Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'Don't put them cups down so, you'll break them,' she said quietly to Rosie.

Rosie looked round sharply and irritatingly set out the rest of the crockery with exaggerated tenderness. Then she tossed her dark curls and disappeared.

'What was you two up to?'

For a moment I was about to profess amazed innocence, like a child. Then I said simply, 'It's nothing whatever to do with you.'

My mother stared at me without changing her expression. She looked abruptly at the floor. 'Don't waste yourself.' She raised her glance round the kitchen. 'You can get yourself out of all this,' she said, just loudly enough to carry the hate in her voice.

The baize door creaked, my father clattered down the stone steps. 'It was the bloody cats what wanted feeding,' he announced bad temperedly. He added in the same tone, 'You ain't got far with that silver.'

'I'm a chemist, not a scullerymaid.'

He grunted. Picking up his nipped out cigarette from the saucer, he turned away in silence. It was the first time I dared to perform the experiment which demonstrated how terrified my parents were of me.

The bruised and silent atmosphere was fortunately shortly broken by the baize door opening again and Mrs Packer appearing, in her hat and about to leave for the day.

'Jim, there you are-Sir Edward wants you upstairs.'

The secretary was definitely not of the servants. She could ring for her tea from her small white office beside the consulting room at the back of the ground floor. She was pale and gingery with freckles, she wore starched white coats tightly belted round her narrow waist. Before leaving for Wuppertal I had imagined her middle-aged, but now I realized she could not have been much older than Gerda. No one seemed to know of Mr Packer, nor to mention him.

'You saw Sir Edward's been to the Palace today?' she said proudly as we reached the hall. 'It's in the evening papers.'

I had not noticed it. 'What's Sir Edward want me about?'

'Good news, I hope. He had a meeting with Sir Almroth Wright earlier. Perhaps he's found a job for you.'

I felt indifferent to this information, when six months earlier I should have been elated. Idleness had become my life, and the arduousness and discipline of employment looked distinctly uninviting. The same spiritual enfeeblement was probably suffered by the three million Britons who shared my experience.

'I do hope so.' She was looking at me smiling, head on one side. 'It does seem such a criminal waste, just kicking your heels down there. I mean with a Cambridge degree, and everything.'

She always sympathized with my being trapped in the lower classes, as she would have sympathized with a convict wrongfully imprisoned. That the social structure of the country was at blame crossed her mind as little as the prospect that it could ever be altered.

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.