SURGEON AT ARMS Read online

  SURGEON AT ARMS

  Richard Gordon

  Richard Gordon

  SURGEON AT ARMS

  First Published in 1968

  1

  He couldn't believe it.

  It was outrageous, ridiculous, but frightening, like finding the Houses of Parliament in the middle of Salisbury Plain, stumbling into St Peter's Square round a corner in Wimbledon, or coming across the Taj Mahal amid the alleys of the City. The front was magnificent. The portico presented a decorated frieze, four stout pale columns of Portland stone, and all the exuberant self-confidence of a Victorian London railway terminus. Behind rose a flattish dome, topped by four minarets, two of them emitting smoke. Then the building seriously got down to business. Its slate-roofed, double-storied, mean-windowed blocks spread in a fan, sticking their ugly fingers into an empty countryside wearing the ragged robes of autumn. All round ran an eight-foot-high wall, topped with unfriendly-looking broken glass. Everything was in yellow brick, which in the pale afternoon sunshine gave the place the look of being constructed from a million bars of Sunlight soap.

  But the grounds were magnificent. Lawns, shrubberies, orchards, flowerbeds, and kitchen gardens were laid out neatly on each side of the long winding driveway, all tended with care befitting a palace. He supposed they must have had an embarrassing surplus of labour. There was a Gothic chapel, with a magnificent clock which had scattered unnecessary hours for a century. There were more modern outbuildings with larger windows, and even more modern corrugated iron Nissen huts with no windows at all. There were signs everywhere. One directed CASUALTIES to some more workmanlike entrance in the rear, another SHELTER directly into the earth, a smart new blue-and-gold board where he parked his car announced

  MINISTRY OF HEALTH-EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICE-SMITHERS BOTHAM SECTOR HOSPITAL.

  It still struck him as a most peculiar name.

  The entrance hall beyond the portico was a disappointment, dark and poky, painted in official spinach green and mustard yellow. Behind a small counter sat an old man with a blue uniform and sadly drooping moustaches, to whom he announced himself, 'I'm Mr Graham Trevose. I'd like to see Captain Pile, please.'

  The old man looked at Graham Trevose wearily. For ten years he had sat behind that counter, hardly molested from morning to night, contemplating his pension. But now there were changes everywhere, he'd hardly time to get through his _Daily Mirror._ 'From Blackfriars Hospital, sir?' he asked.

  Graham nodded.

  'Have you an appointment?'

  'For two o'clock.'

  As the doorman turned to a small switchboard beside him Graham unbuttoned his fawn overcoat, felt for his gold case, and lit a cigarette. He noticed the hall led to a dim, narrow concrete corridor, stretching apparently to infinity. His eye fell on two doors with big brass keyholes and bolts but no handles. A terrible place to find yourself in, mad or sane. He shuddered.

  Smithers Botham was a mental hospital, 'The Asylum' to the villagers, despite the term having been tactfully dropped about the time alienists mysteriously turned themselves into psychiatrists. It sprawled across the sunward slopes of the Downs south of London, which in that autumn of 1939 had lost to the safety of the countryside everything the nation held most precious-the schoolchildren, the expectant mothers, the contents of the National Gallery, the B.B.C., and the Admiralty.

  The moment which had dominated British politics for five years-the arrival of the German Air Force to bomb the capital-seemed most regrettably at last about to occur. The Government confidently expected half a million air-raid casualties in the first week of the war, and something had to be done about patching them up. So the great London hospitals, too, rose stiffly from sites they had occupied for centuries, and shifted to the Home Counties in fleets of converted Green Line buses, doctors, nurses, students, instruments, beds, bed-pans, and all. Blackfriars Hospital, which had tended the sick beside the Thames since the Great Plague, was displaced to Smithers Botham, the others found secure homes in similar nineteenth-century mental institutions scattered so conveniently round the metropolis. The Government could never have kept Londoners healthy through the blitz without these vast and ugly buildings. The bread cast on the broad waters of Victorian compassion was washed ashore in the nick of time.

