The Invisible Victory

13

I signed on the dole at a Labour Exchange just behind Oxford Street. The middle-aged clerk behind the grille, with his yellowish celluloid collar and dandruff, luxuriated in the same official arrogance as the two young Nazis in Wuppertal police station. I got twenty-nine and threepence a week. I paid ten shillings through my father, less as a contribution to Lady Tip's household than to her meanness. People like the Tipladys passed through the Depression as comfortably as passengers in a _wagon lit_ across the bleak, peasant-sustaining plains of Eastern Europe.

Though in 1934, and in London, things weren't as bad as they were remembered. The British national income had dropped by barely a tenth, compared with the American by half. 'The Hungry Thirties' was a will o' the wisp risen from the industrially rotting areas of coal, steel and shipbuilding up north. The unemployed marched on London, but the fire had gone out of the fight since the General Strike of 1926. It was then that. Britain edged the way Germany slid. 'The Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies' was a private army blessed by Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks (scourge of the decade's touchingly coy pornographers), which the various British Fascist Societies began to infiltrate. But in the mid-1930s, the unemployed were a force as submissive to authority as those who advanced at Ypres or the Somme and other names which lodged in British folk memory-like 'the dole' itself.

In the land to which I returned, like the land which I had left, the political party system was suspended. Britain had a 'National' Government, created in 1931 under the threat of imminent national bankruptcy and continued until 1945 under the threat of imminent national extinction. Ramsay MacDonald had won his last election by asking for 'A Doctor's Mandate', a slogan suggested by Sir Edward Tiplady's _bete noire_ Sir Thomas Horder, who breakfasted _tкte-а-tкte_ every Tuesday with this self-doubting, self-despairing Prime Minister. Meanwhile, King George the Fifth gazed upon his subjects in or out of work with unfathomable benignity, the Prince of Wales cut a dash round the Empire and Cambridge continued to win the Boat Race.

The wages of unemployment was boredom. I was imprisoned in the basement, irritated by the ringing of the patients' doorbell to which my father continually ministered. I read books from the library and spent afternoons in art galleries and museums, obtaining a cultural education denied the usual biochemist. As summer came I tramped London from Parliament Hill to the Crystal Palace, patching the soles of my shoes with scraps of leather my father bought at a penny a bag from a kindly cobbler.

One early June evening, I was idling away watching my father cleaning the silver in his butler's pantry, which was hardly more than a large cupboard off the basement kitchen. He sat in shirt-sleeves and green baize apron, an emaciated hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips.

'Got your eye on young Miss Elizabeth, ain't you?' he remarked abruptly.

I coloured at the discovery of a deadly and guilty secret. When she came home from boarding school I always contrived to glimpse her round corners and through the cracks of doors, or more delightfully skipping past our high window. I could only romance about her, but our fantasies are always more solidly satisfying than our realities. As I was incapable of reply, my father added casually, while polishing a silver flower bowl, 'She's not his, you know.'

I was equally shocked and intrigued. 'What makes you think that?' I asked sceptically. I had often romanticized my own true parentage, but I bore a frustrating resemblance to my father.

'I hear things,' He continued polishing in silence. 'Fact, there's precious little about the family what I don't know. When I goes into a room and they clam up tight, I says to myself, "'Ullo, something fishy here". It doesn't take much to overhear a thing or two if you're careful, though often it's not worth the bother, just a row about who they're having to dinner.'

Such duplicity increased my respect for my father. He was not entirely the simpleton I took him for. 'But whose child is she? Do you know?'

'Remember Dr Ross? Sir Ronald Ross, I should say, him of "Malaria Day"? He died a couple of years back.'

