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Since then the whole generation has had to find out how to live by trial and error, with the main result that it has learnt what little it does know very thoroughly indeed. It has found out from bitter personal experience the consequences of most of the commoner sins and the value of many conventions. Above all things it has learnt to watch, to hesitate, and never to be surprised by the worst.

War reminiscences told on the sea-wall or on the benches outside the pubs, or published in books and coming round in the library vans, filled us with a horror of war which far outstripped any evangelical horror of hell, and twenty years of vigorous anti-war propaganda had given us an impressionist picture of modern warfare whose lack of detail could be augmented by the vilest nightmare each individual mind could conceive.

Moreover, from the beginning something had had to be done about our material fortunes, for very few of us were in the position in 1918 to go on with the programme for which we had been prepared in '11 and '12. My own father, for instance, gave up trying to keep up our big old house down the road in late '17, and we all went to London to live in a top flat in Bayswater, where we felt like pigeons in a sealed dovecot. It was close on fifteen years before we younger ones, by solid hard co-operative working, got back again to home ground, and by that time someone had let the house go to ruin and we had to come here, a little further down the road, to the Old Doctor's house in Auburn.