Surgeon at Arms

long-distance telephones were becoming dreadfully unreliable.
    He reflected again that he should give up his Queen Street home, store the furniture, and take a room at The Oak inn on the village green at Smithers Botham. He would exchange the Bentley for a Morris, and be patriotic over petrol. It was all an excuse to save money, to live a simpler life, until the fuss was over—as everyone knew from the newspapers, the Germans were already short of everything from shells to shoeleather. He poured himself another drink. Here was Graham Trevose, he thought sadly, the fashionable plastic surgeon, the favourite guest of a thousand smart parties, and nobody even wanted to talk to him. He had always far keener pity for himself than for his patients. He felt loneliness like pain, to exist without a woman’s company struck him as hard as solitary confinement. Without the compensation of a caress he became as wretched as a stray dog, to wake at night alone he felt a foretaste of the grave. He’d enjoyed affairs enough before the war, but what was their lasting satisfaction? he asked himself bitterly. As little as a handshake. Now everyone he knew seemed to have disappeared, and if the Germans did arrive that night to blow him to pieces there was hardly anyone to care.
    He had a wife, of course, but she was in a home in Sussex, mad for fifteen years.
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    THE HURRICANE had two self-sealing petrol tanks in the wings and another in the fuselage, directly in front of the pilot. On the August Sunday morning when a Messerschmitt 109 caught him over Dungeness he calculated, after a panicky moment wondering if he were alive at all, that he still had a fair chance of eating his dinner that night. As he jettisoned the cockpit hood a stench of petrol struck him. In a second his world was alright. He never remembered how he fell clear. His next recollection was the petrol replaced by a smell even more pungent. It reminded him of something. It was the stink of burning wool, which stuck in your nose when they cleared up after the clip back home.
    He didn’t remember getting clear of his parachute harness, but he must have managed it somehow because he was free when they reached him. His only worry was whether a Mae West could really keep a man afloat. The sea was dead calm, he felt no pain, no unusual sensation at all. Like everyone else, he’d been flying without goggles and gloves. It made it easier to see the enemy and to handle the controls. He watched with detached interest bits of skin and flesh come away from his hands and forearms, like fragments of roast chicken, and float in the water. A civilian lifeboat picked him up. As two men in black oilskins got him aboard he noticed their faces, and wondered what the hell they were staring at.
    It was the same expression on the face of the girl looking down at him. She was in a white apron, a nurse he supposed. Pain, shock, and morphine had by then turned him from a human being to a collection of organs struggling to function together as best they could. He asked where he was, but she didn’t seem to understand. He wondered suddenly if he were in France, put in the bag by the Germans. Then she said, ‘You’re all right. You’re in hospital. In Kent, not far from Tunbridge Wells.’
    He’d heard of Tunbridge Wells. It struck him as an odd sort of place to find himself in.
    He floated on a cloud of euphoria as they were obliged continually to increase his dose of morphine. He didn’t know if he’d been lying there for a couple of days or a week, though it was in fact more than a month. Gradually his body seemed to grow some sort of skin against the painful world. A variety of doctors in white coats came to see him, and generally dug about with forceps and probes, most painfully. As he began to notice things again, he saw when they changed his dressings his hands were black, clawed, and wizened. They reminded him of the hands he’d once seen on the body of an aboriginal, brought into the sheep station after lying for months shrivelling in the sun of the outback. He asked for a mirror, but was told the hospital hadn’t any to spare. They had been broken by a freak of blast in the bombing, they explained, and glass was in short supply.
    His room was small, white-painted, and sunny, looking on to a small garden. He wondered what sort of hospital it was, and if there were any other patients. He certainly saw no sign of them. Over the next few weeks the pain began