Finished with it all quite definitely now. What have the keelies to do with you—except to make you feel sick? They don’t like the same things, haven’t the same interests, don’t care a hang for the books you read (mislaid those text-books this last week somewhere). And you pretending an interest in horses—dog-racing—football—all the silly kid-games that excite the keelies—find History’s beat in their drivelling blah!

… That ghastly house that Bob took you to—father unemployed for over five years, mother all running to a pale grey fat like a thing you found when you turned up a stone, one of the brothers a cretin, rickets—sat giggling and slavering in a half-dark corner, they couldn’t afford to have the gas on, a dead smell of dirt left unstirred and unscrubbed, disharmonic heads and moron brains; and outside the house as you came away: streets on streets, the fug of the Cowgate, keelies on the lounge in the gutter, in the dirt, their ghastly voices and their ghastly faces—

They DON’T concern you. BREAK with it all.

So when Alick and Norman that Saturday asked if you were coming to the Beach Pavilion, Snellie Guff the Scotch Comedian was On, you said No, sorry, I’ve reading to do, and saw their faces fall, damn them, they’d just have to learn as you had to learn. But when you got home and had finished dinner and been caught by that ghastly old bore Ake Ogilvie who thought himself God’s regent on earth because Christ had been of the same trade as himself, and heard his lout swagger on this and that, you felt too restless to rout out the books. Damn nuisance, August blazing outside, birds high up in the Howe today, a bus would take you to Segget in an hour…. If only it could take you back over a year!

And you thought of the times when you’d haunted the Howe, as a schoolboy, seeking the old-time flints, Neolithic stuff, passable collection: you’d forgotten it since you’d come to Duncairn. Where could it be?

And in chase of that you went down to the kitchen and knocked and looked in, Chris and Ma Cleghorn and Meg the maid, they all looked up and you said I’m sorry. Chris, d’you mind where my flints went to?

Chris said she thought you had finished with them, they were up in the box-room under the eaves. Ma called as you turned away Ewan man, why aren’t you out at a game this weather? Or out with a lass?—that’d be more your age than bothering about with a rickle of stones. Your mother showed me them and I thought ‘What dirt!’

You said Oh, really? funny old hag, another keelie trying to keep you in the gutter—games and street-crawling and their blasted girls. Her face fell a bit when you spoke like that, the old fool should heed to her own damned business. Chris looked at you with her nice, cool eyes, a long time since you’d kissed her, she had a nice kiss. Then you went up the stairs to your flints.