'No, I didn't. The last I'd heard of him, he'd gone to Sheffield.'
'What do you do, boy, when you move into a department as a new broom of a professor?'
'Send your staff to the library to look out other people's unfinished lines of research,' I told him promptly.
'You're right. Get them busy picking brains, which is quicker than scratching their own. From all accounts, the Path Department at Oxford was in a pretty ropy state when Florey blew in. About the first item he gingered up his boys and girls to investigate anew was lysozyme.'
'Old Flem's tear antiseptic!' I exclaimed. 'That's as out of date as the Charleston, surely?'
'Oh, God!' exclaimed Margaret in anguish. We both stared at her. 'I forgot to tell Daphne the other bridesmaids have decided on pink hats.'
'She can buy some dye at Woolworth's, dear,' said David helpfully. 'Next on Florey's list was another of Flem's babies which never got past the toddling stage-penicillin. You had something to do with it, hadn't you? Apparently they've now managed to isolate a grain or two of the stuff.'
'Professor Raistrick tried to isolate some at the School of Tropical Medicine,' I said sceptically. 'But I heard the penicillin kept vanishing under his nose.'
'Florey's got a pretty bright chemist working for him there. Chap called Ernst Chain, half-Russian and half-German. Apparently he used to work at the Charitй Hospital in Berlin.'
I had heard of Dr Chain. 'Yes, he escaped from Hitler and went to work with Hoppy at Cambridge.'
David grinned. 'Florey got him transferred to Oxford, like Joe Payne from Luton Town to Chelsea. I don't know what the transfer fee would be.'
'No, I'll tell the others they can all wear white hats, like Daphne,' said Margaret thoughtfully.
'Where did Florey get the mould from?' I asked. 'As far as I knew, the specimen at Mary's was the only one which actually produced any penicillin.'
'They had a culture of it already in the lab. Flem sent a bit to Oxford years ago. Chain is able to grow it faster than Flem did, by lacing the broth underneath with yeast.'
'Have they brought Flem himself into the research?'
'No. Chain thought he was dead.'
I laughed. 'That would be taking Flem's habitual self-effacement to an uncomfortable extreme.'
We talked about the imminent wedding, but more about the imminent war. As two men, we had a particularly keen interest in the possibility of conscription. It arrived within a month. One hundred and forty-three MPs voted against it. 'It is very dangerous to give generals all they want,' objected Major Clement Attlee-but he was thinking of the Somme, when the generals had more men than ideas. The conscripts were afforded exceptional treatment. Unlike any previous soldiers in the British Army, they were issued with pyjamas.
22
Neville Chamberlain was a man of peace. He even went to war peacefully. He was followed by a nation of inoffensive shepherds, cheerfully shouldering their crooks. There was no nastiness. There was no undue enthusiasm. The war was very genteel. We had the blackout and the evacuees. Everyone carried a gasmask in a little cardboard box the size of a Brownie camera. Air-raid trenches were cut among the flower-beds of Hyde Park. Strips of sticky brown paper criss-crossed shop windows, to prevent their breaking when a bomb dropped outside. The only bloodshed was a doubling of road casualties by unlit motor-cars. Meanwhile, Poland was smashed between two flicks of ash from Colonel Beck's cigarette.
Our lives were not endangered, only changed. Archie was outraged to discover that volunteering for the Army was officially discouraged. He saw the chance of his duodenal ulcer returning, and spending yet another war on his back in Swanage. I waited submissively to be gathered tidily by the harvester of conscription.
I had little work nor income, because London was empty of patients and Sir Edward was busy evacuating his hospital from Blackfriars by the Thames to a vast red-brick Victorian asylum sprawling across the South Downs. Its London wards were left empty for the half-million air-raid casualties the Government secretly but confidently expected in the first week of the War. Towards the end of October, when people were still saying it would all be over by Christmas, Sir Edward telephoned me one breakfast time at Archie's flat. Could I call that afternoon on a Professor Ainsley? The address was near Marble Arch. It was important.
Mystified but flattered, I presented myself at a small block of offices, sandbagged to the first floor, not far from St Mary's Hospital, behind a cinema in Edgware Road. I waited in a bleak official anteroom, while a smartly-dressed blonde with a superior accent answered the telephone, typed and received callers with impartial bored condescension. Ainsley's office beyond seemed a store-room for battleship-grey filing cabinets, among which he had wedged himself at a cheap, bare desk with three telephones, each of a different colour. He was small, grey-haired, knobbly-faced, bushy-eyebrowed, middle-aged, solemn-looking. A likeness to Alexander Fleming struck me. He wore a plain blue suit and a red knitted cardigan, which I later found that, like Fleming, he abandoned only during the hottest weeks of midsummer. I had during the morning taken care to discover that he was the Wychart Professor of Biology at Cambridge. I did not know that this self-effacing, amiable, overworked, practical intellectual who was to control my life for the next six years came directly under Professor Lindemann, the Oxford physicist with enormous influence on Churchill. Lindemann had just moved into the Admiralty as the new First Lord's personal assistant.
'Should I make some joke about, "Let slip the dons of war"?' Ainsley asked affably. 'Like a lot of my colleagues at Cambridge, I suppose I'm sitting here working for the Government for the duration.' He looked round the room unenthusiastically. 'I gather you were out in Germany in 1933? And that you met Gerhard Domagk?'
Sitting on a hard chair opposite, I told him, 'I was in Wuppertal, working in a brewery.'
'Yes, we know all about that. Did you meet anyone else in the I. G. Farbenwerke?'
'Only Professor Hцrlein.'
'Phillip Heinrich Hцrlein, born June 5, 1882, at Wendelsheim,' Ainsley recited reflectively. 'And a Nazi. I heard him talk about sulphonamides to the British Association at Nottingham a couple of years ago. Very effective he was, too. Anyone else?'
'Only the lab technician. A girl.'
'Perhaps you'd care to describe Domagk's lab, and anything else you remember in the factory. Draw a plan, if you like.'
I sketched what I could remember of the factory lay-out. Had the British Government been so interested, I thought, they could have sent a man that summer to ride up and down in the Schwebebahn. Ainsley began to question me about the Dieffenbachs. I became aware that a dossier on myself lay somewhere in the battleship-grey cabinets.
The Dieffenbachs were a decent family who fell for the Nazi line, or thought it prudent to pretend as much,' I told him.
'Did you fall for it at the time?'
'Not in the least. I think I saw how dangerous the Nazis were before a lot of people in England did.'
'You've no conscientious objections to killing Germans, nothing like that?' he added airily. I shook my head. 'Nor how you killed them? I don't of course mean resorting to torture, and putting yourself on the Nazis' own level. But killing them by the deliberate spread of-shall we say-botulism or plague or anthrax?'
I hesitated. 'No. It's the same principle as dropping high explosive.'
'I'm glad to see you are a realist, Mr Elgar. Nor am I myself talking theoretical science. The Government intends to wage war with every weapon possible-we are merely returning Hitler's compliment-which includes pathogenic bacteria.' He paused, looking at me closely. 'Little or nothing is known about handling and distributing such pathogens. Or of their likely effect on the enemy population. We've a few sketchy papers on 'germ warfare', that's all. Your name was put forward by Sir Almroth Wright, no less. Sir Edward Tiplady and I both agree that your particular combination of biochemical and bacteriological skills make you the right man to direct our new unit. Of course, bacteria may never be used as a weapon in this war. Neither may poison gas. But I assure you that the enemy has for some time been investigating the possibilities of both, and we should be criminally at fault not preparing ourselves for similar action.'