Surgeon at Arms

by Gordon, Richard

  ‘Neither are most young men in the country, but they are finding themselves obliged to be.’

  ‘I hope you’re not suggesting I lack a sense of duty?’

  ‘I am suggesting nothing of the kind,’ said Haileybury patiently. ‘If anything, I am suggesting you lack a sense of perspective. I made my offer because I thought, firstly, it was in the best interests of the Army, and secondly, it was in the best interests of yourself. You turned it down with hardly a second thought.’

  Graham sat looking surly. Haileybury saw the delicately built-up reconciliation was about to come down with a crash.

  ‘Perhaps I am pressing you too severely,’ he retreated. ‘I cannot expect you to decide on such a far-reaching matter in a couple of minutes. Please excuse my unreasonableness,’ he apologized with unexpected good grace. ‘Perhaps you will accept it as evidence of my enthusiasm for your services? Telephone me in a day or two, when you’ve mulled it over. Here is the number of my extension.’

  Haileybury spent the rest of the meeting talking about the disastrous effect of the war on county cricket, a topic Graham found painfully boring.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘TREVOSE?’ asked Captain Cuthbert Pile of the Royal Army Medical Corps, sitting in his office at Smithers Botham. ‘Trevose? Never heard of him. What’s he want, Corporal?’

  ‘He’s from Blackfriars, sir,’ said Corporal Honeyman. Captain Pile groaned. ‘Not another? He doesn’t need accommodation, I hope? I’m doing miracles as it is.

  The Ministry can’t expect me to squeeze anyone else into the place. What’s his line?’

  ‘He seems to be a plastic surgeon, sir.’

  Captain Pile looked horrified. The war had forced acquaintance with fellow-doctors in many outlandish specialities, but the company of professional face-lifters he felt outside the line of duty. I don’t want to see him.’

  ‘You made an appointment, sir. For two this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh? Did I?’

  ‘You’ll remember the Ministry telephoned, sir. The gentleman has just joined the Emergency Medical Service.’

  Captain Pile rummaged busily through the papers covering his broad desk, which commanded a fine view of the sweeping front drive. There was a fire flickering in the oversized marble grate and an overall glow of mahogany-and-leather Victorian comfort. It had been the office of the Smithers Botham medical superintendent, then a consultant psychiatrist in the Army, where he was, in time, to have greater influence and invoke more widespread exasperation than a good many generals.

  ‘Where is this Trevose? In the hall?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He would have come to see Annex D, sir.’

  ‘Annex D,’ observed Captain Pile somberly. ‘Very well, Corporal, I’d better have a word with him. You go back to your work.’

  Corporal Honeyman withdrew to a small adjacent office to continue reading Lilliput, which he kept in a desk drawer with his bars of chocolate. He was a willowy young man with thinning, dandruff-laden hair, glasses in circular steel frames, and a battledress which chafed his long neck. He was a sight which depressed Captain Pile deeply. Corporal Honeyman had been a clerk in an estate agent’s before joining the Army through love of his country and dislike of living with his mother. The Army found he could use a typewriter, and sent him to Smithers Botham. He felt he would have been tolerably happy there, had it not been for Captain Pile, whom he was coming to care for even less than his mother.

  Captain Pile sat reading through some documents, feeling a little wait would put his visitor in his place. His own civilian career had been sadly frustrating. An intolerance of sick humans had led him into various medical administrative jobs, an intolerance of even healthy ones had made all of them short. But in the Army he felt he was fulfilling himself, having command of all Service patients finding themselves in Smithers Botham and charge of the general running of the place. He rose, and inspected himself carefully in the giltframed mirror over the mantelpiece. Red-cheeked, dark-moustached, well built, if inclined to be stoutish for the late thirties, he felt he filled his new uniform stylishly. He placed his cap on his well-brilliantined head, took his gloves, leather-bound stick, and greatcoat, and opened the door on the hall.

  ‘Mr. Trevose?’ He found the caller slight, pale, and fortyish, with large eyes in a large head, wearing under his overcoat a double-breasted chalk-striped grey flannel suit cut with smartness—flashiness, the captain might have said. ‘I know nothing whatever about plastic surgery,’ he told Graham proudly. ‘And frankly I’m too busy to start learning such subjects now. I suppose you make women new noses and that sort of thing?’

  ‘That sort of thing,’ said Graham.

  ‘Must be very profitable.’

  They went on to the broad front steps, Captain Pile giving a quick glance up and down. There might be a soldier or two about to award him a salute. But there were no soldiers, only a schizophrenic cutting the grass. tAnnex D has been empty for a while,’ he explained. It s not one of the best wards, but your other people from Blackfriars have bagged those already. I’m afraid you’ve rather missed the bus.’

  They started across the lawn.

