We lived in the basement. Everything we had was second-hand. Our furniture was the discards of upstairs, the carpet old and bald, the once expensive chintz sofa grown pale, split and extruding flock, propped up by _Who's Who _and Bradshaw's Railway Time Table, both out of date. Our newspapers were always yesterday's, our magazines last month's. A radiogram upstairs had given us our portable gramophone, a black musical suitcase which my father would charge with a shiny needle and play _Blue Skies _on a scratched record. Our wireless set was almost new, in a wooden cabinet as ornamental as a Victorian bracket clock. It was a gift rather than a throw-out, that we might enjoy the uplifting diversion of Sir John Reith's BBC, which every Sunday had three religious services and five religious talks. Even our food had been used upstairs, cold joints, hashed vegetables, broached pies, milk which left sour little flecks in our tea. But we enjoyed the hottest water and the best nuts of coal, because we lived beside the boiler and the cellar. Sometimes during the London summer I imagined that the air we breathed had already been exhaled by the people upstairs and generously passed down for our consumption via the drains.
My father was Sir Edward Tiplady's butler, my mother his cook. For all I know today, there are biochemists and even professors like myself who are the sons of butlers and barmen, dustmen and dog-catchers. But the educated persons of the 1930s were socially more sensitive, and the middle classes suffered a particularly painful neurosis about those who emerged to join them from 'below stairs', whose next intention was suspected as murdering them in their beds. Largely for these reasons I had been unable to find work in my own country and had gone to seek it in Hitler's Germany
It was early evening on Monday, January 1, 1934, exactly a year after I started at the Red Crown Brewery. I had been home a week, and ached to be back with the Dieffenbachs. Surroundings which the kindly eye of familiarity had once blurred now struck me as starkly squalid. There was the same black kettle forever simmering on the black grate, the high barred window like a cell's looking on an 'area' beside the holystoned front steps, through which I would watch for hours the passing women's calves in Harley Street. I had not seen the rest of my country since returning, as it had stayed aloof behind the worst fog in memory.
'This here Hitler,' said my father. 'Strikes me more like Charlie Chaplin than anything.'
'Don't be misled by the moustache. A lot of people in Germany are very frightened of him, you can take it from me.'
'Go on.' He seemed puzzled. 'I reckon he's leading the Jerries by the nose.'
'On the contrary, more and more Germans are supporting him. Because he's successful, which you must admit is unusual with most politicians in Europe at the moment.'
My father was a cheerful, sardonic Cockney with curly sandy hair gone grey, ostentatious false teeth and terrible feet which had saved his life in the Army by keeping him out of the trenches. He was a servant always ready for a quick draw of a cigarette behind the door, or a quick swig from a forgotten glass. I inherited from him a self-confidence and realism which allowed me to climb in the world with neither humility nor pride, which are equally self-accusatory in the successful man. He was wearing a brown Norfolk jacket-also second-hand-because we were having tea. Proper tea, high tea at six o'clock with kippers my mother had fried in the huge basement kitchen, bread and raspberry jam, bright yellow cake from Lyons with coconut icing which stuck in your teeth and tea so strong it looked like liquid leather.
'I don't hold with Jerries,' my father concluded sweepingly.
'There's good and bad ones, like good and bad Englishmen, and I suppose good and bad Zulus.'
This confused my mother that there were Zulus in Germany, but I had long ago overridden any irritation at these bizarre conversations with my parents. She was not the traditional jolly, plump, floury-armed governess of the kitchen, but thin, tense, severe and silent, her dark clothes always neat, her long greasy black hair always tucked away in a linen cap. She was ten years younger than my father, and like many serious-minded people of shallow intelligence found intense satisfaction in religion. From her I inherited my orderliness and purposefulness, and by some microscopic genetic twist my brains.
'Mind you,' my father continued emphatically, 'even Hitler can't be that barmy he'd start another war. Not after the last little dust up.'
'In Germany you'd sometimes think the next war had started already.'
'Nah, they ain't got no Army, not to speak of.'
