OURS is a small town. That’s how it is, that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it always will be, unless it gets smaller, and dwindles away altogether. But I can’t see why anything should ever change here much—oh, a bit up now, a bit down now, but pretty well the same in the long run. Come to that, I can’t think why anyone comes here at all, unless it’s the complete lack of anything interesting to do or see; that could, I suppose, to certain minds have a sort of charm. It does to mine, as a matter of fact. One can be absolutely certain at any given hour of day or night what is happening in the house opposite, the house next door, the houses all over the town. Because this little place of ours is having one of its downs at the moment, it’s got lost, pushed aside by the great new road that whizzes its traffic a mile away beyond Chapman’s Wood. You see, Cartersfield began as a stop for coaches whenever it was that coaches began to trundle regularly along the roads of England. You know the sort of thing—a pub, a place to change horses, to drop mail—all that stuff. And then the coaches didn’t come any more and cars started coming instead—few at first, of course, not that I can remember, but obviously it’s only since the war that things have got quite out of control and there have been more cars than roads to put them on. And the jolly old government decided a few years ago, about thirty years too late, as a matter of fact, that we were living in the age of the automobile now, the dog-cart was dead, and there were many, many towns, like ours, which were a positive menace to navigation. By Jove, said one civil servant to another, look here, old boy, do you see that Cartersfield’s High Street is only three feet wide, and that High Street of theirs carries the main road from Slough to Reading? (Or rather, being a civil servant, and having, one likes to think, a wider view, from London to the west.) I say, old man, said the other civil servant, that’s a bit thin, what? And they both guffawed a bit, and then one of them said, I say, don’t you think we ought to say something to someone about this, old boy? I mean, now we have all this money to build new roads, wouldn’t it be a really jolly good thing to pull old Cartersfield High Street right off the map? And the other one said he thought that might be a little too strong, so they built us a by-pass instead, and our High Street is still only three feet wide (I exaggerate, of course), and the cars whizz through what used to be the north-east corner of Chapman’s Wood. Which leaves us, as you might say, out of the mainstream of life. Which is where I am quite happy to be, thank you, and personally I couldn’t be more pleased that the garages have all moved out to the by-pass, and we can walk across our charming little High Street with its pretty red-brick eighteenth-century houses and its faintly absurd Victorian street-lamps (which people are always preserving with petitions) without more than a sixty-forty chance of being knocked down by one of those madmen in goggles driving export models to the docks (speed limit 30 m.p.h.) at seventy-five through the middle of the place where our stomachs used to be.

You get the picture? I could go on, telling you all about the drears who live here and think that by electing Mr Ponsonby, the ironmonger, to be mayor every year they are helping to preserve all that’s best in Britain. I could tell you about the terrible scandal of Dr Nye, who made the unholy error of patting Miss Spurgeon (age seventy-three) on the knee-cap when she complained of sciatica in her elbow. But I won’t, partly because the whole thing would be tedious beyond words, partly because I don’t believe a word of it anyway, and mostly because I have a much more interesting story to tell you, about Harry Mengel, who isn’t German, as you might think with a name like that, though he isn’t quite altogether English, you know, either, since his great-great-great-God-knows-how-many-times-grandfather was something to do with one of those Moguls who came over with William the Third, who was, if I remember right, the one married to Mary. Anyway, this ancient Mengel married a nice English girl in Cartersfield, and so the family has gone on ever since, though the big-wig from Holland and his lot died out somewhere around the time of the battle of Waterloo. Nobles come, bringing their trains with them, you see, and then they die and the servants stay on. History. Those who’ve read some tell me it’s fascinating, and I’m sure they’re right. From such a minor question as the origin of Harry Mengel’s surname we get a whole picture of social development. Hurrah.

Not that there was much development in the Mengel family, who remained, I imagine, resolutely servile till Harry’s father bought a sweetshop during the depression, managed to keep it going through the ’thirties, the war, rationing (history will keep breaking in, excuse me) and so on, so that when he died a couple of years ago it was from a thoroughly deserved stroke, since his little sweetshop had become the largest grocery store in the town, he had no inhibitions about testing his stock on his stomach, and his belly was the subject of much speculation among the younger members of our community. Harry, in fact, learnt, or so it seems to me, his business skill at an age when he should have been learning his lessons, because kids being kids, bets would be made about the size of old Mr Mengel’s waistline, accurate statistics upon which could be gauged only by a member of the family—i.e. Harry. He took ten per cent for his measurements. In fact, what he did was to measure his father’s trousers (his father having several pairs, as should be obvious), not his old dad at all, but his figures were agreed to be good. Furthermore, his father’s waist went in and out a good deal, since he made spasmodic and quarter-hearted efforts to get off the fat. Thus speculation on his belly was more or less constant, or traditional, rather, among the boys at the school, and Harry did nothing to discourage it, taking his ten per cent without a qualm.

