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up?’
    ‘Well, nothing ever happens to me. I mean to say, only with boys, and I can manage them. Mother and me often have a good old laugh about my boys. She says it makes her feel young again. Isn’t she a scream, though?’
    ‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’ asked Margaret suddenly.
    Hilda gave such an emphatic nod that all the smooth blonde curls on her shoulders danced, but all she said was:
    ‘I s’pose so. Can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.’
    ‘Well, I’m not,’ said Margaret, feeling in her handbag for another cigarette. ‘I never have been, and as I get older it just gets worse and worse.’
    ‘Your father and mother don’t get on, do they?’ interrupted Hilda, bluntly.
    Margaret shook her head; her friend could just see the little movement in the dimness.
    ‘I always thought so, and so did Mother and Dad (of course, we didn’t chew it over a lot, but you can’t help noticing little things). Well, that’s enough to make you miserable – your parents not getting on.’
    ‘I suppose it was that to begin with,’ said Margaret slowly, ‘but it isn’t only that. I’ve just got an unhappy nature, I think. I take everything so seriously, and I mind it so much when things are ugly, and I worry about the mess the world’s in, and the war. And the year before last –’
    ‘I should think the All Clear’ll go in a minute,’ interrupted Hilda, ‘and the sooner the quicker; I’m starving, aren’t you? Go on, sorry.’
    ‘That time you came up to stay with us – I don’t suppose you remember a boy called FrankKennett, do you? He was a friend of Reg’s.’
    ‘Short fair boy. Rather quiet. Nice manners,’ said Hilda at once, as if quoting from a private file. ‘He danced with you nearly all the time at that dance we went to with Reg’s crowd.’
    ‘That’s the one. But he isn’t short, Hilda, he’s a bit taller than I am.’
    ‘Well, you’re no giant,’ retorted Hilda, ‘and I distinctly remember thinking of him as a short fair boy. Never mind, go on. What about him?’
    ‘We used to go about together a good bit at one time. Boys never did take to me much, you know, I’m not like you’ – there was a smile in her voice again, and this time it was a loving one – ‘and we liked all the things – music and poetry and pictures – that the rest of Reg’s crowd didn’t like. Well, it wasn’t so much that they didn’t like them; they never thought about them; all they cared about was the pictures and dancing and getting enough money to have motor-bikes or cars of their own. They didn’t know about anything else; they were all as ignorant as pigs and as common as dirt, and I loathed and despised the lot of them,’ she ended savagely.
    ‘They didn’t seem too bad to me.’
    ‘I dare say. You aren’t like me; lucky for you you aren’t. Frank and I used to go to the concerts at the Corn Exchange, and that winter there was a repertory company at Northampton and we never missed a week; they did some really good plays, too; Shaw and Ibsen, and Shakespeare and O’Neill. That was the nearest thing to happiness I’ve ever had.
    ‘Did he kiss you?’ interrupted Hilda.
    ‘Sometimes,’ said Margaret, without much expression in her voice. ‘Not very often.’
    ‘I said to a Raf boy I was out with last Sunday, “It’s a good thing I don’t want to kiss you as often as you want to kiss me,” I said, “or we’d never have time for anything else.” “Oh, Hilda,” he said, just like that. “ Oh, Hilda! ” with a kind of a sigh. I had to laugh. But he was a nice boy; I gave him one of my new Polyphotos for luck. “You be careful not to drop it over Berlin,” I said, “I don’t want to be one of Goebbels’s pin-up girls.” Go on, sorry.’
    ‘He worked in Sintram’s; you know, that big wireless factory outside the town; he was something to do with the research they were doing there on short-waves and he was clever. I did like him!’ she burst out resentfully.