growing it and extracting the penicillin, floating round France at this particular moment.'
'Isn't Mellanby being overdramatic?' I felt resentful, because it was Florey's fault Lamartine had left with the specimen, not mine. But it seemed no moment to argue. 'Penicillin is hardly another sulphonamide.'
'Yes, but unlike sulphonamide, it's active in the lab against the staphylococcus and the causative organism of gas gangrene,' replied Ainsley forthrightly. 'So who knows its potential in war wounds? Anyway, some high-up politico has been informed-most foolishly, in my view-and ordered us to get it back.'
'But can't you simply telephone Lamartine? Or somebody at our Paris Embassy?'
'That's exactly what we can't do. He seems to have disappeared.'
'How extraordinary.'
'Things seem somewhat disorganized at the Institut Duhamel,' he continued drily. 'I suppose we can't blame them, if they're at panic stations. But you know about penicillin, Elgar. And you know Lamartine by sight. You've got to cross the Channel and stop the mould falling into the wrong hands.'
'German hands?' I looked even more surprised.
Ainsley gulped down his unsugared tea, his expression wry from more than its bitterness. 'Your friend Lamartine is a bit of an odd fish. We've just found out that he was once mixed up with the Croix de Feu-Colonel de la Rocque's outfit, French-style fascism. Lamartine should never have been allowed to reach the position he did. He may have gone to earth, waiting to hand over his little present when the Nazis arrive.'
'They won't penetrate to Paris, surely?' I objected. 'They didn't last time.'
'They did in 1870. And the parallel with the Franco-Prussian War may be closer than with the last one.' Ainsley glanced at me sideways. 'A couple of days ago, the Cabinet decided we might have to pull Gort's army out.'
'Bring them home?' I was shocked. 'The French didn't care for that, surely?'
'The French don't know. I was let into the secret because we may have to open our bag of tricks.' He nodded round the lab.
'But what about the Maginot Line?'
'The Maginot Line is as irrelevant to the progress of this war as Napoleon's tomb,' Ainsley replied shortly.
When Ainsley had left in his official car, I crossed the road to the Sir William Dunn Laboratories (there was an Oxford variety as well as a Cambridge one). I had never before intruded on Florey there. I gathered that he was a good professor, captaining his team as well as initiating its research, understanding his staff's problems inside the laboratory, and out-which were often the most important ones for successful work. He shunned publicity, but enjoyed that sublimest of professorial gifts, of being able to raise money easily and in large quantities. I found him sitting in his room in his white coat.
'Doesn't look much like a weapon of war, does it?' he said quietly when I had explained Ainsley's visit. He picked from his desk a conical flask stoppered with cotton wool, the fluffy, greenish-white mould inside lying like felt on the dark fluid of its broth.
'You haven't even tried it as a cure for infected mice yet, have you?'
'I'm going to this weekend. Fortunately, I didn't let on to Lamartine. I've a difficult job, judging the right dose. Did you know, the Americans gave sulphonamide with quinine for pneumonia at New Rochelle University back in 1919? It didn't work, so they abandoned it. They fixed the dose too low, I suspect. We haven't much penicillin here to play with, but if I inject too little I won't get a decisive result. Then no one outside these four walls will have any further interest in penicillin, and won't be prepared to give us hard cash to keep up the work on it.'
'Domagk was lucky never to have that problem.'
'It's a hard thing to say at this particular moment, but without Domagk's sulphonamide our mental sights would never have been adjusted to see the potentialities of penicillin. Fleming certainly didn't see a future for penicillin in 1928. Or he didn't think it worth practical steps, beyond using it in a local way once or twice for an infected sinus and an infected eye among his colleagues at St Mary's.'
'Are you working on it full time?'
'Oh, Lord no. Penicillin's only one of our research projects. We've hardly had time to come to grips with it at all these past couple of years. I've a depleted staff, like everybody else with a war on, and we've all the routine work, teaching medical students and all that.' He paused to give a smile. 'Unlike you, who can devote yourself to developing your edible fungi across the road. I hope you can get a mushroom to taste like a turkey. It'll be handy at Christmas.'
Florey understood perfectly well what I did in the Fungus Institute. That he never acknowledged as much was one of his jokes. He made few of them. Some people called him a cold fish. But perhaps Oxford professors lose the facility on appointment, like Trollope's bishops the ability to whistle.
I had two days before travelling to France during the Friday night. Late on Thursday I was summoned to the communal telephone in the hall of my north Oxford lodgings. It was an enormous house built for fecund Victorian dons, as the grey-spired church of St Philip and St James opposite had been raised for their family worship. The hall always smelt of sour milk and cabbage, and the telephone like everything else you touched was coated with a thin layer of grease.
It was Sir Edward Tiplady. He had heard from Ainsley of my expedition. I had discovered they were close friends, serving for some years on a committee planning scientific warfare, of which I had no inkling. 'Jim? You know already, don't you, that Elizabeth's been posted to France?'
'I didn't know she was still there.'
'Would you look her up? She's billeted with a French doctor. A Professor Piйry, at No 6 rue Lascut. That's near the Bois.' He gave the telephone number. 'Just to see if she's all right, don't you know. Things look a little sticky over there. Her mother's bolted back to London. Give her my love. I'm sure you can look after her, should she need it. Good luck, Jim.'
He was trying to be his usual casual, cheerful self, but it did not work, no more than when the old King lay under his care desperately ill. I wondered if the below stairs tales of Elizabeth's parentage were false, or inspired by Lady Tip from hatred of her husband.
24
I sailed from Newhaven to Dieppe in an ordinary cross-Channel steamer, painted grey, blacked out and escorted by a destroyer. There were crates lashed to the decks, the only passengers a hundred or so Servicemen of all ranks, even a red-tabbed general. The journey proved less disturbing than my storm-tossed crossing towards Wuppertal. There were no submarines, no aeroplanes. I found the French blackout lacked the puritanical gloom of our own, where the narrowest chink brought an air-raid warden banging on the front door with that already most tiresome enquiry, 'Don't you know there's a war on?' A comfortable express took me to the Gare St Lazare. I arrived in Paris shortly after eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, May 25, about the same time as Major-General Spears arrived on Churchill's instructions to put some heart into the French Government-and to convince them that the British Army was
I took a taxi past the Madeleine to the British Embassy in rue du Faubourg St Honorй. I never forgot my first impression of Paris, the smell of coffee and Gitane cigarettes, the advertisements everywhere for
An Embassy official with a retired soldierly air expected me, but could offer little help. 'I suppose you could try the NAAFI in the boulevard Magenta,' he suggested gloomily when I asked about a bed.
'To collect a bit of mould.'
He looked lost. The war was becoming too complicated for him.
I decided to make straight for Elizabeth's billet. Another taxi took me between the green billows of chestnuts in