'There're men always on the march, even if they're only off to the Reich Labour Service camps and armed only with beautifully polished picks and shovels. There're always parades, bands, banners inciting everyone to be patriotic, to put their country before absolutely everything, even friends, families, husbands and wives.' My father looked unbelieving. 'Hitler will bring back conscription soon, it's inevitable. He's got the raw material for his Army half-cooked already.'
'I pray there won't be another war,' said my mother solemnly. 'I couldn't face it all again, that's for sure. It was bad enough, bringing you up with your dad in the Army and the casualties and the Zeppelins. And the flu,' she added. 'And that's not even to think of what they did to our Bertie.'
Our only decoration in the basement was our shrine, a photograph of my Uncle Albert with jaunty, spiky moustache, in khaki and twinkling brass. It shared a frame with a sheet of printed buff foolscap, with inked details like a notification of lost property, by which the War Office informed us that 5655 Private A Elgar of the City Regiment had been killed in action. It was headed CASUALTIES FORM LETTER and ended curtly in print, _I am to express the sympathy of the Army Council with the soldier's relatives_ over some distant Civil Servant's signature. We working class were of as little consequence dead as alive. Nobody even bothered advertising to us, other than cigarettes, beer and patent medicines. It was the society of master and man, officer and private, the vigorous, acquisitive, voluptuous, cruel society of the Edwardians. A society too thrustful, successful and self-confident to fall a casualty of the Great War, and was simply demobilized to become the Gay Twenties. It saw Britain through World War II, and when Mr Harold Macmillan stopped his artificial respiration in 1963 was found to have been dead for several years.
'I wouldn't let Jim go for a soldier, that's straight, not after what he's made of himself.' My father looked at me proudly, a self-indulgence he seldom allowed. 'But if you asks me, Hitler's just having us on. He ain't got no money, you see.'
'Can I have another cup of tea, please?' The fourth occupant of our table held across her large slightly chipped cup. She was Rosie, the new nineteen-year-old housemaid, who completed the household staff with Mrs Emerald the daily char and Holdsworth the chauffeur who lived out, and was anyway away with the Daimler. The Tipladys were enjoying their Christmas holiday in some huge mansion whose windows glittered across muddy, misty English fields like their hostess across the difficult terrain of London society.
I was naturally interested in Rosie, snub-nosed and bright cheeked, sharp and pert, neat waisted, promisingly plump above and below. She slept in the attic, five floors above my basement cubicle which was half-filled with chemistry books. All week she had been trying perplexedly to make me out. I was obviously a gentleman, but I mucked in with the servants. It was a contradiction beyond her grasp, an outrage to established order, like a millionaire in prison. But when I chatted to her for ten minutes or so I became depressed and disgusted. An ill-lettered housemaid was dross after a German schoolmistress. My passion for Gerda had burnt almost unfelt, like a low fever, but had flared painfully with a change of environment.
Rosie's bewilderment itself underlined my strange, uncomfortable position in the Tiplady's house. I was the frog which had turned into a prince. An extremely awkward transformation in England, where no former frog could possibly be asked to dinner.
After tea, Rosie had to air the beds, because the Tipladys were expected on the morrow. At six thirty on the following evening, my father brought me a summons to ascend past that resented green baize door, which separated our two families like the water-tight bulkheads between First Class and Steerage on the transatlantic liners. I found the first-floor drawing-room empty. I stood where I had often stood before, by the heavy brass fender which caged a display of well-polished fire-irons, the coals in the carved marble fireplace flickering a vigorous yellow, freshly made up for the evening by Rosie. It was a square room, with three tall windows looking on Harley Street, the ceiling moulded and picked out in gold, the gold-green wallpaper striped and silken, the curtains matching precisely. The furniture was antique and over-plentiful. There were two good pictures, a Stubbs of well-nourished groom holding well-nourished horse, and a William Blake God, sinewy and sea green.
As the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece tinged half past six, Sir Edward Tiplady came in. He was always punctual, always preoccupied, but with the doctor's knack of concentrating upon you his limitless attention for the strictly circumscribed time allowed in his presence.
'You're a rotten correspondent,' he said at once. His hands were full of open letters accumulated during his holiday.