'Surely not Ross!' I exclaimed. I remembered Sir Ronald calling regularly at the house the summer we had moved in, eight years previously. He was then nearing seventy, bull necked and square jawed, wearing a grey moustache with spiked ends as might have decorated a sergeant-major. On August 20, 1897, in a small laboratory facing Queen Victoria's statue in Calcutta, Ross had discovered the parasite which caused malaria, in the stomach of the spotted-winged anopheles mosquito. This was the last link in the casual chain of a fever which had baffled man since it had speeded the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The day was celebrated by annual oratorical lunches at the Ross Institute for Tropical Diseases at Putney. But Ross was mostly proud of his four novels and his poetry (which Osbert Sitwell mysteriously found of unforgettable beauty). Men always flatter themselves at doing at all what they do badly, rather than easily and well. He gave me one of his books and asked when I was going to join the Army.

'Nah, not him,' said my father contemptuously. 'There was an Italian doctor what came with him, and what had bin aht to India and China and such places.' He knocked a spike of ash with his little fingernail into the cracked saucer which passed as an ashtray. I remembered a tall, thin, sallow lank-haired younger visitor in Ross' shadow. 'When Sir Edward was still a doctor in the Army, Lady Tip was having an affair. It was during the flu, what killed so many people.' He continued steadily applying silver powder dissolved in methylated spirits from another cracked saucer.

'Lady Tip didn't catch the flu. She caught something what's more common all the year round.'

My amazement was followed by a pleasant feeling of conspiracy in lиse-majestй, and the desanctification of the goddess Elizabeth. 'They still sees each other to this day. And he still gets a bit of tail of her, for all I know. Bloody good thing, keeps the bitch in a better temper. Shouldn't think she gets even half an inch out of Sir Edward. He's a sissy, you know, written all over him.'

My father dropped his voice. The pantry door was open, and from the clatter in the kitchen it seemed Rosie was laying the trays for tomorrow's early morning teas. She always seemed to create undue noise, whatever she did.

'Why doesn't Sir Edward divorce Lady Tip?' I asked simply.

'Don't be barmy. The King's physician? A divorce would be the end of him at the Palace, that's for sure. And in a lot of other respectable houses as well. He'd never live down the scandal.' The bell rang. My father cursed, pinched out his cigarette, took off his baize apron and put on his tail coat. 'Lady Tip wants her booze, I suppose. Polish that, Jim, there's a good lad.' He tossed me the chamois leather. I started clearing the film of powder from the silver bowl, ruminating on our sensational conversation. I have refrained from giving the Italian doctor's name, because it is perpetuated in a laboratory dye for bacteria, and is familiar to the meanest medical student.

I did not anticipate being alone for long.

'Give us a kiss.'

Rosie appeared at the pantry door, red-faced, bright eyed, lips pursed invitingly. She was in her black art silk afternoon dress-it was rough brown calico for the morning's cleaning-but she had taken off her lace apron and her collar and cuffs, her dark curls tossed free of a cap, giving her an excitingly undressed look. I grabbed her, she pressed hard against me, seeming to exhale the heat of the glowing fires which she was continually reviving. 'When are you going to take me to the pictures?' she asked pertly.

'I can't afford it. I'm on the dole.'

'Go on! I'll pay.'

'That would never do.'

'Why not? Lots of girls stand treat these days.' She rubbed her rough, square nailed fingers against my cheek. As I smiled, without conceding to her, she said, 'Regular toff, ain't you?'

'I'm one of the servants, same as you are.'

'You speaks like a toff.' She slowly and voluptuously cradled my neck in her raw red arms. She had 'set her cap' at me, as they said in the paper-covered novels on greyish pages which she read beside the basement stove. I was drawn into her soft embraces like a bee into a summer flower. In common with Gerda, she never used perfume. She couldn't afford even Woolworth's. But unlike Gerda, her body had that heady tang which the Italians call _odure di donna._ She whispered, 'If you came upstairs one night, I wouldn't mind.'

'I'd wake the whole house up,' I objected.

'No you wouldn't. Not if you went careful, up the back stairs.'

'Supposing Lady Tip found out? You'd lose your position.'

Rosie wrinkled her nose, but made no reply. I had already planned the route of a tiptoe Romeo, but had refused to let myself risk it. Not through chancing Rosie the sack. But because life was humiliating enough, without taking a housemaid as a mistress. I should be letting down the toffs.

