Surgeon at Arms

identification. Something scampered in the corner. The smell was strange, but predominantly faecal.
    ‘Do you mean human beings actually lived here?’ Graham exclaimed. ‘And not so very long ago?’
    ‘It’s a bit musty,’ Captain Pile agreed. ‘I gather they used to keep their senile dementias in the place. You can’t expect those sort of cases to take much notice of their surroundings.’
    Graham eyed a wooden partition dividing the long room, its door swinging ajar. ‘What’s through there?’
    ‘The night ward. This would be the day room.’ Graham picked his way gloomily through the rubbish to the far end of the annex. Of the tacked-on buildings, one revealed itself as the kitchen, with a stone floor and a black iron range. The second contained some cracked washbasins and three large bath-tubs raised proudly on pedestals in the middle. In the third, Graham found himself facing what appeared to be a row of horse-boxes.
    He discovered the half-doors opened inwards, to disclose lavatories with no seats and the chains encased in lengths of pipe running from cistern to handle.
    ‘The patients have hanged themselves on the chains,’ Captain Pile told him informatively.
    Graham stuck his hands in his pockets. After turning down Haileybury’s offer he had signed a contract with the Emergency Medical Service, and was committed to install and run a plastic surgery unit at Smithers Botham. Though he was always able to see a new face in the battered and bleeding remains of an accident, as a sculptor can in a lump of stone, it was beyond him to depict the rotting building as a busy, complex, cheerful, sterile centre for healing the wounded.
    ‘That day room would have to be my operating theatre,’ he suggested glumly. ‘The place must be ripped apart, replumbed, fitted with sinks, sterilizers, electric points. We’ll have one ward in the night room and another upstairs. God knows how we’ll shift anaesthetized patients up there—fireman’s lift, I supopse. I’ll want partitions for the anaesthetic room, the surgeons’ room, the nurses’ room... and where am I supposed to fit the photographer’s studio, X-ray, somewhere for the dentists? I’ll need extractor fans, heating, reinforced ceilings for the lights, doors widening, new windows made. Those horrible iron bars must come off for a start. I want the whole place painted a bright pastel shade. Duck-egg blue, something like that. I’ll have gay curtains, white bedside lockers, flowers everywhere, comfortable chairs, radios, the prettiest nurses in the hospital. My patients get depressed enough with themselves, without any encouragement from their surroundings.’
    ‘Duck-egg blue, did you say?’ murmured Captain Pile, mystified.
    ‘I want those two far tubs in the awful wash-house partitioned off. They’ll have to do for the saline bath unit. The kitchen we’ll have to equip again from scratch.
    We’ll put locks on the lavatories. I’m far more likely to hang myself on the chain than the patients are. No, no, it’s all impossible,’ he decided abruptly. ‘No one could turn this place into anything but a pigsty. They can burn it to the ground, as far as I’m concerned. They’ll have to send me somewhere else.’
    Captain Pile grunted. ‘Where else had you in mind?’ Graham lit another cigarette. The dreadful man was right, of course. Hospital accommodation was as precious as anti-aircraft guns. It was Smithers Botham or nowhere.
    ‘We’ll have to make the most of it, I suppose,’ he said resignedly. ‘Baron Larrey did wonders for Napoleon’s wounded in cowsheds.’
    ‘Well, it’s not my pigeon.’ The captain was becoming impatient. ‘You’ll have to take up rebuilding problems direct with the Ministry. Have you seen enough? I’ve got to get back to the grindstone.’
    Graham stopped half-way along the ward. He noticed a door with a cracked glass panel leading to a verandah under a rusty green-painted roof. It reminded him of a similar one in the sanatorium where he had been sent to die as a young man, a war ago. He wondered if that verandah was still there, and who was lying in his place to count the rivets of the roof in the feverish boredom of tuberculosis. As he turned away, another door with a small glass peephole caught his eye. He swung it open. A tiny high barred window disclosed a cubicle lined entirely with black padded leather, even the floor. A padded cell. Graham couldn’t recall seeing one before.
    ‘I expect