  The Smithers Botham mental doctors, themselves dispatched with the rightful inmates to Scotland, had watched the war approach more bitterly than even Mr Chamberlain. The upper reaches of prewar medicine had many agreeable backwaters, none pleasanter than a job in such a place. They enjoyed free houses in the grounds, free vegetables piled daily on their kitchen tables, even free laundry-which was always beautifully turned out, laundrywork being thought a useful occupation for madwomen. Their main vexations were their own colleagues, who could be difficult, many doctors of unreliable personality choosing to escape from the harsh world behind the same walls as their patients. But their duties were delightfully light, the treatment of mental illness at the time being as passive as the treatment of criminals, consisting mainly in keeping both classes locked well away from public view.

  Now the Smithers Botham gymnasium was partitioned into a row of operating theatres, where long-established cats snoozed in the warmth of the sterilizers or disported themselves among the beams above. New laboratories were fashioned from damp little outhouses, where sometimes toads came hopping round the test-tubes. The long bleak wards, re-equipped and refilled with rows of empty beds, after ten weeks of war still yawned hungrily for the half-million casualties, while bats flicked up and down the corridors at dusk, scaring the night nurses. The evacuated Blackfriars staff fitted in as best they could, the matron numbering among the first horrors of war her charges having to sleep without their usual collective chastity belt of spiked railings. But there were unlooked-for rural compensations-fresh air, a croquet lawn, tennis courts, even a cricket pitch, where the more athletic housemen took their exercise in the mornings and the more amorous ones took their girl-friends at night. And everyone agreed the flap would be over by Christmas, in spring they'd be home again in London.

  Graham Trevose looked at his wristwatch. Ten past two. 'I suppose Captain Pile knows I'm waiting?'

  'He's very busy just now, sir.'

  'My own time's not exactly valueless, you know,' Graham told him, not as unkindly as he might.

  The old man looked wearier than ever. 'There's a war on, sir.'

  Graham winced. He always did at the expression which had come to excuse any incompetence or incivility. Instead of replying he sat resignedly on a short wooden bench, eyeing a red-and-white poster telling him his cheerfulness, his courage, and his resolution would give them victory. In a spot like Smithers Botham, he felt he was going to need all three.

  2

  Graham Trevose was odd man out, as usual.

  The Second World War found the British Government prepared to take a more tolerant view of many things than during the First. Conscientious objectors were allowed to fight fires in preference to the enemy, soldiers' mistresses (if reasonably permanent) were given an allowance, and where the cure for hysteria in British soldiers at Ypres was a British bullet, by Dunkirk 'psychological exhaustion' had become entirely respectable. The Government had a particular new enthusiasm for plastic surgery. Men with faces smashed on the Somme were, if lucky, returned home looking grotesque, and if unlucky, either died or recovered so splendidly they were sent back to present another target. Then Harold Gillies created with the basic elements of surgery and the penetrating eye of an artist his brand-new science of facial repair, though until the Armistice his notion of returning casualties to the world looking roughly like human beings attracted derision from many senior officers, to whom it was a matter of supreme indifference if a man got his face shot off
or his backside.

  But the Government's enthusiasm outran its supply of trained plastic surgeons, who were as scarce as trained pilots. Apart from Graham Trevose, there were only four, installed in special new units round London. Gillies, being the senior man, insisted on first choice and went to Basingstoke in Hampshire (it was convenient for his fly-fishing). An unknown surgeon called Archie McIndoe descended on the charming little local hospital at East Grinstead in Sussex. But Graham went nowhere. He had been overlooked, he assumed deliberately.

  Graham was a realist. He knew he was dismissed by his profession as a 'beauty doctor', a trivial practitioner, a refurbisher of distraught dйbutantes who had inherited daddy's nose along with his money. He had admittedly specialized in offering hope to young actresses who saw their names one day in lights, or to old actresses for whom the lights were starting to dim. He had erased the scars of hunting accidents from the cheeks as neatly as those of dissipation from below the eyes, and the 'Trevose nose' was famous in London society-a little too famous: women were starting to recognize its distinctive handiwork across crowded cocktail parties. Perhaps he had made and spent too much money, lived too fashionably. Perhaps his private life unfitted him for employment by His Majesty. He had recently had a close shave from the General Medical Council over the famous 'infamous conduct'. Or perhaps, he told himself wearily, some stupid clerk in the Ministry had simply mislaid his file.

