The world I momentarily remembered when I saw King Zog』s name on the poster was so different from the world I live in now that you might have a bit of difficulty in believing I ever beloo it.
I suppose by this time you』ve got a kind of picture of me in your mind—a fat middle-aged bloke with false teeth and a red fad subsciously you』ve been imagining that I was just the same even when I was in my cradle. But forty-five years is a long time, and though some people don』t ge and develop, others do. I』ve ged a great deal, and I』ve had my ups and downs, mostly ups. It may seem queer, but my father would probably be rather proud of me if he could see me now. He』d think it a wonderful thing that a son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with a bathroom. Even now I』m a little above my in, and at other times I』ve touched levels that we should never have dreamed of in those old days before the war.
Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the answer will be 『Which war?』 In my case the never-never land that people are thinking of when they say 『before the war』 might almost be before the Boer War. I was born in 『93, and I actually remember the outbreak of the Boer War, because of the first-class row that Father and Uncle Ezekiel had about it. I』ve several other memories that would date from about a year earlier than that.
The very first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin chaff. You went up the stone passage that led from the kit to the shop, and the smell of sainfoin got stronger all the way. Mother had fixed a wooden gate in the doorway to prevent Joe and myself (Joe was my elder brother) from getting into the shop. I still remember standing there clutg the bars, and the smell of sainfoin mixed up with the damp plastery smell that beloo the passage. It wasn』t till years later that I somehow mao crash the gate a into the shop when nobody was there. A mouse that had been having a go at one of the meal-bins suddenly plopped out and raween my feet. It was quite white with meal. This must have happened when I was about six.
When you』re very young you seem to suddenly bee scious of things that have been under your nose for a long time past. The things round about you swim into your mind o a time, rather as they do when you』re waking from sleep. For insta was only when I was nearly four that I suddenly realized that we owned a dog. Nailer, his name was, an old white English terrier of the breed that』s go nowadays. I met him uhe kit table and in some way seemed to grasp, having only learnt it that moment, that he beloo us and that his name was Nailer. In the same way, a bit earlier, I』d discovered that beyond the gate at the end of the passage there lace where the smell of sainfoin came from. And the shop itself, with the huge scales and the wooden measures and the tin shovel, and the white lettering on the window, and the bullfin its cage—which you couldn』t see very well even from the pavement, because the window was always dusty—all these things dropped into pla my mind one by one, like bits of a jig-saw puzzle.
Time goes on, you get stronger on ys, and by degrees you begin to get a grasp of geography. I suppose Lower Binfield was just like any other market town of about two thousand inhabitants. It was in Oxfordshire—I keep saying WAS, you notice, though after all the place still exists—about five miles from the Thames. It lay in a bit of a valley, with a low