‘This is slugged Belgrade, Miss Garden; be careful with it.’ That was always Mr Piper’s warning when a juicy mailer about werewolves or ten-legged donkeys with heads of hens came from the Balkan States. Sometimes there were stories about old women aged a hundred and thirty who had three hundred grandchildren and still made their own aprons on spinning wheels and remembered the death of Byron at Missolonghi and thought the modern girl a minx (probably they used a stronger word, but like naked, it was toned down for the newspaper columns). Sometimes there were similar records about old men aged a hundred and sixteen who had just had their first ride in an aeroplane and said that it was grand and gave them a real thrill. No one took much notice of these stories; people seemed to live to incredibly great ages in the Balkans. It was perhaps something in the air.

It was Sophia’s private opinion that the peasants of the Balkans could not count properly. They got in a muddle, boasted, attracted favourable comments, and found it was too late to retract when some more sophisticated grandchild did a bit of reckoning, and exclaimed ‘But, Grandpa, that only makes you ninety-three, not a hundred and thirty-three.’

As for the werewolves, the roads haunted by old men who begged for lifts in passing cars and then vanished, and the Things that lived at the bottom of wells, no one did much about them either.

The other mailers were about fashions in colours for finger-nails or interviews with minor Japanese and Austrian statesmen, and were easier to deal with.

She sometimes wondered why she kept her job, for she had no established position in the C.N.A.; she just made herself useful in whatever way she could, exactly filling the vague description of an ‘editorial assistant’, but not doing it efficiently.

She could only take down in shorthand at eighty words or so a minute, her typing was not neat and she forgot things. The only gift of which she was sure was her writing. When she was expressing a meaning in words, decoding, toning down a mailer, or making a coherent and vigorous letter from Mr Piper’s dictation, she felt confident. Words were at once her delights and her servants; she marshalled them and played with them and dreamed about their meaning and history until each word had its aura and personality, and seldom allowed herself the luxury of thinking solemnly about ‘style’.

When a young woman is told to type a five hundred word article on ‘London’s Women’ straight on to her machine and given half an hour to do it in from the word Go, she has little time to think about style. This was what occasionally happened to Sophia when the C.N.A. was short of copy for the mailers that went to Canada; and very good it was for her, too.

Miss Candy did most of the filing and routine work, twittering about in her yellow jacket with her dark curls carefully arranged about a small white face. She was twenty-eight, and fond of pleasure, but a little afraid that she would never succeed in marrying one of the minor naval, aerial and military gay dogs with whom she ran around. Her slang was strictly Service, and she smoked a great deal and Sophia had been distressed to notice her smelling of cocktails one day after a lunch with someone whom she called ‘my little naval engagement’. She was kind, gay, silly and charming. Sophia felt years older than she, and liked her.