that sulphonamide was the only way to prevent our young English friend from cutting the figure of Admiral Nelson.'
'Very well.' Domagk nodded several times. 'I shall exhibit sulphonamide.' He paused. 'I had already made up my mind, Otto, but I wanted to share responsibility with someone outside the family.'
'Have you the 'Streptozon'?' Dr Dieffenbach asked urgently. 'I've none of the pills left.'
'I was intending to collect some from my laboratory, then go on to the hospital.'
'Why waste time? Herr Elgar here knows the way, and his American friend drives the fastest car in Germany. They'll get to the hospital with the pills before you do. Go along and see your child, and tell the surgeons what you've decided. Those gentlemen might take some persuading, they haven't got wind of sulphonamide yet.'
I was instructed to revisit Domagk's room, the one with the painting by Otto Dix. I was told that Professor Hцrlein had left a phial containing twenty tablets of 'Streptozon' on the roll-topped desk. Domagk departed for the hospital. Dr Dieffenbach telephoned the I G Farben works for the night-watchman to admit me.
The expedition appealed hugely to Jeff. In 1933, motorists in neither Germany nor England were incommoded with speed limits, and we roared through the misty night with headlights ablaze and horn blaring. The only necessity for our breakneck rush was Jeff's sense of the dramatic. I left him provoking the car to angry, impatient roars in the triangular cobbled yard with the railway tracks, while I hurried across the footbridge over the stinking river, above me the brightly-lit cars of the passing Schwebebahn. A window or two was alight in the research block, indicating some engrossed scientist-or perhaps just the cleaners. I reached Domagk's study door on the third floor and switched on the light.
I saw the sulphonamide at once. Two phials, not one. Each with twenty tablets. I hesitated. I should be leaving Germany within hours. I took one phial in my hand. The other I slipped into my tweed jacket pocket.
I turned to go. There was a gap among the framed photographs on the wall. I missed the amiable, bearded features of Professor Paul Ehrlich from Frankfurt-on-Main. The man who cured the infection which took the lives of Schubert, Nietzsche, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec had the misfortune to be born a Jew, and therefore worthy of nothing but odium.
12
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
