Richard Gordon: SURGEON AT ARMS

'Do you want to come home with me, darling?' she enquired.

'I'm afraid this is my home, here,' Graham told her politely. 'Oh, sorry. I hope you don't mind?'

He noticed she was young, and very plain. The regulations which forbade the lighting of shop windows threw a kindly shade on goods more immediately for sale, and the West End of London was as alive with seductive murmurs as Prospero's Isle. Graham supposed the girls hadn't enjoyed such a busy time of it since the lightless days of Boswell. He entered the empty house, reflecting sombrely that the difference between many women he knew of easy-going morals and these seedy and undoubtedly infected creatures was exactly the same as between Haileybury and himself. Even Haileybury had done the occasional beautifying job for guineas. But Graham had for the best part of fifteen years sold his services without question to all comers. And what was left? He had been dreadfully extravagant. His contract at Smithers Botham had exchanged an income of thousands for one of hundreds and debarred him from private practice-if he could have found any, plastic surgery suddenly being fashionable no longer, perhaps because the possibility of having one's head blown off ousted any dissatisfaction with the look of it. He was terribly in debt. And the income-tax inspector, as always, clanked across his life like Marley's ghost.

He fixed the blackout in the upstairs drawing-room, switched on the light, and poured a whisky at the corner cocktail cabinet. Usually he drank only to relieve the tedium of other people's company, now he was drinking twice as much to relieve the tedium of his own. His servants had left, a genteel middle-aged woman came in daily from Finchley to clear up his mess, which she referred to as her 'war work'. His son Desmond was in his first year at Cambridge, reading medicine. Unlike the First World War, which emptied the medical schools into the ranks of Kitchener's army, the Second barred medical students from joining the colours as firmly as miners or middle-aged ploughmen. For safety's sake, Graham had sent Desmond to spend Christmas with his cousin Alec, also destined for medicine, Alec's mother Edith then running a guest house for the better class of evacuee in Devon. Graham swirled the whisky round his glass. Edith Trevose had been successively his own fiancйe, his sister-in-law, his brother's widow, and his mistress, but despite these disturbing changes in status still his friend. He wondered whether to ring her up, but decided against it. It might start new complications. And anyway, the long-distance telephones were becoming dreadfully unreliable.

He reflected again that he should give up his Queen Street home, store the furniture, and take a room at The Oak inn on the village green at Smithers Botham. He would exchange the Bentley for a Morris, and be patriotic over petrol. It was all an excuse to save money, to live a simpler life, until the fuss was over-as everyone knew from the newspapers, the Germans were already short of everything from shells to shoeleather. He poured himself another drink. Here was Graham Trevose, he thought sadly, the fashionable plastic surgeon, the favourite guest of a thousand smart parties, and nobody even wanted to talk to him. He had always far keener pity for himself than for his patients. He felt loneliness like pain, to exist without a woman's company struck him as hard as solitary confinement. Without the compensation of a caress he became as wretched as a stray dog, to wake at night alone he felt a foretaste of the grave. He'd enjoyed affairs enough before the war, but what was their lasting satisfaction? he asked himself bitterly. As little as a handshake. Now everyone he knew seemed to have disappeared, and if the Germans did arrive that night to blow him to pieces there was hardly anyone to care.

He had a wife, of course, but she was in a home in Sussex, mad for fifteen years.

The hurricane had two self-sealing petrol tanks in the wings and another in the fuselage, directly in front of the pilot. On the August Sunday morning when a Messerschmitt 109 caught him over Dungeness he calculated, after a panicky moment wondering if he were alive at all, that he still had a fair chance of eating his dinner that night. As he jettisoned the cockpit hood a stench of petrol struck him. In a second his world was alight. He never remembered how he fell clear. His next recollection was the petrol replaced by a smell even more pungent. It reminded him of something. It was the stink of burning wool, which stuck in your nose when they cleared up after the clip back home.

He didn't remember getting clear of his parachute harness, but he must have managed it somehow because he was free when they reached him. His only worry was whether a Mae West could really keep a man afloat. The sea was dead calm, he felt no pain, no unusual sensation at all. Like everyone else, he'd been flying without goggles and gloves. It made it easier to see the enemy and to handle the controls. He watched with detached interest bits of skin and flesh come away from his hands and forearms, like fragments of roast chicken, and float in the water. A civilian lifeboat picked him up. As two men in black oilskins got him aboard he noticed their faces, and wondered what the hell they were staring at.

It was the same expression on the face of the girl looking down at him. She was in a white apron, a nurse he supposed. Pain, shock, and morphine had by then turned him from a human being to a collection of organs struggling to function together as best they could. He asked "where he was, but she didn't seem to understand. He wondered suddenly if he were in France, put in the bag by the Germans. Then she said, 'You're all right. You're in hospital. In Kent, not far from Tunbridge Wells.'

He'd heard of Tunbridge Wells. It struck him as an odd sort of place to find himself in.

He floated on a cloud of euphoria as they were obliged continually to increase his dose of morphine. He didn't know if he'd been lying there for a couple of days or a week, though it was in fact more than a month. Gradually his body seemed to grow some sort of skin against the painful world. A variety of doctors in white coats came to see him, and generally dug about with forceps and probes, most painfully. As he began to notice things again, he saw when they changed his dressings his hands were black, clawed, and wizened. They reminded him of the hands he'd once seen on the body of an aboriginal, brought into the sheep station after lying for months shrivelling in the sun of the outback. He asked for a mirror, but was told the hospital hadn't any to spare. They had been broken by a freak of blast in the bombing, they explained, and glass was in short supply.

His room was small, white-painted, and sunny, looking on to a small garden. He wondered what sort of hospital it was, and if there were any other patients. He certainly saw no sign of them. Over the next few weeks the pain began to ease and the needles became less frequent. One afternoon he noticed there was a mirror right in the room. It was over the washbasin, though they'd covered it with flowered curtain material fixed by strips of sticking-plaster. He crawled out of bed, staggered, and fell. He managed to struggle across the floor, and to tug the flowered covering aside with the point of his elbow. He wondered who he was looking at. The face in the glass was swollen, black, and running with pus. There was no nose, and the eyes stared through a pair of encrusted lids. The door opened and the young nurse came in, scolding him like a naughty child for getting out of bed.

A few mornings later the blue-uniformed sister, a stout and kindly woman, appeared at his bedside with a stranger. He was a civilian, thin, pale, weedy-looking, with a large head and eyes showing too much white.