Porteous is a retired public-school master. He lives in rooms, which luckily are in the lower half of the house, in the old part of the town, near the church. He’s a bachelor, of course. You can’t imagine that kind married. Lives all alone with his books and his pipe and has a woman in to do for him. He’s a learned kind of chap, with his Greek and Latin and poetry and all that. I suppose that if the local Left Book Qub branch represents Progress, old Porteous stands for Culture. Neither of them cuts much ice in West Bletchley.

The light was burning in the little room where old Porteous sits reading till all hours of the night. As I tapped on the front door he came strolling out as usual, with his pipe between his teeth and his fingers in a book to keep the place. He’s rather a striking-looking chap, very tall, with curly grey hair and a thin, dreamy kind of face that’s a bit discoloured but might almost belong to a boy, though he must be nearly sixty. It’s funny how some of these public-school and university chaps manage to look like boys till their dying day. It’s something in their movements. Old Porteous has got a way of strolling up and down, with that handsome head of his, with the grey curls, held a little back, that makes you feel that all the while he’s dreaming about some poem or other and isn’t conscious of what’s going on round him. You can’t look at him without seeing the way he’s lived written all over him. Public School, Oxford, and then back to his old school as a master. Whole life lived in an atmosphere of Latin, Greek and cricket. He’s got all the mannerisms. Always wears an old Harris tweed jacket and old grey flannel bags which he likes you to call “disgraceful,” smokes a pipe and looks down on cigarettes, and though he sits up half the night I bet he has a cold bath every morning. I suppose from his point of view I’m a bit of a bounder. I hayen’t been to a public school, I don’t know any Latin and don’t even want to. He tells me sometimes that it’s a pity I’m “insensible to beauty,” which I suppose is a polite way of saying that I’ve got no education. All the same I like him. He’s very hospitable in the right kind of way, always ready to have you in and talk at all hours, and always got drinks handy. When you live in a house like ours, more or less infested by women and kids, it does you good to get out of it sometimes into a bachelor atmosphere, a kind of book-pipe-fire atmosphere. And the classy Oxford feeling of nothing mattering except books and poetry and Greek statues, and nothing worth mentioning having happened since the Goths sacked Rome—sometimes that’s a comfort too.

He shoved me into the old leather armchair by the fire and dished out whisky and soda. I’ve never seen his sitting-room when it wasn’t dim with pipe-smoke. The ceiling is almost black. It’s a smallish room, and except for the door and the window and the space over the fireplace, the walls are covered with books from the floor right up to the ceiling. On the mantelpiece there are all the things you’d expect. A row of old briar pipes, all filthy, a few Greek silver coins, a tobacco jar with the arms of old Porteous’s college on it, and a little earthenware lamp which he told me he dug up on some mountain in Sicily. Over the mantelpiece there are photos of Greek statues. There’s a big one in the middle, of a woman with wings and no head who looks as if she was stepping out to catch a bus. I remember how shocked old Porteous was when the first time I saw it, not knowing any better, I asked him why they didn’t stick a head on it.