‘Sir, at twenty-three fourty-one hours on Saturday, April 29th…’ The corporal was staring over the colonel’s shoulder at the wall and reciting his evidence with the toneless regularity of a machine gun.

…but, thought the colonel, hearing the evidence remotely as a noise, without taking it in… but deep down at the bottom of society, far below workpeople like his own, feared and hated and despised, indeed, by them, was a submerged multitude of Scannocks; in every port, in every great city there was a slumful of them; the ones who worked the longest for the lowest wages; who were little trouble to their employers because they were like beasts of burden and because they rarely came together, like other working men, to fight, but fought each man for himself, more often than not with each other, wild, anarchic beasts.

The corporal was still giving evidence. The colonel half-heard him, each phrase registering as a confirmation of his own thoughts. ‘Entered the camp drunk and singing… urinated in the doorway of his hut… fell asleep across his bed fully clothed… spewed and urinated in his bed… refused to clean his own bed area in the morning… said it was the billet orderly’s job… swore at his section corporal, was insubordinate, was placed under close arrest… ’

The colonel knew Liverpool. When he was a young man, before he had set up on his own, he had worked in Liverpool as a foreman, with a dozen Scannocks under him. He could see Scannock’s home now, while the corporal was talking; the room on the stone landing, the man and his wife hiccuping drunk and wrestling across the stale bed, with bugs dropping on to the pillow from the wet, peeling wall and the children huddled staring in the other bed across the room; the wife, ancient at thirty, with puffy red face, wispy hair and flaccid, pendant breasts, squatting over the stinking bucket in the corner; the husband washing in the bowl of scummy grey water that had been standing three days on the table.