By Christmas, when the fighting should have been over, the German armies broke through at the Ardennes for the second time in the war. Luckily for the Allies, the weather cleared and they could bomb them to pieces on the twisting hilly roads-which they would have saved themselves a great deal of trouble by doing in 1940, if only they'd had any aeroplanes. In London the flying-bombs were replaced by rockets, which perplexed and affronted the Government, as Lord Cherwell had worked out most carefully they were too expensive for the Germans to use. The rockets particularly harassed Alec Trevose, who was doing his two months' midwifery training at a sandbagged lying-in hospital in north London. Every time one fell the noise sent half a dozen local women into labour, and it was no fun finding your way through blacked-out back streets on a bicycle, loaded like a mule with bags of instruments and dressings, suspected by policemen of being some sort of saboteur, and wondering if the next unheralded missile had your number on it.
Alec didn't like midwifery. He was beginning to see himself as an intellectual, a man of culture, and childbirth was an extremely uncultured pursuit Tor all concerned. Alec hated the babies. He hated the midwife in charge of him, a sparse-bosomed Scotswoman with a vinegary tongue. She in turn seemed to hate him, and indeed men in general, which he felt was reasonable from her toilsome occupation. Only the jovial Mr O'Rory brought levity to the solemn reproductive circus with his visits twice a week. He was a Catholic, and therefore unable to perform abortions-though he stretched a point when they were natural, like Clare's miscarriage, and passed the others to his houseman, back-seat driving over his right shoulder. Female sterilization was for him, he confessed, quite out of the question. He would perform the operation to the crucial point, then demand genially of his assistant, 'Just tie a a knot in those two ligatures round the Fallopian tubes, my boy, there's a good fellow. My religion doesn't allow me to do that sort of thing at all.'
Alec rather took to Mr O'Rory. He felt he had the cultured approach.
In the spring the Nazi magnificos suddenly appeared in the papers as haggard and anxious old men, shuffling about in baggy civilian suits. It induced feelings of freakishness rather than triumph. To anyone of Alec Trevose's age, a world empty of Hitler and Mussolini was as strange as one without Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Himmler bit the cyanide capsule in his tooth, and vomited himself to death over the trousers of a British officer. If nobody really knew what had happened to Hitler, nobody really cared. There were rejoicings in British streets, of a seemly nature. The Government, in a burst of official relaxation, allowed the citizenry to use binoculars again. If the population were restrained by the scarcity of hard liquor from getting lit up when the lights went up in London, at least they had some sort of fling before the authorities switched them off again through shortage of fuel. On the June day when the world inaugurated the United Nations in San Francisco and so abolished war for ever-for the second occasion in a quarter of a century-both Alec and Desmond found they had qualified as doctors.
Alec quickly found that qualification, like marriage, brought more problems than it settled. His first difficulty was to win a resident post at Smithers Botham. Failing to get a 'house job' in your mother hospital was like being expelled from school, it stuck for life. Besides, he was going to specialize. All the students were going to specialize, their teachers (who were specialists) having freely laced their instruction with their opinion of family doctors as dangerous fumbling ignoramuses. But specialize in what? Psychiatry, Alec decided. It was intellectual, and you never got your hands messy. There was no psychiatric houseman, so as a first step he must land a house physician's appointment. But unfortunately for Alec the jobs had come to be decided solely by Mr Cramphorn, who dominated the selection committee. His methods were simple. He would look through the list of applicants, grunting, and strike out with his gold pencil all coloured students, Jews, those with un-English sounding names, any he had taken a dislike to, and any he had for some reason never heard of. And Mr Cramphorn had taken a fierce dislike to the Trevose family. He thought Graham's treatment of Clare outrageous, and after he had lavished his rabbits on her, too. Desmond, he admitted grudgingly, must be given a job, as the son of a Blackfriars consultant. If that unspoken rule lapsed the whole structure of the hospital might tumble, and there were changes enough in the wind already. But Alec could be sacrificed. In the end, Mr Cramphorn compromised by making Alec the resident anaesthetist, this speciality, Mr Cramphorn believed, being reserved for those unfitted for the practice of medicine at all.
