I’m not really looking. I’m just part of this machine, the part that holds it steady, keeps it aimed in the right direction. All that part of me which is capable of being shocked – or amused – is back home, in bed. Let it be so.

But she was looking for Ethel. And Ethel was not there among the naked revellers.

Concern for Ethel began to swell and spread in her mind, like those little objects called – what was it? – Japanese Flowers, which would open when placed in a glass of water. All along, it has been Ethel.

I don’t mind about the others. They’re volunteers. They joined. They chose this. Let them caper about, guzzling and drinking. . . .

But where is Ethel?

Presently. That was the voice in her mind again. This is only a beginning. A warming up. I don’t think I’ll waste any more film on it.

She moved away, behind the door, and indulged in some more swift, profound thoughts. Table manners. There again, you had the conflict between the animal and the human being. To eat was to live, and the primitive instinct was to fall upon food, tear it with claws and teeth, gobble it down. Up the long ladder of the centuries the creature whose destiny was to be man, made in God’s image, the creature who was to be Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein, had dragged himself. He had reached the point where, with a plate of food in front of him, he would unfold his table napkin, make conversation, pass the salt.

Out there, they had discarded all such niceties, together with their clothes. They had ripped at the meat with their hands, crammed it into their mouths, laughed, talked, kissed one another with full mouths, with grease-gleaming lips.

Presently the quality of the noise changed, warning her to take up her station again. Once more, despite all that she had read, she was amazed, and shocked, and revolted. The books said ‘sexual orgies’, and ‘debauchery’ and ‘perversion’, but to her these had been mere arrangements of certain letters which formed certain words. They had no more prepared her for what, on this All Hallowse’en, was following the feasting and the drinking in Walwyk church than the words ‘red’ and ‘scented’ would prepare a person for the beauty of the rose he had never seen. Even to look upon this scene was to be soiled. To call it bestial was to insult every animal in creation, for this was deliberate obscenity.

Grotesque, insane, she thought, forcing herself to hold the camera steady and listening to its gentle clicking.