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.
14
I can remember today that speck of mould on Fleming's Petri dish. It was fluffy and white, its centre dark green, almost black. I remember wondering at the time if it was the same mould as grew upon the loaves we ate in the basement, too stale to set before our betters above stairs. My mother would often bandage it on my septic cuts, an old wives' remedy which sent me to school with my fingers in the form of a sandwich. The mould from a dead man's skull was apparently more effective, had she been able to lay her hands on any.
The mould had at least not lodged me unfavourably in the memory of Sir Almroth Wright. As I left for tea with him three weeks later, I daringly slipped into my tweed jacket pocket the phial of Domagk's 'Streptozon'. I decided that the King's physician had been a shade off-hand about the drug. Today I realize that Sir Edward had little faith in any treatment at all, because there was little treatment to have any faith in, even for a King. He had only insulin for the diabetic, liver for the anaemic and digitalis for the cardiac, X-rays were ghostly and the electrocardiograph a delicate toy. He used mostly his own eyes, hands and ears, dextrously assembling round the sick man a fragile scaffolding of the medicaments available until Nature cured.
I had not set eyes on St Mary's Hospital since leaving with my scholarship, after working there and enjoying free its first-year lectures. It was an exorbitantly solid building of red brick and stone, its first and second floors with verandahs looking upon the passing bus tops in Praed Street. The Prince Consort laid its foundation stone in 1845, it grew amid the shrieks of engines from Paddington Station, the miasmas of the Grand Junction Canal and the stink of a nearby carter's stables. The hospital itself was sick in my time. It was the most popular among the medical students in London, being the worst and therefore the easiest to get into. But the new dean was already effecting a cure, as in World War II he effected it with the health of Winston Churchill.
The terrace of seedy Victorian shops opposite was the same, so was the Fountains Abbey pub on the corner. But the turret which had housed the Inoculation Department, in converted poky wards and sisters' sitting-rooms, was superseded by a handsome, rectangular, five-storied building joined to the hospital by a bridge and known to everyone as 'The House of Lords'.
'Ah! Young Elgar. Been on your travels, I hear.'
I found Sir Almroth Wright in his own laboratory, at his elbow a row of metal drums packed with test-tubes plugged by cotton wool, on the bench before him microscope, Petri dishes, platignum loops, a throaty Bunsen burner, behind him shelves of chemical reagents and dyes. A bacteriologist, like an airline pilot, has to keep everything within finger-tip reach.
He immediately started talking to me in German, which he had learned fifty years before as a student in Leipzig. It seemed to suit his taste for polysyllabled pomposity. Pink cheeked, white hair brushed across the dome of his head, white moustached, he had a Nordic look inherited from his grandfather, once Director of the Swedish Mint. He had a protruding lower lip, circular steel-rimmed glasses half way down a stubby nose, a dark suit with the hopelessly ill-fitting look of a growing schoolboy's, and only a wing collar to show respect for his professional position.
'It would seem that Herr Hitler's cohorts are now diverting their murderous energies more usefully against each other,' he broke off in English, after we had talked of Wuppertal and Domagk. 'Directly after von Papen-of all people-dared to speak out for tolerance, freedom of the Press, silence for fanatics, and all that. Causing Dr Goebbels to stuff his fingers very promptly into his countrymen's ear-holes. From my knowledge of the officer corps, I should imagine the German Army was behind the massacre at Munich. They wouldn't care for Rцhm's plan to enlist a brownshirted rabble of two and a half million Storm Troopers in their ranks.'
I saw that he was not condescending to invite my opinion, and indeed events had moved so swiftly in Germany after my leaving that I could not give one. It was shortly after the 'Night of the Long Knives', when Hitler appeared at two o'clock on the Saturday morning of June 30 at the Hanslbauer Hotel in the lakeside resort of Weissee near Munich, to pull his closest friend Ernst Rцhm and other top Storm Troopers from their beds, an operation simplified by many being in bed with each other. 'Peculators, drunkards and homosexuals', the Storm Troopers appeared through the monocle of General von Brauchitsch-and they were anyway interfering with the serious business of Germany's illicit rearmament.
A thousand other prominent Germans were murdered in the days which followed. Affable, portly 'Artful Dodger' General Kurt von Schleicher was shot on his doorstep with his new wife. The socialism in National Socialism was eliminated, the Storm Troopers were demoted, the black-uniformed SS were freed to become the most efficient and ruthless political police in Europe's tortured history. President Hindenburg watched it all through eyes dimming with death, and the gentleman showjumper Franz von Papen, whose talent for survival approached genius, lived to fight another day, at Nьrnberg.
German politics lead us on to German drugs. Sir Almroth tipped my red 'Streptozon' tablets into the palm of his hand.
'I left Elberfeld with the laboratory and the factory in my mind inseparable,' he said in a discouraging voice. 'I G Farben churns out every variety of chemical for dyes, pesticides and yarns, and Professor Domagk churns them into mice, to see if the chemical kills them, or the bacteria with which he's already infected the poor creatures. That's not experimentation. That's not even science. It's roulette-a limited mental exercise, which even with the best of luck inevitably bankrupts the players.'
I had anticipated a rebuff more readily than from Sir Edward. Sir Almroth Wright was a Victorian naturalist with a microscope, at one with the country rector classifying his lepidoptera, the holidaymaking schoolmaster chipping specimens from the Alps, the don with camel-hair brush cross-pollinating his roses. He sought the panacea with glass microscope slides, putty and dabs of sealing-wax.
'The cure for disease, the elimination of human disease altogether, lies in the intelligent application of vaccine therapy,' he emphasized to me. This was more than Wright's life work. It was Wright's life. 'Do you know what is far superior to any mouse as an experimental animal? The human white blood corpuscle. We watch down our microscopes the effect of our cures upon that, not upon cages of white mice.'
He handed me back the phial. I was in no position
to protest, nor had I the courage. Our conversation was anyway disrupted by the sudden appearance of Dr John Freeman, tall, handsome, Charterhouse and Oxford, in his fifties but eternally energetic, said in the Inoculation Department always to 'Blow in, blow up and blow out'.
Sir Almroth gave his usual salutation, 'Well, friend, what have you won from our Mother Science today?'
They started discussing hay fever, on which Freeman was an expert. He thought this miserable complaint to be caused by the spores of moulds, and for years had scraped bedroom floors all over London for specimens of them. They were shortly joined by Professor Alexander Fleming, as different from Freeman as Burns from Byron.
Flem was not Charterhouse and Oxford, but Kilmarnock Academy and Regent Street Polytechnic. The last of an Ayrshire sheep farmer's large family, he clerked four years in a Leadenhall Street shipping office before warmer breezes of fortune brought him the windfall of a legacy, and wafted him into St Mary's at the turn of the century. He had passed the surgical fellowship with the plan of applying his nimble fingers to the profitable scalpel of an eye surgeon, but had been given a job in the Inoculation Department to retain at St Mary's his other talents as a sharpshooter in the hospital rifle team.
Their talk turned to wound infection. All three had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the war at No 13 General Hospital in Boulogne Casino, studying infection in the top floor laboratory, even constructing experimental wounds among the plethora from paper and spiky test-tubes impregnated with blood serum and germs. Wright had always been close to the Army. He was professor at the Army Medical School in the 1890s, resigning when the Army ridiculed his notion of inoculation against typhoid fever. Fifteen out of every thousand soldiers in the Boer War died from typhoid, then the Army thought again, and in the Great War the proportion dropped to two.
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 11