  When the war was a month old, before he had set eyes on Smithers Botham, Graham was surprised by a telephone call inviting him to meet Brigadier Haileybury at his club the following evening. Before the war, Haileybury, too, had been a civilian plastic surgeon, and the pair had for twenty years lived in mutual dislike. It was a dignified but deadly feud, and like all feuds afforded the onlookers much innocent amusement. But Graham accepted the invitation. He had nothing else to do. And it would be the first time that he could remember Haileybury buying him a drink.

  The newly created brigadier was already waiting. Of all the man's virtues, Graham found his strict punctuality the most regularly irritating.

  'Well, Trevose, you're looking fit.'

  'That's very kind. So are you.'

  'I'm finding it difficult to get enough exercise, sitting all day behind a desk.' Haileybury held an administrative job in the Army medical services. He had a flair for organizing people. 'Shall we find a quiet corner in the morning room?'

  Haileybury ordered sherry. He was a tall, thin, bald, graceless man with large red hands more fitting a stevedore than a surgeon, wearing an immaculate uniform with red tabs. 'I've just seen Tom Raleigh,' he stated.

  'Oh, Tom.' Tom Raleigh was a young plastic surgeon, Graham's partner until the arrangement was disrupted through the Trevose temperament, which was almost as famous in London as the nose.

  'You know he's been called up for the R.A.M.C.? I could have had him left in civvy street had you wanted his services. But you'll remember, when I enquired, you turned the idea down very flatly indeed.'

  Graham did remember. He'd learned Tom had supplied evidence leading to that close shave with the General Medical Council. A stroke of treachery he was disinclined to overlook. But he said only, 'His services? No one seems to find any use for my own.'

  'I assure you that you're misinformed, Trevose,' Haileybury said hastily. 'I admit there was some hesitation…' He stopped. Under the circumstances, it seemed best not to recall the past. 'Anyway, you'll shortly have your chance to join the civilian Emergency Medical Service. I thought that something really should be done about you.'

  The condescension grated on Graham, but he said nothing. He was adjusting himself to being a nonentity, while Haileybury was now one of the nation's elite, as you could tell from a glance at his clothes.

  'But I have something better to offer.'

  Graham looked up.

  'I have never made a secret of my disagreement with you on many things, Trevose, personal and professional.'

  'No, you haven't,' Graham concurred.

  Haileybury had passed his civilian years between the wars with a modesty indistinguishable from drabness, his bachelor home in Richmond as plain as his sister's cooking, his few amusements harmless to the point of boredom. Where Graham saw plastic surgery as an exciting art in the most rewarding medium of all, human flesh and blood, to Haileybury it was a science, the calculated repair of injuries and defects rather than interference with the endowments of Nature. He would have been almost as reluctant to reshape an actress's nose as to perform her abortion.

  'Neither have I made a secret of my admiration for your workmanship,' Haileybury went on. 'Your surgery on burns at Blackfriars called for far wider recognition.'

  'I found it a very interesting branch of plastics.'

  'I supposed you didn't publish it because you found the surgery of pretty women even more interesting.'

  "That's unfair. It was simply because I hadn't the time.'

  'Forgive me. Perhaps it's not the first occasion I've misconstrued your motives.'

  'Misconstrued?' Graham smiled. 'Are you being honest with yourself?'

  'I think that my next remarks will prove that. I am going to offer you a responsibility which, to be frank, I would offer no-one else.' The brigadier leaned back impressively. 'The responsibility for all facial and related wounds in the Army. Let your mind dwell on it a moment. I can promise you a perfectly free hand. Within the usual limits you will be your own master. I can promise you first-class accommodation and equipment. You can pick your own team. You can organize your own training programme and choose whom you want to train. No one will interfere. I give you my guarantee. Come! Just think. Isn't it a splendid chance to make a second reputation?'

