Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

I laughed. 'A brewery's an advance on lemonade bottles, I suppose. It's imaginative, anyway.'

'Sure, it's imaginative,' he said seriously. I finished my highball, and sat tinkling the ice in my glass. 'It's only by being imaginative that I've made my money. So what's the problem? Growing a mould and extracting a chemical from its juice.'

'Florey used amyl acetate for the extraction process.'

'There you are. The principle's established, it's only a matter of nuts and bolts.' He got up to fetch a foolscap pad and pencil from his leather topped desk. 'Let's try sketching out the production line. See here, I've got the vat…"

The interest of us both warmed, glowed, and broke into a flame. The floor round Jeff became covered with sheets of pencilled plans. I watched over his shoulder, giving a chemist's advice and replenishing the highballs. The New York lights were fading in the summer dawn when we plummeted down the elevator. Jeff picked up his Cadillac from the sidewalk and we drove through the sharpening light to White Plains. Beyond the city, to one side of the highway stood Jeff's chemical plant, to the other the Beckerman Brewery. He turned the car towards the brewery, roused the watchman, strode with the drawings under his arm towards the vast building with the fermentation vats, and pacing distances with his feet began the plan which flooded a wartime world with penicillin.

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?'