Johnny Swanson (5 page)

‘This can’s got really badly bashed,’ he said. ‘And the label’s ripped.’

‘Put it to one side,’ said Hutch. ‘I’ll have to sell it at a discount. No one’s going to want to pay full price for that.’

Johnny put the dented can under the counter.

Albert Taylor and Ernest Roberts were waiting outside with their pocket money. Strictly speaking, Hutch didn’t let customers in till nine o’clock, but everyone knew he could be persuaded to sell a newspaper or two earlier, and today was the day the comics arrived. Hutch let the boys in. They were polite to him, but when his back was turned they made coughing noises at Johnny.

‘Heard from your girlfriend?’ said Taylor. ‘Is she dead yet?’

Johnny pretended not to notice, and raced out of the shop to deliver the morning papers.

At the end of the day, when Johnny had helped tidy up, Hutch reached under the counter and handed him the damaged tin of peaches. ‘Take this home to your mum,’ he said. ‘Tell her it’s not charity. It’s your pay for the extra work you’ve done.’ Then he looked sternly at Johnny. ‘I won’t always be so generous, mind.’

But Johnny saw it as the start of a new role for him. From now on he would take stuff home from the shop whenever he could. That way his mother wouldn’t go in there and Hutch would never get the chance to ask her about Auntie Ada. It had been a good day. For on his paper round he had looked in all the newspapers to find out how to place adverts. He reckoned he could get his secret business up and running with just one more raid on the money in the Peace Mug. He would write out his first advertisement in bed that night.

T
he next morning, Dr Langford gave Johnny another exhilarating bike ride down the hill. Hutch was not there when they arrived at the shop. The doctor propped his bicycle against the wall and waited with Johnny.

‘I might as well pick up my paper here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be at the sanatorium all day, and there’s no point in you taking it to my house if I’m not in.’

‘Is that a flat tyre?’ Johnny asked, pointing to the front wheel of the bike.

‘Oh dear. It looks as if we went over something sharp,’ said Dr Langford. ‘Yes, here’s the culprit.’ He showed Johnny a tiny nail sticking into the rubber. ‘Never mind, I’ll have it fixed in no time.’

The doctor opened the saddlebag and handed Johnny a long tin with rounded ends. Johnny wriggled the lid off. Inside there were some metal levers, sandpaper, assorted patches, a tube marked
RUBBER SOLUTION
, a crayon, and a few bits and pieces Johnny couldn’t identify at all.

The doctor turned the bike upside-down and asked Johnny to pass him one of the levers. Soon he’d worked the inner tube of the tyre out from under the rubber tread. It hung like an empty sausage skin. Dr Langford unclipped the pump from the bicycle frame and inflated the tube. ‘Come here, Johnny,’ he said. ‘Keep quiet and tell me if you hear a hiss. With a bit of luck we’ll find the hole pretty quickly. If not, we’ll have to dunk the tube in a puddle and look for some bubbles.’

Johnny put his head close to the doctor’s and listened. ‘There it is!’ they cried together.

‘Crayon!’ said Dr Langford, as if he were talking to a nurse in an operating theatre. Johnny passed it to him, and Dr Langford marked the spot.

As the doctor got to work on the puncture, Johnny found the courage to talk to him more freely than he had before. It was easier when they weren’t looking directly at each other. Johnny cleared his throat. ‘Dr Langford?’ he said. ‘Can I ask you an embarrassing question?’

The doctor seemed uncomfortable too. ‘I’ll be happy to talk to you, Johnny,’ he replied, without looking up. ‘But you will have to come and see me at my old surgery. I can open it up specially for you, if you’ve got something on your mind.’

‘Oh no,’ said Johnny. ‘I didn’t mean that sort of embarrassing. It’s just that I’m ashamed that I don’t know this already. You said you were going to the sanatorium. My teacher talked about it too. What exactly
is
a sanatorium?’

The doctor laughed, and asked Johnny to pass the sandpaper. ‘Oh, is that all? What a relief. Well, if they taught Latin at that school of ours, you’d be able to work it out. It comes from the verb
sanare
, meaning “to cure”, or “to heal”, and the adjective
sanus, –a, –um
, meaning “healthy”. It’s a place of health: a kind of hospital. But a special one. It’s just for people who’ve got tuberculosis. That’s the disease I was checking you for at school the other day. We sometimes call it TB, or consumption.’

‘Everyone’s talking about it at school. They say it makes you cough up blood and shrivel away to skin and bone.’

