Well, we buried her next to Father, and that was my last glimpse of Lower Binfield. It had changed a lot, even in three years. Some of the shops were shut, some had different names over them. Nearly all the men I’d known as boys were gone, and some of them were dead. Sid Lovegrove was dead, killed on the Somme. Ginger Watson, the farm lad who’d belonged to the Black Hand years ago, the one who used to catch rabbits alive, was dead in Egypt. One of the chaps who’d worked with me at Grimmett’s had lost both legs. Old Lovegrove had shut up his shop and was living in a cottage near Walton on a tiny annuity. Old Grimmett, on the other hand, was doing well out of the war and had turned patriotic and was a member of the local board which tried conscientious objectors. The thing which more than anything else gave the town an empty, forlorn kind of look was that there were practically no horses left. Every horse worth taking had been commandeered long ago. The station fly still existed, but the brute that pulled it wouldn’t have been able to stand up if it hadn’t been for the shafts. For the hour or so that I was there before the funeral I wandered round the town, saying how d’you do to people and showing off my uniform. Luckily I didn’t run into Elsie. I saw all the changes, and yet it was as though I didn’t see them. My mind was on other things, chiefly the pleasure of being seen in my second-loot’s uniform, with my black armlet (a thing which looks rather smart on khaki) and my new whipcord breeches. I distinctly remember that I was still thinking about those whipcord breeches when we stood at the grave-side. And then they chucked some earth on to the coffin and I suddenly realised what it means for your mother to be lying with seven feet of earth on top of her, and something kind of twitched behind my eyes and nose, but even then the whipcord breeches weren’t altogether out of my mind.