Alec had never administered an anaesthetic in his life, but luckily John Bickley was an indulgent master. He was used to getting the duds. John had been working for Mr Cramphorn and Mr Twelvetrees in the general theatres of Smithers Botham itself since his row with Graham, who often enough had wished him back. But he was not a man to relent on his own rashness. Alec was scared of Mr Cramphorn, but discovered that he treated his anaesthetist exactly as he treated his prewar chauffeur, an underling expected to do his job and keep out of the conversation. Otherwise his new occupation seemed, like the war, ninety per cent boredom and ten per cent panic. He started bringing books into the theatre, reading them hidden in the sterile towels screening the unconscious patient's head. Having a quick mind he could demolish even a Victorian novel in two or three operating sessions. Alec was never sure of the effect of his anaesthetics on his patients, but he felt they were improving his own mind considerably. He was becoming more intellectual and cultured than ever. Desmond meanwhile performed the duties of a house-surgeon, with much correctitude and distinction.
Alec's second problem was his political allegiance. The general election of July 1945 was a nervous experience for the medical profession. Like Henry the Eighth's monks, the doctors quivered, half in indignation and half in fright, as schemes for their official disposal reached their ears. The hospitals were apparently to be grabbed, not only inefficient little institutions maintained by ladies selling paper flags, but those as proud as Blackfriars itself, even though it most regrettably existed at the time only as a pile of rubble with pretty wild flowers growing on it. It would all wreck the 'doctor-patient relationship', everyone declared at Smithers Botham, and though nobody knew exactly what this meant, it was a telling phrase with a ringing note to it, and anyway a substitute for whistling to keep your spirits up.
How should he cast the first vote of his life? Alec wondered. The newspapers seemed poor instruments of political education. The cartoons at least made the issue simple, between bad bald men in top hats and good clean-cut ones in overalls.' The People' came into it a good deal. Alec rather distrusted The People, who were sadly unintellectual, indeed somewhat dim. Sensitive to the doctors' vote, the local candidates presented themselves on successive nights in the Smithers Botham assembly hall. The Conservative was plump and confident, and based his persuasion on the fact that the Cabinet were a very decent set of chaps (he had been to school with many of them). The Labour man was hollow-chested and nervously respectful, and based his persuasion on the fact that someone was rude to him in a Labour Exchange during the thirties. Mr Cramphorn clapped the first oration to the echo, and walked out of the second.
Alec decided to support Labour, because he learned Desmond was voting Tory. In the end he was too busy in the operating theatre to reach the polls, and the hollow-chested man won handsomely. Mr Cramphorn stayed at home for a week's sulk. But worse was in store. He appeared in the theatre at the beginning of August white and trembling. 'They sang the _Red Flag,' _he muttered. 'Actually in the House of Commons! Good God! Some woman danced in the benches. It's the end.' But it wasn't. The next day a patient addressed him as 'Mate'. Mate! To Mr Cramphorn, who had given a lifetime to the curing of the poor, who felt the deepest concern for their ills and pains, just like the old Tsars of Russia for their serfs. Social order and sanity were sliding everywhere. They would be swinging from the lamp-posts next. He stayed at home for a month, and his housekeeper sent a message to say he was very poorly.
Alec's next concern was finding his mother about to become a G.I. bride.
Edith Trevose had spent the war in a small Devon seaside town, in a guest-house whose rooms were furnished for a fortnight's summer endurance at the most, but had been occupied since 1939 by elderly middle-class guests from London who complained increasingly about the food, the cooking, the war in general, and each other. Edith had been a typist with a Gray's Inn solicitor, but decided to help a friend run the place as her 'war work'. She was still pretty, and the sun of her affections, which had dawned upon Graham and shone through the noonday of her life on his brother, now glowed upon her son Alec, and was crossed by the first long restful shadows of the menopause. Edith had a split social position in the town. However much she tried to disguise it from herself, in the boarding-house she was taken as a servant. When twice a week she lent a hand in the small local hospital, she was respected by everyone as the widow of a medical missionary and the sister-in-law of Graham Trevose himself. Edith bore the discrepancy cheerfully. She had put up with more disagreeable places in life than the guesthouse, and always reflected that the irritations of others, like their illnesses, though painful to witness could hardly kill her.
In the summer of 1943 something happened to change the town's face more alarmingly than the war itself. Strange uniforms, strange vehicles, and strange habits became evident everywhere. The Americans poured from a near-by camp to amuse themselves, having to draw less on their supplies of cash (which were said to be limitless) than on those of their native enthusiasm and optimism. Strange soft-packaged cigarettes, chocolate bars, chewing-gum, and tinned beer circulated everywhere, and the girls' hair-styles improved sensationally. The Americans had glamour, in a land which was short of it outside the overpacked cinemas. All were assumed to come from spacious and labour-saving apartments in Manhattan, though most lived in towns even sleepier than a Devon village, and knew of their hosts only from their official guide-book, which told them not to say 'bloody', that the British could take any amount of aerial bombardment, and were deeply grateful for all the dried egg.
