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my father absconded to Australia, where, so far as I know, he may yet be living, and I was brought up by an aunt who, just so soon as I was capable of being impressed, firmly impressed upon me the need for bringing some grist to the mill, so that from the age of twelve I earned my own living and an occasional bun or whatnot for my aunt’s large family. The European War gave me a glad exit from home, and the winter of 1914 found me, at the age of sixteen, learning the art of evading the effects of modern armaments. I grew up with the War, so that I cannot say how it affected me, but I certainly grew to manhood with extremely few beliefs in anything or anybody. Not many fighting men came through the War without some bitterness in their souls, and with the small gratuity I received after the Armistice I washed mine from my mouth with a fortnight’s hectic living, and then the bitterness returned, for I was seeking a job. The exceedingly slight knowledge of carpentry achieved during my youth when in the factory of a building firm I ran errands and fetched tea for the workmen, proved useless in a country recuperating from a great war with skilfully complacent aid from men who had been indispensable during the fighting, so that, finally, an enticing odour of stew wisping across my distended nostrils, led me hungrily through the barrack gates, and once again I became a gunner in ’Is Majesty’s Royal ’Orse. For seven years I lived, but for the amount of reading I managed to do, the usual soldier’s life in the Far and the Near Easts, and then I doffed my uniform to return to a grateful country, once again in search of a job.
    This time I was luckier, even though it meant stepping into a uniform again. A uniform that had been designed, I think, by a Hollywood film magnate for a Bolivian Prince who happened at the same time to be a super-general, a glorified aide-de-camp, and a Prime Minister. I became a cinema commissionaire! Not, as you will have gathered, a menial to a suburban picture palace, a mere colonel of militia with a uniform coat over civilian trousers, croaking at intervals ‘Standin’ One an’ therree, Seats Two an fouer’. My height, I am six feet and an inch, and the fact that I had five medals to add to the already glittering uniform, procured the job for me, and I spent four years running to seed under the portico of a magnificent west-end cinema, The Luxurides. Close to the ornate doors when rain mirrored the pavement and away from the sickly scented warm air drifting through those doors when the night was fine.
    Motionlessly staring over the heads of people who wanted me to open taxi doors and less-than-people who wanted to know were there any cheaper seats than seven-and-six, I began to run to flesh, and was seriously contemplating whether an increase in majestic mien was worthy of a corresponding increase in salary, when, I’ve an idea, that had life gone on in the same old humdrum way, the ‘sack’ would have been my portion. For one Saturday afternoon I so far forgot my dignity as to run—actually run—down to the pavement and shout ‘Hi!’ at the top of my voice!
    Bingen was the cause of my undignified emotion. Bingen! Even the manager’s beady eyes glinting over a herbaic nose around the box-office did not deter me. Bingen, who had swung the pole of my gun magically between his shiny chestnuts at Karachi, and on the Menin Road, at Poona, and on the space of Abbassia. Wheel-driver of my battery!
    Comradeships between gunners and drivers are infra-dig —to the gunner—in the Royal ’Orse, but Bingen and I, despite a difference in tastes and amusements, had been pals of a sort, and four long years standing outside the Luxurides had covered the past with glamour, and Bingen was the first of the old crowd I had met.
    And with the coming of Bingen, death, in a hideous guise, enshrouded the City.

 
     
     
    II
    The Tunnel Beneath the Brewery

    SATURDAY AFTERNOON CROWDS thronged Piccadilly. A