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grammar lesson.
    He asked, ‘Is she happy with you there?’
    ‘She seems all right,’ I said.
    ‘I don’t want her to feel lonely – ever. Does she speak of me sometimes?’
    ‘Oh yes,’ I told him. ‘She’s always wondering when you’ll turn up. She listens to footsteps.’
    ‘I think,’ he said with a kind of humble doubt, ‘that she’s a bit fond of me. In her own way of course.’
    That tone of his came back to my mind when she said to me in her turn (I had just given her the envelope ‘with his love’), ‘I do think he likes me a lot – in his own way.’ They neither of them seemed to be quite sure of the other’s way. She added, ‘You like him, don’t you?’
    We seemed, between the three of us in those days, to be doing a lot of thinking.
    ‘You’ve got to get to know the Captain,’ she repeated and she spoke in such an earnest tone that I can remember the exact phrase she used to this day. It was as if for a moment she had let me into the important secret which would help to explain what was already a mysterious past and any future, equally mysterious, which was likely to come.
    (4)
    As for the immediate future – well, perhaps not really the immediate, for I cannot remember now what length of time passed before we saw the Captain again and I have no memory of his return. Was it after weeks or months? Never mind, my memory leaps ahead to an evening when he took me to a movie house in order to see a film – it was I think called
King Kong
. (It was by that time already an ancient film even to my young eyes, but I remember how the Captain remarked to me as he bought the tickets, ‘In this old flea-house you can see all the old films, and the old films are always the best.’) There were few people in the cinema, for it was very early evening, but he took great care about our seats – a little too close for my eyesight and I asked whether we couldn’t go back a few rows. The answer was ‘No’, firmly stated, and I assumed that the Captain had become short-sighted with age, for a man in his forties was to me as old as the pyramids. King Kong, if it was King Kong, clambered about the skyscrapers with a blonde girl – whose name I don’t remember – in his arms. Every man’s hand was against him – police, soldiers, even firemen I seem to remember. The girl kicked a bit, but she soon became quiescent.
    ‘It’s a great story,’ the Captain whispered into my right ear.
    ‘Yes.’
    I believe that in the story the authorities – whoever they were – even brought planes into action against King Kong, who naturally interested me much more than the burden he carried.
    ‘Why doesn’t he drop her?’ I asked.
    I suppose I sounded very heartless to the Captain, for he replied harshly, ‘He loves her, boy. Can’t you understand that – he loves her?’ But of course I couldn’t understand. I had watched her kicking King Kong and to me love was more or less the same thing as liking, except that it might involve kissing, and kissing to me had little importance. Kissing had been something imposed on me by my aunt, but surely all the same neither liking nor loving could involve kicking. One kicked an enemy, in order to hurt. I realized that well enough, although I had never desired to hurt anyone except a boy called Twining who had made my life miserable as an Amalekite at a period which now began to seem years away.
    An odd thing came to my notice when the lights went on. I saw that the Captain had tears in his eyes. I felt sorry for King Kong, but not to that extent. After all he was the stronger and he could have kicked back – as I couldn’t with Twining who was two years older. I assumed that it was something else which had disturbed the Captain and I asked him, ‘Is anything the matter?’
    ‘The poor chap,’ he said, ‘all the world was against him.’
    ‘I liked King Kong, but why did he carry the girl around all that time when she didn’t like him?’
    ‘How do you know