Neville Chamberlain was a man of peace. He even went to war peacefully. He was followed by a nation of inoffensive shepherds, cheerfully shouldering their crooks. There was no nastiness. There was no undue enthusiasm. The war was very genteel. We had the blackout and the evacuees. Everyone carried a gasmask in a little cardboard box the size of a Brownie camera. Air-raid trenches were cut among the flower-beds of Hyde Park. Strips of sticky brown paper criss-crossed shop windows, to prevent their breaking when a bomb dropped outside. The only bloodshed was a doubling of road casualties by unlit motor-cars. Meanwhile, Poland was smashed between two flicks of ash from Colonel Beck's cigarette.
Our lives were not endangered, only changed. Archie was outraged to discover that volunteering for the Army was officially discouraged. He saw the chance of his duodenal ulcer returning, and spending yet another war on his back in Swanage. I waited submissively to be gathered tidily by the harvester of conscription.
I had little work nor income, because London was empty of patients and Sir Edward was busy evacuating his hospital from Blackfriars by the Thames to a vast red-brick Victorian asylum sprawling across the South Downs. Its London wards were left empty for the half-million air-raid casualties the Government secretly but confidently expected in the first week of the War. Towards the end of October, when people were still saying it would all be over by Christmas, Sir Edward telephoned me one breakfast time at Archie's flat. Could I call that afternoon on a Professor Ainsley? The address was near Marble Arch. It was important.
Mystified but flattered, I presented myself at a small block of offices, sandbagged to the first floor, not far from St Mary's Hospital, behind a cinema in Edgware Road. I waited in a bleak official anteroom, while a smartly-dressed blonde with a superior accent answered the telephone, typed and received callers with impartial bored condescension. Ainsley's office beyond seemed a store-room for battleship-grey filing cabinets, among which he had wedged himself at a cheap, bare desk with three telephones, each of a different colour. He was small, grey-haired, knobbly-faced, bushy-eyebrowed, middle-aged, solemn-looking. A likeness to Alexander Fleming struck me. He wore a plain blue suit and a red knitted cardigan, which I later found that, like Fleming, he abandoned only during the hottest weeks of midsummer. I had during the morning taken care to discover that he was the Wychart Professor of Biology at Cambridge. I did not know that this self-effacing, amiable, overworked, practical intellectual who was to control my life for the next six years came directly under Professor Lindemann, the Oxford physicist with enormous influence on Churchill. Lindemann had just moved into the Admiralty as the new First Lord's personal assistant.
'Should I make some joke about, 'Let slip the dons of war'?' Ainsley asked affably. 'Like a lot of my colleagues at Cambridge, I suppose I'm sitting here working for the Government for the duration.' He looked round the room unenthusiastically. 'I gather you were out in Germany in 1933? And that you met Gerhard Domagk?'
Sitting on a hard chair opposite, I told him, 'I was in Wuppertal, working in a brewery.'
'Yes, we know all about that. Did you meet anyone else in the I. G. Farbenwerke?'
'Only Professor Hцrlein.'
'Phillip Heinrich Hцrlein, born June 5, 1882, at Wendelsheim,' Ainsley recited reflectively. 'And a Nazi. I heard him talk about sulphonamides to the British Association at Nottingham a couple of years ago. Very effective he was, too. Anyone else?'
'Only the lab technician. A girl.'
'Perhaps you'd care to describe Domagk's lab, and anything else you remember in the factory. Draw a plan, if you like.'
I sketched what I could remember of the factory lay-out. Had the British Government been so interested, I thought, they could have sent a man that summer to ride up and down in the Schwebebahn. Ainsley began to question me about the Dieffenbachs. I became aware that a dossier on myself lay somewhere in the battleship-grey cabinets.
The Dieffenbachs were a decent family who fell for the Nazi line, or thought it prudent to pretend as much,' I told him.
'Did
'Not in the least. I think I saw how dangerous the Nazis were before a lot of people in England did.'
