Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'I'd prefer to ascribe that to your own healthy young blood, rather than a dye for carpets.' He did not even look up. 'Everyone knows how lymphangitis can clear up on its own accord. The Germans are always pressing their latest chemicals on us as miraculous cures. I've been injecting gold into my tuberculous patients for months, with no good reason except that every other doctor in London has been persuaded to do the same. I prefer to treat infections on the sound and tried principle of immunology, as preached by our mutual friend Sir Almroth Wright.'

We were interrupted by my father in his tail coat with red-and-white striped waistcoat, come to serve the evening cocktails.

'You must be pleased to have Jim home again, Elgar,' remarked Sir Edward, still scribbling.

'He uses too many of them Jerry words, sir.'

'But aren't you glad he's become proficient in the German language?'

'What's wrong with English, sir, I always say,' my father disagreed cheerfully.

He was carrying a large oval silver tray by its handles, ceremoniously breast-high. He lowered it slowly on the eighteenth-century pier table, marble topped, its legs a vulgar profusion of gilt mermaids and dolphins. Then he filled a glass with pale sherry from a square decanter and transferred it to a silver salver. All was performed with a solemnity, an exaggeration of movement, to imply that any action in Sir Edward Tiplady's personal service was of importance, or that a butler's performance of tasks as easily done by his master was worth the money.

'Edward, you haven't changed yet.' Lady Tiplady appeared almost on the heels of my father. 'You know we're going to the theatre.'

'Are we? What a bore.' He was reading a letter through his monocle. 'What's the show?'

'It's the Lunts-_Reunion in Vienna,_ at the Lyric: The Rothschilds asked us before Christmas to join their box. Surely you remember?'

'I've laid out your evening dress, sir,' came from my father, who had to play the valet in the same way that my mother was obliged to double as housekeeper. The War had replaced servant plenitude with the servant problem, the ingredient of all middle-class conversation.

'Well, Jim, you would seem to have resisted the siren voice of _Die Lorelei.'_ 'Lady Tip', as she was known downstairs, directed to me a voice laced with the acid she kept for servants, tradesmen, gossip, and dinner guests either boring or more intelligent than herself. She was tall, slim and dark-haired, in her late thirties but looking younger, beautiful and beautifully dressed.

'Perhaps I was lucky to resist it, your Ladyship. As it is a voice reputed to deprive a man of his sight and hearing.'

'Then the siren's voice would seem to have caught the ear of a good many people in Germany today, by all accounts.' She took a gin-and-french from my father's salver without glancing at him. 'What are we going to do about Jim?' she asked her husband.

'Do?' he asked vaguely, sipping his sherry at the desk.

'I mean, he can't go on living here, can he?'

I had noticed how the upper classes frequently assumed their language incomprehensible to the lower. There were many things which they would never discuss before the servants. The servants' affairs they could discuss freely over their own heads. But I was not listening. The Tipladys' only child, Elizabeth, had come into the room.

The year which may have changed me had transformed her. I had previously disregarded her as a household nuisance, like Sir Edward's half dozen cats. Now she was nearing fifteen, and already developed as a young woman. She had the same glistening dark hair, pale complexion and high cheekbones as her mother, but her eyes were softer, her lips full and as inviting as June strawberries, her breasts straining impatiently against the maidenly cut of her short blue dress. She seemed infinitely innocent, submissive and explosive-the look of Leonardo da Vinci. She sat on the sofa, turning her attention idly to a copy of the Tatler lying on the fireside table with three or four new novels from Harrod's library. The likes of me were to be ignored.

'Why not?' asked Sir Edward. 'Why shouldn't he still live with us?'

'The situation has become perfectly bizarre.' Lady Tip sat beside Elizabeth on the sofa, smoothing the sheath-like crimson silk evening gown over her long legs. 'It was all right when he was the butler's boy, but now he's a grown man and perfectly able to look after himself. He can't expect us to go on feeding and housing him in times like these.'

Lady Tip hated me. She was naturally jealous of the attention and affection which I diverted from her husband. My whole education I owed to Sir Edward's urging, expense and inspiration. The ladder of learning was then steep, sharply tapering and rickety. I was lucky to be the child in ten who progressed from elementary to secondary school, and among the four in a thousand who stepped further into university. There were only three hundred State scholarships, and three hundred more from Oxford and Cambridge, fought over by every clever poor child in the country.

Sir Edward had spurred me to win one of each, he had himself coached me in Latin for Cambridge 'Little Go', his cheques at Trinity arrived for birthdays, May Week or out of the blue. Aside froth the unmentionable part of our relationship, he was generous because he had no son and because he hated to see a good brain go to waste. Without Sir Edward, I should today look back on a life scribbled away as a clerk in some benumbing office. Or I should be a millionaire.

'Jim could at least get a job, and make some contribution to his keep,' Lady Tip continued.

'Perhaps I could persuade Almroth Wright to take you back at Mary's,' Sir Edward said to me. 'Though of course, Sir Almroth hates chemists in any shape or form. I'm seeing Alexander Fleming next week, I'll sound him out. God, what a bore old Flem is getting!' he broke off. 'It must be five years now since he found penicillium mould contaminating his Petri dishes and killing off his staphylococci. He still keeps working it into a discussion on anything whatever at the Research Club. Not of course that anyone can hear a word Flem says beyond the first two rows.'

'There's always the dole,' said Lady Tip, sipping her gin-and-french.

This annoyed Sir Edward. 'You really can't expect Jim to queue at the Labour Exchange with a lot of unemployed tram drivers and road menders.'

'Why on earth not?' she asked calmly.

Another cat, a tortoiseshell, appeared mysteriously and jumped on to Sir Edward's lap. My father impassively poured a second glass of sherry. Elizabeth continued turning the shiny pages of the Tatler, the unattainable eyed by the unspeakable.

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.