Young reader, responding badly : why my book is really about the 1950s, though set in the 1940s...

After the end of WWII, some Big People began to write a self-congratulatory and dishonest 'La historia oficial' of wartime penicillin.

Other Big People, in government, media and in universities, read it and got it, totally.

And why not ? It certainly reflected their take on Reality.

So they spread the official version ever outward, out to the very ordinary public and even out to little children.

But most of us know how any story we tell can get distorted in the understanding of some who hear it - no matter how short and simple the story.