Every man jack was full of his little woman and the Edies, the Joans, and the little Marys, in their pinnies, he had left behind, sleeping in their little cots (most likely watching mum in bed with a stranger), in what each man was proud to call home.

The Auxiliary on guard with him had been in the Navy. Some time ago this man had seen “King Kong,” the film of an outsize in apes that was twenty foot tall. Roe’s explanation was that the experience had had a lasting effect on his adjectives. One in particular, “conga,” he used to cover almost everything.

“A conga night,” he said. He called each Rescue man “cock.” He remarked that their whisky was dodgy. He went by the name of “Shiner,” because his surname was Wright.

The Rescue men spoke huskily of their families. Richard half heard what they said. The black-out was new to all, this was their second night. It stilled the loudest voice, by that moonlight such as no town-dweller had seen except on honeymoon, if then, yet it encouraged men and women to keep quiet, not for repeated love, but by the menace in that highly polished sky which they felt might, at any moment, fall flat, and across which the stars began to skate or slither as he crouched drinking, nostrils dilated, the air he took in that fed, as will a forced draught, the fire which ran with the charged blood in his veins.

He was not sorry when their relief came. Shiner, of course, said he felt “conga,” and that he could have stayed out all night, but Richard, who was not used to keeping awake, was longing, by the great weight on his eyes, for as much sleep as he could get in the stench of Piper’s feet. He was to be disappointed. A great muffled din hit them as they came towards their gas-proofed shelter. When they raised the wet blanket across the opening they saw, in a deep violet light from three coloured bulbs invisibly wreathed with footrot, two Regular firemen, one with a twenty-eight-pound hammer, the other with a crowbar, racing cockroaches along a course they had prepared between Auxiliaries rolled in blankets on the floor out of which, as though about to rise from the dead, came heads and shoulders as they propped themselves up to watch.

A man’s face, in that profound, dim blood of the flower, was dead white. As these two drunk firemen bellowed oaths while they pounded the boards to make those cockroaches go faster, as they hopped, crouching in sapphire shirt sleeves, someone shouting odds, then Richard knew this was the end. He saw it more than double, and could remember no more of that night although, so they told him next day, he had made as much noise as any. He had been asleep standing up but, even so, he had been eager, in common with most of the others, to curry favour by sharing these men’s phantasmal antics.