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.

The Smithers Botham mental doctors, themselves dispatched with the rightful inmates to Scotland, had watched the war approach more bitterly than even Mr Chamberlain. The upper reaches of prewar medicine had many agreeable backwaters, none pleasanter than a job in such a place. They enjoyed free houses in the grounds, free vegetables piled daily on their kitchen tables, even free laundry-which was always beautifully turned out, laundrywork being thought a useful occupation for madwomen. Their main vexations were their own colleagues, who could be difficult, many doctors of unreliable personality choosing to escape from the harsh world behind the same walls as their patients. But their duties were delightfully light, the treatment of mental illness at the time being as passive as the treatment of criminals, consisting mainly in keeping both classes locked well away from public view.

Now the Smithers Botham gymnasium was partitioned into a row of operating theatres, where long-established cats snoozed in the warmth of the sterilizers or disported themselves among the beams above. New laboratories were fashioned from damp little outhouses, where sometimes toads came hopping round the test-tubes. The long bleak wards, re-equipped and refilled with rows of empty beds, after ten weeks of war still yawned hungrily for the half-million casualties, while bats flicked up and down the corridors at dusk, scaring the night nurses.