I said it was coming in 1941. The chap in the Jug and Bottle said he reckoned it was a bad job. The barmaid said it gave her the creeps. She said:

“It don’t seem to do much good, does it, after all is said and done? And sometimes I lie awake at night and hear one of those great things going overhead, and I think to myself, ‘Well, now, suppose that was to drop a bomb right down on top of me!’ And all this A.R.P., and Miss Todgers, she’s the Air Warden, telling you it’ll be all right if you keep your head and stuff the windows up with newspaper, and they say they’re going to dig a shelter under the Town Hall. But the way I look at it is, how could you put a gas-mask on a baby?”

The chap in the Jug and Bottle said he’d read in the paper that you ought to get into a hot bath till it was all over. The chaps in the public bar overheard this and there was a bit of by-play on the subject of how many people could get into the same bath, and both of them asked the barmaid if they could share her bath with her. She told them not to get saucy, and then she went up to the other end of the bar and hauled them out a couple more pints of old and mild. I took a suck at my beer. It was poor stuff. Bitter, they call it. And it was bitter, right enough, too bitter, a kind of sulphurous taste. Chemicals. They say no English hops ever go into beer nowadays, they’re all made into chemicals. Chemicals, on the other hand, are made into beer. I found myself thinking about Uncle Ezekiel, what he’d have said to beer like this, and what he’d have said about A.R.P. and the buckets of sand you’re supposed to put the thermite bombs out with. As the barmaid came back to my side of the bar I said:

“By the way, who’s got the Hall nowadays?”

We always used to call it the Hall, though its name was Binfield House. For a moment she didn’t seem to understand.

“The Hall, sir?”

“‘E means Binfield ‘Ouse,” said the chap in the Jug and Bottle.

“Oh, Binfield House! Oo, I thought you meant the Memorial Hall. It’s Dr. Merrall’s got Binfield House now.”

“Dr. Merrall?”

“Yes, sir. He’s got more than sixty patients up there, they say.”

“Patients? Have they turned it into a hospital, or something?”

“Well—it’s not what you’d call an ordinary hospital. More of a sanatorium. It’s mental patients, reely. What they call a Mental Home.”

A loony-bin!

But after all, what else could you expect?

THREE

I CRAWLED out of bed with a bad taste in my mouth and my bones creaking.

The fact was that, what with a bottle of wine at lunch and another at dinner, and several pints in between, besides a brandy or two, I’d had a bit too much to drink the day before. For several minutes I stood in the middle of the carpet, gazing at nothing in particular and too done-in to make a move. You know that god-awful feeling you get sometimes in the early morning. It’s a feeling chiefly in your legs, but it says to you clearer than any words could do, “Why the hell do you go on with it? Chuck it up, old chap! Stick your head in the gas oven!”