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
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.
