“Wonderful June weather we’re having.”

It was a pretty harmless remark, wasn’t it? Not in the same class as “Haven’t I met you somewhere before?”

But it wasn’t a success. She didn’t answer, merely lowered for about half a second the paper she was reading and gave me a look that would have cracked a window. It was awful. She had one of those blue eyes that go into you like a bullet. In that split second I saw how hopelessly I’d got her wrong. She wasn’t the kind of widow with dyed hair who likes being taken out to dance-halls. She was upper-middle-class, probably an admiral’s daughter, and been to one of those good schools where they play hockey. And I’d got myself wrong too. New suit or no new suit, I couldn’t pass for a stockbroker. Merely looked like a commercial traveller who’d happened to get hold of a bit of dough. I sneaked off to the private bar to have a pint or two before dinner.

The beer wasn’t the same. I remember the old beer, the good Thames Valley beer that used to have a bit of taste in it because it was made out of chalky water. I asked the barmaid:

“Have Bessemers’ still got the brewery?”

“Bessemers’? Oo, no, sir! They’ve gorn. Oo, years ago—long before we come ‘ere.”

She was a friendly sort, what I call the elder-sister type of barmaid, thirty-fivish, with a mild kind of face and the fat arms they develop from working the beer-handle. She told me the name of the combine that had taken over the brewery. I could have guessed it from the taste, as a matter of fact. The different bars ran round in a circle with compartments in between. Across in the public bar two chaps were playing a game of darts, and in the Jug and Bottle there was a chap I couldn’t see who occasionally put in a remark in a sepulchral kind of voice. The barmaid leaned her fat elbows on the bar and had a talk with me. I ran over the names of the people I used to know, and there wasn’t a single one of them that she’d heard of. She said she’d only been in Lower Binfield five years. She hadn’t even heard of old Trew, who used to have the George in the old days.

“I used to live in Lower Binfield myself,” I told her. “A good while back, it was, before the war.”

“Before the war? Well, now! You don’t look that old.”

“See some changes, I dessay,” said the chap in the Jug and Bottle.

“The town’s grown,” I said. “It’s the factories, I suppose.”

“Well, of course they mostly work at the factories. There’s the gramophone works, and then there’s Truefitt Stockings. But of course they’re making bombs nowadays.”

I didn’t altogether see why it was of course, but she began telling me about a young fellow who worked in Truefitt’s factory and sometimes came to the George, and he’d told her that they were making bombs as well as stockings, the two, for some reason I didn’t understand, being easy to combine. And then she told me about the big military aerodrome near Walton—that accounted for the bombing planes I kept seeing—and the next moment we’d starting talking about war, as usual. Funny. It was exactly to escape the thought of war that I’d come here. But how can you, anyway? It’s in the air you breathe.