Well, I didn’t get that job. It seemed that nobody was anxious to pay me £2,000 a year for sitting among stream-lined office furniture and dictating letters to a platinum blonde. I was discovering what three-quarters of the blokes who’d been officers were discovering—that from a financial point of view we’d been better off in the Army than we were ever likely to be again. We’d suddenly changed from gentlemen holding His Majesty’s commission into miserable out-of-works whom nobody wanted. My ideas soon sank from two thousand a year to three or four pounds a week. But even jobs of the three or four pounds a week kind didn’t seem to exist. Every mortal job was filled already, either by men who’d been a few years too old to fight, or by boys who’d been a few months too young. The poor bastards who’d happened to be born between 1890 and 1900 were left out in the cold. And still it never occurred to me to go back to the grocering business. Probably I could have got a job as a grocer’s assistant; old Grimmett, if he was still alive and in business (I wasn’t in touch with Lower Binfield and didn’t know), would have given me good refs. But I’d passed into a different orbit. Even if my social ideas hadn’t risen. I could hardly have imagined, after what I’d seen and learned, going back to the old safe existence behind the counter. I wanted to be travelling about and pulling down the big dough. Chiefly I wanted to be a travelling salesman, which I knew would suit me.

But there were no jobs for travelling salesmen—that’s to say, jobs with a salary attached. What there were, however, were on-commission jobs. That racket was just beginning on a big scale. It’s a beautifully simple method of increasing your sales and advertising your stuff without taking any risks, and it always flourishes when times are bad. They keep you on a string by hinting that perhaps there’ll be a salaried job going in three months’ time, and when you get fed up there’s always some other poor devil ready to take over. Naturally it wasn’t long before I had an on-commission job, in fact I had quite a number in rapid succession. Thank God, I never came down to peddling vacuum-cleaners or dictionaries. But I travelled in cutlery, in soap-powder, in a line of patent corkscrews, tin-openers and similar gadgets, and finally in a line of office accessories—paper-clips, carbon paper, typewriter ribbons and so forth. I didn’t do so badly either. I’m the type that can sell things on commission. I’ve got the temperament and I’ve got the manner. But I never came anywhere near making a decent living. You can’t, in jobs like that—and, of course, you aren’t meant to.