‘We should go away,’ I said in a choked voice, but when I spoke anger took hold of me, and I ran to the door and went in. A foul air greeted me. Terry came at my heels.

I knew my way through the rooms in darkest pitch night and I hurried from the lobby to the kitchen. My feet made a grating noise on the floor as I walked, and I heard broken glass break under my boots.

‘What’s happened here?’ I asked aloud. ‘What’s happened here?’ I demanded again of the barren air.

‘Light a match, Hugh,’ Terry told me. When the light flared up I heard her cry, ‘Oh!’

Our first impulse was to run away and leave for ever that fouled gutted house that was our home. We stayed to glut our rage and lacerate our hurt, going from room to room, calling each other to see each new defilement that we found. We fell on our knees on the filthy floors to turn over the broken rubbish gathered there, to pick fragments from the heap of muck and say, This was our picture, ‘and,’ That was your party dress, Terry,’ and, ‘Don’t you remember when we bought this, Hugh?’ Everything we owned lay on the floor, trampled, smeared with the dirt of miry boots, broken. The very walls were smeared with muck and our chairs had been torn to bits to make firewood. The fireplaces were overflowing with ashes and bits of wood, bits of picture-frames, bits of trunks, charred papers. Dishes and bottles broken into fragments littered the kitchen floor. Our books met us everywhere we moved. I struck matches mechanically, holding each match until it burnt my fingers, then lighting the next and putting the burnt stump carefully back into the box as I had learned to do on the hill or in our cave. Terry came to me with a little broken Dresden shepherdess in her cupped hands.

‘It’s almost not broken at all,’ she said in a queer voice. Her face was haggard, her eyes wild. They went out as the match I held went out, and then they were before me again.

‘Throw it away,’ I told her harshly, ‘throw the damned thing away.’

‘Will we go now?’ she said in the same strained voice. ‘Will we go now?’ she insisted in rising tones. ‘There’s nothing you want to take with you, Hugh?’

‘Nothing that’s been touched—’ I managed to say, and could find no more words.

‘There’s my good frock,’ she cried, pouncing on a tattered fragment of silk on the floor.

‘It’s time for us to go,’ I said in a miserable voice. ‘Give me your hand, Terry.’

‘Oh, but I can see the way,’ she returned. ‘Are you there, Hugh? Don’t leave me.’

I took her hand. I could feel the pieces of the china image in her clenched fist.

‘Are you taking this with you?’ I asked.