"SURGEON AT ARMS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Richard)

First Published in 1968
1

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