We leapt apart. The green baize door leading down to the basement creaked on its spring. Rosie was clattering at her trays again when my mother came in. She wore her best black overcoat and her black hat with a bow and black gloves. She had been to weekday evensong at Holy Trinity Church by Regent's Park, Sunday matins being precluded by the Tipladys' lunch. She stood looking through the pantry door, taking off her gloves. I was busy polishing the silver with my leather.

'Don't put them cups down so, you'll break them,' she said quietly to Rosie.

Rosie looked round sharply and irritatingly set out the rest of the crockery with exaggerated tenderness. Then she tossed her dark curls and disappeared.

'What was you two up to?'

For a moment I was about to profess amazed innocence, like a child. Then I said simply, 'It's nothing whatever to do with you.'

My mother stared at me without changing her expression. She looked abruptly at the floor. 'Don't waste yourself.' She raised her glance round the kitchen. 'You can get yourself out of all this,' she said, just loudly enough to carry the hate in her voice.

The baize door creaked, my father clattered down the stone steps. 'It was the bloody cats what wanted feeding,' he announced bad temperedly. He added in the same tone, 'You ain't got far with that silver.'

'I'm a chemist, not a scullerymaid.'

He grunted. Picking up his nipped out cigarette from the saucer, he turned away in silence. It was the first time I dared to perform the experiment which demonstrated how terrified my parents were of me.

The bruised and silent atmosphere was fortunately shortly broken by the baize door opening again and Mrs Packer appearing, in her hat and about to leave for the day.

'Jim, there you are-Sir Edward wants you upstairs.'

The secretary was definitely not of the servants. She could ring for her tea from her small white office beside the consulting room at the back of the ground floor. She was pale and gingery with freckles, she wore starched white coats tightly belted round her narrow waist. Before leaving for Wuppertal I had imagined her middle-aged, but now I realized she could not have been much older than Gerda. No one seemed to know of Mr Packer, nor to mention him.

'You saw Sir Edward's been to the Palace today?' she said proudly as we reached the hall. 'It's in the evening papers.'

I had not noticed it. 'What's Sir Edward want me about?'

'Good news, I hope. He had a meeting with Sir Almroth Wright earlier. Perhaps he's found a job for you.'

I felt indifferent to this information, when six months earlier I should have been elated. Idleness had become my life, and the arduousness and discipline of employment looked distinctly uninviting. The same spiritual enfeeblement was probably suffered by the three million Britons who shared my experience.

'I do hope so.' She was looking at me smiling, head on one side. 'It does seem such a criminal waste, just kicking your heels down there. I mean with a Cambridge degree, and everything.'

She always sympathized with my being trapped in the lower classes, as she would have sympathized with a convict wrongfully imprisoned. That the social structure of the country was at blame crossed her mind as little as the prospect that it could ever be altered.

I found Sir Edward in his black jacket and striped trousers, striding about the upstairs drawing-room. 'Hello! Seen the papers?' he greeted me, boasting cheerfully. 'Nothing serious with the old gentleman, but you know how panicky everyone gets after last time.'

I took my place on the sheepskin rug, the fire in summer replaced by a fan of shiny paper, painstakingly folded by Rosie and generously speckled with soot.

'The King sends for me, he doesn't send for Tommy Horder,' he continued in the same tone. 'Tommy may be a first rate diagnostician with a first rate practice-H G Wells, Thomas Beecham, Somerset Maugham and all that-but he understands illnesses better than he does people.'

He took a cigarette from a mantelpiece more crowded with cards than ever, as it was the height of the London Season. Sir Edward was a regular attendant not only at the Royal bedside but at the Royal armchair whenever His Majesty fancied himself seedy. He went down so well because of a flair, when he chose to use it, for putting medical processes into earthy terms and even the language of the stable. This appealed to a monarch with a downright vocabulary, and an ear for a broad story which was richly satisfied by his Dominions Secretary, the Cockney J H Thomas.

