It had been very different after the abduction.

“Take a hospital,” Pye might be saying, “you are called there, you arrive, and this lecture is called practical fire-fighting ’ints, but all this comes into the job, just as much as putting out the fire. Take an institution, even take what they call a place of public entertainment. Now what do you do? You’ve got always to recollect you must make as little disturbance as possible, use your loaf, don’t let the patients get any idea there’s something up. Go about it quietly. Don’t rush in a ward shouting where’s the fire? There may be people in there through no fault of their own. They’re to be pitied.” He would be careful not to look at Richard. “It might send them altogether crazy, a sudden shock just like that. Women that a sudden shock,” and the whole class would laugh. “No, I’m serious.” “No, that’s right,” from Piper. “Women,” Pye would go on, “they might be our own folks, lads, being treated lying there in bed because of some kink, or misfortune, taken by force out of their own homes most likely, so use your loaf.”

Knowing what he then knew, lying on the cushioned seat, covered with material so rough it was like glasspaper, Roe gave a cough of embarrassment. Those lectures haunted him.

SEVEN weeks after he had first been home, Roe worked four days and nights straight off to get another forty-eight hours’ leave.

The life he now led was not hard. There were still no raids and they waited at the substation, in their periods of duty, day and night, night and day. At all times they had to be ready to ride out on a pump to civilian fires, fully dressed, in under sixty seconds. But they thought the strain of waiting for raids prodigious. So much so that when, at last, he got into a train, travelling seemed an unnecessary waste of leisure hours which had been dearly bought, and his fellow travellers did not seem to be fellow beings in the war with him, but an odd lot of unpleasant individuals who did not have to go through that which he endured, and which he was now, miraculously as ever, forgetting.

At Oxford, young men of military age, elegantly dressed in last year’s Austrian outfits, skated on each pond. He wondered how they had the time. Then at Evesham, where the Avon was frozen over, townspeople were out along the stretches by the town.

Tired, his expectations lost, Roe found Dy had again brought Christopher to meet the train. This time it was light and they could see each other as they gravely shook hands. The boy blushed. On the drive home he asked what his parents were going to give him the next morning, his birthday, but they would not tell. Then, after some other talk, he said twice he wished they could have come home a different way. It was plain that he was bored. He became restless. He began to irritate Richard, whom he would not allow to finish a sentence when speaking to Dy. In fact, on this occasion, he was extravagantly self absorbed.