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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 gas works, and walked home from there. Our street, between the gas works 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 realised 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.