This precociousness was not the only thing which singled out Harry among his contemporaries, I may say. Of course he stole apples, broke windows, played cricket in alleys, booted a football about and so on, like any English kid, but he did all these things, or so it seemed to me, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. I should explain, I suppose, that I am the schoolmaster of Cartersfield. All right, I know, go and talk to the barmaid if you’d rather. Well, when I say the schoolmaster I don’t mean that at all, really, you see there’s a very good little Grammar School in Cartersfield, only it’s very small, and I am only one of seven masters and four mistresses. None the less, my opinion of my colleagues being what it is, I am, in my own eyes at any rate, the schoolmaster here, though the headmaster, who considers himself an almost unbearably fair man, would tell you I’m just a member of his staff. Anyhow, what I’m getting at is this—Harry was brighter than average, not brilliant, no, but decidedly brighter than average, and I, being a sort of damn-fool enthusiast, and pleased with his progress in mathematics, which is what I teach, encouraged him, with the doubtful assistance of his father, to try for a scholarship to Reading University. Now you may say, if you’re a snob, that Reading University is not the sort of university that you’d want your child to go to, and if you are that sort of snob then to you I say, go to hell. Reading is near by, I went there myself, and it is an excellent university. Furthermore Harry had about as much chance of getting to Oxford or Cambridge as I have of being the first man on the moon, someone who is, as it happens, a man I should very much like to be. And from this you will gather why I hold a low opinion of my colleagues—Cartersfield Grammar School has had exactly one pupil at a university in the last ten years. He was sent down from University College, London, for getting a girl with child. (As though that was any reason to deprive him of further education: quite the contrary, in my opinion, but that’s the sort of thing we’re up against.)

Where was I? Oh yes, Harry Mengel. Well, though the headmaster, turning somersaults to be fair to everyone, was against me, and the rest of the staff was against me, doing its damnedest to be unfair to everyone, I was for me, Harry was for me, and between us we taught him enough to get in, if the examiners hadn’t had some prejudice against the school, and possibly against me and Harry as well. I’m prejudiced against the school myself, but I still think Harry was good enough for a scholarship, and if Reading University has the nerve to ask me for money to help them build new buildings again I shall write and tell them exactly what they can do with their new buildings and offer them Cartersfield Grammar School into the bargain. Well, I was exceedingly angry about all this, and Harry was very disappointed, of course, the poor boy, and between us we had a good cry. I hate to see talent chucked away like that. Things are bad enough in this country without wasting perfectly good men like Harry Mengel. But that was that, and I think old Mengel was rather relieved in a way, and Harry went into the store like a good son, and his father got fatter and fatter, though Harry no longer measured him for other people’s bets, and I went on teaching the kids the difference between alt and parallel lines never meeting, and they still didn’t understand, the dolts.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a town like Cartersfield, right out, as I’ve said, of the mainstream of life, but let me try and explain what living there meant to a boy like Harry. As I told you, he was bright, not brilliant, but quite intelligent enough to realize that life of a different and much more exciting variety might very well be going on somewhere else, such as London, or Reading University. After a while he began to brood, just as many young men do, I suppose, about the unfairness of having been born in a place which was dying just as he was beginning to live. Because while he was swotting away for Reading night after night, the by-pass was being built, and by the time he’d been told he wasn’t good enough the thing was finished, and Cartersfield had started on one of its downs. You see, for the last four years it’s been fading away, not altogether, no, but definitely fading, like a tree without water. The road was our water, and they’ve altered its banks to take it away from us. Goodness, a metaphor from a mathematician, but that’s it, really. That’s it, and that’s life, and, anyway, everyone was all for it—though they didn’t know what would happen at the time—and, as I say, I like it, I like living in a quiet little town. Deadly dull, but it gives you a chance to get on with your own life. But not everyone would agree with me about that, and one person who didn’t then was Harry Mengel. ‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said to me one day, ‘that there is only one dance hall in Cartersfield, and that is open only one evening a week, and, anyway, no drinks are served?’ Well, of course, it hadn’t. I’m no dancer myself, I never have been, and it certainly hadn’t entered my mind that the inadequacy of the Lord George Brunswick Memorial Hall might be a source of juvenile resentment. But I saw his point. Years of teaching adolescents have taught me a few things, and one of them is that dancing is considered among the half-grown as not merely—inadequate word—‘fun’, but also a social necessity. Ugh. However, I have the interests of my charges at heart, and I could see that he was really on to something. There was nothing to do in Cartersfield whatever. There were pubs, of course, but one could hardly call the pubs of Cartersfield places of sparkling entertainment. There was the Alhambra Cinema, which showed torn copies of films that ceased to be in vogue about the time D. W. Griffith began to shoot Intolerance (if indeed he did begin to shoot it, and not someone else—I’m not very good on films, though my ex-wife was a cineaste and took me to all the classics. Frankly, I have always preferred horror and science-fiction films. I suppose I should explain that when I say ex-wife I mean that divorce proceedings had been begun by me when she died in childbirth, the child, itself dead, having been fathered by that standby of the newspapers, the other man.) And apart from these two cultural centres there was the Lord George Brunswick Memorial Hall, once a week, eight to twelve, non-alcoholic. I have no idea who Lord George Brunswick was, or why he gave us a hall to remember him by, but judging by the statue which stands outside he was himself a chronic alcoholic, since the veins on his nose are distinctly swollen. However, there are no drinks in his hall, and I have now described to you the whole glittering range of social possibilities.