‘That’s one way of putting it, yes,’ said Dr Langford. ‘It usually affects the lungs, but it can strike other organs too. It can give you a very nasty condition called scrofula – horrible purple lumps on the neck.’

Johnny automatically put his hand to his own
throat and started feeling for bumps, rolling the sound of the word ‘scrofula’ round his mouth.

‘Rubber solution!’ said the doctor. ‘It’s the little yellow tube.’ Johnny gave it to him, and he continued working on the bike with the dexterity of a surgeon, chatting on about diseases. ‘In the olden days they thought scrofula could be cured by a touch of the King’s hand. They called it the King’s Evil. But it was really just another kind of tuberculosis.’

‘And tuberculosis is TB?’

‘Yes, but we doctors have yet another name for it. Here’s a special word for you, Johnny. This one’s from ancient Greek:
phthisis
. It’s one of my favourites. Just eight letters, but quite a tongue-twister – and only one vowel, if you don’t count the “i” twice.’ He spelled it out for Johnny. ‘Remember that word, son. Try it out on your teacher and see if he knows what it means. You might need it in a crossword puzzle one day.’

As the doctor stuck a patch over the repair, Johnny tried to fix the word in his memory, saying it again and again; flicking from the first ‘f’ sound of the ‘ph’ into the ‘th’ and then on to the hiss at the end. ‘It sounds like a curse,’ he said.

‘Well, the disease certainly is,’ said Dr Langford.
‘I’m sorry to say that it’s often fatal. Some people get better, but there’s no absolute cure. We do our best for patients with fresh air, good food and exercise. And we keep them away from other people, so that they don’t pass on their germs. Last time there was a TB outbreak in Stambleton we had a big collection to build our sanatorium a few miles out in the country, so there would be less risk in the town.’

‘Was that when all the Dangerfields died?’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘I’ve seen the gravestones in the cemetery.’

The doctor shook his head. ‘Poor Miss Dangerfield. First her beloved brother and his wife were taken by the disease, then their children died, one by one. She nursed them all, you know. I’ll never forget the sight of her weeping over the tiny body of her last dead nephew. And after all that, she lost her fiancé in the war. She was already getting on a bit then. It was her last chance of happiness. She’s the only Dangerfield left now. It’s no wonder she looks so much older than she really is.’ He changed the subject without a pause. ‘Any chalk in that tin? We need it to stop the repair sticking to the inside of the tyre when the tube goes back in.’

Johnny passed the chalk. ‘Why didn’t Miss Dangerfield catch TB? Why haven’t you?’

‘Well, you know, Johnny, we doctors have a way of staying healthy. And it’s like all diseases. Not everyone who comes into contact with a nasty bug gets sick. If they did, the human race would have been wiped out long ago. But some people – babies especially – can pick up tuberculosis very easily. And they can die from it. Anyone can. Mind you, some French doctors have come up with a vaccine …’

‘A what?’

‘Vaccine – that’s another good word for you (double “c” – you don’t get that very often). It’s a special medicine to stop you getting a disease in the first place. It’s a wonderful thing – made of living cells. But it’s very hard to produce – they have to grow it in a special liquid made from potatoes.’

Johnny laughed. ‘Potatoes?’

‘Yes, I know it sounds comical, but it’s actually a very tricky process.’ The doctor picked up the lever again, and carefully manoeuvred the inner tube back inside the tyre. ‘It’s not something you can just boil up in your kitchen. You need controlled laboratory conditions. But if you get the process exactly right, the vaccine contains a tiny dose of the disease.’

‘Isn’t that what was in the test you gave us?’ Johnny held out his wrist to show that he was in the clear.

‘A vaccine’s much more potent than that. It’s strong enough to teach the blood to fight against invading germs, but it doesn’t make people ill. Do you want some more strange words? This vaccine’s called Bacille Calmette-Guérin. We make it easier for ourselves by calling it BCG. It’s named after the Frenchmen who developed it – lucky devils.’

‘Lucky?’

The doctor wiped his hands on his trousers. ‘Oh, Johnny,’ he chuckled. ‘There’s nothing a medic wants more than his name attached to something: a piece of equipment, or a disease.’ He screwed the nozzle of the bicycle pump back onto the valve. ‘That way your memory lives on even after your death. I knew them both, you know – Calmette and Guérin – when they were starting out on their research, long before the war. In fact, that’s how I met my wife. She’s a distant relative of Professor Calmette.’

