The Invisible Victory

31

All bad things come to an end. The European war and my marriage finished on the same day.

It was never much of a marriage. My second wife was perfectly correct the day I enlightened her about my first. I did have a casual approach to matrimony. But in wartime, everyone seemed to be getting married with a desperate lightheartedness.

I still cannot walk through the front door of the Radcliffe Infirmary without a sickening feeling at my own foolishness. The greater event of that wedding day is recorded just inside. A plaque acclaims 'The first systematic use of penicillin', which all medical people wrongly take as a misspelling for 'systemic'. There is another plaque outside the Botanic Garden at the foot of Magdalen Bridge. Fleming is mentioned on neither of them.

I had turned to Jean as to the comfort of a glowing fire after the icy wind which had pierced me from Elizabeth. But a warm fire sends you to sleep, when you wake up there are only uninteresting ashes. Jean had lived a narrow life of high teas and earnest conversation. I had shared the easygoing, amiable hardheartedness of Archie's circle. I had been browbeaten by Hitler's Storm Troopers. Our similar occupations were a disadvantage. We were both more interested in our work than each other. We were both rather duller than our jobs. We had a large number of bitter rows, though they were pardonably about socialism, van Gogh, ITMA and T. S. Eliot. Then a pink-faced young doctor called Fred appeared, and she went to live with him. 'I say, I really am most frightfully sorry about this,' he kept apologizing, as though he had inadvertently gone off with my umbrella.

On a Friday morning a week after VE-Day in May 1945, I had been called urgently to Ainsley's office off the Edgware Road. 'What do you know about FIAT?' he asked at once.

'It's a make of Italian car.'

He gave an uncharacteristic gesture of impatience. 'These damned initials are sprouting everywhere-ALSOS, OSRD, TIIC, and so on. Now FIAT has just been created by SHAEF.'

I knew at least that SHAEF was Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. The others were a secret cypher to my ears. 'OSRD is the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and TIIC the Technical Industrial Information Committee,' Ainsley explained. 'I have completely forgotten what ASLOS stands for, but it's the brain-child of General Marshall. I believe there's also something called CIOS, which must be…let's say, Combined Intelligence Objective Subcommittee. FIAT is Field Intelligence Agency bracket Technical bracket.'

He stared for some moments gloomily across his desk. 'I imagined in my innocence that the war would become less complicated when the enemy surrendered, rather than more so. But we are now responsible for the entire German population as well as our own. FIAT's an Anglo-American show, but of course the Americans are running it, building up an enormous staff in Germany with secretaries, dictating machines, doubtless its own PX and cinema. We're just sending across a few odd bods. I'd like you to be one of them.'

I was attracted at the prospect of escape from the rubble of my domestic life. And I could not prevent an immensely self-satisfied feeling at the notion of returning to Germany as a conqueror. Ainsley continued by reading from a typed paper on his desk, 'FIAT is an intelligence service for identifying targets, subjects and personalities which may be of technical interest to British government departments or firms." In other words, they want you to grab as many German trade secrets as possible, and as many Germans as might know how to make better mousetraps than we do. It's the Ministry of Supply's baby. Frankly, I'm not interested in it.'

'You'd want me to nose round the IG Farben works at Wuppertal?'

'That's right. Dogmak's still alive, we found that out.' I wondered about Gerda.

'Have you turned up any evidence of the Germans producing penicillin?' I asked.

'Not so far. Hitler was flinging a few Iron Crosses about for penicillin research, but that means nothing, of course. I hear Montgomery's HQ have just sent some phials of penicillin they discovered, but they were probably one or two of ours picked up by the Afrika Korps.'

Nearly every molecule of penicillin used by the Allied Armies had been manufactured in America. The penicillin from Florey's animal house had been tried only experimentally in the summer of 1942, on fifteen wounded men in the North African desert. The supply was so meagre that it was powdered upon the wounds themselves, or injected into them through little rubber tubes-a ghost of Sir Almroth Wright's irrigation of wounds with salt solution in the Boulogne Casino. The experiment was so successful that they wanted to make Florey a general.

'It was rather ridiculous that the Germans could read all of Florey's case reports in the Lancet,' I complained. The policeman who pricked himself on a rose bush, the boy with the brain infection, all appeared in the Lancet of August 1941, embellished with a leading article of masterful caution which ran second to _Care For Home Guard Casualties._

Ainsley agreed. 'Admittedly, we were a bit late officially suppressing information about penicillin. But look at it another way. If Fleming had developed penicillin in 1928, the whole world would have been making it. Including Germany. As it turned out, our valuable weapon was denied the Nazis.'

'A point which most certainly escaped Wright when he wrote to _The Times,'_ I commented.

When penicillin had seeped into the newspapers in the middle of 1942, Sir Almroth claimed forthrightly that Fleming deserved the honour of discovering penicillin, and of the first suggestion that it promised an important use in medicine. The letter predictably had a Latin tag stuck in the middle.

'It's a wonder to me that Sir Almroth didn't write to _The Times_ claiming he discovered penicillin himself.' Ainsley gave his slow smile. 'We all know Wright, don't we? He'd put his name to anything he possibly could. While telling his 'sons in science' their discoveries were far too important to be published by an unknown research worker, and would create far more attention under the stamp of his own authority. Pretty cool of him, I always thought.'

'I got the impression when I visited Mary's last month that Fleming doesn't at all mind playing the Greta Garbo in the penicillin drama.'

'And I don't suppose St Mary's minds, either,' Ainsley said emphatically. 'They want to raise money from the public, like every other hospital. How's Wright reacting to Fleming's new knighthood?'

'He gave no indication of his feelings, apart from persistently referring to him as Doctor Fleming.'

