But taking it by and large, I thought, it’s not so bad to be fat. One thing about a fat man is that he’s always popular. There’s really no kind of company, from bookies to bishops, where a fat man doesn’t fit in and feel at home. As for women, fat men have more luck with them than people seem to think. It’s all bunk to imagine, as some people do, that a woman looks on a fat man as just a joke. The truth is that a woman doesn’t look on any man as a joke if he can kid her that he’s in love with her.

Mind you, I haven’t always been fat. I’ve been fat for eight or nine years, and I suppose I’ve developed most of the characteristics. But it’s also a fact that internally, mentally, I’m not altogether fat. No! Don’t mistake me. I’m not trying to put myself over as a kind of tender flower, the aching heart behind the smiling face and so forth. You couldn’t get on in the insurance business if you were anything like that. I’m vulgar, I’m insensitive, and I fit in with my environment. So long as anywhere in the world things are being sold on commission and livings are picked up by sheer brass and lack of finer feelings, chaps like me will be doing it. In almost all circumstances I’d manage to make a living—always a living and never a fortune—and even in war, revolution, plague and famine I’d back myself to stay alive longer than most people. I’m that type. But also I’ve got something else inside me, chiefly a hangover from the past. I’ll tell you about that later. I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?

The chap who’d borrowed my matches was having a good pick at his teeth over the Express.

“Legs case don’t seem to get much forrader,” he said.

“They’ll never get ‘im,” said the other. “‘Ow could you identify a pair of legs? They’re all the bleeding same, aren’t they?”

“Might trace ‘im through the piece of paper ‘e wrapped ‘em up in,” said the first.

Down below you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, twisting this way and that with the streets, but stretching on and on, like an enormous plain that you could have ridden over. Whichever way you cross London it’s twenty miles of houses almost without a break. Christ! how can the bombers miss us when they come? We’re just one great big bull’s-eye. And no warning, probably. Because who’s going to be such a bloody fool as to declare war nowadays? If I was Hitler I’d send my bombers across in the middle of a disarmament conference. Some quiet morning, when the clerks are streaming across London Bridge, and the canary’s singing and the old woman’s pegging the bloomers on the line—zoom, whizz, plonk! Houses going up into the air, bloomers soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses.