I had an “A” subscription at Boots and went to half-crown dances and belonged to a local tennis club. You know those tennis clubs in the genteel suburbs—little wooden pavilions and high wire-netting enclosures where young chaps in rather badly cut white flannels prance up and down, shouting “Fifteen forty!” and “Vantage all!” in voices which are a tolerable imitation of the Upper Crust. I’d learned to play tennis, didn’t dance too badly and got on well with the girls. At nearly thirty I wasn’t a bad-looking chap, with my red face and butter-coloured hair, and in those days it was still a point in your favour to have fought in the war. I never, then or at any other time, succeeded in looking like a gentleman, but on the other hand you probably wouldn’t have taken me for the son of a small shopkeeper in a country town. I could keep my end up in the rather mixed society of a place like Ealing, where the office-employee class overlaps with the middling-professional class. It was at the tennis club that I first met Hilda.

At that time Hilda was twenty-four. She was a small, slim, rather timid girl, with dark hair, beautiful movements and—because of having very large eyes—a distinct resemblance to a hare. She was one of those people who never say much, but remain on the edge of any conversation that’s going on, and give the impression that they’re listening. If she said anything at all, it was usually “Oh, yes, 1 think so too,” agreeing with whoever had spoken last. At tennis she hopped about very gracefully, and didn’t play badly, but somehow had a helpless, childish dr. Her surname was Vincent.

If you’re married, there’ll have been times when you’ve said to yourself “Why the hell did I do it?” and God knows I’ve said it often enough about Hilda. And once again, looking at it across fifteen years, why did I marry Hilda?

Partly, of course, because she was young and in a way very pretty. Beyond that I can only say that because she came of totally different origins from myself it was very difficult for me to get any grasp of what she was really like. I had to marry her first and find out about her afterwards, whereas if I’d married, say, Elsie Waters, I’d have known what I was marrying. Hilda belonged to a class I only knew by hearsay, the poverty-stricken officer class. For generations past her family had been soldiers, sailors, clergymen, Anglo-Indian officials and that kind of thing. They’d never had any money, but on the other hand none of them had ever done anything that I should recognise as work. Say what you will, there’s a kind of snob-appeal in that, if you belong as I do to the God-fearing shopkeeper class, the low church and high-tea class. It wouldn’t make any impression oh me now, but it did then. Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I don’t mean that I married Hilda because she belonged to the class I’d once served across the counter, with some notion of jockeying myself up in the social scale. It was merely that I couldn’t understand her and therefore was capable of being goofy about her. And one thing I certainly didn’t grasp was that the girls in these penniless middle-class families will marry anything in trousers, just to get away from home.