Yes, he had been close to the earth then, and it led him back to the first girl he had known, not long before his father took them away from the village in which their childhood was passed, for that too was of the earth. In the grass lane, and Pye groaned as he lay on the floor, his head by a telephone, that winding lane between high banks, in moonlight, in colour blue, leaning back against the pale wild flowers whose names he had forgotten, her face, wildly cool to his touch, turned away from him and the underside of her jaw which went soft into her throat that was a colour of junket, oh my God he said to himself as he remembered how she panted through her nose and the feel of her true, roughened hands as they came to repel him and then, at the warmth of his skin, had stayed irresolute at the surface while, all lost, she murmured, “Will it hurt?” Oh God she had been so white and this bloody black-out brought you in mind of it with the moon, this blue colour, and with the creeping home. He had been out hunting that first night right enough as he came home, her tears still on the back of his hand, with the cries of an owl at his temples, like it might be the shrieks of that cat on the wall over there, bloody well yelling for her greens.

He was too tired to sleep. His mind switched from one thing to the next. The bank against which he had pressed her led him to worry about his wall of sandbags, which he had hoped they would have finished that same night. He had wanted a clear run the next day, sandbagging windows but, close on half past eleven, when they had all had just about enough, the wall collapsed. Well, he said to himself, my lads are all in, and Trant, the District Officer who was his immediate superior, can go drown ’isself, they can none of them do more tonight.

Then he turned to the asylum and the letter he had received, asking how much he could afford to pay towards his sister’s upkeep. Surely, as a ratepayer, he was entitled to that free? They could force him to send her in, but no power in the country could make him pay out money for her.

That night, so long ago, as he crept back, who would then have thought that he was in for two wars? And as he came along in shadow, up the sides of hedges, to get back home unheard, unseen, because his old man must not know he was out, as he came slinking like any other creature out at night, and there was that dog whimpering near, chained up on account of a bitch, he had seen another shadow moving in front towards their bit of garden at the back, creeping as he was but lower, more like a wild animal, heavier in shame because a woman, and, as he saw with a deep tremor, his own sister, out whoring maybe as he had been, up now from off her back no doubt, out of a low shadow cast by the moon.