'I'm sorry. I find writing such an effort I keep putting it off. Then it seems too late to bother.'
'You sound like one of my patients excusing his failure to break his bad habits.'
He went to the mantelpiece, taking a cigarette from a silver box amid a forest of shiny white cards inscribed with copperplate, seeking his attendance at social or medical gatherings. I never remembered the mantelpiece without them. He could have accepted barely a fraction, but I suppose stuck them up from vanity, or for self-assurance or because he thought it churlish to chuck them newly opened into the wastepaper basket.
'You look five years older, Jim. When did you get back?'
'Christmas Eve.'
'You knew they'd made Tommy Horder a lord?'
'Yes, that was last year, just after I left England.'
'God knows why. Pal of Ramsay Mac's, I suppose. Tommy hasn't done anything in particular since attending the last King and discovering sugar in the Royal wee.'
He was famously jealous of unpretentious, sarcastic Thomas Horder, twenty years his senior and living down the road at No 141. Horder had made his way without pushing too violently the doors of the many anterooms to medical success. Tiplady was a deft manipulator of men and their favours, and had no doubt whatever that he was a physician fit for a King. Perhaps he saw the truth which everyone whispered, that Lord Horder was the better doctor.
'Did you see this year's Honours List? Morris of the Morris Oxford now Lord Nuffield! Neither Rolls nor Royce managed that.'
Sir Edward lit the cigarette with his gold petrol lighter and threw himself into a brocade armchair, sheaf of letters on his lap. He was tall and lean, handsome, fair-haired and smooth-cheeked, in his early forties. He had as usual plunged from holiday into consultations already arranged by his secretary Mrs Packer, and wore his professional uniform of black jacket and striped trousers. He seldom changed for dinner like everyone else, his evenings always busy with patients or meetings. I noticed that he now sported a large pearl pin through his grey silk tie, and a dashing lavender waistcoat. He still wore spats, though he had abandoned the wing collar during the past twelve-month. He always had a clinical smell about him, a faint tangy odour of antiseptic. Or perhaps he only suggested it.
He sat smiling, wrinkling the fine lines round his pale blue eyes, looking at me quizzically but fondly. He always treated me in a humorously easygoing way. He was always unsparingly kind to me and effortlessly generous. I think he found our relationship less complicated than any other which he was obliged to make in the house. Of course, it was a Platonic homosexual one. This streak in Tiplady was then unmentionable, tacitly unrecognizable, and believed to nurture the seeds of collapse of the British Empire as of the Roman.
'So you're not going back to Germany?' I shook my head. He continued, 'I suppose every young man's entitled to one voyage of adventure, even if it ends in shipwreck. You're far more self-assured,' he decided. 'Meet any nice girls there?'
'Only Dr Dieffenbach's daughter.'
'What's-her-name…yes, Gerda. She must be very grown up. She was a little thing of seven or eight when I finally got Otto out of the clutches of our military people. What's he think of our friend Hitler?'
'He's one of his most fervent supporters.'
Sir Edward looked shocked. 'I just don't believe you. A man of Otto's social position and intelligence falling for all that ranting and raving-'
'You don't understand how it is over there-' I stopped. It was becoming increasingly difficult to explain Germany in secure, easygoing, respectable, comfortable, unexcitable, insular, fogbound England. 'People like the Dieffenbachs see Hitler as their saviour against the Communists. And the man to put Germany back on the map, the map which they remember from 1914. The Nazis sit round camp fires singing patriotic songs, and the next morning batter to death anyone who disagrees with them.'
'But that's all exaggerated, surely?' Sir Edward looked pained that I should regale him with travellers' tales. 'It was exactly the same during the War, our newspapers running a serial of frightfulness by the Hun, babies on bayonets and all that. I never believed a word of it, neither did anyone else with a brain. It was all a ruse of Northcliffe's to whip up morale on the Home Front. Well, he got his Viscountancy out of it.' A large, fluffy, pale ginger cat leapt into Sir Edward's lap, its claws scratching the bundle of letters. I had not been aware of an animal in the room, but cats seem able to materialize themselves at will. He sat stroking it restlessly. 'I utterly refuse to take a single word that Hitler utters seriously.'
