In Africa, he had caught a nasty dose of the clap – though was there such a thing as a nice dose of the clap? – and in Burma he contracted an even nastier case of malaria. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. Life – a mug’s game.

The end of the war was a shock for Private Tice. In peacetime, he didn’t know what to do with himself, and drifted from place to place around London, and from job to job. He had no family, that he knew of – he had been brought up, or dragged up, more like, in an Irish orphanage – and didn’t keep in touch with his mates from the old days in the desert or on the ocean wave. There weren’t that many of them, anyway. None, in fact, if the truth were told.

For a while he had a serious go at the girls, but it wasn’t a success. Most of the ones he picked up turned out to be on the game – he must give off a particular scent or something, since the brassers fairly flocked to him; it was a thing he noticed. Of course, it was against his principles to pay for it, and anyway it wasn’t much to write home about, in his opinion.

There was one who latched on to him who wasn’t a tart. She was a hot little redhead, halfway respectable – she had an office job in the Morris motor car factory up near Oxford, though she was cockney to the bone. He didn’t drive a car, himself, so he only saw her if he went up on the train, or when she came down to the Smoke the odd weekend for a bit of fun among the bright lights.

Sapphire, she said her name was. Ooh-la-la. In the Dog and Bone one night he had a rummage in her handbag, just out of curiosity, while she was off powdering her nose, and came across an old ration book and found out her real name was Doris – Doris Huggett, from over Stepney way. That was the same night he realised, when he took a close look at it, that her hair was dyed. He should have known, it was that bright, with that fake metallic shine, like the shine on the curve of a brand-new Morris Oxford mudguard.

Doris-alias-Sapphire didn’t last much longer than any of the others. In a place in Soho on New Year’s Eve she had a couple of Babychams too many and turned away and spluttered with laughter at some remark he had made. He couldn’t see anything funny in what he’d said. Drunk though she was, he took her out the lane behind the club and gave her a few smacks to teach her manners. Next morning, she rang up screaming, and threatening to have him done for assault and battery, but nothing came of it.