Now I am not a political man, in any sense. As I’ve said, I prefer living my own life to participating actively in the life of a community. I don’t vote, on principle. But there are various, to me non-political, issues about which I take what must be considered by retired officers in general, and are so considered by Brigadier  Hobson in particular (he lives on the edge of the town), extreme views. I am against hanging, for instance, and against the reintroduction of the cat and the housing of prisoners three to a cell. About these and related topics I feel very strongly indeed, and can even be persuaded to sign petitions. I also feel, though more mildly, that it would be a great mistake to start another war, or to have anything to do with one started by anyone else. Oh, I fought myself, I was patriotic and all that rubbish, but I decided soon after the war was over that I had been wrong to do so. I’m not a Christian or anything loony like that, it’s just a decision I came to by what I hope was logical reasoning, and though I don’t hide my opinion, I don’t go around preaching it, either. I don’t try to convert my pupils, or anything subversive like that, in fact I urge them to do their national service, but I do try to get them to realize that there is a problem to be thought about, and then to think about it. And Harry Mengel did think about it, more seriously than most. After he’d been weighing his father’s flour for about six months he went off to the Army, became a corporal, was sent to Cyprus, saw a little bit of the world beyond the by-pass, heard the screams of men being tortured, didn’t like the idea, worried about it—cautiously, of course—wrote to me about it, read my even more cautious answers, did nothing heroic, came home and was demobbed.

Those two years, you know, can have quite an effect on an intelligent young man who’s hardly left his home-town before. And Harry came home distinctly thoughtful, even rather radical. Now I approve of radicalism in the young—I approve of the young altogether, in fact, and I think that any young man with any spunk in him will find something to be radical about, even if it’s only his dear old dad. Well, Harry went farther than most, in fact he cut out the father-hating stage altogether, and I used to find him in the public library reading The New Statesman rather than taking it home to shock the old man, who was, by the way, frankly obese by this time. Harry and I used to have long talks together, during which I would shatter what I considered dangerous leanings towards Teach-Yourself-Marxism, while he tried to undermine my faith in political quietism. And, of course, we became good friends, and we both forgot that I had once been his teacher. He even began to get me worried, to make me wonder if I shouldn’t get out of Cartersfield and go and live a little before I died, but, of course, I didn’t do anything more than wonder.