I did not feel that I could contradict him. Men believe what they want to believe, or dare not disbelieve. That was Hitler's secret weapon from the start. I only repeated what I had told my father, of Germany already a nation of marching armies.
'Well, we won't be able to reintroduce conscription here,' he said cheerfully, abruptly standing up and turfing off the cat. He always seemed to be moving. 'MacDonald and the Labour Party would have fits. We'll have to rely on the Territorials and the Officers Training Corps in the public schools to keep us out of the soup. I wager everyone will have forgotten Hitler in five years. Their Chancellors come and go like the turns in a music hall show, surely?' He pushed the bell beside the fireplace. 'I say, weren't you ill over there? Otto wrote something last summer about a lymphangitis of the arm. That must have been most unpleasant for you.'
This was the moment for me to produce, like the prize of the Saladin's talisman from the Crusades, the phial of tablets which I had stolen from Domagk's room.
'What's this stuff?' He stood with legs apart before the fire, turning the phial in his fingers without opening it.
'It's the drug Dr Dieffenbach cured my arm with. It goes by the name of "Streptozon".'
'Proprietary names mean nothing,' he interrupted impatiently. 'You can name a drug like a new sort of chocolate.'
'Chemically, it's para-amino sulphonamide. I G Farben have been making it for years, as a red dye for carpets and curtains and all that. For some reason or other they decided to try it against streptococcal infections. I've even had a look at the lab report on their infected mice.'
'How did you come by this?'
'It's a sample given me by Professor Domagk.'
'Professor who?'
I repeated the name. 'He's the fellow who did all the work on it.'
'Never heard of him, I'm afraid.' To my amazement, I had my trophy handed back.
'But aren't you interested in it?'
'Not particularly. Chemotherapy is an exclusively German fetish, because they are better at handling molecules than handling people, and they have no compunction about slaughtering droves of mice to prove some obscure and often impractical chemical point. I suppose I was a bad research worker when I was younger, because I became too friendly with my guinea-pigs.' He sat at the mahogany bureau by the window, spreading out his letters and uncapping his fountain-pen. 'Leonard Colebrook is at this very moment trying to cure ordinary puerperal fever by injecting his mothers with arsenicals-the arsenicals which Ehrlich invented against the spirochaete. With utter lack of success.'
I had not imagined this rebuff. 'It worked on my arm,' I objected.
'I'd prefer to ascribe that to your own healthy young blood, rather than a dye for carpets.' He did not even look up. 'Everyone knows how lymphangitis can clear up on its own accord. The Germans are always pressing their latest chemicals on us as miraculous cures. I've been injecting gold into my tuberculous patients for months, with no good reason except that every other doctor in London has been persuaded to do the same. I prefer to treat infections on the sound and tried principle of immunology, as preached by our mutual friend Sir Almroth Wright.'
We were interrupted by my father in his tail coat with red-and-white striped waistcoat, come to serve the evening cocktails.
'You must be pleased to have Jim home again, Elgar,' remarked Sir Edward, still scribbling.
'He uses too many of them Jerry words, sir.'
'But aren't you glad he's become proficient in the German language?'
'What's wrong with English, sir, I always say,' my father disagreed cheerfully.
He was carrying a large oval silver tray by its handles, ceremoniously breast-high. He lowered it slowly on the eighteenth-century pier table, marble topped, its legs a vulgar profusion of gilt mermaids and dolphins. Then he filled a glass with pale sherry from a square decanter and transferred it to a silver salver. All was performed with a solemnity, an exaggeration of movement, to imply that any action in Sir Edward Tiplady's personal service was of importance, or that a butler's performance of tasks as easily done by his master was worth the money.
'Edward, you haven't changed yet.' Lady Tiplady appeared almost on the heels of my father. 'You know we're going to the theatre.'
'Are we? What a bore.' He was reading a letter through his monocle. 'What's the show?'
'It's the Lunts-_Reunion in Vienna,_ at the Lyric: The Rothschilds asked us before Christmas to join their box. Surely you remember?'
