'Of course, it was Dr and Madame Trefouлl working at the Institut Pasteur in Paris who made sulphonamide therapy on any scale possible at all.' Dr Henri Lamartine, beside me on a deck chair in the afternoon sunshine early in a beautiful summer, produced another blue and gold packet of Weekend cigarettes. It opened like a book. He had been in Oxford six days, without exhausting his supply brought from Paris. He refused English cigarettes, because they gave him _la toux sиche._
'Isn't that a little sweeping?'
'No, I don't think so, _mon cher confrиre.'_ He spoke excellent English, in a dry, precise way which matched his appearance and, as far as I could tell from a week's collaboration, his character. He was of middle height but lean, his dark hair well greased and brushed back, with a small woolly moustache and many thin lines round the angles of his mouth. His complexion was yellowish, and his long-fingered hands had many moles on the back. He wore a smart chalk-striped blue suit, a dark shirt and plain silk tie. He was ten years older than me, my opposite number at the Institut Duhamel in Montparnasse, though his position in the French military and bureaucratic cat's cradle was more complicated than mine. He was ending a week's exchange of information and opinions. I was to pay a return visit to Paris in the autumn.
'Oh, well left alone, sir,' I interrupted.
Lamartine frowned deeply. 'I do not understand why you acclaim a player for missing the ball.'
That Wednesday of May 8, 1940, we were enjoying a cricket match in the Oxford Parks. 'It's simple. The bowler made the ball veer at the last moment. Had the batsman not spotted it, he would have been caught off the edge of his bat and sent back to the pavilion. You see?'
'I think you have to be an Englishman of many generations to comprehend this mysterious game.'
'It's really simple but with delightfully subtle variations, like a Mozart symphony.'
'Why could they not all have bats?' Lamartine wondered. 'It would make the game much livelier.' He resumed his argument. 'I G Farben waited two years before presenting "Prontosil" to the world, while countless millions continued to die from blood poisoning, meningitis, etcetera. They wanted their patents watertight, that's all. Well, _c'est logique._ But it was the Trefouлl, with Dr Nitti and Dr Bovet, who found the "Protosil" dye was broken down in the body, and only the sulphonamide part of it did the work of killing the bacteria. As sulphonamide was discovered by Gelmo of Vienna in 1908, I G Farben couldn't patent it. We made the Germans look fools. Farben must have known all the time that only the sulphonamide in "Prontosil" was active. They manufactured it with a red colour to mask the truth.'
'Taking pure sulphonamide instead of "Prontosil" at least saved the patients turning bright pink and passing alarming pink urine.'
'It's over?' asked Lamartine, as the players abruptly trooped from the field.
'No, the captain's declared.'
'Declared what?'
'It doesn't matter. Let's have a cup of tea.'
It was towards the end of the phoney war, the _drфle de guerre_ as Lamartine called it. A month previously, Chamberlain announced that Hitler had missed the bus. But unfortunately it was still being driven by the Fьhrer in whichever direction he cared, at an unstoppable pace. Denmark and Norway had been swiftly overcome, though Lamartine assured me emphatically that the French expected little trouble from the Germans for the rest of the year-'Hitler was forced to strike up north. He will be somewhat more prudent before letting fly at the Maginot Line.' Lamartine was returning to Paris in the morning, and I solicited Professor Florey to invite us that night to dine in Queen's College.
High table life continued, as it had when Charles I was conducting another war from Oxford. Sitting on either side of Florey in his long-sleeved MA gown, we inevitably fell into the argument whether Chamberlain would go and Churchill come in.
'I am sure the change is very necessary,' Lamartine gave his opinion. 'Just as it was very necessary for France to get rid of Deladier as prime minister six weeks ago. Paul Reynaud has brought a much more invigorating atmosphere, you can feel it in Paris already.'
'He seems a sprightly sixty-two,' agreed Florey guardedly. 'Indeed, Professor. He bicycles, and does the gymnastic daily.'
'I think barnacle Chamberlain will survive tonight's vote,' I said gloomily. 'The Conservatives will flock into the lobby behind him, because it's part of the public school spirit. If Labour has the guts to force a division at all, with the prospect of exactly that happening.'
'In what research are you engaged, Professor?' asked
Lamartine, politely directing the conversation to his host.
'Have you heard of a substance called penicillin?'
'Never.'
Howard Florey was then aged forty-one. He had thick dark hair parted carefully just left of centre, and an impassive deliberative look. He often smiled, but never widely. He wore soft collars with plain ties and dark suits, and rimless glasses. His quiet voice still showed its salting in the air of Adelaide. He could be aloof. He distrusted England and the English since arriving in Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1922, but he had mellowed like the Oxford stone and was tipped to emerge from donnish intrigues as the next Provost of Queen's. I thought during the war that he bore a resemblance to the bandleader Glen Miller. But perhaps it was only the glasses.
'It's the juice of the mould _Penicillium notatum,_ which has been found to kill staphylococci in the lab,' Florey explained.
'Staphylococci, which are resistant to sulphonamides,' reflected Lamartine. 'Might it be used on patients?'
'It's wretchedly difficult stuff to extract. All we've got is a few grains of brownish powder. But we've found it's completely non-toxic to animals, which is encouraging.'
'Might I be allowed a specimen of this mould?' Lamartine asked. 'It sounds quite interesting.'
'If you wish,' Florey said amicably. 'Drop into my labs before you go, and I'll let you have some reprints of the published papers and a note on our work in progress. The mould travels excellently.'
That night in the House of Commons, Labour found the courage to force a vote. According to the Oxford History a quarter of a century later, Labour's mind was made up by the female MPs of all parties, who decided in their room to divide the House if nobody else would. I hope the story is true. I have long believed women more practical in misfortune than men. I bade farewell to Lamartine on the Thursday. On the morning of Friday, May 20, the elderly maid in my north Oxford lodgings brought early tea with the news that the wireless said Germany had invaded Belgium. 'Just like last time,' she added. 'They'll never learn.'
Holland was invaded, too. That Holland was conquered in five days was bemusing to Britain. We all thought the Dutch needed simply to open the dykes for the Germans to be bogged down or drowned. Prime Minister Churchill offered us blood, toil, tears and sweat. But the fighting was still, as Chamberlain had said of the Czechs, comfortably in a far away country between people of which we knew nothing. About eleven in the morning of Wednesday, May 22, Professor Ainsley appeared at the Fungus Institute unannounced.
'It's this bloody man Lamartine,' he began as I poured him a cup of tea. We sat on laboratory stools, alone amid sufficient germs to depopulate Oxfordshire overnight. 'Elgar, you've got to go to France.'
This was hardly cheering news. The fighting was then round the names graved on British war memorials-Arras, Cambrai, Bapaume. That very morning the Wehrmacht panzers had reached the Channel near Etaples, our base in the Great War, its geometrical grey forest of British headstones washed with the salty winds across the estuary of the River Canche. 'Sugar?' I asked.
'No, thanks. Given it up for the duration. My kids have my ration. You seem to have dropped something of a danger, Elgar. I passed on to Sir Edward Mellanby at the Medical Research Council what you told me about giving Lamartine a specimen of penicillin mould. Obviously, Mellanby's interested in Florey's work across the road-though I must say he doesn't seem to give it much urgency. But he doesn't want a bit of the mould, plus full instructions for 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.