And then all of a sudden I seemed to see him. It was as if I hadn’t properly seen him till that moment.

A very young eager face, might have belonged to a good-looking schoolboy, with blue eyes and tow-coloured hair, gazing into mine, and for a moment actually he’d got tears in his eyes! Felt as strongly as all that about the German Jews! But as a matter of fact I knew just what he felt. He’s a hefty lad, probably plays rugger for the bank. Got brains, too. And here he is, a bank clerk in a godless suburb, sitting behind the frosted window, entering figures in a ledger, counting piles of notes, bumsucking to the manager. Feels his life rotting away. And all the while, over in Europe, the big stuff’s happening. Shells bursting over the trenches and waves of infantry charging through the drifts of smoke. Probably some of his pals are fighting in Spain. Of course he’s spoiling for a war. How can you blame him? For a moment I had a peculiar feeling that he was my son, which in point of years he might have been. And I thought of that sweltering hot day in August when the newsboy stuck up the poster ENGLAND DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY, and we all rushed out on to the pavement in our white aprons and cheered.

“Listen, son,” I said, “you’ve got it all wrong. In 1914 we thought it was going to be a glorious business. Well, it wasn’t. It was just a bloody mess. If it comes again, you keep out of it. Why should you get your body plugged full of lead? Keep it for some girl. You think war’s all heroism and V.C. charges, but I tell you it isn’t like that. You don’t have bayonet-charges nowadays, and when you do it isn’t like you imagine. You don’t feel like a hero. All you know is that you’ve had no sleep for three days, you stink like a polecat, you’re pissing your bags with fright and your hands are so cold you can’t hold your rifle. But that doesn’t matter a damn, either. It’s the things that happen afterwards.”

Makes no impression of course. They just think you’re out of date. Might as well stand at the door of a knocking-shop handing out tracts.

The people were beginning to clear off. Witchett was taking the lecturer home. The three Communists and the little Jew went up the road together, and they were going at it again with proletarian solidarity and dialectic of the dialectic and what Trotsky said in 1917. They’re all the same, really. It was a damp, still, very black night. The lamps seemed to hang in the darkness like stars and didn’t light the road. In the distance you could hear the trams booming along the High Street. I wanted a drink, but it was nearly ten and the nearest pub was half a mile away. Besides, I wanted somebody to talk to, the way you can’t talk in a pub. It was funny how my brain had been on the go all day. Partly the result of not working, of course, and partly of the new false teeth, which had kind of freshened me up. All day I’d been brooding on the future and the past. I wanted to talk about the bad time that’s either coming or isn’t coming, the slogans and the coloured shirts and the stream-lined men from eastern Europe who are going to knock old England cock-eyed. Hopeless trying to talk to Hilda. Suddenly it occurred to me to go and look up old Porteous, who’s a pal of mine and keeps late hours.