'I've laid out your evening dress, sir,' came from my father, who had to play the valet in the same way that my mother was obliged to double as housekeeper. The War had replaced servant plenitude with the servant problem, the ingredient of all middle-class conversation.
'Well, Jim, you would seem to have resisted the siren voice of _Die Lorelei.'_ 'Lady Tip', as she was known downstairs, directed to me a voice laced with the acid she kept for servants, tradesmen, gossip, and dinner guests either boring or more intelligent than herself. She was tall, slim and dark-haired, in her late thirties but looking younger, beautiful and beautifully dressed.
'Perhaps I was lucky to resist it, your Ladyship. As it is a voice reputed to deprive a man of his sight and hearing.'
'Then the siren's voice would seem to have caught the ear of a good many people in Germany today, by all accounts.' She took a gin-and-french from my father's salver without glancing at him. 'What are we going to do about Jim?' she asked her husband.
'Do?' he asked vaguely, sipping his sherry at the desk.
'I mean, he can't go on living here, can he?'
I had noticed how the upper classes frequently assumed their language incomprehensible to the lower. There were many things which they would never discuss before the servants. The servants' affairs they could discuss freely over their own heads. But I was not listening. The Tipladys' only child, Elizabeth, had come into the room.
The year which may have changed me had transformed her. I had previously disregarded her as a household nuisance, like Sir Edward's half dozen cats. Now she was nearing fifteen, and already developed as a young woman. She had the same glistening dark hair, pale complexion and high cheekbones as her mother, but her eyes were softer, her lips full and as inviting as June strawberries, her breasts straining impatiently against the maidenly cut of her short blue dress. She seemed infinitely innocent, submissive and explosive-the look of Leonardo da Vinci. She sat on the sofa, turning her attention idly to a copy of the Tatler lying on the fireside table with three or four new novels from Harrod's library. The likes of me were to be ignored.
'Why not?' asked Sir Edward. 'Why shouldn't he still live with us?'
'The situation has become perfectly bizarre.' Lady Tip sat beside Elizabeth on the sofa, smoothing the sheath-like crimson silk evening gown over her long legs. 'It was all right when he was the butler's boy, but now he's a grown man and perfectly able to look after himself. He can't expect us to go on feeding and housing him in times like these.'
Lady Tip hated me. She was naturally jealous of the attention and affection which I diverted from her husband. My whole education I owed to Sir Edward's urging, expense and inspiration. The ladder of learning was then steep, sharply tapering and rickety. I was lucky to be the child in ten who progressed from elementary to secondary school, and among the four in a thousand who stepped further into university. There were only three hundred State scholarships, and three hundred more from Oxford and Cambridge, fought over by every clever poor child in the country.
Sir Edward had spurred me to win one of each, he had himself coached me in Latin for Cambridge 'Little Go', his cheques at Trinity arrived for birthdays, May Week or out of the blue. Aside froth the unmentionable part of our relationship, he was generous because he had no son and because he hated to see a good brain go to waste. Without Sir Edward, I should today look back on a life scribbled away as a clerk in some benumbing office. Or I should be a millionaire.
'Jim could at least get a job, and make some contribution to his keep,' Lady Tip continued.
'Perhaps I could persuade Almroth Wright to take you back at Mary's,' Sir Edward said to me. 'Though of course, Sir Almroth hates chemists in any shape or form. I'm seeing Alexander Fleming next week, I'll sound him out. God, what a bore old Flem is getting!' he broke off. 'It must be five years now since he found penicillium mould contaminating his Petri dishes and killing off his staphylococci. He still keeps working it into a discussion on anything whatever at the Research Club. Not of course that anyone can hear a word Flem says beyond the first two rows.'
'There's always the dole,' said Lady Tip, sipping her gin-and-french.
This annoyed Sir Edward. 'You really can't expect Jim to queue at the Labour Exchange with a lot of unemployed tram drivers and road menders.'
'Why on earth not?' she asked calmly.
Another cat, a tortoiseshell, appeared mysteriously and jumped on to Sir Edward's lap. My father impassively poured a second glass of sherry. Elizabeth continued turning the shiny pages of the Tatler, the unattainable eyed by the unspeakable.