They’d evidently turned both the shop and what used to be the parlour into tea-rooms. As for the yard at the back where the dustbin used to stand and Father’s little patch of weeds used to grow, they’d paved it all over and dolled it up with rustic tables and hydrangeas and things. I went through into the parlour. More ghosts! The piano and the texts on the wall, and the two lumpy old red armchairs where Father and Mother used to sit on opposite sides of the fireplace, reading the People and the News of the World on Sunday afternoons! They’d got the place up in an even more antique style than the George, with gate-leg tables and a hammered-iron chandelier and pewter plates hanging on the wall and what-not. Do you notice how dark they always manage to make it in these arty tearooms? It’s part of the antiqueness, I suppose. And instead of an ordinary waitress there was a young woman in a kind of print wrapper who met me with a sour expression. I asked her for tea, and she was ten minutes getting it. You know the kind of tea—China tea, so weak that you could think it’s water till you put the milk in. I was sitting almost exactly where Father’s armchair used to stand. I could almost hear his voice, reading out a “piece,” as he used to call it, from the People, about the new flying machines, or the chap who was swallowed by a whale, or something. It gave me a most peculiar feeling that I was there on false pretences and they could kick me out if they discovered who I was, and yet simultaneously I had a kind of longing to tell somebody that I’d been born here, that I belonged to this house, or rather (what I really felt) that the house belonged to me. There was nobody else having tea. The girl in the print wrapper was hanging about by the window, and I could see that if I hadn’t been there she’d have been picking her teeth. I bit into one of the slices of cake she’d brought me. Home-made cakes! You bet they were. Home-made with margarine and egg-substitute. But in the end I had to speak. I said:

“Have you been in Lower Binfield long?”

She started, looked surprised, and didn’t answer. I tried again:

“I used to live in Lower Binfield myself, a good while ago.”

Again no answer, or only something that I couldn’t hear. She gave me a kind of frigid look and then gazed out of the window again. I saw how it was. Too much of a lady to go in for back-chat with customers. Besides, she probably thought I was trying to get off with her. What was the good of telling her I’d been born in this house? Even if she believed it, it wouldn’t interest her. She’d never heard of Samuel Bowling, Corn & Seed Merchant. I paid the bill and cleared out.