England Made Me Read Online Free

money in their pockets; it’s only later when I put a little in my own that they ask me to explain.
    Selling tea. Three hundred spoilt sacks they could do nothing with and shooting in the streets. I bought the lot from them for a song and sold them again at the full rate. There’s always money to be picked up in a revolution. But they looked at me askance after that. They never trusted me again.
    Voices whispering in the dormitory: ‘Someone has left a vest in the changing-room. Honour of the House,’ running the gauntlet of the knotted towels, noise over the roof-tops, paper screens trembling, spoilt tea, shooting in the streets, ‘honour of the firm.’
    And so on to Aden.
    Everybody in bed; the night cold and the water invisible under the pale knife-edge of foam. The man in the lower bunk talking all night in a language I do not understand, and the new day grey and windy, the canvas of the deck chairs flapping, and very few people at breakfast; an unshaven chin, the dismal jocularity of stewards, a girl with hair like Greta Garbo’s walking alone, a smell of oil and a long time till lunch, Kate thinking of Krogh.
    How do I know that she is thinking of Krogh? How did I know that she would be waiting for me in the barn?
    She said: ‘We’ll spend the night in Gothenburg,’ and I knew she was worried.
    I pretended I wanted to go to the lavatory and slipped out. I had my clothes on under my dressing-gown, carried my shoes and socks hidden, wore bedroom slippers. The cold of the stone steps crept through the torn sole. I left the dressing-gown in the lavatory and listened at the housemaster’s door. It was all so easy. He had gone to supper and his window had no bars. But Kate sent me back and I trusted her: frost on the road and the smell of nipped leaves and a clear sky and I happy with everything behind; the hard ruts in the by-road and the noisy twigs snapping underfoot and the lamps of motorists on the main road and I miserable with everything the same as before.
    Thinking of Krogh. ‘Use Krogh’s. Krogh’s are cheapest and best.’ That was ten years ago, no, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, shopping with the nurse at the general stores, stooping in the doorway under the baskets, brushing against the tins of weedkiller, examining the mowing machines, while my nurse bought Krogh’s. Now they are not the cheapest and the best. They are the only. Krogh’s in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland, Krogh’s everywhere. ‘Buy Krogh’s’ has a different meaning now: ten per cent and rising daily.
    And I might have been as famous and as rich as Krogh if I had been trusted as Krogh has been trusted, if I had been lent capital; they gave me a five-pound note and expected me to be grateful. There was a fortune in every one of my schemes, if they had trusted me. Could Krogh have sold a hundred bags of spoilt tea?
    But I’ve never been trusted.
    When Wilber came in, there were no more free whiskies from the fellows there; I was drummed out of that club; and so on to Colombo. Grey sea, the telegrams home, the bandit sheltering behind the chimney-pot, escape from school after the cracked bell had gone lights out, shippers’ complaints, and the sound of the bomb rattling behind the roofs; a hundred bags of spoilt tea, the little Chinese officer in gold-rimmed glasses smoking Woodbines, the green dormitory walls and the grey sea and the canvas chairs flapping, Kate thinking of Krogh; Krogh like God Almighty in every home; impossible in the smallest cottage to do without Krogh; Krogh in England, in Europe, in Asia, but Krogh, like Almighty God, only a bloody man.

3
    Kate heard Anthony’s voice long before she was able to pick out his table. She listened with jealousy, affection, an irritated admiration, to the cheerful plausible tones. So he had found friends already, she thought: two hours alone in Gothenburg and he had found friends. It was