I had another interview that day which held greater promise of fascination. I was having lunch with Archie. I had not set eyes on him since he left on his honeymoon. He took me to a small cheap restaurant near the Ministry of Information offices in Bloomsbury, where he said they understood his diet. He still suffered from his duodenal ulcer, and had a special ration book, of which he seemed proud, as some distinction amid wartime uniformity. He had lost so much weight that his eyes seemed larger, staring from a skull-like head. He was pale and he stooped. He wore a suit of brown corduroy.

'How's Elizabeth keeping?' I asked as we sat down.

'She's very well. She's stationed at the War Office. I heard you'd got married?'

'It didn't last.'

'I'm sorry,' he sympathized briefly. 'I know all about you and Elizabeth in France, by the way.'

'Those were exceptional circumstances.'

'Oh, yes, highly exceptional.'

'Does it worry you?'

'Of course not.'

'Isn't it like our being members of the same good club?'

'I don't think that's quite the way to describe Elizabeth,' he said, quite severely.

Archie had invited me because he was writing a propaganda article on Anglo-American co-operation with penicillin. He asked closely about Jeff Beckerman. 'Elizabeth tells me that she actually met this fellow with you before the war. He seemed to her a rough diamond, hardly the type of man to become a public benefactor.'

'Jeff doesn't want to benefit the public. He wants to make money out of it. At first they thought he was crazy, using profitable brewing capacity to grow the contaminants which all the other brewers were doing their damnedest to remove. Then Florey's paper describing his successful cases at Oxford got into the New York papers. Jeff's competitors quickly put two and two together and decided it made four or five million dollars.'

'Haven't the Americans got some enormous penicillin factory out in Illinois, or somewhere?' Archie sipped his glass of dried milk.

'Yes, by accident. The US Department of Agriculture had just opened a new fermentation research lab in Peoria, south of Chicago. That was about the time that Florey himself was sent out to the States. Did you know,' I told Archie proudly, 'that until Pearl Harbor all the penicillin mould in the world were descendants from the blob I let fall on Flem's Petri dish in the summer of 1928? But of course, the Americans do everything so much more thoroughly than we British. They got their Air Force to fly samples of soil home from all over the world. They analysed thousands and thousands of specimens at Peoria, until in the summer of 1943 they discovered an absolutely new superstrain of mould. It was named _Penicillium chrysogenum,_ and it produces five hundred times the penicillin of the old one.'

'Where did they find it?' asked Archie.

'On a canteloupe melon in the gutter of the market in Peoria.'

'But there's more to the process than growing a mould on molasses in a brewery vat, surely?'

'Indeed. You have to grow it in completely germ-free air, which is a job enough in itself. If Florey got one of his bedpans contaminated with germs, he just threw the penicillin down the sink. You can't do that with a fifteen thousand gallon vat. Then they had to design agitators for the vats, and invent a new drying technique. We could never have managed it here, especially with the bombs and the U-boats.'

'But aren't we in Britain making a lot of money out of this, too?'

'Not a penny.'

'Surely, the professor in Oxford could have patented penicillin? Like the sulpha drug you stole in Germany?'

'I mentioned the possibility to Florey. He said that you simply can't patent medical discoveries in Britain, even in wartime. It would be unethical. He would be struck off the Medical Register, as though he had committed adultery with a patient.'

Archie frowned towards his cottage cheese omelette made with dried egg. I was enjoying a Spam fritter. 'That's something the Government's got to change. Those profits shouldn't be pouring into the pockets of American capitalists. They should be used for the good of the entire British people.'

'You're still a Socialist?'

'More fiercely than ever. Did you know there's going to be a general election quite soon? I was on the telephone this morning to Blackpool.' The Labour Party conference was convening to replan the world in the Empress Ballroom. 'Clem Attlee's going to break up the Coalition. I know that for sure.'

'Then Churchill will have a walkover.'

'I'm resigned to that. But Labour will at least make some sort of impact on the country as a separate party, instead as part of the administration running the war. I intend to do some vigorous electioneering, though it's difficult for a peer. The wretched public do seem to think that you live in a castle and spend every day fox-hunting. Could I rope you in to help?'

'I've abandoned Socialism. In this country, you are born either to work for other people, or have others work for you. No political doctrine can absolve you of either original sin.'

Archie seemed shocked. 'When did you first think that?'

'The day you got married.'

'I shall of course return to publishing once the election's out of the way,' he went on hastily. 'It was hardly my fault that my firm went bust. A lot of London publishers were rather sharper than me, getting their hands on a wartime quota of paper which they didn't deserve.'

'I'm off to Germany on intelligence work.'

Archie looked puzzled. 'I didn't think that was your sort of line. Don't you just mess about with fungi?'

'My job was singular in Oxford, to create disease not to cure it. I have just invented a method of wiping out Germany with bubonic plague. Now my five years' work is completely wasted. It's very disappointing.'

He stared at me, half-disbelieving. 'You never gave the slightest inkling you were engaged in that sort of horrible war work.'

'Elizabeth knew,' I told him airily. 'Didn't she mention it?'

'If Labour should win the election,' Archie resumed, scraping up the last morsel of his leathery omelette, 'at least we've men with experience of Government. Attlee, Morrison, Bevin, Cripps, Greenwood, all members of the War Cabinet. No one can lay the old charge of Labour being short of ministerial talent.'

'If Labour did win, it would be a national disaster. They would use their energy to institute Heaven run on bureaucratic principles.'

'Perhaps you're right,' he conceded, looking gloomier than ever.

I could hardly blame myself for failing to see that in a couple of months Archie would be a Minister of the Crown.