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lunched.
    The Managing Director, Mr. Norman Evans, he was very nice to me. I think he must have heard about my trouble, becausewhen I said that I’d been back two days and I’d had personal things to see to first, he said quickly, “I know, Cutter. Things get a bit tangled up when one’s away for a long time. I’m very sorry indeed.” And then he went on to talk about the work, so that I didn’t have to answer.
    The business was all upset, of course, because it had been expanded greatly in the war years with war orders, and now those had come to an end and it was having to contract again. It’s easy enough to expand an aviation business, but it’s bloody difficult to get it back to what it was before. Mr. Evans couldn’t have been nicer. “I want to tell you how much I appreciate the job you did in Egypt,” he said. “We’ve got to make a lot of changes now. What I want you to do is to take over the whole of our repair and servicing side in the British Isles—here, and at Bristol and at Belfast.”
    It was a first-class job, of course, as good as any I could hope to get. I was only thirty-one years old. “The main office would be here, sir, I suppose?” I asked. “I’d do most of the work from here, and travel to Bristol arid Belfast?”
    “That’s right,” he said. “I thought you might take over Mr. Holden’s old office. I’ll have that room next to it divided into two, and you can have your secretary in there unless you want her in the room with you.” Then he went on to talk about the salary, which was good, and as we talked I knew that it would never work. Unless I came to work each day by helicopter I’d have to use the same streets and the same Underground and the same passages and roads about the works that I had walked with Beryl.
    I said presently, “I’ve got a month’s leave due to me, sir. Can I take that now?”
    “That’s right,” he said. He glanced at the calendar. “Oh, well, that takes us up to Christmas. Suppose we say you’ll start immediately after that.”
    I thanked him, and agreed, and then he took me for a walk around the works and we talked about the layout of the place, and what parts we would shut down or use as stores, and how the rest of it should be reorganized. I had only half my mind on the job. At every corner there was some new place I had forgottenabout where I had walked and talked with Beryl in the lunch hour. When finally Mr. Evans asked me to stay and lunch in the canteen I couldn’t take it any longer, and I said that if he’d excuse me I’d get off down to my home in Southampton that afternoon.
    As I walked down to the Underground, looking furtively around in case there were some of the Cousins family about, I knew it was impossible. I couldn’t go back there to work. I’d have been off my rocker in a fortnight.
    I got my bag and paid my bill at the hotel, and went to Waterloo and caught a train down to Southampton. I got there in the late afternoon, and took a bus to the gasworks, and walked home from there. Our street, between the gasworks and the docks, hadn’t suffered much in the blitz; old Mrs. Tickle’s house had gone, and Mrs. Tickle with it, but that was the only damage actually in our street, and that had been done before I went to Egypt.
    I was surprised at how small it all looked now. I knew it was dirty, because you can’t keep houses clean between the gasworks and the docks, but I had not realized till then how small the houses were, how small and mean the shops. As I got near our house I could see that an upstairs window was broken and shut up with windowlite tacked over the frame; they had written to tell me about that, done by a flying bomb that fell into Montgomery Street in July 1944. I thought that while I was home I’d build up the frame and get a bit of glass and do that for them, even if it was the landlord’s job.
    I went in at the street door that opened straight into the living room and there was Ma laying the