Surgeon at Arms

settled way of life, to be borne as patiently as residence in the Malayan jungle or in the Devon guest-house. Yet she realized that she belonged to the dread class of ‘distressed gentlefolk’. What would she do after the war? She was frightfully poor, she would have to go typing for solicitors until her fingers became too infirm for the keyboard. Hal was really very kind. And he was a doctor. The emotions of her fife had been entwined round doctors, as pliantly as the serpents round Aesculapius’ staff. She would have to live in America, but America was the place for self-betterment, everyone said so. The idea of self-betterment had driven her as a girl from her father’s butcher’s shop in Ramsgate—to where? After a quarter of a century, to running a boarding-house. It was a chance. Only one thing could she be certain of. It would be her last.
    That summer, the inhabitants of two Japanese cities were ofï-handedly incinerated, and the war was over. A week later Lease Lend was cut off, equally off-handedly. It occurred only to Lord Keynes that the country was broke, and the millennium which so agitated Mr. Cramphorn would have to be financed by a loan of American money. So the country, like Edith, escaped from the possibility of German mastership to the certainty of American, with as much excitement and less thought.
    Edith, Hal, and Alec met for the first time in the basement restaurant of the Criterion in Piccadilly. It was a disturbing gathering. Alec seemed to find Edith’s lover only funny. She had been worried for months at the peculiar excited flippancy in her son, quite unlike the stolid outlook of his father. She gave him a cheque for a hundred pounds, explaining it was all she could afford, and he must save it to visit her in America, once she was married and transported by the United States Government with eighty thousand other British women. Alec decided to spend it on a car. The medical profession lived at the time in a weird intimacy with the motor trade. Though the petrol ration was small, increased by the new Government so meanly as to arouse the irritation of even the New Statesman, doctors, who went on errands of mercy, were allowed more or less as much as they could use, with a bit of fiddling. He’d raise the fare to see his mother when the time came, he decided. He was never able to give a serious thought to the future of anything, particularly when there was fun to be found in the present.
    During the rest of the hot summer of 1945 the war began to run down at Smithers Botham as gaily as everywhere else. There still wasn’t much to drink, but there was A.F.N. Munich on the radio, the jam ration was said to be going up (incorrectly), and the place was enlivened by the first demobilized medical officers, sent on a six-month course to refit them for gentler practice. Captain Pile was finally demobilized. He Went to Olympia for his new suit, and at once returned to Smithers Botham. He had grown to like the country hospital, and the future medical world was filled with half-glimpsed hazards. He had taken the post of medical officer to Smithers Botham as a mental institution, and was charged with preparing its return to normal function whenever Blackfriars could be evicted. As he walked up the long drive from the bus, once again mere Dr Pile, he saw the portico had for a second time been decorated. A Union Jack was spread across the columns, and a painted banner announced, ‘Welcome Home Our Heroic Cuthbert‘.
     

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
     
    THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER of the Annex Club at the beginning of 1947 was predictably a noisy affair. It was held at a restaurant frustrated like all others from doing its best for its diners, by the Government order that only three courses might be served, including the soup. The law took itself seriously, an establishment serving asparagus on a separate plate instead of accompanying the sliver of meat having already incurred prosecution. But the millennium had arrived. The coal mines had been nationalized, the railways and the doctors were next. The rations were reduced, coupons were needed for bread, and cigarettes were as hard to come by as ever.
    The club was Peter Thomas’s idea. Military units seemed hardly able to await their dispersal before arranging their reunions, so why not the patients who had passed through the annex? Besides, some sort of society was needed to help those who suffered from disability, official meanness, or bad luck. And it