“Ah, that! That is sacrosanct. We have decided never to build in it. It is sacred to the young people. Nature, you know.” He twinkled at me, a kind of roguish look, as if he was letting me into a little secret: “We call it the Pixy Glen.”

The Pixy Glen. I got rid of him, went back to the car and drove down to Lower Binfield. The Pixy Glen. And they’d filled my pool up with tin cans. God rot them and bust them! Say what you like—call it silly, childish, anything—but doesn’t it make you puke sometimes to see what they’re doing to England, with their bird-baths and their plaster gnomes, and their pixies and tin cans, where the beechwoods used to be?

Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what trees and what men. Not that there’s anything one can do about it; except to wish them the pox in their guts.

One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I’m finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches up to the stratosphere. All the same, I didn’t particularly care. After all, I thought, I’ve still got three days left. I’d have a bit of peace and quiet, and stop bothering about what they’d done to Lower Binfield. As for my idea of going fishing—that was off, of course. Fishing, indeed! At my age! Really, Hilda was right.

I dumped the car in the garage of the George and walked into the lounge. It was six o’clock. Somebody had switched on the wireless and the news-broadcast was beginning. I came through the door just in time to hear the last few words of an S O S. And it gave me a bit of a jolt, I admit. For the words I heard were:

“—where his wife, Hilda Bowling, is seriously ill.”

The next instant the plummy voice went on: “Here is another SOS. Will Percival Chute, who was last heard of—,” but I didn’t wait to hear any more. I just walked straight on. What made me feel rather proud, when I thought it over afterwards, was that when I heard those words come out of the loudspeaker I never turned an eyelash. Not even a pause in my step to let anyone know that I was George Bowling, whose wife Hilda Bowling was seriously ill. The landlord’s wife was in the lounge, and she knew my name was Bowling, at any rate she’d seen it in the register. Otherwise there was nobody there except a couple of chaps who were staying at the George and who didn’t know me from Adam. But I kept my head. Not a sign to anyone. I merely walked on into the private bar, which had just opened, and ordered my pint as usual.