As well as I could from the back row I had a look at the audience. I suppose, if you come to think of it, we people who’ll turn out on winter nights to sit in draughty halls listening to Left Book Club lectures (and I consider that I’m entitled to the “we,” seeing that I’d done it myself on this occasion) have a certain significance. We’re the West Bletchley revolutionaries. Doesn’t look hopeful at first sight. It struck me as I looked round the audience that only about half a dozen of them had really grasped what the lecturer was talking about, though by this time he’d been pitching into Hitler and the Nazis for over half an hour. It’s always like that with meetings of this kind. Invariably half the people come away without a notion of what it’s all about. In his chair beside the table Witchett was watching the lecturer with a delighted smile, and his face looked a little like a pink geranium. You could hear in advance the speech he’d make as soon as the lecturer sat down—same speech as he makes at the end of the magic lantern lecture in aid of trousers for the Melanesians: “Express our thanks-voicing the opinion of all of us—most interesting—give us all a lot to think about—most stimulating evening!” In the front row Miss Minns was sitting very upright, with her head cocked a little on one side, like a bird. The lecturer had taken a sheet of paper from under the tumbler and was reading out statistics about the German suicide-rate. You could see by the look of Miss Minns’s long thin neck that she wasn’t feeling happy. Was this improving her mind, or wasn’t it? If only she could make out what it was all about! The other two were sitting there like lumps of pudding. Next to them a little woman with red hair was knitting a jumper. One plain, two purl, drop one and knit two together. The lecturer was describing how the Nazis chop people’s heads off for treason and sometimes the executioner makes a bosh shot. There was one other woman in the audience, a girl with dark hair, one of the teachers at the Council School. Unlike the others she was really listening, sitting forward with her big round eyes fixed on the lecturer and her mouth a little bit open, drinking it all in.