Meanwhile there was the problem of avoiding contact. He must form no roots in his new stratum of society, but remain independent of class, forming roots only with impersonal things such as places and seasons, or, in the other end of the scale, genuinely personal attachments that could be gently prised loose from all considerations involving more than two people. The first thing to do was to get out of the Y.M.C.A. hostel, for it involved him in a certain degree of corporate life, and he had already drifted dangerously close to the dreaded state of becoming a member of his community. He had been spending his evenings following up hints about accommodation, usually from scrawled post cards exhibited (‘6d per week’) in wire-netting cases outside small general shops. But most of these had been entirely useless for his purpose, for they had involved becoming ‘one of the family’; others had been merely squalid, and Charles shared the general human attitude towards squalor—he enjoyed his own but disliked other people’s.

By eleven o’clock he had had to move on three times from his lounging-point, because of attempts to start conversation on the part of his fellow idlers. It was difficult to have to avoid this so persistently, and Charles was reminded of the various accounts he had read of the adventures of those escaping from prison camps in war-time: the nights spent in marching, the days in hiding, always in terror of being addressed because, as officers and gentle­men, the fugitives could not speak any other language than their own. A close parallel, he mused, for his accent would have given him away even if he had made a serious attempt to pass for a ‘typical’ window-cleaner; and ultimately, conversation would have led to arrest and a closer detention in the prison camp. The way to stay outside the barbed wire was to keep his mouth shut.

As his thoughts wandered over these and similar topics, he was strolling between chestnut trees in the town’s park, beyond which only a brewery blocked the advance of the unspoilt countryside. The sun was hot by now, and the park presented its usual summer appearance: families sprawled on the grass, children ran swiftly up and down imitating aeroplanes, chattering as they neared one another to represent machine-gun fire; hundredweights of waste paper lay in heaps, waiting for a breeze to start them on their long pilgrimage; broken bottles glinted in the sun, and every few yards lay a young couple in what appeared to the averted gaze to be the last throes of sexual enjoyment.