The commercial took another of my matches, to pick his teeth with, and chucked the box back. The train whizzed on to an iron bridge. Down below I got a glimpse of a baker’s van and a long string of lorries loaded with cement. The queer thing, I was thinking, is that in a way they’re right about fat men. It’s a fact that a fat man, particularly a man who’s been fat from birth—from childhood, that’s to say—isn’t quite like other men. He goes through his life on a different plane, a sort of light-comedy plane, though in the case of blokes in side-shows at fairs, or in fact anyone over twenty stone, it isn’t so much light comedy as low farce. I’ve been both fat and thin in my life, and I know the difference fatness makes to your outlook. It kind of prevents you from taking things too hard. I doubt whether a man who’s never been anything but fat; a man who’s been called Fatty ever since he could walk, even knows of the existence of any really deep emotions. How could he? He’s got no experience of such things. He can’t ever be present at a tragic scene, because a scene where there’s a fat man present isn’t tragic, it’s comic. Just imagine a fat Hamlet; for instance! Or Oliver Hardy acting Romeo. Funnily enough I’d been thinking something of the kind only a few days earlier when I was reading a novel I’d got out of Boots. Wasted Passion, it was called. The chap in the story finds out that his girl has gone off with another chap. He’s one of these chaps you read about in novels, that have pale sensitive faces and dark hair and a private income. I remember more or less how the passage went:

David paced up and down the room, his hands pressed to his forehead. The news seemed to have stunned him. For a long time he could not believe it. Sheila untrue to him! It could not be! Suddenly realisation rushed over him, and he saw the fact in all its stark horror. It was too much. He flung himself down In a paroxysm of weeping.

Anyway, it went something like that. And even at the time it started me thinking. There you have it, you see. That’s how people—some people—are expected to behave. But how about a chap like me? Suppose Hilda went off for a week-end with somebody else—not that I’d care a damn, in fact it would rather please me to find that she’d still got that much kick left in her—but suppose I did care, would I fling myself down in a paroxysm of weeping? Would anyone expect me to? You couldn’t, with a figure like mine. It would be downright obscene.

The train was running along an embankment. A little below us you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them. Funny how we keep on thinking about bombs. Of course there’s no question that it’s coming soon. You can tell how close it is by the cheer-up stuff they’re talking about in the newspapers. I was reading a piece in the News Chronicle the other day where it said that bombing planes can’t do any damage nowadays. The anti-aircraft guns have got so good that the bomber has to stay at twenty thousand feet. The chap thinks, you notice, that if an aeroplane’s high enough the bombs don’t reach the ground. Or more likely what he really meant was that they’ll miss Woolwich Arsenal and only hit places like Ellesmere Road.