He had nothing to do, and nothing he could do would make any difference. His companions had little to say. For the most part they stood in silence while the officers bawled at each other over their heads. He did not seem able to get away from Piper, that was the one snag, because Piper had seen the taxi. They hardly spoke again except the once, after it had come on to rain, when this man advised him to move his blankets under cover.

For several hours they had all to stand in different groups only to be regrouped, creatures of the utter confusion the London Fire Brigade creates.

They were mute in a vast asphalted space. The store towered above, pile after dark pile which, gradually, light after light went darker than the night that was falling and which he dreaded. For twenty minutes at dusk the scene was his wife’s eyes, wet with tears he thought, her long lashes those black railings, everywhere wet, but, in the air, the menace of what was yet to be experienced, the beginning.

Earlier the balloons had been a colour of the blade of a knife.

He found he could not think of his family. They had at once grown remote. Life with them, as it all had been, unrealised yet, was an ideal imagined. He was so without anticipation he did not even fear that Piper might be stationed with him, as of course, once they were sorted out, the old man was. He did not suppose even for a wild moment that Pye could be his Station Officer. Indeed, when he did know, the rush and turmoil was too great. He did not care until the evening of the next day, until, as he was listening to Piper in the pub on abduction in Africa and to his own story so inimitably retold, Pye came over. Piper at once got up to let them be alone.

They had all worked hard to get into temporary quarters. They had by now done some of the sandbagging. Pye had got through more than anyone. They were tired out. They expected a gigantic raid any minute. The conversation of hanging, civilian faces in bowler hats up at the counter seemed mostly of the pet they had had put away that very morning, in accordance with instructions issued against gas attack. Or, if they had drowned the dog themselves, then they would ask each other whether the dustmen would reject a bin in which there was a body. One hairless dewlap with mastiff’s eyes spoke up. He said every dustcart was commandeered to remove human carcasses that same night. The black-out, new to all, was of a vault. All this, while he had not specifically observed it, moved Pye to get things over, to speak for the first time, and, as he thought, for the last, directly of his sister to Richard.