He lit the cigarette, throwing himself into an armchair. 'You have to keep your head among those people at the Palace. You can imagine how I felt when Lord Dawson suddenly called me in, that Christmas of 1928? Finding myself in a bedroom with my Sovereign unconscious, blue in the face and snorting like a grampus, chest sounding like bubble-and-squeak, X-rays inconclusive, needle-tap dry, my distinguished colleagues throwing up their hands and the Privy Council convening all round me to tell the Empire the King was dead.' He laughed, and pressed the bell. 'I needed inspiration to think of an abscess under the diaphragm, and even more to know exactly where the needle had to go in search of the Royal pus. But I saved him! A couple of months, and he was off to convalesce in Bognor.'

I remember even today reading a Proclamation damp on the wall, its heavy official type declaring bravely, ornately, and pathetically, _Whereas We have been stricken by illness and are unable for the time being to give due attention to the affairs of Our Realm_…The news that a Council of State was to act for the King ran through the country like a tolling bell, the churches were left open day and night and my mother prayed at the kitchen table. The germs of pneumonia were as indifferent to a crown as to a cloth cap, and there was no treatment save the skilful fingers of his nurses. After Dr Tiplady was called on the Wednesday afternoon of December 12, an internal abscess was spotted, a rib snipped to emit the pus and antiseptic-soaked gauze packed painfully into the gap. The beloved Monarch breathed easier, the Empire rejoiced, Dr Tiplady became Sir Edward and Bognor became Bognor Regis.

'Elgar, I think I've found your lad a job,' Sir Edward announced as my father appeared with the cocktail tray.

'Glad to hear it, sir. Get him from under our feet all day.'

'I saw Sir Almroth and Flem this morning. What Flem never told me before-' he continued to me. Not of course that Flem ever tells you anything, conversation with him is like tennis with an opponent who pockets the ball after your every shot-and what _you _never told me before, was that _penicillium_ mould contaminated his Petri dish entirely through your own incompetence and carelessness.' He said this smiling good-humouredly.

'I never thought much about it at the time,' I confessed. 'I was awfully busy working for my Cambridge scholarship. And scared stiff of being blown up by Sir Almroth, if it came to his ears. So I kept pretty quiet.'

'What modesty,' he said banteringly. 'You participated in a discovery.'

One of my jobs as a St Mary's lab boy was preparing the Petri dishes-shallow circular glass plates three inches across and quarter of an inch high, with another fitting snugly over the top, faintly resembling the domestic butter dish. As even germs must feed, these were floored with jelly made from pink Japanese seaweed, laced with the same meat broth as doubtless sustained the patients they had infected.

Fleming used a loop of sterilized platignum to smear on the jelly the spit or pus which arrived in an unending stream of swabs from the wards to his tiny, awkward laboratory in a turret on the corner of the hospital, its three windows overlooking busy Praed Street. After a night in the incubator, the invisible seeds had grown by repeatedly splitting in two, forming characteristic 'colonies' which Fleming could identify as one sort of germ or another. For confirmation, he stained them with dye and inspected them down his microscope, which had a special leather guard to prevent condensation from an ever-running nose stimulated by an ever-smouldering cigarette.

Once escaped from their protective glass, germs could be as dangerous as the vipers kept safely behind the windows of the Reptile House of the Zoo. In my own memory, two of Sir Almroth Wright's 'sons in science', as he called his staff, had been killed by their work. One caught tuberculosis, another glanders, which can strike down the rider as well as the horse. My job was to sterilize the used Petri dishes in a metal bowl of strong antiseptic. But when Fleming left for his holiday in Scotland in the miserably cold July of 1928, I stacked the dishes in the bowl and completely forgot about them until the morning he returned. He summoned me, he pointed silently to the top two or three, which I had so carelessly left above the level of the disinfectant fluid, and which could have been extruding germs into the atmosphere like the breath of a sick man.

