'Say, did you ever meet the Duchess?' asked the other girl eagerly. I looked blank. 'You know, Mrs Simpson.'
I apologized that our paths had not crossed.
'Have you got yourself married again?' Jeff asked. I nodded. 'So have I. But that didn't work out, either. Was it that pretty dark thing in uniform you brought along to the Savoy?'
'No. She married a friend of mine, who's been discharged from the Army with an ulcer and works for the Ministry of Information. He's one of the people who keep telling us that the German economy is finished.'
'Why aren't you in the British Army?' asked the first girl, I thought bluntly.
'Flat feet.'
'You must be hungry,' Jeff said to me. We arrived at a huge restaurant with a loud band, exuberant chorus girls and enormous steaks. Jeff began reminiscing about our night out in Cologne. Our two companions grew bored. Some time after midnight we shed them. I went back to Jeff's apartment-luxurious rooms, apparently unending, high above Park Avenue. 'Take anything you like from the closets,' he invited. 'Even your clothes are rationed now, I guess?'
I helped myself to a tie. A negro in a white jacket brought highballs. Through the big window I could look down on the feverish lights of New York. We talked about Wuppertal and the Schwebebahn. 'Hitler was crazy, shoving Domagk in jail,' Jeff commented. 'He should have let the Professor go ahead and receive his Nobel Prize, turn out the band when he got home, and have Goebbels proclaim the magnificent benefits to all mankind hatching from Nazi Germany. That's why nothing, nothing at all, will ever come out of Nazism,' he added in disgust. 'It's a nihilistic creed. When the Nazis have wiped out everything that's good and decent in the world, they'll have nothing to replace it, except more oppression. When there's no one left alive on earth for them to oppress, they'll start cutting one another's throats. For the simple reason that Nazism can't exist without aggression. Imagine Hitler snipping the tape to open a new hospital!'
His remark made me remember the test-tube in my jacket pocket. I had left Jeff mystified at the real reason for my mission to Colorado, and he had swallowed his inquisitiveness.
'What in hell's this?' He turned the test-tube in his fingers, sprawling in his chair, his heavy bar of eyebrow puckered.
'Ever heard of penicillin?'
'Never.'
'It's a drug produced by that mould.' Jeff did not find it an intriguing exhibit at that hour of the night. 'It hits staphylococci and gas gangrene and diphtheria, which aren't touched by your sulpha drugs. An extremely efficient Oxford professor called Florey started using penicillin on patients, only eighteen months after beginning his experiments to find exactly what it was. Imagine even Henry Ford achieving that with the automobile.'
Jeff grunted. He rolled the test-tube round, looking more interested. 'I guess Churchill knows all about this?'
'They've hardly enough to treat a couple of kids with blood-poisoning, let alone an Army. They have to grow the mould in bedpans, because they can't get anything else. They have to extract the penicillin juice with lemonade bottles and milk churns, fixed in a lovely bookcase from the Bodleian Library. Perhaps penicillin could be our secret weapon. But its production is strictly a cottage industry. I thought you'd be interested to look at it. The mould loves nothing better to grow on than brewer's yeast.'
'Brewer's yeast you can't get your hands on.' Jeff scratched his chin with his thumb. 'You could grow it on corn-steep liquor, I guess.' I had never heard of this. 'When you crack corn to get the starch,' Jeff explained, 'you steep the grain in sodium sulphate. You end up with thousands of gallons of stuff like molasses, which you can't even give away. Out West, they're trying it out for fermentation processes of various sorts. You could grow this mould on it, like any other mould.'
He fell silent, continuing to revolve the test-tube in his fingers. 'Supposing Mr Churchill came to me and said, "Jeff, old man, we want penicillin by the ton, and tomorrow". Do you know what I'd do? I'd buy a few loads of corn-steep liquor-I wouldn't need to buy it, they'd pay me for taking it away. Then I'd shut down a section of the brewery out at White Plains, and I'd grow penicillin in the vats. You know how these contaminating moulds _love _to grow in breweries.'
I laughed. 'A brewery's an advance on lemonade bottles, I suppose. It's imaginative, anyway.'
'Sure, it's imaginative,' he said seriously. I finished my highball, and sat tinkling the ice in my glass. 'It's only by being imaginative that I've made my money. So what's the problem? Growing a mould and extracting a chemical from its juice.'
'Florey used amyl acetate for the extraction process.'
'There you are. The principle's established, it's only a matter of nuts and bolts.' He got up to fetch a foolscap pad and pencil from his leather topped desk. 'Let's try sketching out the production line. See here, I've got the vat…"
The interest of us both warmed, glowed, and broke into a flame. The floor round Jeff became covered with sheets of pencilled plans. I watched over his shoulder, giving a chemist's advice and replenishing the highballs. The New York lights were fading in the summer dawn when we plummeted down the elevator. Jeff picked up his Cadillac from the sidewalk and we drove through the sharpening light to White Plains. Beyond the city, to one side of the highway stood Jeff's chemical plant, to the other the Beckerman Brewery. He turned the car towards the brewery, roused the watchman, strode with the drawings under his arm towards the vast building with the fermentation vats, and pacing distances with his feet began the plan which flooded a wartime world with penicillin.
31
All bad things come to an end. The European war and my marriage finished on the same day.
It was never much of a marriage. My second wife was perfectly correct the day I enlightened her about my first. I did have a casual approach to matrimony. But in wartime, everyone seemed to be getting married with a desperate lightheartedness.
I still cannot walk through the front door of the Radcliffe Infirmary without a sickening feeling at my own foolishness. The greater event of that wedding day is recorded just inside. A plaque acclaims 'The first systematic use of penicillin', which all medical people wrongly take as a misspelling for 'systemic'. There is another plaque outside the Botanic Garden at the foot of Magdalen Bridge. Fleming is mentioned on neither of them.
I had turned to Jean as to the comfort of a glowing fire after the icy wind which had pierced me from Elizabeth. But a warm fire sends you to sleep, when you wake up there are only uninteresting ashes. Jean had lived a narrow life of high teas and earnest conversation. I had shared the easygoing, amiable hardheartedness of Archie's circle. I had been browbeaten by Hitler's Storm Troopers. Our similar occupations were a disadvantage. We were both more interested in our work than each other. We were both rather duller than our jobs. We had a large number of bitter rows, though they were pardonably about socialism, van Gogh, ITMA and T. S. Eliot. Then a pink-faced young doctor called Fred appeared, and she went to live with him. 'I say, I really am most frightfully sorry about this,' he kept apologizing, as though he had inadvertently gone off with my umbrella.
On a Friday morning a week after VE-Day in May 1945, I had been called urgently to Ainsley's office off the Edgware Road. 'What do you know about FIAT?' he asked at once.
'It's a make of Italian car.'
He gave an uncharacteristic gesture of impatience. 'These damned initials are sprouting everywhere-ALSOS, OSRD, TIIC, and so on. Now FIAT has just been created by SHAEF.'
I knew at least that SHAEF was Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. The others were a secret cypher to my ears. 'OSRD is the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and TIIC the Technical Industrial Information Committee,' Ainsley explained. 'I have completely forgotten what ASLOS stands for, but it's the brain-child of General Marshall. I believe there's also something called CIOS, which must be…let's say, Combined Intelligence Objective Subcommittee. FIAT is Field Intelligence Agency bracket Technical bracket.'