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We were not alone in this sort of experience by any means, and it is an agonising business to be jerked out of one scheme into another when one is thirteen or so. Agony of that kind at that age generates power, and the present popular theory that it is a sin to be rich is due, I fancy, not only to the fundamental urge towards universal equality, but also to our passionate efforts at self-defence at that time when it was still a sin to be poor.

That evening in the yard the prospect of another war, of the generation after us going the same way as the one before us, was not only horrible but seemed hardly to be borne.

It was not as though we had made no progress. Looking round, it occurred to me that although none of us was rich we certainly had all recovered. We were all, after considerable effort, living something like the lives we wanted to live in the place we felt was our natural home.

Sam was the youngest of us, at thirty-one. He was born in Auburn, had never left it for long, and was married, with two remarkably fine children under five.