The first thing Paul did after settling into medical school was to join the Student Union and make contact with other Christians in the program. The second thing he did was sign up for the University Squadron, where students would learn to fly in readiness for being called up to fight in a war. All of the students recognized that a dark cloud loomed over them—the dark cloud of a possible war in Europe. Even though newly elected British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was promising to “bring peace in our time” to Europe, many had their doubts that the Nazis in Germany in particular could be trusted, despite the prime minister’s desire to negotiate peace in Europe with them. To his disappointment, Paul learned that medical students at the university were barred from signing up for the squadron. He was informed that their effort and skill would be needed in hospitals if war broke out. Paul was left to concentrate fully on his medical studies. In the case of war, there would be no flying in his future.
Later that week Paul headed to his first chemistry lab. Everyone in the lab sat in alphabetical order. Paul Brand and Margaret Berry were assigned to the same worktable. Paul introduced himself to the pretty, blonde woman sitting across from him, noting how young she looked. The two chatted as they performed their first lab assignment. Paul learned that Margaret, at seventeen years of age, had earned herself a full scholarship to medical school. He was impressed.
Margaret had a slight accent. She explained to Paul that she had been born in England but raised in South Africa, where her father had taken a job as a public health doctor. Paul was glad to find someone else in the class who had spent some of her childhood living in an exotic, faraway place. He told Margaret about his parents being missionaries in India and how he had been born there and spent the first nine years of his life in the hill country of southeast India. Margaret then volunteered that her older sister Anna had encouraged her to join the Christian Union.
“That’s wonderful!” Paul exclaimed, remembering the prayer meeting he was going to attend when class was over. “Would you like to come along to the PM after class?” he asked.
Margaret’s face lit up. “A PM? Of course, I would love to come.”
When chemistry lab was over, Paul walked with Margaret to the meeting room, where several students were already on their knees praying. Margaret stood at the door frowning. “Didn’t you say we were going to a PM?” she asked quizzically.
“Of course,” Paul replied. “Doesn’t this look like a prayer meeting to you?”
Margaret laughed out loud. “I guess we do come from different backgrounds. I thought you invited me to a postmortem!”
The relationship did not get off to a great start, not that Paul imagined its going very far anyway. He had no intention of dating any one person. He had too many other things to do, including study. And there, Margaret turned out to be a great help. She was ambitious and studious and had already finished the chemistry class the previous year at a polytechnic school, but she was too young to take the exam and get credit for the course. So now she was taking the class again and offered to help Paul study. The arrangement worked perfectly, and Paul received the second highest exam grade in the eighty-member class. Margaret beat him by several points to come in first.
Paul was happy to report his grades to his mother, who was preparing to return to India. Once again his mother had persuaded the mission board to allow her one more term of missionary service in India. However, the board had adamantly refused to send her back to the Kolli Hills region. Instead, she was headed for Sendamangalam, on the plains, where Paul’s cousin, Dr. Ruth Harris, ran a busy medical clinic and drove a mobile clinic to surrounding villages. Evelyn would be Ruth’s new assistant.
The start of Paul’s third year of medical school was interrupted when clouds of war became a storm. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and Europe braced itself for what could come next. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain issued an ultimatum to Germany to immediately withdraw its troops from Poland. When the Nazis ignored his ultimatum, Chamberlain declared Great Britain to be at war with Germany on September 3, 1939.
Everyone in London scrambled to collect government-issued gas masks and locate shelter from possible air raids. At night, outside lights had to be turned off and windows blacked out so as not to make London an easy target for German Luftwaffe bombers.
People also made preparations inside their homes. Paul helped his aunts store supplies in the basement. One time when he visited Margaret’s home in Northwood, on the outskirts of London, he got to try out a Morrison shelter that her father had arranged to be installed in the house. This was a sturdy, metal cagelike affair that the family could crawl into in case of a bombing attack. The shelter was reinforced so as to remain effective even if the upper floors of the house collapsed onto it.
Despite such preparations, everything seemed to go on pretty much as normal for Paul. There were air raid sirens and drills, but no German bombs. Nonetheless, the British government decreed that all pregnant women, children, and nonessential persons to the war effort should evacuate from London in advance of any attack. Children of all ages, with labels on their lapels, were hastily bundled into trains and transported into the countryside, where strangers took them in for the duration of the war.
The students at the University College Medical School were designated as nonessential persons, and the entire staff and student body evacuated the city. The men were moved to Cardiff, Wales, and the women to Sheffield in north central England.
Paul and three other students found board with an old Welsh woman, Mrs. Morgan, who lived in Llandaff, a village just outside Cardiff. Mrs. Morgan was a devout Christian, and when she learned that Paul’s mother was serving as a missionary in India, she refused to take his weekly board money.
