Meanwhile I was doing something I’d never before had the chance to do as a full-time job—reading.

The officers who’d been there before had left a few books behind, mostly sevenpenny editions and nearly all of them the kind of tripe that people were reading in those days, Ian Hay and Sapper and the Craig Kennedy stories and so forth. But at some time or other somebody had been there who knew what books are worth reading and what are not. I myself, at the time, didn’t know anything of the kind. The only books I’d ever voluntarily read were detective stories and once in a while a smutty sex book. God knows I don’t set up to be a highbrow even now, but if you’d asked me then for the name of a “good” book I’d have answered The Woman Thou Gavest Me, or (in memory of the vicar) Sesame and Lilies. In any case a “good” book was a book one didn’t have any intention of reading. But there I was, in a job where there was less than nothing to do, with the sea booming on the beach and the rain streaming down the window panes—and a whole row of books staring me in the face on the temporary shelf someone had rigged up against the wall of the hut. Naturally I started to read them from end to end, with, at the beginning, about as much attempt to discriminate as a pig working its way through a pail of garbage.

But in among them there were three or four books that were different from the others. No, you’ve got it wrong! Don’t run away with the idea that I suddenly discovered Marcel Proust or Henry James or somebody. I wouldn’t have read them even if I had. These books I’m speaking of weren’t in the least highbrow. But now and again it so happens that you strike a book which is exactly at the mental level you’ve reached at the moment, so much so that it seems to have been written specially for you. One of them was H. G. Wells’s The History of Mr. Folly, in a cheap shilling edition which was falling to pieces. I wonder if you can imagine the effect it had upon me, to be brought up as I’d been brought up, the son of a shopkeeper in a country town, and then to come across a book like that? Another was Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street. It had been the scandal of the season a few years back, and I’d even heard vague rumours of it in Lower Binfield. Another was Conrad’s Victory, parts of which bored me. But books like that started you thinking. And there was a back number of some magazine with a blue cover which had a short story of D. H. Lawrence’s in it. I don’t remember the name of it. It was a story about a German conscript who shoves his sergeant-major over the edge of a fortification and then does a bunk and gets caught in his girl’s bedroom. It puzzled me a lot. I couldn’t make out what it was all about, and yet it left me with a vague feeling that I’d like to read some others like it.