Well, among the many things which seemed to Harry to be violently wrong with the world, the wrongest of all was the hydrogen bomb. He learnt all about it, he could tell you how many people died at Hiroshima, how many people would die, over what period of time, if an H-bomb were dropped at such and such a height over Marble Arch or the Birmingham Public Library or the main Post Office at Leeds. He knew about geese on American radar screens, and radioactive milk, and babies with two heads, the lucky things. I don’t know how much of his information was correct, and I think he probably took the gloomiest possible view of everything to do with the bomb, but it was quite obvious, even to Brigadier Hobson, that to answer Harry Mengel you had to know your facts. And, of course, in Cartersfield no one knew anything at all; in fact poor Harry had great difficulty in getting anyone to argue with him, even. People said: ‘Is that right, Harry?’ and ‘You don’t say?’ and ‘Well I never’, but they couldn’t, you know, contribute to the conversation. There was Brigadier Hobson, it’s true, but he was hardly fair game, since he seemed to think that the next war would be fought with infantry, like the last, and anyway he was quite nice really, even if he did embody all the positively evil clichés of the public-school system. I was mildly on Harry’s side. No one else gave a damn. Mr Ponsonby, the perennial mayor, couldn’t have told a hawk from a handsaw if he hadn’t been the ironmonger. And the headmaster, that chairman among chairmen, believed in letting things take their course and seeing all the evidence before one made one’s decision; that is to say he never listened to a word anyone else said, then gave his own opinion, which was, briefly, on the one hand this, on the other hand that, and we should wait and see. ‘Then you’d better be wearing dark glasses, that’s all,’ Harry told him one evening, ‘or you’ll never see anything again.’

Now I don’t want to give you the wrong impression about Harry. He had his views, yes, but he was still a grocer, and when his father died at last of sheer adiposity (this was not the official reason, of course, but Dr Nye did have a tendency to be indiscreet) Harry found himself with a pretty good business to run. It’s true that trade in Cartersfield wasn’t as good as it had been, but people still had to eat, and Harry’s father had branched out a bit—there were Mengel’s Groceries in two or three neighbouring towns—and Harry was really rather well-off. I think this annoyed him a little, being a rich radical, but, after all, what about Stafford Cripps, so that was all right. I told him I didn’t see why a rich man shouldn’t be a Socialist if he wanted, and he needn’t give all his money away, either, this isn’t the day of judgment: when he gets the sort of state he’s working for he’ll find it’s taken from him soon enough, and meanwhile he can probably do a lot more good by hanging on to it. That’s what I said, and I think I may even believe it. So not long after the funeral, anti-bomb posters began to appear in the windows of Harry’s shops, and a few people muttered and said he should keep his politics out of his business, but they didn’t stop buying at his store, because it was easily the best one in Cartersfield, and, anyway, a poster didn’t make any difference to the quality of the goods. I think he could have put up a Communist poster and people would still have come. Not that Harry had any leanings towards Communism, far from it; Harry was a petit bourgeois and glad of it once I’d explained to him that it was all right really. Brigadier Hobson did threaten to take his account elsewhere, it’s true, but Harry simply grinned at him and said, loud enough for a few people to hear (and they told everyone else): ‘Thank you, sir, I should be very glad to have a cheque. Your account stands at two hundred and thirty-five pounds, four shillings and fourpence, plus that bunch of grapes you are carrying, and I was going to speak to you about it anyway, sir.’ And Brigadier Hobson went very red in the face, because he had plenty of money, but didn’t like paying bills very much, and he stayed with Mengel’s and his credit remained, too. Nice man, Hobson, under all the bombast. They often are, those harrumphers. He knows when he’s beaten, all right, and accepts defeat better than victory, the old fool.

Anyhow, there was Harry, a young radical with a chain of groceries and a bomb on the brain, and lo and behold, one day it occurs to him that the Aldermaston March would be clumping along the by-pass in a month’s time, and Easter Saturday being Easter Saturday, what was he going to do about it? There’s a dilemma for you, business versus faith, a big selling day against the biggest anti-bomb performance of the year. He pondered and puzzled about it for days. He even made tactful inquiries to see if any of his friends would take over for him while the March chugged along the by-pass, but without success. Meanwhile he made his preparations—he was going on the three other days, anyway; it was just the Saturday, when the march would be passing his own town, that he couldn’t be on it. And he wanted very much to be on it on that day in particular, to march, even if it was only along the by-pass, with a great big banner saying: ‘CARTERSFIELD SAYS BAN THE BOMB’. ‘We’ve got to give them a feeling of welcome,’ he said to me one night, when I caught him making it, a huge thing it was, too, blue with the words in gold, and a picture of a mushroom cloud in scarlet. Absolutely hideous. Harry had no colour-sense at all.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ I said, though it was quite obvious what he was doing.