Paul was glad that he had lived with his two unmarried aunts in London for so long, because it helped him adjust to living with the eccentric old widow. Mrs. Morgan was completely deaf without the aid of a huge ear trumpet. Paul found it disconcerting when she held the trumpet to his chin so that she could hear what he was saying. Mrs. Morgan was also afraid of being bombed out of her home and so took to wearing several layers of clothes and hiding in the various layers of pockets important items such as her family Bible, house keys, papers, glasses, spare ear trumpet, and ration books. When she walked down the street, Mrs. Morgan rattled from all the things she was carrying.
Life in Cardiff settled into a busy but uncomplicated routine. Paul continued his medical studies at Cardiff University, where he completed his senior project—tracing the twelve cranial nerves that bypass the spinal cord and connect directly to the brain. These nerves link the sense organs of the head—the nose, eyes, mouth, and ears—to the brain. To accomplish this task, he was given the head of a cadaver to dissect. For the next month he carefully cut away flesh and chiseled off layers of bone as he traced the white, stringlike lines of nerves back into the brain. His professor was so impressed with Paul’s painstaking work that he had the dissected head of the cadaver preserved and placed in a specimen jar on public display in the Welsh National School of Medicine Museum.
While living in Cardiff, Paul gave Mrs. Morgan his ration book, which entitled him each week to purchase one egg, egg powder, four ounces of meat, two rations of bacon, two ounces of butter, four ounces of margarine, half a pound of sugar, and half a pound of jam. With this and the rations from the other boarders, Mrs. Morgan made meals for them all. Because gasoline was also rationed, trips beyond Llandaff and Cardiff were rare. During his time in Wales, Paul studied hard, attended church and prayer meetings, and, like millions of other English men and women, tuned in to the BBC on the radio each night at 9:00 PM to hear the latest war news.
By May 1940 things were looking grim. To this point Paul had to admit that the war had been more of a nuisance than anything else. That all changed on May 10, when Nazi forces simultaneously invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Paul listened on the radio to the news of the attack and wondered what would happen next. Events started to accelerate. Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg were overrun by German forces. By late May a huge contingent of British, French, and Belgian troops were trapped at the port of Dunkirk in northern France, close to the Belgian border. On the following evenings over the radio, Paul learned of the daring evacuation of the trapped soldiers in the face of the advancing Germans. A flotilla made up of almost every kind of boat imaginable, from ships to small pleasure boats, had crossed the English Channel to Dunkirk and begun evacuating the soldiers. It took a week, but by June 4, 1940, over 338,000 troops had been evacuated.
The days were dark for the British, and more so when the Nazis overran France. The English felt isolated and alone, yet resolved to fight to the bitter end. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the Germans launched an all-out attack on Great Britain. That attack began in July 1940, when waves of German Luftwaffe airplanes began bombing England. At first the Germans launched daylight bombing runs, attacking aircraft factories, airfields, and ports, mostly in the south of the country, in the hope of destroying the Royal Air Force.
Just as the German bombing of England began, Paul’s time in Cardiff came to an end. It was time for Paul to return to London to begin his practical training at the University College Hospital. Paul studied surgical techniques at the hospital by day, took a brief nap before dinner, and then got up to care for the wounded and dying who were carried or hobbled into the hospital as a result of the German bombing. One of the recurring injuries Paul dealt with was Royal Air Force pilots whose faces had been burned. This occurred because of a design flaw in the Hurricane airplanes the pilots flew. The fuel lines threaded their way through the cockpit on the way to the engine mounted at the front of the plane. When these planes were hit, the cockpit would erupt in an intense, fuel-fed fireball. In the two or three seconds that it took the pilot to eject from his aircraft, the fire burned away his face. It was not uncommon for Paul to see pilots brought in with their noses, eyelids, lips, even their cheeks burned off. When a burned pilot arrived, Paul would help to stabilize his condition and prepare him for surgery. A talented team of plastic surgeons then set to work to reconstruct the pilot’s facial features. Sometimes this would take as many as forty surgeries, with the surgeons often developing new techniques as they went. Paul was amazed at the results they could achieve.
In early September 1940, the Germans changed tactics. They switched to night bombing raids and focused on mercilessly bombing London. Night after night, loads of German bombs rained down on the city. Some of the city’s residents sought shelter in underground railway tunnels. Others stayed in their homes and hoped and prayed that their homes would be spared.
The operating rooms at University College Hospital were transferred to the basement of the hospital so that the doctors would not be disturbed by anything less than a direct hit from a bomb. Every night Paul headed down to the basement and all the human misery it contained. As the stream of bombing victims rolled in, he was kept busy setting broken bones, giving blood transfusions, and cleaning, suturing, and bandaging wounds.
On one occasion Paul, with several other medical personnel, was called to the Imperial Hotel, where a bomb had hit the hotel’s Turkish bathhouse. When he arrived, Paul found naked, dazed men standing and lying around in pools of blood, their flesh shredded by shards of glass from the shattered bathhouse windows. Paul set to work cleaning and suturing cuts on the spot and dispatching those who needed more intensive care to the hospital. The bodies of the dead were carried away.
