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note and was glad when she said he should not wait for the train, he had too much to see to.
    She knew of one other girl from her grammar school who was going to London, though Sybil Parsons had been in the parallel form and never afriend. But when May got onto the train she saw Sybil in a corner of the first compartment she came to and slid the door back at once, relieved not to be travelling alone after all, though she had not known until this moment that she had minded.
    Sybil Parsons was knitting, the work growing out of a neat cotton bag. She was dressed neatly, in a plaid skirt and white blouse with a high collar. Her coat and a small grey hat were on the rack above her head and it was from the rack, an hour later, that she produced her lunch, a tidy parcel of greaseproof paper tied with string containing egg sandwiches, a neatly cut square of Battenberg cake and two small perfectly round apples.
    May had rejected Bertha’s offer of a packed lunch, saying that she would eat on the train, but when the attendant came down the car calling first service for the restaurant, her nerve failed her entirely and so she sat opposite Sybil Parsons, watching her eat the neat, crustless sandwiches, biting them with small snaps of her front teeth.
    She had a flask of orange squash and when she had drunk some, offered it to May, after first wiping round the rim of the cup with a paper napkin.
    May could taste the weak squash now, feel the cream Bakelite cup against her lips and even the lurch of the train as she drank.
    *
    London. She had been confused and unhappy from the first day, not by the city itself which she liked to walk in by herself, through crowded streets and empty squares, up side alleys and wide open green spaces. For that first term she spent most of her spare time when she was not in classes walking alone, and as it was dark early most of her memories of that time were of lighted shop windows and lighted buses, the smell of smoke and fog on cold air and the faces of strangers looming at her suddenly in the streets.
    No, it was not London.
    She did not enjoy living with other people in the honeycomb of college hall, where she made no friends because she could not learn the language of late-night gossiping and early romance. She shared a room with a pleasant, quiet girl called Frances Lea who was studying biology and left for the labs early and came home late after meetings of Societies – the Folk Dance Society, the Alpine Society, the Methodist Union, the Choral Society. May worked dutifully and attended lectures and walked through London. After some hesitation she joined the Film Society and sat in dark cinemas watching strange art films with subtitles that seemed to her as meaningless as rituals from a lost past. At a meeting she suggested they try Ealing Comedies or films starring Fred Astaire but wasreceived with such coolness that she abandoned the Film Society and went to small cinemas alone to enjoy
Top Hat
and
Spring in Park Lane
.
    She made the best of her own company but when the spring came she joined the tennis club and played in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
    It was around this time that the terrors began. The first had come when she was waiting at a crossing in the Strand, and before the lights changed from red to green she saw the whole stream of traffic as a thunderous army menacing her and the people walking past as hostile enemies with staring eyes which bored through her body and into her soul. The lights changed from red to green perhaps twenty times before she was able to shake herself free of the terror enough to cross the road and then she ran for the safety of the college walls and a dark corner where she stood with her hand on the wall, and the wall seemed to be about to crack and crumble.
    The terror left her as suddenly as it had come, so she decided she must be sickening for an illness and even went to the college nurse who took her temperature, pronounced her well and told her to have a quiet