‘I’m making a bloody banner,’ he said. ‘Here, grab a hold of that corner, will you? It’s getting wrinkled. We don’t want our lovely message lopsided, do we?’

So I took an end, and I helped him paint it. I even added a few violet puffs to the mushroom cloud.

‘Pretty good,’ he said, when we’d finished. ‘Now we’ll let it dry before we add the poles.’

‘Poles?’ I said. ‘What do you mean, poles?’

‘Two poles. One each side. It’s got to be spread out tight so that people can see it. It’ll be no bloody good if it just droops, will it?’

‘And who’s taking the other pole?’

‘You are,’ he said; he didn’t even bother to look at me, he just stated it as though it was a fact we had both known for a very long time, but I had not known it for a long time, I had no intention of making a fool of myself for him or anyone else, and I told him so, briefly and clearly.

‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘You and I will show these dead and dying men of Cartersfield that we mean business.’

‘Damn it, Harry,’ I said, ‘I’m —— if I will.’ Yes, I swore. Tut, tut, fancy a schoolmaster knowing such horrible words. Well, where do you think schoolboys learn them? ‘I’m —— if I will,’ I said, and I meant it.

‘Well, then, you’re ——, that’s all,’ he said.

And we left it at that, because he knew perfectly well that I could never be induced to march in his march, let alone carry a hideous banner. And so time passed, and Easter came nearer, and Harry’s problem remained unsolved. He was terribly torn between shutting the shop altogether and missing a day of footslogging, and people didn’t help him, either, in fact they even began to be a little unkind, saying: ‘Oh, I won’t take it now, I’ll collect it Saturday; you will be open then, Mr Mengel, won’t you?’ and Harry would smile and say: ‘Yes,’ then go into his office and curse a bit. I may say that by this time, thanks to Harry and his dilemma, people were beginning to get interested in this march thing, though not me, of course. I had no intention of walking even as far as the north-east corner of Chapman’s Wood just to watch a lot of fanatics parading down a main road. But others were saying that perhaps Harry might be right, one never knew, did one, and perhaps these people weren’t all cuckoo, were they? And others said angrily that it shouldn’t be allowed, particularly not at holiday-time, holding up the traffic when everyone wanted to get out for a drive. The pubs got quite quarrelsome. Even one young radical can cause trouble if he tries.

And though of course he was delighted that people were taking an interest, Harry was still going through agonies about Easter Saturday. Ever since he’d taken those commissions on his father’s waistline Harry had hated to let a good thing go by, and holiday-time is no time to close your shop just to go on a crusade (because that’s what he called it now). And then he thought he’d had a brilliant idea. He came and told me, under pain of radiation sickness if I told anyone else, that he’d thought up a compromise. He’d shut the shop for half an hour while the march went by, and give everyone on it an Easter egg.

‘How about that!’ he said.

‘But, Harry,’ I said, ‘there may be a thousand people there.’

‘No, there won’t,’ he said. ‘Second day—five hundred at the most. Anyway, I can afford to give away a thousand Easter eggs.’

Well, how should I know what he could afford, and how many people there’d be on his precious march? I reckoned he knew what he was talking about, and I just hoped his old mother wouldn’t die of a stroke when she heard about it. So I shrugged and said I thought he was quite out of his mind, but that was his business, not mine.

And then things began to get out of control. On Good Friday Harry went off to Aldermaston and he tramped along all day, feeling like Christ going to Calvary, no doubt, with all those students from all over the place who, said the newspapers, gave the whole thing its character. And suddenly, in that procession, which was much bigger than anyone expected, Harry said, he began to feel at home. It must be just like a university, he thought, I suppose, and forgetting he’d given up that sort of thing to be a good steady grocer he got really worked up. He told me afterwards, that night in fact, that he’d never been so excited in his life.

‘It’s bloody marvellous!’ he said, hopping about all over my room in his great big marching boots. ‘Why, there’s thousands of us, David, thousands!’

