Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'He gave no indication of his feelings, apart from persistently referring to him as Doctor Fleming.'

I had another interview that day which held greater promise of fascination. I was having lunch with Archie. I had not set eyes on him since he left on his honeymoon. He took me to a small cheap restaurant near the Ministry of Information offices in Bloomsbury, where he said they understood his diet. He still suffered from his duodenal ulcer, and had a special ration book, of which he seemed proud, as some distinction amid wartime uniformity. He had lost so much weight that his eyes seemed larger, staring from a skull-like head. He was pale and he stooped. He wore a suit of brown corduroy.

'How's Elizabeth keeping?' I asked as we sat down.

'She's very well. She's stationed at the War Office. I heard you'd got married?'

'It didn't last.'

'I'm sorry,' he sympathized briefly. 'I know all about you and Elizabeth in France, by the way.'

'Those were exceptional circumstances.'

'Oh, yes, highly exceptional.'

'Does it worry you?'

'Of course not.'

'Isn't it like our being members of the same good club?'

'I don't think that's quite the way to describe Elizabeth,' he said, quite severely.

Archie had invited me because he was writing a propaganda article on Anglo-American co-operation with penicillin. He asked closely about Jeff Beckerman. 'Elizabeth tells me that she actually met this fellow with you before the war. He seemed to her a rough diamond, hardly the type of man to become a public benefactor.'

'Jeff doesn't want to benefit the public. He wants to make money out of it. At first they thought he was crazy, using profitable brewing capacity to grow the contaminants which all the other brewers were doing their damnedest to remove. Then Florey's paper describing his successful cases at Oxford got into the New York papers. Jeff's competitors quickly put two and two together and decided it made four or five million dollars.'

'Haven't the Americans got some enormous penicillin factory out in Illinois, or somewhere?' Archie sipped his glass of dried milk.

'Yes, by accident. The US Department of Agriculture had just opened a new fermentation research lab in Peoria, south of Chicago. That was about the time that Florey himself was sent out to the States. Did you know,' I told Archie proudly, 'that until Pearl Harbor all the penicillin mould in the world were descendants from the blob I let fall on Flem's Petri dish in the summer of 1928? But of course, the Americans do everything so much more thoroughly than we British. They got their Air Force to fly samples of soil home from all over the world. They analysed thousands and thousands of specimens at Peoria, until in the summer of 1943 they discovered an absolutely new superstrain of mould. It was named _Penicillium chrysogenum,_ and it produces five hundred times the penicillin of the old one.'

'Where did they find it?' asked Archie.

'On a canteloupe melon in the gutter of the market in Peoria.'

'But there's more to the process than growing a mould on molasses in a brewery vat, surely?'

'Indeed. You have to grow it in completely germ-free air, which is a job enough in itself. If Florey got one of his bedpans contaminated with germs, he just threw the penicillin down the sink. You can't do that with a fifteen thousand gallon vat. Then they had to design agitators for the vats, and invent a new drying technique. We could never have managed it here, especially with the bombs and the U-boats.'

'But aren't we in Britain making a lot of money out of this, too?'

'Not a penny.'

'Surely, the professor in Oxford could have patented penicillin? Like the sulpha drug you stole in Germany?'

'I mentioned the possibility to Florey. He said that you simply can't patent medical discoveries in Britain, even in wartime. It would be unethical. He would be struck off the Medical Register, as though he had committed adultery with a patient.'

Archie frowned towards his cottage cheese omelette made with dried egg. I was enjoying a Spam fritter. 'That's something the Government's got to change. Those profits shouldn't be pouring into the pockets of American capitalists. They should be used for the good of the entire British people.'

'You're still a Socialist?'

'More fiercely than ever. Did you know there's going to be a general election quite soon? I was on the telephone this morning to Blackpool.' The Labour Party conference was convening to replan the world in the Empress Ballroom. 'Clem Attlee's going to break up the Coalition. I know that for sure.'

'Then Churchill will have a walkover.'

'I'm resigned to that. But Labour will at least make some sort of impact on the country as a separate party, instead as part of the administration running the war. I intend to do some vigorous electioneering, though it's difficult for a peer. The wretched public do seem to think that you live in a castle and spend every day fox-hunting. Could I rope you in to help?'

'I've abandoned Socialism. In this country, you are born either to work for other people, or have others work for you. No political doctrine can absolve you of either original sin.'

Archie seemed shocked. 'When did you first think that?'

'The day you got married.'

'I shall of course return to publishing once the election's out of the way,' he went on hastily. 'It was hardly my fault that my firm went bust. A lot of London publishers were rather sharper than me, getting their hands on a wartime quota of paper which they didn't deserve.'

'I'm off to Germany on intelligence work.'

Archie looked puzzled. 'I didn't think that was your sort of line. Don't you just mess about with fungi?'

'My job was singular in Oxford, to create disease not to cure it. I have just invented a method of wiping out Germany with bubonic plague. Now my five years' work is completely wasted. It's very disappointing.'

He stared at me, half-disbelieving. 'You never gave the slightest inkling you were engaged in that sort of horrible war work.'

'Elizabeth knew,' I told him airily. 'Didn't she mention it?'

'If Labour should win the election,' Archie resumed, scraping up the last morsel of his leathery omelette, 'at least we've men with experience of Government. Attlee, Morrison, Bevin, Cripps, Greenwood, all members of the War Cabinet. No one can lay the old charge of Labour being short of ministerial talent.'

'If Labour did win, it would be a national disaster. They would use their energy to institute Heaven run on bureaucratic principles.'

'Perhaps you're right,' he conceded, looking gloomier than ever.

I could hardly blame myself for failing to see that in a couple of months Archie would be a Minister of the Crown.

'The problem of the Nazi is essentially that of Caliban,' said Dr Harold Greenparish in his quarrelsome little voice. 'To all intents and purposes, your Nazi has been raised in complete isolation from the rest of the world. His standards are those of his dam Sycorax, his worship directed to her god Setebos-the Nazi state and the late Adolf Hitler,' he explained to me. 'He has simply no yardstick of conventional morality to measure his behaviour, none whatsoever.'

'I think that's rather an oversimplification.'

He looked pained, annoyed, a little shocked. It was the first time I had contradicted him since we had left London. 'No, I don't think so. I've talked to some of these SS chappies in the prisoner of war camps. They're puzzled-to say the least-suddenly to find the world regards them as absolute monsters. By their own lights, they were simply doing their duty. In war, one is required to kill one's fellow man, whether he is the enemy without or the traitor within. The more of either category one disposes of, the more patriotic one is esteemed to be. Surely you take my point? That's how the SS people see it, I assure you.'