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twenty minutes of exhaustion to make myself understood.
    Once they’d grasped the situation they made short work of fetching the car, patching the inner tube that was still worth patching, and selling me a replacement for the other; but even so, it meant that I had to kick my heels in Neustadt for two hours, and it was past six when I got on my way again.
    All it meant was that I should have to drive later than I’d intended. I put up the best speed I could, but towards evening that road is infested with enormous lorries, eight-wheelers and worse, and they drive hell for leather, and take an age to pass, so the whole run into Würzburg was tough on my nerves, even apart from the falling dusk, which seems to come inordinately early there by English standards, and the frequent and fierce thunder showers.
    If I hadn’t already been somewhat daunted I don’t suppose I should have picked up the hitchhiker with the Union Jack on his rucksack who thumbed me hopefully outside the village of Enzlar. He had a beard, and glasses, and hobnailed boots, a discoloured windjacket, and about half a ton of impedimenta dangling round him, camera, tape-recorder, everything you can think of. I suppose he was rising fifty, and deadly serious. Not my type. But he was advertising the fact that he was British, which meant that he could at least talk English to me, and prevent me from going completely melancholy for want of a human voice.
    He talked! The first thing he told me was that he’d come all across Europe without walking more than two miles at a stretch, which made me want to ask why he needed the boots. I’d hoped he was going all the way to Aschaffenburg or Frankfurt, but he was only bound for Kitzingen, on the near side of Würzburg.
    â€˜Where are you spending the night?’ he asked me, hoping I’d stay in Kitzingen, too, and take him on with me next day.
    â€˜Hanau,’ I told him firmly. It might have been sensible to draw in my horns and settle for somewhere nearer, but I was determined not to alter my plans just for a run of bad luck.
    I knew what he’d say, and he said it. Straight out of the guidebook. For that matter, it’s the only thing there is to say about Hanau. ‘Ah, the birthplace of the brothers Grimm!’ he said, beaming at me with queer, light, opaque eyes; and he began to talk about the folklore of fairy tales with the gusto of a devotee.
    I’d always thought the Grimm fairy stories a pretty grisly collection of horror comics in their own right, but this fellow knew exactly how sinister they really are when considered in all their implications. And what he knew he meant to share with me. The sky sank low over our heads, copper and lead in mottled patches, the darkness came down hours before its time, and the thunder rolled along mile for mile with us on our left quarter, and slashed at us with vicious scuds of rain. And this fellow talked. Like a book.
    â€˜You know, of course, what the dwarfs and ogres and gnomes of fairy stories really are, don’t you? They date from the dawn of history, when new races were sweeping westward out of the Danube valley. They’re the new people’s view of the old, the survivors of the old civilization depressed and submerged into decline, pushed out of the fat lands into the hills and forests, where living is hard and precarious. They’re the relics of submerged peoples, dispossessed gods, outmoded cults. The stories turn them into grotesques, shrunken in stature, ugly, wicked, because the people who made the stories were afraid of them still. They made them malevolent because they knew they’d given them reason for hatred, reason to be inimical and vengeful. And they are malevolent – they do hate – they are inimical and vengeful. Because they have reason to be.’
    His eyes glowed at me gleefully. He talked as if the old war were still going on, and all the guerrillas of innumerable doomed races