He’d never called me by my Christian name before, and I hadn’t invited him to, because I prefer not to be called anything. My ex-wife used to call me Dave, and I’ve hated my name ever since. So that annoyed me to start with, and then his dirty great boots all over my carpet.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘sit down or take those boots off, man, I don’t want this place looking as though your whole loony procession has been through.’

But he wasn’t listening to a word I said, he just went on and on about how marvellous everything was.

‘David,’ he said, ‘I want to tell you——’

‘Don’t call me David,’ I said, ‘and take your boots off.’

‘But why shouldn’t I call you David?’ he said. ‘It’s your name, isn’t it? God, you don’t know what today was like. I fell in love with the whole world, it was just fabulous!’

Now when people say things like that to me I’m liable to get very pedantic and sarcastic and boring, and usually I say: ‘Really, are you sure, the whole world, how can that be? Let us examine our terms,’ and other carefully chosen irritants along the same lines. But Harry was different, Harry was a friend of mine, and besides he was clearly out of his mind. I didn’t know what to say, so I said: ‘Oh my God, Harry.’

‘Dave,’ he said, and I winced, ‘Dave,’ and he seized my shoulders and started shaking me, ‘do you realize that the youth of the country is with us? Nothing can stop us now.’

‘Oh my God,’ I said again. What else could I say?

‘We’ll win now. We can’t lose. Everyone will come over. The thing’s a wild successs, don’t you see?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t. And take your boots——’

‘You will tomorrow!’ he shouted, and then he danced round my room a bit more, and then he went away, planning God knows what.

Well, you can imagine how I felt about all this, pretty fed up hardly describes it. I mean, what the hell could have got into the boy? I made myself angry thinking about the effect of mass meetings on impressionable minds, and muttered ‘Nuremberg’ to myself, like a good suspicious radical, and then I went to bed. I was so angry with Harry that I went straight to sleep. (Usually I lie awake for an hour or so working myself up into a rage, otherwise I can’t sleep. Yes, I dare say it is unusual.)

Well, next morning came, and nothing very exciting seemed to be happening that I could see. I hate the Easter holidays, anyway. It usually rains, and with a lot of guff about religion they even shut the cinemas most of the time. And I feel I ought to be doing something, which is nonsense. It’s as bad as Christmas. Anyway, I went along to the store to see what Harry was up to, but he wasn’t there. A lot of other people were there, though, and his poor mother was running round in circles doing his job and hers on one of the busiest mornings of the year. She was far too flustered for me to bother even to ask where Harry was. Anyway, she’s a pretty stupid woman, I think, or she wouldn’t let Harry spend so much time thinking about politics. If she was loyal to her class she wouldn’t stand for it. Well, I came out of the shop ready to be angry at the slightest opportunity, and the first thing I saw was one of my pupils, a particularly dim one at that, so I asked him with perhaps exaggerated care if he’d seen Harry. But of course he hadn’t, and he gave me a look as if to say I must be round the bend. Now if there’s one thing that really makes me angry it’s being treated as loopy by someone whom I know to be less intelligent than myself, so I gave him a gentle cuff over the ear and was about to move on when I saw that he was staring past me at something up the street.

Now our High Street, as well as being narrow, is straight. Jokes have been made about this which I do not intend to repeat. From the crossroads in the middle of the town you can see a full mile in both directions. And coming from what must have been Aldermaston was the march. Right in the distance, turning the bend, was the front banner itself, a huge black and white and red job, and beyond it a whole lot of other ones in different colours. The road slopes down to the crossroads, and then on and up again, so I had a splendid view, and shattered I was by it, I may say. I’m sure that in all its history Cartersfield never saw anything like it.

‘For God’s sake!’ I said to the dim pupil, whose mouth was hanging open like a letter-box. But he simply looked at me again as though I was mad and ran off, telling his friends, I dare say. So I turned to a perfect stranger beside me, a policeman as it happened, and said: ‘But I thought it was supposed to go along the by-pass?’

‘Special request,’ said the policeman. ‘Coming down here instead. Got the message this morning.’

And then I realized. Harry had really pulled a trick to shatter his home-town. But if he’d fooled us, then so had the march fooled him, because it was much bigger than he’d estimated. I should say his five hundred was exceeded several times, not that I know. I dare say there are statistics somewhere if you want to find out. The marchers came on and on, like a medieval army, flags flying, banners streaming, just like the pictures in fact. I kept thinking of Henry V, though I didn’t notice Laurence Olivier out there leading them into the breach. In fact as the front of the procession came nearer I saw that the leaders, about a dozen of them, included (you’ve guessed, of course) Harry Mengel, and he’d got someone on the other end of his banner, and he was strutting along at the front as though he was the Great Panjandrum himself, his chest swollen up like a balloon and his eyes front as though he was back in the Army. A band somewhere farther back was playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. Very appropriate.

