis interned with anti-Nazis in scrupulous British fairness. Dйbutantes put their hands enthusiastically to driving ambulances, and showgirls theirs slightly less so to the udders of cows. Royal Academicians were painting trees to disguise factories, and keepers at the London Zoo were armed, in case bombs sprung the cages, to organize big-game hunting in Regent's Park. In Bloomsbury, the Ministry of Information was emitting propaganda of praiseworthy gentility and over Westphalia the R.A.F. were dropping leaflets in impeccable good taste. Citizens were advised to walk in the blackout with white shirt-tails exposed behind, lighting cigarettes in the street after dark attracted abuse and sometimes prosecution, and for protection against motorists with two dim half-moons for headlights, the ponies of the New Forest were striped with white paint like zebras. The weather was more irksome than the war, the countryside for most of the winter being covered thickly with snow, a fact unmentionable in the papers lest it reach the attention of the enemy.

At Smithers Botham there was a wonderful house-party atmosphere, with snowballing, skating on the pond, and amateur theatricals, like Dingley Dell. The fighting in Finland stimulated the students to inaugurate a sauna bath, rushing naked from their steaming wash-house to roll with wild shouts in the snow in full view of any female who might be passing in the blackout (an extraordinary number always were). The vast wards stayed half-empty, most civilians on the Blackfriars waiting-list being required to hold on a little longer to their hernias and varicosities in contribution to the war-effort. Space must be kept for the half-million casualties, enjoying a stay of execution. Trained hands remained idle. The nurses occupied themselves making and remaking beds, and the housemen occupied themselves making and remaking the nurses.

Five miles away, in the Kentish market town of Maiden Cross, the local hospital was overwhelmed with cases of meningitis, of which there was an epidemic that winter, with a befitting outbreak of German measles. On Christmas Eve an old man was hit by a lorry in Smithers Botham village, and rushed by ambulance to the splendid portico. Captain Pile hastily redirected it to Maiden Cross, admission of such cases to Smithers Botham being against the regulations. The ambulance driver protested, but set off along twisting and slippery roads, and if the old man died on the way the coroner pronounced afterwards he would most likely have done so anyway.

Something more horrifying happened on Boxing Day. A lady visiting her sister hospitalized with a goitre was caught short by her pregnancy, and enthusiastically delivered by an orthopaedic surgeon occupying the operating theatre at the time. But Smithers Botham was not classified by the Ministry for midwifery. No one had the slightest right to be born there. Captain Pile confessed himself greatly distressed by the irregularity. The versatile orthopaedic surgeon apologized, but found himself caught in a baffled correspondence with Whitehall, which continued on and off for the duration of the war.

New Year's Eve fell on a Sunday, and Graham had spent the day as usual at Smithers Botham. There was so much to do. He was astounded how the squad of builders were performing a workmanlike miracle in the annex. Huts were thrown up in the neglected garden, pipes and wires sprouted everywhere, they were even starting to apply the duck-egg blue, and if this turned out nearer royal purple the place was at least beginning to take something of its shape in his mind. He began to gather staff. Tudor Beverley, a young plastic surgeon from Canada whom Graham had met on a lecture-tour, unexpectedly appeared on the Smithers Botham portico and was promptly press-ganged as his first assistant. He even had a few patients, whom he was obliged to operate upon in the main theatres. His first case was the removal of a soldier's tattoo, a splendid emblazonment on his arm dedicated to Florence, who had apparently become unworthy of the honour. Graham pickled it in a jar of spirit, and kept it on the desk of his hut office until the end of the war. He treated a sailor with a jaw fractured while fighting, regrettably not the enemy but another sailor in a pub off Piccadilly. There were a number of smashed-up dispatch riders, the motor-bike at the time striking Graham as the most dangerous weapon in the British Army.

