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table for tea; it was getting on for five o’clock when Dad would be knocking off at the docks. I put my suitcase down. “I’m back, Ma,” I said quietly.
    She said, “Oh, Tom! You’re looking so brown!” And when she’d kissed me she said, “We know about poor Beryl, Tom. We’re all ever so sorry.”
    “How did you get to know?” I asked.
    “Mrs. Cousins wrote and told us,” she replied. “There was a bit about it in the paper, too. It’s been a sad homecoming for you, boy.”
    “That’s right,” I said heavily. “Nothing to be done about itnow, though, and the least said the better.” She took the hint and she must have dropped a word to Dad, because they never bothered me with questions.
    We had plenty of other things to talk about, though, specially when Dad came home. I’d written to them regularly while I was away, and they’d got young Ted’s school atlas and marked on it all the places that I’d been to, and it made a sort of spider’s web all over the Near East. I had some photographs that I’d collected from time to time, and after we’d done the washing up I got these out and showed them and told them all about it. My sister Joyce came in with her husband Joe Morton who kept the greengrocer’s shop in Allenby Street just round the corner, and he brought a couple of bottles of beer in, and I sat talking and telling them about it all till nearly ten o’clock.
    When they had gone and Dad and I were sitting with a final cigarette before the fire, and Ted and Ma had gone up to bed, Dad said to me, “What comes next, boy?”
    “I don’t know.” I told him about the job I had been offered that morning, and I told him something about my great unwillingness to go back to Morden. He asked, “What’s the pay like?”
    “Nine hundred a year,” I told him.
    He opened his eyes. “That’s twice what I get. Three times what I ever got before the war. You’re getting on in the world, boy.”
    “I know,” I said. “It’s a good job and I’d be a bloody fool to turn it down. But it’s no good working in a place that’s going to send you round the bend.”
    “You’re looking tired,” he said. “You’ll feel different when you’ve had a bit of a rest. How long leave have you got?”
    “They’re giving me a month,” I told him. “Till after Christmas. I haven’t had a day off since I went out to Egypt.”
    He said in wonder, “I never had more’n a week’s holiday in all my life. Are they paying you?”
    “My Cairo pay goes on till the end of December,” I said.
    “Do you spend it all?”
    I shook my head. “I’ve got a good bit saved up.” I hesitated. “I was saving up for furniture.”
    Ted was the only one of the family still living at home; he wasjust eighteen and due to go off for his military service pretty soon. He worked for a firm of contractors and Dad had had him taught to drive, so he was all set to be a truck driver. We had three bedrooms in that house; when I was a boy it had been Dad and Mum upstairs in one room and the girls in the other, and for us boys there was a room downstairs built out behind the scullery in the garden. It was a good big room, and it had need to be because four of us had slept together there when I was a boy, in two beds. Ted had got the girls’ room upstairs, and Dad and Mum had titivated up the big old room for me, colourwashed it and all when they heard I was coming home; they’d gone to a lot of trouble over it, working at it over the week-end. I slept there that night, comforted a bit by memories of childhood, and although I stayed awake some time, I did sleep.
    I went out early next day and got a chisel and a brass-backed saw, and started on that window. I worked on it all that day and the next and got it finished and glazed for them, with a coat of white lead paint. I did a lot of odd jobs round the house in the next few days, and got an electric water heater and installed it over the sink in the scullery for Ma. While I