The argument went on for a bit. All day I’d been wanting to talk to somebody about this business. It’s funny. I’m not a fool, but I’m not a highbrow either, and God knows at normal times I don’t have many interests that you wouldn’t expect a middle-aged seven-pound-a-weeker with two kids to have. And yet I’ve enough sense to see that the old life we’re used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. I can see the war that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think. And I’m not even exceptional in this. There are millions of others like me. Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run across in pubs, bus drivers and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet. And yet here’s this learned chap, who’s lived all his life with books and soaked himself in history till it’s running out of his pores, and he can’t even see that things are changing. Doesn’t think Hitler matters. Refuses to believe there’s another war coming. In any case, as he didn’t fight in the last war, it doesn’t enter much into his thoughts—he thinks it was a poor show compared with the siege of Troy. Doesn’t see why one should bother about the slogans and the loudspeakers and the coloured shirts. What intelligent person would pay any attention to such things? he always says. Hitler and Stalin will pass away, but something which old Porteous calls “the eternal verities” won’t pass away. This, of course, is simply another way of saying that things will always go on exactly as he’s known them. For ever and ever, cultivated Oxford blokes will stroll up and down studies full of books, quoting Latin tags and smoking good tobacco out of jars with coats of arms on them. Really it was no use talking to him. I’d have got more change out of the lad with tow-coloured hair. By degrees the conversation twisted off, as it always does, to things that happened B.C. Then it worked round to poetry. Finally old Porteous drags another book out of the shelves and begins reading Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (or maybe it was a skylark—I forget).

So far as I’m concerned a little poetry goes a long way. But it’s a curious fact that I rather like hearing old Porteous reading it aloud. There’s no question that he reads well. He’s got the habit, of course—used to reading to classes of boys. He’ll lean up against something in his lounging way, with his pipe between his teeth and little jets of smoke coming out, and his voice goes kind of solemn and rises and falls with the line. You can see that it moves him in some way. I don’t know what poetry is or what it’s supposed to do. I imagine it has a kind of nervous effect on some people like music has on others. When he’s reading I don’t actually listen, that’s to say I don’t take in the words, but sometimes the sound of it brings a kind of peaceful feeling into my mind. On the whole I like it. But somehow tonight it didn’t work. It was as if a cold draught had blown into the room. I just felt that this was all bunk. Poetry! What is it? Just a voice, a bit of an eddy in the air. And Gosh! what use would that be against machine-guns?