principles. He searched Germany and France for sulphonamide, dosed his own mice, and issued his own paper on the sulphonamide treatment of puerperal fever in the _Lancet _in June, 1936. A year after that, the mortality at Queen Charlotte's for the disease which killed my wife had dropped from thirty-three in a hundred to under five.
There was still Clare.
I put my problem to Colebrook. The evening of the funeral I went to his home in Chiswick Mall, which was bright with daffodils from his week-end house at Farnham in Surrey-which he had characteristically bought near Sir Almroth Wright's.
'Puerperal fever is a triple tragedy,' he told me solemnly. 'Though I've no children of my own, I do my best to sort out the domestic problems of bereaved husbands. They've sometimes two or three small ones to manage somehow or other, and often enough financial troubles into the bargain. Do you want to keep the child?'
'No.'
'Adoption may not be easy.' he remarked doubtfully. 'A lot of people these days can't run to the luxury.'
'She'll have to be put in a home, like her mother.' As he said nothing, I asked, 'Am I abnormal? I don't feel particularly attached to the child.'
'I have seen too much of the relationships between husbands and wives and their newborn babies to find any variation whatever abnormal. Do you know of anyone who might take her?'
'Not a soul.'
The Lady Almoner at Charlotte's is of course an expert on this subject. Though I'm afraid she can't perform miracles any more than I can in the wards.'
Mrs Packer saved her. She called the next morning at Arundel College. 'Jim, I have something terribly important to say,' she began earnestly as I went down from my lab to the hall. 'Can we sit down?'
I took her across to the refreshment room at Euston Station, where Clare's fate was decided.
'My husband's a solicitor, you know, and doing as well as anyone can these times,' she explained. 'As I expect you noticed at your wedding, he's…well, he's older than I am. I mean, Jim, we'd love to have her, and we can afford to look after her, and we've a new house at Hendon which is really very nice, and of course whenever you want to come and see her-'
'There's one condition.'
She swallowed, her Adam's apple bouncing in her thin neck like a ping-pong ball. 'Anything you say, Jim.'
'Clare must never have the faintest idea who her father and mother were.'
She looked flustered. 'Of course, we'd try if you really want us to. But these things do tend to slip out, and everyone in Sir Edward's house knows-'
'You must give me your promise. Your solemn promise.'
'I promise. At least, I promise I'll do my best.'
She did very well. Clare today-and Mrs Packer's is the only false name I have used in this narrative-became a bright young MP in the 1960s, but left politics to become Professor of Sociology at a university situated…shall we say, between St Louis and Oklahoma City. She is married for a second time, to an American professor who smokes a pipe, wears tweeds and goes fishing. Perhaps he wanted her to complete his English
That summer of 1935 was King George the Fifth's Silver Jubilee. There were flags and tea-parties in working- class streets, royal processions, military reviews, vibrantly choral services of thanksgiving. In London, St Paul's was floodlit, at Spithead the Fleet was beflagged. Clever fellows who saw it all as a carnival to boost the National Government were quickly lost in the morass of emotion. On June 7, MacDonald departed from No 10 Downing Street, Baldwin returned. On June 27, two and a half million Britons voting in Lord Cecil's Peace Ballot stood against any military measures whatever to repel foreign aggression.
The following January had Sir Edward Tiplady on the front pages again. The King was suffering a recurrence of his old chest infection. Like Leonard Colebrook with Rosie, the doctors were against ransoming a King's life with an unknown German drug. At half past nine on the night of Monday, January 20, Lord Dawson's medical bulletin said only, The King's life is moving peacefully to its close.' The BBC fell silent, but for the ticking of a clock. The nation dropped its head. At five minutes to midnight the King died. Nobody was sure if his last words were, 'How is the Empire?' or 'Bugger Bognor'.
19
'Tonight Hitler sleeps in the Hrad?any Palace in Prague. It is time to redefine our attitudes.'
Archie said this without a shred of self-consciousness. All men become caricatures of themselves, but he achieved it younger than most. It was three years later, the evening of March 15, 1939, and the four of us were eating dinner in his Belgrave Square home. Since his father's death, he had combined the huge dining-room with the sitting-room in the modern flat-dwelling fashion, redecorating and refurnishing the rest of the place with pleasing, extravagant plainness.
'The Ides of March are come,' said David Mellors, unusually gloomily.
'Ay, Chamberlain; but not gone,' added Elizabeth Tiplady, who had left school more recently than the rest of us.
'So much for Hitler's 'last territorial demand in Europe', over the Sudeten Germans,' I said.
'Do you realize the significance of what's just happened?' Archie demanded of the table in general. 'By now, we're sickeningly used to Hitler invading neighbouring countries. But for the first time he's enlarged the Reich
'The Poles,' David poured himself more claret-a '34, claimed by Archie to be the best out of ten terrible years.
'Us?' suggested Elizabeth.
'What's Chamberlain going to do?' I asked, Archie being a fount of political information more immediate if not always more accurate than the newspapers.
'Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He's done all he can do already. Did you read what he said in the House this afternoon? That the collapse of Czecho-Slovakia was inevitable. That the Slovakia half of it simply declared itself independent, so we're no longer bound to guarantee its frontiers under the Munich agreement. Fancy falling back on legal niceties with the Gestapo already in Prague! Chamberlain whines about a breach of the Munich spirit, as though Hitler had omitted to send him a Christmas card. The whole business is utterly disgraceful. Poor, old, ill President Hбcha has been horribly let down, just as we let down President Beneљ. No wonder the Tory party's looking sick. If I was a Conservative MP today, I'd vomit over the benches.'
'What's this we're supposed to be eating?' asked David. 'Stewed pheasant?'
'It couldn't possibly be. Pheasant shooting ends on February the first,' said Archie severely. For all his socialism, he had the aristocrat's disdain for ignorance of country matters.
'It's chicken, _I think.'_ Elizabeth struggled to cut it.
'I don't know the first thing about food,' remarked Archie airily. 'It's a dish which Watson seems to like cooking. I suppose because he finds it one of the easiest.'
'Do you think Watson appreciates that instead of not having to call you 'Sir', he now doesn't have to call you 'My Lord'?' I enquired.
'Oh, this title!' Archie complained. 'Do you realize, politically it's like those concrete overcoats in which gangsters drop their rivals into New York harbour. One simply disappeared without a gurgle. Of course, none of us expected my father to die so suddenly last Christmas. I so much wanted to make some sort of impact on the Commons before being shoved into the Madame Tussaud's of the Lords. When I think of the constituencies I've nursed!' He ended pathetically.
Archie had always seemed to be nursing a constituency since going down from Cambridge, though the foundlings were never grateful enough to elect him to Parliament. But he did good among them, helping the inadequate and the inarticulate before they were lavished with the bounty of the Welfare State.
