28
I did not see my fiancйe for a month. I reconciled myself that separations are the saddest undertones of war. Then Elizabeth wrote from her transport depot near Norwich that she was bored to death, and would be coming to Oxford on the Saturday of July 20 by the midday train. It was awfully tedious, but she couldn't spend the night.
The German jackboots which had trampled over France now seemed likely to crunch upon English shingle. But the Luftwaffe which had smashed or scared from the sky the air forces of six nations, and paralysed European statesmen for five years, was for the first time tasting a well-mounted and well-directed adversary in the Spitfires and Hurricanes which Churchill had refused the dying prayers of the French. I was working day and night developing murderous germs to spatter any invading Nazis, who themselves seemed the most pernicious bacilli on earth. The technical details were exasperating. You can turn loose wild germs as you can turn loose a wild dog, but you cannot guarantee they will bite only the right persons.
The morning of Elizabeth's visit. I fell in with Florey as he was walking across the tree-dotted Parks, in sight of the jubilantly Tractarian red brick of Keble College. He always walked to the Dunn labs from his home in Parks Road.
'If the Germans do get as far as Oxford, which God forbid,' he said sombrely, 'we'll destroy everything to do with penicillin in the Department, except just enough mould to smear on our jacket linings. A few of us might escape to carry on the good work.'
'Escape to where?'
'That's the question. Perhaps to Canada. I've heard that the Fleet and the King and Queen are ready to go there in the last resort.' Florey's face lightened under the curly brim of his trilby as he began to talk about his successful experiment with mice during the week of Dunkirk. 'It was really most conclusive. I used eight mice, and you wouldn't have imagined that the ones injected with penicillin had ever been infected. Our untreated controls all died within twelve hours. The problem now is production. We've only enough penicillin for another twenty-five mice, and when I ask the big drug manufacturers for help they explain they're busy on war work. It's most infuriating.'
'What's the chance of being able to use penicillin on humans one day?'
'The step from mouse to man is a big one,' Florey said warily. 'Literally-a man is three thousand times mouse-sized. At this rate, I don't know when we'd ever have our hands on enough to treat a single case.'
'Have you written your work up yet?'
'There's a short preliminary paper appearing in the Lancet next month.' I missed at the time the significance of this casual exchange. We had reached the gate leading from the Parks to the rear of Florey's Pathology Department. 'Would you like a look at the national penicillin factory?' he invited. 'I've ten minutes before lecturing. The medical students still have to be taught, and the rest of my time seems to be absorbed filling in forms.'
He led me to a smaller building against the main laboratories. 'The animal house,' Florey explained. 'We're making use of its post mortem room.'
It was small and filled by an extraordinary apparatus the height of a man in the middle. Four large upturned bottles on the top were connected by rubber tubes and glass pipes to half a dozen smaller ones below, the whole cased in an open-fronted stand of polished mahogany. It resembled one of the preposterously logical drawings of Heath Robinson's-perhaps a machine for getting quarts into pint pots.
'It's the brain child of my ingenious young assistant, Norman Heatley.'
Florey explained how it worked. 'We suck out the broth-which of course has all the penicillin juice in it-from under the growing mould, replacing it with a fresh supply. You can do that a dozen times, the mould doesn't seem to mind. Then we cool the broth with ice, acidify it with phosphoric acid, and let it drip from those inverted lemonade bottles on top through the glass columns of amyl acetate. That's a good solvent for penicillin. Our final result is a few grains of brown powder.'
An electric bell rang and a light flashed on a makeshift panel to the right of the machine. 'One of the lemonade bottles needs replenishing,' observed Florey mildly.
'That's a beautiful piece of woodwork.'
'Yes, it's one of the shelves from the Bodleian Library.'
I asked him if he was still growing the mould on Fleming's original nutriment of meat broth. 'We tried all manner of chemicals to increase the yield,' Florey told me. 'Glucose, glycerol, thioglycolic acid. In the end, we found brewer's yeast did the trick. Then we needed something bigger than the ordinary lab flask for growing the fell of mould, but fortunately the right sort of receptacle was in good supply and near at hand.'
'Pie dishes?' I guessed.
'No, bedpans.' He gave his slight smile. 'It's very improvised, isn't it? And very British.'
It was largely improvisation, from one end of the country to the other, which that summer of 1940 saved our skins.
Elizabeth's train was as usual half an hour late. She was in uniform, running down the platform like a schoolgirl. 'Darling Jim, how wonderful, how absolutely wizard! I'd almost forgotten what you looked like. I really must see round the colleges, Christ Church and Balliol and places, I'd never been to Oxford in my life.'_
'The colleges are full of Civil Servants, who were evacuated from London with the children and expectant mothers.'
'And the river, I must see the river. Do you suppose we can still hire a punt?'
'I expect so.'
'Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?'
'That was Cambridge.'
We went to a pub. There was only beer and sloe gin to drink. We sat at a table in a dark beamed nook. 'Did you get court-martialled or anything about the car?' I asked.
'What car?'
'The one we abandoned at Angoulкme.'
'Oh, that! The whole French adventure seems just like a dream to me now. Doesn't it to you? Do you suppose they've got any cigarettes? It really did bring the war home to me, not being able to buy a packet of fags when I felt like it.'
I returned from the bar with ten Woodbines. Elizabeth was slightly pink and staring straight ahead of her. 'Jim, darling, I was intending to be ever so flippant and stupid, and pass off everything in France as a trivial joke which of course neither of us could possibly be expected to take seriously.' She paused. She continued in a crushed voice, 'But I can't. It couldn't possibly be a joke to you, I know. It doesn't look very funny to me, however hard I try.'
I had already suspected her cursing herself as a bigger fool for giving me her hand after giving me her body. 'Are those your own feelings? Or are your mother and your father behind it?'
She shook her head vigorously. But I insisted, 'I'm still the butler's boy. God!' I exclaimed. 'With Hitler just across the Channel. Nothing in this country is quite so indestructible as its snobbery. We'll go down with the ermine ensign fluttering bravely on our stern.'
'Jim-! It's nothing to do with that. I can't marry you because I'm going to marry Archie.'
'Archie!' I sat bolt upright, almost cracking my head on a beam. 'But you can't possibly marry Archie.'
'I can,' she said meekly.
'But Archie's a fool.'
'He's a very intelligent writer.'
'That doesn't make him more intelligent than I am. You told me so yourself.'
She made no reply, but performed the extravagantly wasteful gesture of stubbing out her half-smoked cigarette. 'Well, I'm going to marry him, and that's that,' she concluded in a matter-of-fact voice. 'I'm sorry. Jim. That's absolutely all I can say, isn't it?'