He pursed his lips up. For a moment, half a minute perhaps, he was thinking quite deeply. It was curious. Even at the time I realised that it was curious. This important old bloke, who was probably worth at least half a million, was actually taking thought on my behalf, I’d deflected him from his path and wasted at least three minutes of his time, all because of a chance remark I’d happened to make years earlier. I’d stuck in his memory and therefore he was willing to take the tiny bit of trouble that was needed to find me a job. I dare say the same day he gave twenty clerks the sack. Finally he said:

“How’d you like to go into an insurance firm? Always fairly safe, you know. People have got to have insurance, same as they’ve got to eat.”

Of course I jumped at the idea of going into an insurance firm. Sir Joseph was “interested” in the Flying Salamander. God knows how many companies he was “interested” in. One of the underlings wafted himself forward with a scribbling-pad, and there and then, with the gold stylo out of his waistcoat pocket; Sir Joseph scribbled me a note to some higher-up in the Flying Salamander. Then I thanked him, and he marched on, and I sneaked off in the other direction, and we never saw one another again.

Well, I got the job, and, as I said earlier, the job got me. I’ve been with the Flying Salamander close on eighteen years. I started off in the office, but now I’m what’s known as an Inspector, or, when there’s reason to sound particularly impressive, a Representative. A couple of days a week I’m working in the district office, and the rest of the time I’m travelling around, interviewing clients whose names have been sent in by the local agents, making assessments on shops and other property, and now and again snapping up a few orders on my own account. I earn round about seven quid a week. And properly speaking that’s the end of my story.

When I look back I realise that my active life, if I ever had one, ended when I was sixteen. Everything that really matters to me had happened before that date. But in a manner of speaking things were still happening—the war, for instance—up to the time when I got the job with the Flying Salamander. After that—well, they say that happy people have no histories, and neither do the blokes who work in insurance offices. From that day forward there was nothing in my life that you could properly describe as an event, except that about two and a half years later, at the beginning of ‘23, I got married.

TEN

I WAS LIVING in a boarding-house in Ealing. The years were rolling on, or crawling on. Lower Binfield had passed almost out of my memory. I was the usual young city worker who scoots for the 8:15 and intrigues for the other fellow’s job. I was fairly well thought of in the firm and pretty satisfied with life. The post-war success dope had caught me, more or less. You remember the line of talk. Pep, punch, grit, sand. Get on or get out. There’s plenty of room at the top. You can’t keep a good man down. And the ads in the magazines about the chap that the boss clapped on the shoulder, and the keen-jawed executive who’s pulling down the big dough and attributes his success to so and so’s correspondence course. It’s funny how we all swallowed it, even blokes like me to whom it hadn’t the smallest application. Because I’m neither a go-getter nor a down-and-out, and I’m by nature incapable of being either. But it was the spirit of the time. Get on! Make good! If you see a man down, jump on his guts before he gets up again. Of course this was in the early ‘twenties, when some of the effects of the war had worn off and the slump hadn’t yet arrived to knock the stuffing out of us.