‘Mum told me she was French,’ said Johnny, looking longingly at the pump. ‘But she doesn’t sound foreign, does she?’

Dr Langford turned round. ‘Would you like to do this bit?’ he asked, and Johnny gladly got to work
re-inflating the tyre. The doctor set an empty apple box on its end and sat down. ‘Well, she’s been living here for more than forty years, remember. And her English was pretty good to start with.’ He smiled, and his eyes grew moist as he thought back. ‘It was the first thing I noticed at that dinner party in Lille all those years ago. She’s very well educated. From a fine background. It was good of her to give it all up for a humble English doctor.’ He cleared his throat and slapped his knees. ‘Still, as it turned out, her family lost everything in the war, so it’s probably just as well that she married me.’ He reached over and felt the wheel. ‘That’s enough now. Leave it for a bit to make sure it doesn’t go down again.’

‘But the professor,’ said Johnny; ‘the one who made the vaccine – did he survive?’

‘Oh yes. He’s still around – though, like me, he’s ageing now. I saw him quite recently. My wife and I went over to visit the laboratory where they produce the vaccine. France has gone overboard for it. They’re giving it to babies – free.’

‘Why don’t we have it here?’ asked Johnny, collecting up all the bits and pieces from the pavement, and putting them back in the tin.

Dr Langford sighed. ‘It’s complicated. There’s a law
against bringing new medicines into this country unless they’ve been approved by the government.’

‘So why don’t they approve it?’

‘All sorts of reasons. Some people are against vaccination on principle – they think it’s wrong to interfere with Nature; and there are big-wigs here who aren’t convinced that the BCG works. But the fact is, Johnny, we British have never liked being taught anything by the French. Our government is paying British scientists to search for a British treatment. They haven’t come up with anything yet, and I don’t think there’s any need for them to try.’

‘Couldn’t you tell the government to let us have the French vaccine?’

‘Oh, I’m a nobody as far as they’re concerned.’ Dr Langford dropped his voice. ‘But, as it happens, I do have a little plan for something that might change their minds.’ He looked around, cautiously. ‘Now you mustn’t tell anyone, Johnny, but when I last went to France I didn’t come back empty-handed.’

Johnny was excited at being let into a secret. He pulled up a crate of his own and sat down close to the doctor. ‘You brought the vaccine with you?’ he whispered.

‘Not exactly. I brought some of the culture – the
cells from which it’s made – and I’ve passed it on to someone who has access to a laboratory. We’re trying to keep it alive and grow it on to create a reliable supply. If we can, we’re going to run a little trial – just enough to prove to the authorities that it works, and to persuade them to use it here.’

‘But aren’t you breaking the law? Suppose they find your lab. Won’t you get into trouble?’

‘Possibly, Johnny. But I’m an old man. I’m happy to take that risk, just in case I can save some lives with the vaccine.’

‘And you could give it an English name. It could be called after you: “the Langford Treatment”, or something like that.’

The doctor laughed. ‘That does have an attractive ring to it. But I don’t think it would be fair. I’m only copying what the French are doing. I think we’d still have to call it BCG.’

‘Can I come and see it? Will you take me to the laboratory?’

‘No, Johnny. I’ve already told you too much. And anyway, the lab is far, far away from here, out in the wilds. The project is entirely in the hands of my associate at the moment.’

‘When will the vaccine be ready?’

‘If all goes well, we may have a little before the end of the year, but it will be a long while before we can produce enough to get the government to change their policy. For the time being they’ll just have to keep on building special hospitals, like our sanatorium.’ Dr Langford rose and turned his bike the right way up, wheeling it backwards and forwards along the pavement to check that the repair was good.

Johnny was enjoying getting to know the doctor better. Now that they were at ease with each other, he plucked up the courage to ask a question he’d had in mind all along but had kept to himself, for fear of appearing love-struck, or nosy. ‘Dr Langford,’ he said cautiously, ‘do you know anything about Olwen? Is she all right?’

To Johnny’s relief, the doctor answered without a trace of amusement or disdain. ‘The little Welsh girl? When I examined her, she was perfectly well. But she’s gone back to Wales to stay with relatives. She’ll be safe there, and I’ve passed on the name of an excellent sanatorium nearby that will take her in if she does develop symptoms. I’m afraid her parents and her sister were too sick to travel with her. They’re in the sanatorium here. I’m sorry to say that the baby is desperately ill.’