SURGEON AT ARMS

Graham stuck his hands in his pockets. After turning down Haileybury's offer he had signed a contract with the Emergency Medical Service, and was committed to install and run a plastic surgery unit at Smithers Botham. Though he was always able to see a new face in the battered and bleeding remains of an accident, as a sculptor can in a lump of stone, it was beyond him to depict the rotting building as a busy, complex, cheerful, sterile centre for healing the wounded.

'That day room would have to be my operating theatre,' he suggested glumly. 'The place must be ripped apart, replumbed, fitted with sinks, sterilizers, electric points. We'll have one ward in the night room and another upstairs. God knows how we'll shift anaesthetized patients up there-fireman's lift, I suppose. I'll want partitions for the anaesthetic room, the surgeons' room, the nurses' room…and where am I supposed to fit the photographer's studio, X-ray, somewhere for the dentists? I'll need extractor fans, heating, reinforced ceilings for the lights, doors widening, new windows made. Those horrible iron bars must come off for a start. I want the whole place painted a bright pastel shade. Duck-egg blue, something like that. I'll have gay curtains, white bedside lockers, flowers everywhere, comfortable chairs, radios, the prettiest nurses in the hospital. My patients get depressed enough with themselves, without any encouragement from their surroundings.'

'Duck-egg blue, did you say? murmured Captain Pile, mystified.

'I want those two far tubs in the awful wash-house partitioned off. They'll have to do for the saline bath unit. The kitchen we'll have to equip again from scratch. We'll put locks on the lavatories. I'm far more likely to hang myself on the chain than the patients are. No, no, it's all impossible,' he decided abruptly. 'No one could turn this place into anything but a pigsty. They can bum it to the ground, as far as I'm concerned. They'll have to send me somewhere else.'

Captain Pile grunted. 'Where else had you in mind?'

Graham lit another cigarette. The dreadful man was right, of course. Hospital accommodation was as precious as anti-aircraft guns. It was Smithers Botham or nowhere.

'We'll have to make the most of it, I suppose,' he said resignedly. 'Baron Larrey did wonders for Napoleon's wounded in cowsheds.'

'Well, it's not my pigeon.' The captain was becoming impatient. 'You'll have to take up rebuilding problems direct with the Ministry. Have you seen enough? I've got to get back to the grindstone.'

Graham stopped half-way along the ward. He noticed a door with a cracked glass panel leading to a veranda under a rusty green-painted roof. It reminded him of a similar one in the sanatorium where he had been sent to die as a young man, a war ago. He wondered if that verandah were still there, and who was lying in his place to count the rivets of the roof in the feverish boredom of tuberculosis. As he turned away, another door with a small glass peephole caught his eye. He swung it open. A tiny high barred window disclosed a cubicle lined entirely with black padded leather, even the floor. A padded cell. Graham couldn't recall seeing one before.

'I expect you'll find a use for it,' Captain Pile suggested helpfully.

Graham walked back across the lawn in silence. It was all horribly depressing. But, he reminded himself, it was better than having to say 'Sir' to Haileybury.

4

By the first Christmas the war was still a novelty, something to expose the nation's pettiness rather than its greatness. Olympia housed not Bertram Mills' circus but Germans, Nazis interned with anti-Nazis in scrupulous British fairness. Dйbutantes put their hands enthusiastically to driving ambulances, and showgirls theirs slightly less so to the udders of cows. Royal Academicians were painting trees to disguise factories, and keepers at the London Zoo were armed, in case bombs sprung the cages, to organize big-game hunting in Regent's Park. In Bloomsbury, the Ministry of Information was emitting propaganda of praiseworthy gentility and over Westphalia the R.A.F. were dropping leaflets in impeccable good taste. Citizens were advised to walk in the blackout with white shirt-tails exposed behind, lighting cigarettes in the street after dark attracted abuse and sometimes prosecution, and for protection against motorists with two dim half-moons for headlights, the ponies of the New Forest were striped with white paint like zebras. The weather was more irksome than the war, the countryside for most of the winter being covered thickly with snow, a fact unmentionable in the papers lest it reach the attention of the enemy.