When he finished training, lost his fear of heights, and was allowed to go to fires, he never had one in all the time he waited fully dressed there, and he had gone every Tuesday for three hours until war was declared, that is for nine months. He had never felt war was possible, although in his mind he could not see how it could be avoided. His feelings were usually uppermost. As a result he did not expect ever to go to a fire, and he did not consider that his life in the station, what little he had, could at any time be real.

He was called up three days before the outbreak and, certain of death in the immediate raid he expected to raze London to the ground, he was soon saying farewell to his family away out in the country whenever he was alone, losing them because he loved himself so well that he was afraid. In his self pity he might have been sighing goodbye to adored unreality. All that was real to him then was his death in a matter of days.

Then, when there were no raids, and he was happy at the substation because it was a complete change of scene, he forgot his family until, on his first leave, he found he was still terrified of dying, perhaps because his son was older, also because his wife was miserable in the country, but almost entirely because, now that he had been parted from them, he could not bear to leave for ever, never to share life with them again just when he had discovered how it had been shared.

A year later, when raids began, and he faced death, he loved them fiercely, not so much for himself as for something between the three of them which he felt made life worth living, as his son grew up, for father, mother, and child.

But while being trained, that is before the war, when he was still working through a joke discipline with regard to heights, it had seemed too amusing to be true, being put through it down in the yard by a burly fireman who took them all in ladder drill, who could not see a girl of any kind but he was struck dumb, followed her with his eyes until she was gone, and only then was able to pick up the lecture he had learned by heart, where her legs had scissored it off his tongue.

All his period of training meant to Roe afterwards was flashes of a kind, scenes such as those when below the single arc lamp, an instructor’s bulbous eyes followed the girl’s criss-crossing legs, under silk stockings her skin a sheath of magnolia petals beneath the blue white light.

Magnolia and rose was what it meant to him, the country house in which he had been born, and in which he was to spend his next leave with Christopher.