Well, when I saw him it was too much for me, much too much. I wasn’t letting him get away with it that easy. I just jumped straight in and took the other pole of his banner away from whatever nabob of the march had a hold of it, and shouted at him. What I shouted isn’t altogether repeatable, but the gist of it was, what did he think he was doing, how the hell had he managed it, and what about his precious Easter eggs?

‘You’ll see!’ he yelled back, and really he looked so happy I didn’t want to spoil it for him by being narky, so I just marched along beside him at the head of the carnival, that bloody great procession, and whenever I saw anyone I knew, and I know most of the people in Cartersfield, I said: ‘Join the march’ in my most ferocious schoolmaster’s voice, and as most of them had been my pupils at some time or another, quite a lot of them were sufficiently frightened or awed or something that they did join in, so that we had a pretty impressive Cartersfield group banning the bomb by the time we came out the other side of the town. I don’t know what had got into me, but when they came up to us—the big-wigs, I mean—and said: ‘O.K., you’ve had your glory, Cartersfield, back with the boys now,’ I was about to brain them with the banner, but Harry said: ‘That’s right, and thanks a lot.’ So off we went to the back, or rather, since the back was so far away, to the middle or thereabouts, in with a lot of students from (it had to be) Reading University. By this time I was cooling down, and beginning to realize just what a fool I’d made of myself, but then the procession stopped for a moment, and I had a good look at it.

All through the town, and up the hill over the crossroads, the march beetled along, people singing, waving, shuffling, striding, as though there wasn’t a by-pass round Cartersfield at all, and the life had come back to it again, and things mattered—you know what I mean? For a moment I nearly cried, and it takes a lot to make me even think of wanting to do that, Hiroshima or no Hiroshima, but luckily the procession started up again then, and the fools around us started singing ‘Free beer for all the workers’, which made me very angry indeed. If there’s one thing that makes me ache with rage it’s intellectuals pretending to love the proletariat.

Well, after about another twenty minutes of staggering along under this banner of Harry’s which was no light weight, let me tell you, and like a barrage balloon when the wind blew even softly, we stopped for a break. And here Harry really did himself proud. When the procession moved off again he stood at the side of the road with four vast boxes of Easter eggs, giving one to every single man, woman and child on that march. I watched him for a bit, wondering what he was going to do next. Because I’d had enough. I hate physical exercise of any sort, and I’d already walked farther than I’d any intention of doing, and I was going home to face my shame. So, as the end of the procession began to move past him, I went over to Harry and said: ‘Coming home now, boy?’

He was flushed and excited, like a twelve-year-old at Christmas, unwrapping the presents he’s given, because he can’t bear to wait for the happiness with which they will be received. And when he saw what I meant he looked as though he’d just seen his favourite toy smashed in front of his face and said he supposed so.

And then I did something which maddens me still every time I think about it. I go white with rage and practically fall asleep if someone even mentions it casually. Because if there’s one thing—no, I’ve said that before—but, really, this time I mean it—if there’s one thing that I find quite intolerable in my fellow human-beings, it’s the way they step out of character to be heroic and noble, or even unheroic and ignoble, depending on the character. And I am not the sort of person who does this sort of thing even in my dreams, ever, and I have absolutely no intention of ever doing anything of the kind again, and before I tell you about it I want that to be understood quite clearly.

I looked at him suffering pangs of longing, split right down the middle between profit and honour, and I said: ‘Why don’t you go on, Harry? I’ll go and mind your bloody shop for you.’

And he looked at me as though I was Lenin arriving at the Finland Station, or the Archangel Gabriel, or some other figure of religious literature, and he didn’t say a word, he just grabbed his banner and ran off to join the end of the procession. Not so much as a thank-you.

‘You bastard!’ I shouted after him, already shuddering with rage again, but I don’t think he heard, unfortunately.

And that, since you wanted to know, is how I came to serve for the first and last time in my life behind the counter of a shop.