‘Well, ask yourself,’ said Walter, turning to face him. ‘If the Pater knew I was building a special, he knows me well enough to know that when it’s finished I shan’t just put it in a glass case. I shall use it. I shall enter it in sprints and hill-climbs if I can’t race it. And we’ve had one or two almighty scenes already. It’s the only thing we have had scenes over, as a matter of fact. Nothing of that sort till I’m twenty-one, if you please.’

He scowled at the spanner in his hand, the grease mark on his face twisting itself into an irritable line.

‘And here’s me having to put every brass farthing of my allowance into getting a few worn-out old parts off the junk heaps. I was actually offered a double-knocker Norton unit for twenty quid the other day. Think of it! Unique offer! I could have built the best five-hundred that ever raced. But twenty quid, twenty measly quid—not me. So I have to get along without even proper equipment, and work in a damned shack like this.’

The damned shack was Walter’s workshop at the bottom of the kitchen garden. It had doubtless been handed over to him when, in more tender years, he first showed an interest in working with his hands. Certainly it was not a suitable place for the building of motor cars. What a paradox the whole thing was!

‘Forgive my asking this,’ said Charles, ‘but don’t you some­times feel it was a stroke of bad luck for you to be born with a well-to-do father who’s got ideas about educating you, and so forth, inflicting a tutor on you in the holidays?—when if you were the son of, let’s say, a chimney-sweep, you could have been happily employed by now as a garage hand.’

But Walter, surprisingly, shook his head.

‘Not much fun in being a garage-hand. They very seldom see anything interesting. Working on stock jobs most of the time.’ He paused, then suddenly bellowed with laughter. ‘I’d soon get the sack for trying my ideas on the customers’ chariots. Imagine a fellow’s face if he brought his car in to have the brakes tested, or something, and found when he got away that I’d machined his guides for him and got double valve springs in!’

Charles joined, a trifle uncertainly, in the laughter.

‘Or better still,’ Walter spluttered, ‘fitted him a bigger sump and brought his pressure up—particularly if I’d forgotten to get a pump shroud in for him to stop his oil surge!’

Then his laughter was suddenly cut short by a sobering recol­lection. He looked at his watch.

‘Oh, flaming hell,’ he said, ‘got another spell with my tutor in ten minutes’ time. Latin, Latin, always Latin.’

‘How do you get on with him?’