Fleming never became angry. He reminded me of another Scots doctor, described by Robert Louis Stevenson in _Jekyll and Hyde_ as 'about as emotional as a bagpipe'. But his taciturnity could make you feel horribly uncertain and guilty. As I was hastily carrying the bowl away, he picked up the top Petri dish and said, 'That's funny.' _I_ saw it was contaminated with a blob of greenish mould. Fleming saw that the mould was killing off the colonies of staphylococcus germs all round it.

Sir Edward started stroking a black cat which had leapt into his lap. 'I must admit, it was canny of Flem to notice his colonies of staphs turning to ghosts of their former selves. Thank God it was Flem who baptized the mysterious mould-juice "penicillin". Did you know that penicillium is the Latin for "a brush"?' I shook my head. 'Wright is so damn proud of his Classical education, he would have anointed the stuff with jaw-breaking polysyllables, far beyond Flem's limited powers of speech.' He took his glass of sherry from my father. 'Her ladyship won't be in to dinner tonight, Elgar.'

'Very good, sir.'

'There must have been a good many chances involved-even the weather-to let those staphs grow cheek by jowl with the mould,' Sir Edward mused. I always admired how he effortlessly switched the level of conversation from my father to myself. It must have come from handling all manner of men in his profession. 'I suppose the mould floated from Praed Street or Heaven, or the funnel of the Cornish Riviera Express in Paddington Station, for all I know. He's kept the dish, you know. He showed it me this morning.'

It is now in the British Museum-fittingly, history being largely the record of man's lucky or unlucky mistakes.

'So Flem's ended up with a neat little laboratory toy,' Sir Edward continued. 'Do you know what he does with this penicillin?'

'Not exactly. I never heard of it again, until you mentioned it after I got back from Germany.'

'He mixes it with the agar jelly in his Petri dishes, and it kills off all the bugs causing the common diseases-you know, pneumonia, gonorrhea, diphtheria, septicaemia and all that. But it doesn't touch such odd birds as _Bacillus Influenzae._ So Flem makes his patients cough all over a Petri dish soaked in his mould juice, and if they're incubating the influenza bacillus it will grow in lovely colonies instead of being crowded out by the other common or garden bugs.'

'That's rather neat.'

'Oh, it's a very elegant experiment. But of course Flem's one of the most stylish lab workers I've ever come across. I wish we had someone like him at Blackfriars-my own hospital suffers a very ham-handed lot in the bacteriological department. Though unfortunately the experiment is not of the slightest importance whatever.' He laughed. 'Andrews and the bright boys at the Medical Research Institute have discovered that flu isn't caused by the influenza bacillus at all. It's due to a virus.' He drained his sherry. 'No more, thank you, Elgar. That will do.'

My father withdrew, by custom turning at the door to leave backwards, as though Sir Edward were royalty rather than its medical attendant.

'So Flem goes on boring us about his wretched mould-juice at the Research Club. But I suppose Edward Jenner utterly bored his friends for twenty years over his smallpox vaccination theories. At any rate, they tried to chuck him out of something called the Convivio-Medical Club down in Gloucester. But the story may have a happy ending for you. Sir Almroth would like to see you again. He's even asked you to tea.' Sir Edward produced his pocket diary, screwing in his monocle. 'Tuesday, July 3. GBS will be there.'

He paused for me to look impressed. I knew that Shaw was a regular visitor to the ceremonial if unappetizing teas in Sir Almroth's department. 'So you'd better sharpen up your wits,' he advised. 'Sir Almroth may offer you a job, but of course I can't promise. The Inoculation Department at Mary's is hardly running with money like your German drug companies.' He pushed the black cat off his lap and stood up. 'Now I must run along, I've a hundred things to finish before I dine in solitary state. My wife is out tonight in the company of an old admirer.'

He tried to say this lightly, but in a sentence his voice plummeted down like a singer's. We both looked embarrassed. He struggled to resume in his usual manner, 'Let me give you some advice-never get married.' But he failed. Then he stroked my cheek. That was the only gesture he ever made towards me. I was frightened to discover how miserable he was.