Richard Gordon - SURGEON AT ARMS

'Not me,' said Mr Cramphorn. He disliked being drawn into the animosities of others. He had enough in the hospital of his own, complaining almost daily to Captain Pile about the quality of everything from the operating equipment to the food, and appearing regularly in his office with the shepherd's pie. 'Why don't you have a friendly word in his ear, John? You're nearest to him.'

John Bickley tried to find an excuse, but Dr Pomfrey looked at his watch and hastily switched on the wireless. The nine o'clock news brought an end to the conversation, as it did to almost every other in the country.

John had his friendly word with Graham in the annex the following morning. His wife had insisted on it. But Graham only laughed and said, 'Well, I half expected something like this. Who's kicking up the fuss?'

'Pomfrey, in his own sort of way. And a few of the others.'

'Twelvetrees, I'll bet?' John said nothing. 'Will they never learn? Things are so different now. There's no one to benefit except the boys. It cheered them up, someone taking an interest in them, particularly a pretty girl. Though God knows I deserve some sort of encouragement. I haven't had much since the war started.'

'I know all that, of course, Graham. But you must be aware how sticky the others can be about publicity.'

'I don't give a damn.' They were standing outside the wash-house, and Graham started towards the ward. 'I cared little enough in peacetime what my professional brethren thought of me. Now I don't care at all. Anyway, they've a nice surprise in store. As a result of the article, that American fellow's coming down-what's his name, always being photographed in a tin hat coming out of shelters? Hugo Kirkham. His stuff's syndicated right across the States, and they aren't coy over there about hushing up the doctors' names. A nice little flutter that'll cause when the cuttings get back here.' Graham began to sound annoyed. 'I'm not trying to attract attention to myself. I'm trying to attract attention to the annex, which is quite a different thing.'

Anxious to change the conversation, John asked, 'Are you going to have a look at that fellow with the post-operative chest?'

'Later, old man, if that's all right?' Graham excused himself hastily. 'I've got to have a word with sister.'

Sister Mills occupied a partitioned office the size of a largish cupboard beside the ward door. She had been on the unit for three months, and Graham was astounded at her success. She seemed to have the right touch with unruly patients. There was less drunkenness, less swearing, fewer nurses asking for transfers. Even Bluey seemed to be behaving himself. Graham felt smugly gratified at the perspicacity of his choice. On the mornings when he wasn't operating, he exercised his prerogative as 'The Chief by taking with her a cup of the tasteless khaki liquid passing at Smithers Botham for coffee. He was not usually one for fraternizing with his nursing staff. He generally treated them brusquely, partly through fussiness over the smallest details of treatment, and partly as a defence reaction. For the sake of his patients he tried to fill his wards with the prettiest girls going, and though some of them fired his imagination, particularly in his present monkish existence, he was careful to avoid any entanglements. He didn't care to foul his own doorstep. Besides, he was something of a sexual snob. The man who before the war had got himself into bed with Stella Garrod might find the joys of common-or-garden girls something of a come-down. And anyway, he told himself sharply, he was getting far too old for them.

'You look in a mood,' Sister Mills smiled, as Graham squeezed himself into the spare chair.

'It's a passing irritation. Some of the others are grousing about that article yesterday. They still can't forgive me for getting my name in the papers before the war.'

She handed him a thick chipped cup and said, 'Yes, I remember reading some of the things they said about you.'

'I hope they were nice things. Many of them weren't. But you must have been only an impressionable schoolgirl at the time.'

It always put him in a better humour talking to Sister Mills. And he noticed she had become less solemn, less nervous of him. A sympathetic ear was a luxury when he was expected to bear the troubles of everyone in the annex.

'My father was always interested in your activities,' she told him.

'Is he a doctor?' He had never asked about her background before.

'No, he's a commercial artist. Not a particularly successful one, I'm afraid to say. Now he's working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production.'

'I used to paint at week-ends before the war. I don't think I was much good at it. I used to delude myself it was based on the same principles as my surgery. But it isn't. My job's more like plumbing, really. Whatever the look of the result, everything's got to join up the right way underneath.'

'Your own father was at Blackfriars, wasn't he?'

'Yes, the formidable old boy was the professor of anatomy,' Graham said fondly. 'He wrote an erudite volume about the synovial membranes, so erudite that only about fifty people in the country understood it. We've always been doctors of a sort. My grandfather was a semi-educated bonesetter. My greatgrandfather wasn't educated at all, but an out-and-out quack. He left a fortune. He could diagnose everything known to medical science, and a good deal that wasn't, by merely inspecting the patient's urine in a flask. What's called a piss-prophet.'

She smiled. 'Quite a weight of medical tradition to carry.'

'The family business, I suppose. My son Desmond's going in for it. You must meet him when he comes down from Cambridge. He stays with me at the pub, and I let him mess about here trying his hand at being anything from assistant anaesthetist to theatre porter. You'll like him. He's a charmer.'

'I'm sure I shall. I'll look forward to it.'

Graham fell silent. He had a vague uneasiness about mentioning Desmond. 'The fuss about the newspaper will soon blow over,' he went on.

'We're proud of you on the unit, anyway.'

'"The Wizz".' He laughed and got up. 'If I'm making a reputation I'd better live up to it, by doing some work. I've got to see a pneumonia John Bickley's inflicted. The fellow uses far too much ether.'

Despite his protestations, the realist in Graham admitted readily enough that he enjoyed recapturing the glory of print. He was an exhibitionist in a neurotically self-effacing profession, and finding himself so long in a surgical backwater where nobody was inclined to wander had been galling. But it was more gratifying still to find the article reviving Val Arlott's twenty-years-old interest in plastic surgery. He telephoned asking if Graham lacked equipment, promising to jolt action out of the authorities. The longed-for extra huts seemed at last likely to appear. Val even suggested a fund to provide the annex with 'comforts'-an excellent idea, Graham thought, it would keep the place in the public eye for months. But the best news of all was Peter Thomas becoming engaged to marry one of the nurses. He still looked a mess, but there he was, to marry in the merry month of May. It put up morale in the annex wonderfully. If a girl could sleep with Peter Thomas looking like that, Bluey declared, then he was off to pick up a bloody harem.

The wedding was to be at Chelsea registry office on May the twelfth, a Monday. On the Saturday night London had its last bad raid of the war, and an unexpected guest, Rudolph Hess, floated by parachute into Scotland. While the Deputy Fuhrer's fractured ankle was being attended by a British military doctor, a younger German flier, steadfastly doing his duty above the Thames, made a mistake in his bomb-aiming and blew most of Blackfriars Hospital to pieces. Luckily, the casualties were light, the patients being at Smithers Botham and the wooden props in the basement being stronger than everyone gloomily believed. But the firemen were still working thirty-six hours later, when Graham stood with a carnation in his buttonhole soulfully inspecting the wreckage before making across battered London to the registry office. The Arlott Wing, where he had worked before the war, had simply disappeared. The rest of the building, which he could remember standing in apparently unshakeable dignity when his father had shown it off as a childhood treat, was a hardly recognizable ruin. But the pavements were still busy. The bowler hat was still worn. The tramlines still ran down the Embankment. London had shrugged off fire and plague before. The smashed eighteenth-century masonry was a shame, but what was the loss of the most splendid building, he asked himself, compared with that of the most miserable of lives?