It was a queer time, those years just after the war, almost queerer than the war itself, though people don’t remember it so vividly. In a rather different form the sense of disbelieving in everything was stronger than ever. Millions of men had suddenly been kicked out of the Army to find that the country they’d fought for didn’t want them, and Lloyd George and his pals were giving the works to any illusions that still existed. Bands of ex-service men marched up and down rattling collection boxes, masked women were singing in the streets and chaps in officers’ tunics were grinding barrel-organs. Everybody in England seemed to be scrambling for jobs, myself included. But I came off luckier than most. I got a small wound-gratuity, and what with that and the bit of money I’d put aside during the last year of war (not having had much opportunity to spend it), I came out of the Army with no less than three hundred and fifty quid. It’s rather interesting, I think, to notice my reaction. Here I was, with quite enough money to do the thing I’d been brought up to do and the thing I’d dreamed of for years—that is, start a shop. I had plenty of capital. If you bide your time and keep your eyes open you can run across quite nice little businesses for three hundred and fifty quid. And yet, if you’ll believe me, the idea never occurred to me. I not only didn’t make any move towards starting a shop, but it wasn’t till years later, about 1925 in fact, that it even crossed my mind that I might have done so. The fact was that I’d passed right out of the shop-keeping orbit. That was what the Army did to you. It turned you into an imitation gentleman and gave you a fixed idea that there’d always be a bit of money coming from somewhere. If you’d suggested to me then, in 1919, that I ought to start a shop—a tobacco and sweet shop, say, or a general store in some god-forsaken village—I’d just have laughed. I’d worn pips on my shoulder, and my social standards had risen. At the same time I didn’t share the delusion, which was pretty common among ex-officers, that I could spend the rest of my life drinking pink gin. I knew I’d got to have a job. And the job, of course, would be “in business”—just what kind of job I didn’t know, but something high-up and important, something with a car and a telephone and if possible a secretary with a permanent wave. During the last year or so of war a lot of us had had visions like that. The chap who’d been a shopwalker saw himself as a travelling salesman, and the chap who’d been a travelling salesman saw himself as a managing director. It was the effect of Army life, the effect of wearing pips and having a cheque-book and calling the evening meal dinner. All the while there’d been an idea floating round—and this applied to the men in the ranks as well as the officers—that when we came out of the Army there’d be jobs waiting for us that would bring in at least as much as our Army pay. Of course, if ideas like that didn’t circulate, no war would ever be fought.