  Graham said nothing. His quick mind had fallen on the suggestion like a terrier, worrying the different elements from it.

  'Of course, you're already famous,' Haileybury conceded. 'Far more than myself. Everyone in London knows Graham Trevose.'

  'By "everyone in London",' Graham suggested, 'I presume you mean the few despised for regularly getting their names in the papers by the many who wish they could?'

  Haileybury shrugged his shoulders. 'I'm trying to say this would bring a different sort of fame. It's a chance to get yourself remembered as Gillies was in the last war. Surely that would be reward enough?'

  The idea appealed to Graham. He would be making himself known to men who had, at the most, only seen his name in the gossip columns. It suited his exhibitionism, which had saddened his friends in the profession as much as it had enraged his enemies. He would be running his own show, pushing his own ideas, moulding his own assistants. Haileybury would be as good as his word-that was another of his infuriating virtues. Anyway, it would be better than doing nothing.

  A thought struck him. 'You mean I'd have to join the Army?'

  Haileybury looked surprised. 'That would be inescapable.'

  'What rank?'

  'Lieutenant-colonel.'

  'Is that the best you can do?' Graham asked crossly.

  'That's a very high rank.' Haileybury was shocked. 'Quite a number of senior men are coming in as majors.'

  'Then it's out of the question.'

  Why, he would be subordinate to Haileybury! Even if he, too, became in time a brigadier, the fellow would by then be a general, or some such. He would have to call the bloody man 'Sir'! A grisly thought.

  'Totally out of the question,' Graham repeated. 'I was a civilian in the last war and I'd best stay a civilian in this one. I'm not the military type.'

  Haileybury sipped his sherry with a pained look. 'Neither are most young men in the country, but they are finding themselves obliged to be.'

  'I hope you're not suggesting I lack a sense of duty?'

  'I am suggesting nothing of the kind,' said Haileybury patiently. 'If anything, I am suggesting you lack a sense of perspective. I made my offer because I thought, firstly, it was in the best interests of the Army, and secondly, it was in the best interests of yourself. You turned it down wit
h hardly a second thought.'

  Graham sat looking surly. Haileybury saw the delicately built-up reconciliation was about to come down with a crash.

  'Perhaps I am pressing you too severely,' he retreated. 'I cannot expect you to decide on such a far-reaching matter in a couple of minutes. Please excuse my unreasonableness,' he apologized with unexpected good grace. 'Perhaps you will accept it as evidence of my enthusiasm for your services? Telephone me in a day or two, when you've mulled it over. Here is the number of my extension.'

  Haileybury spent the rest of the meeting talking about the disastrous effect of the war on county cricket, a topic Graham found painfully boring.

  3

  'Trevose?' asked Captain Cuthbert Pile of the Royal Army Medical Corps, sitting in his office at Smithers Botham. 'Trevose? Never heard of him. What's he want, Corporal?'

  'He's from Blackfriars, sir,' said Corporal Honeyman.

  Captain Pile groaned. 'Not another? He doesn't need accommodation, I hope? I'm doing miracles as it is. The Ministry can't expect me to squeeze anyone else into the place. What's his line?'

  'He seems to be a plastic surgeon, sir.'

  Captain Pile looked horrified. The war had forced acquaintance with fellow-doctors in many outlandish specialities, but the company of professional face-lifters he felt outside the line of duty. 'I don't want to see him.'

  'You made an appointment, sir. For two this afternoon.'

  'Oh? Did I?'

  'You'll remember the Ministry telephoned, sir. The gentleman has just joined the Emergency Medical Service.'

  Captain Pile rummaged busily through the papers covering his broad desk, which commanded a fine view of the sweeping front drive. There was a fire flickering in the oversized marble grate and an overall glow of mahogany-and-leather Victorian comfort. It had been the office of the Smithers Botham medical superintendent, then a consultant psychiatrist in the Army, where he was, in time, to have greater influence and invoke more widespread exasperation than a good many generals.