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sound cannot travel through a vacuum - so that if the vacuum could be made the airship could get through. So the propellers at the front of the airship were put into reverse; they went faster and faster; the propellers at the back drove the airship forwards; somehow or other the propellers at the front created a vacuum! And so Captain Steadfast and his crew got through. And they destroyed the evil demon and rescued the girl; and people on earth stopped hopping up and down as if they were demented.
    My father and I were quite carried away by this. We sat side by side staring at the ceiling.
    I said 'But could that sort of thing be true?'
    He said 'Well, it is true that sound cannot exist in a vacuum.'
    I said 'What about light?'
    He said 'Ah yes, light.' Then - 'What we want to do, perhaps, is to make a vacuum in our heads, and then light might break in; and then it might not even have to be us who break through!'
    We sat with our arms round each other staring at the universe. Sometimes there did seem to be outlines of dark light around the objects in the room in front; as if we were through to a strange planet.
    At night I would lay in bed and would try both to think and to stop thinking of all this: there were all these lumps of light coming down - had it not been proved that light had weight? a hundred and sixty tons of it fell on the earth each day! - so what would become of us? Would we be crushed? Would we be made full of holes like a sieve? Was it true that if one made one's mind a blank then such images might fall through? There would be bits of gold and diamonds at the bottom of the sieve.
    Sometimes at night there would be the sounds of my mother's and father's voices across the passage: my mother was nagging at my father; my father was being so reasonable; but it seemed to be his very reasonableness, like the demon's unheard voice, that was sending my mother mad. My mother would shout 'You think I don't know about the beautiful things you talk about with Eleanor!' My father would say indeed I would like you to be interested in

    the beautiful things I talk about with Eleanor.' Then occasionally (as almost happened with Captain Steadfast's airship) my father's patience would break; he would roar and rage at my mother. I would want to shout - But the vacuum! The vacuum! Then I would think - Do we each of us have our evil demons and our Captain Steadfasts in our universes? I would try to go to sleep. But how do you make your mind a vacuum in order to go to sleep? I thought -There must be some trick: how does it happen, just when you are not looking, that you get tipped over on to another universe.
    Of course, there were a myriad other things going on in my life at this time: there was my work with Miss Henne; the tea-parties at the houses of friends. But it was my relationship with my father that was like a thread through the maze; it was because of this, of course, that I remember it; one does not remember what is random in a maze.
    There are two more instances that pick themselves out from the oddities of this time - the thread of memory bumping me into this or that corner of the maze.
    The first was to do with the occasion that became known in history as the Kapp Putsch: this occurred in Berlin in March 1920. There had for some time been rumours - coincidental with the excitement over the confirmation of Einstein's General Theory - of a possible coup by right-wing militarists: these were objecting to what they saw as a too easy acceptance of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In particular there was said to be danger from General von Liittwitz whose troops did in fact move in from where they had been encamped in the suburbs; members of the socialist government under President Ebert fled to Stuttgart; a new government was proclaimed with at its head a conservative politician called Kapp. But then there was the question - as indeed had occurred before to other revolutionaries - what are troops to do after they have