Edith met Hal White at the hospital. He was a doctor, a captain, about her own age, thin, with a large Adam's apple, glasses like Glenn Miller's, and given to long periods of deliberation before opening his mouth about anything. He offered her a packet of Life Savers and asked her to a dance. Edith hesitated. Jennifer, the girl who helped in the kitchen, might be there. Hal explained it was an officers only affair, and she accepted. She loved dancing. It would be really quite fun to be taken out by a man again. And of course he was a doctor, and therefore a gentleman.
The dance was exactly like a thousand others in the kingdom that Saturday night. The local recreation hall was crowded, dirty and ill-kept, with French chalk sprinkled hopefully over a rough floor with painted fines for badminton courts. The decorations were posters urging the merrymakers to dig or save for victory, and that careless talk cost lives. At one end was a trestle table where for half an hour or so they sold gin and lime, and afterwards beer, which everyone hoped would last the evening. Half a dozen G.I.s on the stage were playing with startling professionalism. Hal and Edith danced to _Paper Doll_ and _Sentimental Journey,_ and she thought him amazingly light on his feet. He said he lived in Yonkers and was a widower. They tried to hokey-cokey, which Edith thought silly, really, but quite fun. Hal explained he had knocked around the world a good deal, mostly doing medical jobs with construction companies, for a long stretch in Singapore. Edith exclaimed she knew Singapore well. They cheerfully explored the graveyards of their memories, exhuming a body or two to see if it were a mutual friend.
For the last year of the war they saw each other regularly. Hal brought her a good deal of Spam, Life magazine, and some nylons-her eyes shone as she smoothed the wonderfully sheer material with her fingers. When he asked her to marry him she was amazed. Marriage simply hadn't entered into her scheme of things. Illness and death, yes, but widowhood had become a settled way of life, to be borne as patiently as residence in the Malayan jungle or in the Devon guest-house. Yet she realized that she belonged to the dread class of 'distressed gentlefolk'. What would she do after the war? She was frightfully poor, she would have to go typing for solicitors until her fingers became too infirm for the keyboard. Hal was really very kind. And he was a doctor. The emotions of her life had been entwined round doctors, as pliantly as the serpents round Aesculapius' staff. She would have to live in America, but America was the place for self-betterment, everyone said so. The ideal of self-betterment had driven her as a girl from her father's butcher's shop in Ramsgate-to where? After a quarter of a century, to running a boarding-house. It was a chance. Only one thing could she be certain of. It would be her last.
That summer, the inhabitants of two Japanese cities were off-handedly incinerated, and the war was over. A week later Lease Lend was cut off, equally off-handedly. It occurred only to Lord Keynes that the country was broke, and the millennium which so agitated Mr Cramphorn would have to be financed by a loan of American money. So the country, like Edith, escaped from the possibility of German mastership to the certainty of American, with as much excitement and less thought
Edith, Hal, and Alec met for the first time in the basement restaurant of the Criterion in Piccadilly. It was a disturbing gathering. Alec seemed to find Edith's lover only funny. She had been worried for months at the peculiar excited flippancy in her son, quite unlike the stolid outlook of his father. She gave him a cheque for a hundred pounds, explaining it was all she could afford, and he must save it to visit her in America, once she was married and transported by the United States Government with eighty thousand other British women. Alec decided to spend it on a car. The medical profession lived at the time in a weird intimacy with the motor trade. Though the petrol ration was small, increased by the new Government so meanly as to arouse the irritation of even the _New Statesman,_ doctors, who went on errands of mercy, were allowed more or less as much as they could use, with a bit of fiddling. He'd raise the fare to see his mother when the time came, he decided. He was never able to give a serious thought to the future of anything, particularly when there was fun to be found in the present.
During the rest of the hot summer of 1945 the war began to run down at Smithers Botham as gaily as everywhere else. There still wasn't much to drink, but there was A.F.N. Munich on the radio, the jam ration was said to be going up (incorrectly), and the place was enlivened by the first demobilized medical officers, sent on a six-month course to refit them for gentler practice. Captain Pile was finally demobilized. He went to Olympia for his new suit, and at once returned to Smithers Botham. He had grown to like the country hospital, and the future medical world was filled with half-glimpsed hazards. He had taken the post of medical officer to Smithers Botham as a mental institution, and was charged with preparing its return to normal function whenever Blackfriars could be evicted. As he walked up the long drive from the bus, once again mere Dr Pile, he saw the portico had for a second time been decorated. A Union Jack was spread across the columns, and a painted banner announced, 'Welcome Home Our Heroic Cuthbert'.