  Captain Pile unlocked a heavy teak door in another yellow-brick wall with more broken glass on top. Graham’s spirits, already sinking under the weight of Smithers Botham’s massive ugliness, plunged further. The annex was ghastly. It looked older and bleaker than the rest of the hospital. It was as narrow as a ship, two stories high, a hundred yards long. Slates were missing from the roof, a good many windows were broken, and all of them were backed with stout iron bars. A jumble of small buildings sprouting iron stove-pipes were tacked on one end as an afterthought. The garden had for some seasons clearly been left to its own devices. Even Captain Pile looked faintly apologetic.

  Inside was dark, damp, and empty. On the bare floor were sheets of newspaper, streaming toilet rolls, a pile of black-chipped enamel mugs, and other wreckage beyond Graham’s powers of identification. Something scampered in the corner. The smell was strange, but predominantly faecal.

  ‘Do you mean human beings actually lived here?’ Graham exclaimed. ‘And not so very long ago?’

  ‘It’s a bit musty,’ Captain Pile agreed. ‘I gather they used to keep their senile dementias in the place. You can’t expect those sort of cases to take much notice of their surroundings.’

  Graham eyed a wooden partition dividing the long room, its door swinging ajar. ‘What’s through there?’

  ‘The night ward. This would be the day room.’ Graham picked his way gloomily through the rubbish to the far end of the annex. Of the tacked-on buildings, one revealed itself as the kitchen, with a stone floor and a black iron range. The second contained some cracked washbasins and three large bath-tubs raised proudly on pedestals in the middle. In the third, Graham found himself facing what appeared to be a row of horse-boxes.

  He discovered the half-doors opened inwards, to disclose lavatories with no seats and the chains encased in lengths of pipe running from cistern to handle.

  ‘The patients have hanged themselves on the chains,’ Captain Pile told him informatively.

  Graham stuck his hands in his pockets. After turning down Haileybury’s offer he had signed a contract with the Emergency Medical Service, and was committed to install and run a plastic surgery unit at Smithers Botham. Though he was always able to see a new face in the battered and bleeding remains of an accident, as a sculptor can in a lump of stone, it was beyond him to depict the rotting building as a busy, complex, cheerful, sterile centre for healing the wounded.

  ‘That day room would have to be my operating theatre,’ he suggested glumly. ‘The place must be ripped apart, replumbed, fitted with sinks, sterilizers, electric points. We’ll have one ward in the night room and another upstairs. God knows how we’ll shift anaesthetized patients up there—fireman’s lift, I supopse. I’ll want partitions for the anaesthetic room, the surgeons’ room, the nurses’ room... and where am I supposed to fit the photographer’s
studio, X-ray, somewhere for the dentists? I’ll need extractor fans, heating, reinforced ceilings for the lights, doors widening, new windows made. Those horrible iron bars must come off for a start. I want the whole place painted a bright pastel shade. Duck-egg blue, something like that. I’ll have gay curtains, white bedside lockers, flowers everywhere, comfortable chairs, radios, the prettiest nurses in the hospital. My patients get depressed enough with themselves, without any encouragement from their surroundings.’

  ‘Duck-egg blue, did you say?’ murmured Captain Pile, mystified.

  ‘I want those two far tubs in the awful wash-house partitioned off. They’ll have to do for the saline bath unit. The kitchen we’ll have to equip again from scratch.

  We’ll put locks on the lavatories. I’m far more likely to hang myself on the chain than the patients are. No, no, it’s all impossible,’ he decided abruptly. ‘No one could turn this place into anything but a pigsty. They can burn it to the ground, as far as I’m concerned. They’ll have to send me somewhere else.’

  Captain Pile grunted. ‘Where else had you in mind?’ Graham lit another cigarette. The dreadful man was right, of course. Hospital accommodation was as precious as anti-aircraft guns. It was Smithers Botham or nowhere.

  ‘We’ll have to make the most of it, I suppose,’ he said resignedly. ‘Baron Larrey did wonders for Napoleon’s wounded in cowsheds.’

  ‘Well, it’s not my pigeon.’ The captain was becoming impatient. ‘You’ll have to take up rebuilding problems direct with the Ministry. Have you seen enough? I’ve got to get back to the grindstone.’

  Graham stopped half-way along the ward. He noticed a door with a cracked glass panel leading to a verandah under a rusty green-painted roof. It reminded him of a similar one in the sanatorium where he had been sent to die as a young man, a war ago. He wondered if that verandah was still there, and who was lying in his place to count the rivets of the roof in the feverish boredom of tuberculosis. As he turned away, another door with a small glass peephole caught his eye. He swung it open. A tiny high barred window disclosed a cubicle lined entirely with black padded leather, even the floor. A padded cell. Graham couldn’t recall seeing one before.

  ‘I expect you’ll find a use for it,’ Captain Pile suggested helpfully.

  Graham walked back across the lawn in silence. It was all horribly depressing. But, he reminded himself, it was better than having to say ‘Sir’ to Haileybury.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  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 Mill’s circus but Germans, Nazis interned with anti-Nazis in scrupulous British fairness. Débutantes 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 washhouse 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 fight, 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 fiancée, 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.