Feeling he should prepare himself as well as the annex, Graham read as many textbooks and papers about wound surgery as he could lay hands on. He listened to Archie McIndoe at the Royal Society of Medicine, and to Sir Harold Gillies more intimately at Basingstoke-and more exhaustingly, Gillies being a forceful and sometimes eccentric exponent of his genius. Graham had resigned himself to the annex being something of a sideshow. The other four plastic units were better housed, better equipped, and better staffed, destined to take most of the work, if the war didn't fizzle out. He even half-regretted not submitting himself to Haileybury. He would at least have had a uniform. He had come to avoid his club in St James's because he felt the members looked askance on his lack of it. Most seemed to possess one, though whatever their martial duties these did not prevent their spending a good deal of time in its comfortable leather armchairs. But he had made his decision, and if it were the wrong one it unhappily wouldn't be his first.

On that New Year's Eve he left his Bentley in a mews garage off Curzon Street and walked the few yards to his house in fashionable Queen Street by the light of his pocket torch (screened by law with two thicknesses of tissue-paper). As he approached his front door he saw a girl standing on the step, her identity solved by an invitation flashed at him by a torch through her mackintosh pocket.

'Do you want to come home with me, darling?' she enquired.

'I'm afraid this is my home, here,' Graham told her politely. 'Oh, sorry. I hope you don't mind?'

He noticed she was young, and very plain. The regulations which forbade the lighting of shop windows threw a kindly shade on goods more immediately for sale, and the West End of London was as alive with seductive murmurs as Prospero's Isle. Graham supposed the girls hadn't enjoyed such a busy time of it since the lightless days of Boswell. He entered the empty house, reflecting sombrely that the difference between many women he knew of easy-going morals and these seedy and undoubtedly infected creatures was exactly the same as between Haileybury and himself. Even Haileybury had done the occasional beautifying job for guineas. But Graham had for the best part of fifteen years sold his services without question to all comers. And what was left? He had been dreadfully extravagant. His contract at Smithers Botham had exchanged an income of thousands for one of hundreds and debarred him from private practice-if he could have found any, plastic surgery suddenly being fashionable no longer, perhaps because the possibility of having one's head blown off ousted any dissatisfaction with the look of it. He was terribly in debt. And the income-tax inspector, as always, clanked across his life like Marley's ghost.

He fixed the blackout in the upstairs drawing-room, switched on the light, and poured a whisky at the corner cocktail cabinet. Usually he drank only to relieve the tedium of other people's company, now he was drinking twice as much to relieve the tedium of his own. His servants had left, a genteel middle-aged woman came in daily from Finchley to clear up his mess, which she referred to as her 'war work'. His son Desmond was in his first year at Cambridge, reading medicine. Unlike the First World War, which emptied the medical schools into the ranks of Kitchener's army, the Second barred medical students from joining the colours as firmly as miners or middle-aged ploughmen. For safety's sake, Graham had sent Desmond to spend Christmas with his cousin Alec, also destined for medicine, Alec's mother Edith then running a guest house for the better class of evacuee in Devon. Graham swirled the whisky round his glass. Edith Trevose had been successively his own fiancйe, his sister-in-law, his brother's widow, and his mistress, but despite these disturbing changes in status still his friend. He wondered whether to ring her up, but decided against it. It might start new complications. And anyway, the long-distance telephones were becoming dreadfully unreliable.

He reflected again that he should give up his Queen Street home, store the furniture, and take a room at The Oak inn on the village green at Smithers Botham. He would exchange the Bentley for a Morris, and be patriotic over petrol. It was all an excuse to save money, to live a simpler life, until the fuss was over-as everyone knew from the newspapers, the Germans were already short of everything from shells to shoeleather. He poured himself another drink. Here was Graham Trevose, he thought sadly, the fashionable plastic surgeon, the favourite guest of a thousand smart parties, and nobody even wanted to talk to him. He had always far keener pity for himself than for his patients. He felt loneliness like pain, to exist without a woman's company struck him as hard as solitary confinement. Without the compensation of a caress he became as wretched as a stray dog, to wake at night alone he felt a foretaste of the grave. He'd enjoyed affairs enough before the war, but what was their lasting satisfaction? he asked himself bitterly. As little as a handshake. Now everyone he knew seemed to have disappeared, and if the Germans did arrive that night to blow him to pieces there was hardly anyone to care.

He had a wife, of course, but she was in a home in Sussex, mad for fifteen years.