In the centre of the old town, on the other hand, things hadn’t changed much, so far as the buildings went. A lot of the shops were still doing the same line of trade, although the names were different. Lilywhite’s was still a draper’s, but it didn’t look too prosperous. What used to be Gravitt’s, the butcher’s, was now a shop that sold radio parts. Mother Wheeler’s little window had been bricked over. Grimmett’s was still a grocer’s, but it had been taken over by the International. It gives you an idea of the power of these big combines that they could even swallow up a cute old skinflint like Grimmett. But from what I know of him—not to mention that slap-up tombstone in the churchyard—I bet he got out while the going was good and had ten or fifteen thousand quid to take to heaven with him. The only shop that was still in the same hands was Sarazins’, the people who’d ruined Father. They’d swollen to enormous dimensions, and they had another huge branch in the new part of the town. But they’d turned into a kind of general store and sold furniture, drugs, hardware and ironmongery as well as the old garden stuff.

For the best part of two days I was wandering round, not actually groaning and rattling a chain, but sometimes feeling that I’d like to. Also I was drinking more than was good for me. Almost as soon as I got to Lower Binfield I’d started on the booze, and after that the pubs never seemed to open quite early enough. My tongue was always hanging out of my mouth for the last half-hour before opening time.

Mind you, I wasn’t in the same mood all the time. Sometimes it seemed to me that it didn’t matter a damn if Lower Binfield had been obliterated. After all, what had I come here for, except to get away from the family? There was no reason why I shouldn’t do all the things I wanted to do, even go fishing, if I felt like it. On the Saturday afternoon I even went to the fishing-tackle shop in the High Street and bought a split-cane rod (I’d always pined for a split-cane rod as a boy—it’s a little bit dearer than a greenheart) and hooks and gut and so forth. The atmosphere of the shop cheered me up. Whatever else changes, fishing-tackle doesn’t—because, of course, fish don’t change either. And the shopman didn’t see anything funny in a fat middle-aged man buying a fishing-rod. On the contrary, we had a little talk about the fishing in the Thames and the big chub somebody had landed the year before last on a paste made of brown bread, honey and minced boiled rabbit. I even—though I didn’t tell him what I wanted them for, and hardly even admitted it to myself—bought the strongest salmon trace he’d got; and some No. 5 roach-hooks, with an eye to those big carp at Binfield House, in case they still existed.