The Invisible Victory

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.

It was the end of June 1941 and the blitz had stopped-though Britain had by then lost more civilian dead than Servicemen. Hitler had turned on his Russian allies, exactly as Lamartine had foreseen. 'I've at last persuaded a little chemical firm in the East End to grow the mould, and send up the juice in more milk churns,' Florey imparted. 'We're getting to look like prosperous dairy farmers. But a single bomb any night could put an end to that contribution.'

Florey asked if I had read his penicillin paper in the recent Lancet. I nodded. It was not overinformative. Florey and Chain stated simply that after their work on Fleming's lysozyme, penicillin seemed promising to investigate. They described its purification as a stable brown powder, its killing various germs in the test-tube, and more significantly its saving the lives of twenty-five infected mice. The Lancet had added a short and tepid leading article.

'I suppose you realize that copy of the Lancet will be opened in Stockholm?' I could not prevent myself asking. 'The conscientious German intelligence service will snip out your article, and in a few days a translation will be sitting on Gerhard Domagk's desk in Wuppertal. If the Gestapo now feel they can trust him.'

'Perhaps we should have done everything in secrecy, but it's difficult,' Florey said resignedly. 'We'd no encouragement from the Government to hush our work up. If it comes to that, we've had precious little encouragement from the Government about anything. They seem to have lost all interest, since risking your life in France for it. I suppose they've plenty of other things to worry about.'

'Did publication of your paper produce any result?'

'Yes. Flem appeared in Oxford.'

'I heard he'd come up for the day. At least he's proved that he's alive.'

We had reached the Science Library at the top of South Parks Road. Florey was going to dine in Queen's, I was going home. I asked, 'Does Flem really think that penicillin has possibilities?'

'Oh, yes. He thinks it could oust the sulphonamides.'

'That's rather grandiose, isn't it?'

Florey cautiously made no reply.

'Is Flem bitter at all over your success with it?'

'I think he's envious that I've got Chain on my staff here. Chain discovered how to purify it only after so many chemists had failed. Raistrick, and so on. But you know, Jim, if Flem really had faith in his discovery in the 1920S, he'd have nagged the chemists, or searched for one with the right trick up his sleeve. After all, Flem wasn't working in some isolated lab in an attic He had all the resources of the Inoculation Department at St Mary's at his beck and call.'

'Don't forget Sir Almroth Wright couldn't stand chemists at any price.'

'Well, Wright was getting doddery by then,' Florey said realistically. 'Flan would have got his own way, if he'd pushed hard enough.'

'He missed the bus, as the late Chamberlain said about Hitler?'

'I hope I'm not being vain, but penicillin would be unknown today if I hadn't decided to reinvestigate it in 1938. That delay of ten years was perfectly inexcusable. Old Flem missed the significance of his own paper.'

We parted. As I walked home, a half-forgotten fact impishly tickled my memory. I looked out my signed copy of _The British Journal of Experimental Pathology_ containing Fleming's paper. I read again the list of editors. They included H. W. Florey. He had missed the significance of Fleming's paper, too.