Surgeon at Arms

by the authorities at the beginning of the war, unlike Graham, who was inclined to take a neurotic view of everything, Mr Cramphorn had simply ignored the slight. He had appeared on the Smithers Botham portico puffing his pipe, rubbing his hands, and declaring, ‘Work to do? I’m willing and ready. Boys to teach? I’ll teach ’em!’ He marched in, discovered his old ward sister, herself recalled from helping a cousin run a boarding house at Bexhill, appropriated a dozen of the empty beds, and set up shop.
    Mr Cramphorn did teach very well, the surgery of the First World War. He had lived through all the fashions. From the twenties, with short skirts and the surgical vogue of removing as many internal organs as possible compatible with the continuance of life, through the thirties with their padded shoulders and the enthusiastic tacking of floating kidneys, spleens, colons, and the like the more firmly into place, to the forties with their slacks and headscarves and ‘septic foci’. Nobody knew exactly what these malevolent foci did, nor even what they were, but Mr Cramphorn removed them just the same.
    It never crossed his mind to explain his methods to his patients, whom he treated as a well-mannered squire his tenants. To Mr Cramphorn a hospital was a charitable institution, and a man begging bread at your door had no business enquiring the ability of your baker. For a disgruntled sufferer to threaten litigation was to him as unthinkable as for his gardener to threaten joining his dinner-table. He was an individualist, and like the British generals facing up to the aeroplane, distrustful of such comparatively new-fangled devices as asepsis coming between himself and the pure exercise of his art. His gloved fingers often strayed absently during operations to the pocket of his pepper-and-salt trousers under his gown, to produce a large yellow handkerchief on which he would blow his nose. He frequently puffed his pipe over the scrubbing-up basin, laying it aside with his freshly sterilized hand. But whatever operation he performed, whatever its chances of doing good or ill (they stood about fifty-fifty), it was a superb piece of surgical handicraft. Mr. Cramphorn was a real professional.
    ‘H’m,’ said Mr Cramphorn, finishing reading the cutting. He liked the company of good-looking women, and had asked the Bickleys across that April evening for dinner. He had bagged a couple of precious rabbits, though he often complained the war had quite ruined the shooting. ‘What d’you think of that, Pomfrey?’
    He passed the cutting to the fourth sharer of the feast, a Blackfriars physician at Smithers Botham, Dr Paul Pomfrey, who observed mildly, ‘I do hope it’s nothing disgraceful.’
    Dr Pomfrey was a distinguished elderly neurologist, a collector of butterflies, a player of the ’cello, an addict of crossword puzzles, his mind too fine a key to unlock such current mysteries as ration books, identity cards, and stirrup-pumps. He was under Mr Cramphorn’s thumb through living with him. When the war started, Mr Cramphorn instructed his housekeeper to open his doors to the expectant mothers who arrived from London, much fortified by vicars and vitamins, but his brisk behaviour so induced fears of premature labour, the women were replaced by evacuee children—according to himself the nastiest available, through the billeting officer’s personal spite. These guests, too, Mr. Cramp-horn was shortly relieved of, after insisting on treating their nits in the sheep-dip. Dr Pomfrey was conscripted to fill the spare room, and so put an end to such rude intrusions into a professional man’s privacy.
    ‘Oh dear,’ added Dr Pomfrey, reading. ‘We did have so much trouble with young Trevose at Blackfriars before the war. He always seemed to be getting into the papers. People must have gained the impression that plastic surgery was the only work our hospital was capable of.’
    ‘It doesn’t actually mention Graham by name,’ said John, coming to his surgeon’s defence.
    ‘He’d be much too fly for that,’ laughed Mr. Cramphorn, puffing briskly.
    ‘ “This wonderful work”,’ Dr Pomfrey read out hollowly, “is being performed by the brilliant plastic surgery expert who gave hope and beauty to stage and society in London before the war”. I suppose that would sink in with a good many people—eh, Crampers?’
    ‘Of course, Graham is doing wonderful work,’ admitted Denise. ‘But I don’t see why he