'You've no conscientious objections to killing Germans, nothing like that?' he added airily. I shook my head. 'Nor how you killed them? I don't of course mean resorting to torture, and putting yourself on the Nazis' own level. But killing them by the deliberate spread of-shall we say-botulism or plague or anthrax?'
I hesitated. 'No. It's the same principle as dropping high explosive.'
'I'm glad to see you are a realist, Mr Elgar. Nor am I myself talking theoretical science. The Government intends to wage war with every weapon possible-we are merely returning Hitler's compliment-which includes pathogenic bacteria.' He paused, looking at me closely. 'Little or nothing is known about handling and distributing such pathogens. Or of their likely effect on the enemy population. We've a few sketchy papers on 'germ warfare', that's all. Your name was put forward by Sir Almroth Wright, no less. Sir Edward Tiplady and I both agree that your particular combination of biochemical and bacteriological skills make you the right man to direct our new unit. Of course, bacteria may never be used as a weapon in this war. Neither may poison gas. But I assure you that the enemy has for some time been investigating the possibilities of both, and we should be criminally at fault not preparing ourselves for similar action.'
I could say nothing for a moment. I was amazed, even more flattered. I felt a flush of warmth towards Wright for at last finding me a job, if a peculiar one. I had imagined Ainsley wished only to interrogate me about the I G Farben plant, not to offer me a lever of the war machine. Perhaps they could find no one else to take it. My students today might be appalled at my accepting such inhuman work without scruple. But I had no qualms later over the Americans dropping two atom bombs on the Japanese. You could not fight the Nazis or the Kamikazes with half a smile on your face. My only feeling, as I agreed, was the job being preferable to peeling potatoes in the Army.
'Where does this research take place?'
'In Oxford. At the Fungus Institute, a small and admirably unobtrusive grey stone building just south of the Parks. The strictest secrecy is of course essential-you will have to sign the Official Secrets Act, which proscribes the most alarming penalties. As far as the University and the rest of the country are concerned, you are performing research on making valuable foodstuffs from toadstools and lichens.'
Well before that snowy Christmas, I was installed on one side of South Parks Road at Oxford, secretly attempting to breed strains of germs so deadly they could wipe out the population of Europe, while in the large building opposite Professor Florey was attempting to develop penicillin and save the world from the deadly germs which already infested it. Thus science progresses.
I wore grey flannel trousers and a Harris tweed jacket and I bought a second-hand bicycle. I found lodgings in north Oxford, that area of red-brick family dwellings embraced by the Woodstock and Banbury roads, where the lofty donnish intellect struggles daily with earthy domesticity. I had David Mellors and his new wife nearby for company. I browsed in Blackwell's and drank in the Randolph. I have never enjoyed so gentle and agreeable a life as the time I was preparing unpleasant death for millions. Of my laboratories, my colleagues and my work itself I may still write nothing. The Official Secrets Act has an infinite memory, and the world is not yet peaceful enough for dust to lie undisturbed on my deadly experiments.
In that December, when the strange war became weirder, with the Russians fighting the Finns and the British about to fight the neutral Russians instead of the Germans, I had a letter forwarded from the Harley Street house with a Swedish stamp and an affixed strip of brown paper printed, _Opened By the Censor._ Inside was an unaddressed, undated sheet with a typed message.
_Dear Jim
God willing, I shall arrive in London via Stockholm first-second week December. I'm trying to fix a passage with United States Lines to be home in time for Christmas, but of course it's tricky. Call me up at the Savoy. I'm still where the railway flies in the sky.
Cordially,
Jeff_
I was astounded to find Jeff still in Wuppertal, even though the RAF was dropping on him nothing more weighty than the prose of the Ministry of Information leaflets. Perhaps he was still trying to stop the war. The Savoy knew nothing of him, but it was not the time to make bookings from one side of Europe to another. I left the Fungus Institute number, and two mornings later he telephoned in high spirits.
