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On a wet winter day a journey through some of the poorer sections of the western Midlands conurbation is a shocking experience. As your car moves down street after street of drab brick houses, past dull, smelly pubs and duller shopwindows, occasionally coming upon hideous, lonely churches, you are oppressed. The air is heavy with smoke and the warring smells of industry. Poverty itself is depressing, but here it is not poverty of the pocket but poverty of the soul which shocks. Remorseless conformity and unrestrained commercialism have imposed this on the lively land of Shakespeare. Can great virtues or great vices spring from this smug, stifling environment?

Yet bright spirits are bred. One remembers people met over the years: a sergeant from the Clyde quoting Blake one morning long ago at Arras; Welsh miners singing in the evenings. Out of this can come new Miltons, Newtons, and Blakes. A Nelson of the skies may be studying now at that crumbling school on the corner.

In September 1945 I was riding in from London airport in a bus crowded with Quentin Reynolds (whose presence would crowd an empty Yankee Stadium) and returning soldiers and airmen of the British Army and the Royal Air Force. As we passed through the forlorn streets of Hammersmith, Quentin, brooding on the recent election, said: "These are the people who gave it to Mr. Churchill."