Then Piper would say, “of course it shouldn’t.”

This was before Christopher had been abducted, at a time when Pye could speak freely in Roe’s presence, without ending almost every period, because he was always talking, by a dark reference to his sister’s little trouble. Piper’s echoes had been doubly embarrassing then.

Piper was older than the rest of the volunteers. He did say he was fifty-nine, but then he might well have been drawing his old age pension.

He had a narrow, dark face, not healthy, and coloured as is the sole of a shoe after walking dry streets in summer, whether by dirt, or ill-health, or both, it was hard to tell. Talking of the war that impended he would say if “this bit of trouble” came to anything, it would be his “fifth campaign.” At lectures he dodged the instructors with approving comments. These men had learned by heart that which they had to give. Piper would hush any recruit who shuffled, and then would repeat the last few words of what he had just heard. At first he had been called on by Pye for confirmation, probably because he was so much older than the rest. Pye might be reciting:

“By virtue of the fact that you get gas before you know or you can realise, when I was out in France I have met lines of men coming back in single file, their hands on each other’s shoulders, blinded. Is that right Piper?”

The old man would nod his head, which was newspaper white. He had thick dark eyebrows, with a yellow white moustache. His hair was short, so that the skin, dry and pied, and as though travel stained with dust, came through in places.

“That’s right,” he would say, “in file, caught before they rightly knew they ’ad it.”

He was the prize bore. It was not long after that he was repeating unasked. Worse, he began not to understand. He echoed wrong. So it came about, when they were doing “knots and lines,” that Pye asked one of his long rhetorical questions, as follows:

“Now take a fire, you are in attendance, you’ve got inside, and there is a man flaked out at your feet, perhaps he’s just by a window, it might be one of your own mates. You’ve got your lowering line handy, there may be no other means of getting him down, very likely the staircase will be burned out, well you would do the obvious, you will lower him away out of that window, or have a dab at it. Now then, what knot would you use?” “Why you would make a yachtsman’s purchase,” Piper put in too soon. For the first few times Pye kept his temper. He would say no more than, “No, you will use a chair knot, or the bowline on a bight, you all know what a yachtsman’s purchase is for, or you should, to strengthen a ladder. But try and be a credit, don’t speak out of turn.” Piper said, “That’s right.” “When they come to give you the examination,” Pye went on, “I shall get a bottle, they’ll blame me if you pretend to more knowledge than you have required. Don’t give them long answers if they should ask you. You can’t know everything in this job. So don’t get me a blister. For God’s sake pipe down.” At this the class would laugh dutifully, none louder than the ancient, his voice high and cracked. But, once started, nothing would stop Piper and before long he was saying “That’s so,” or “Of course,” every five minutes, nodding his parched head in agreement, looking sideways.