After a while, she was strutting her way back across the yard, watched every quiver and shake of the way by Mort and me. I was to see a lot more of her, for urgent orders that needed to be personally delivered became a lot more common, and in fact began to occur every day, usually at around eleven o’clock, just after smoke-o. Mort would wait by the door of the shed and when he saw her coming would return to his seat behind the table in the corner.
 “Go and chalk five hundred lengths of 3/4 round, will yer son.”
    I wondered how Mort could know what the order was before she actually arrived with it. But it was always best to have something to do, so I took my chalk and went and marked the ends of five hundred round steel rods in the stack on the fartherest side of the yard. When I got back I discovered that the shed door had been bolted from the inside.
    There was nothing to do but moon across and sit on the wheel of the crane, until finally the door was opened and Judy Simmons emerged, giggling, and scurried off across the yard. Then Mort came out, the pink order document flapping in his hand, and his face flushed to much the same colour:
 “Right, lets get this.”
 “Five hundred round?”
 “No. Seventeen half inch flat.”

I had also arrived at the end of the great age of ancient epics, a decade of colossal spectacles which, for me, had been a delight throughout, even the crummy ones. Barabbas by Par Lagerkvist, a Swedish writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1951, the year after he wrote this book. It describes the plight of a man in a very unique position—he finds that a God has been executed instead of himself—and wanders through many hardships and trials, dazed by the experience. A load of religious rubbish. Don’t read it. See the marvellously gloomy epic movie made from it instead which does it far more justice than it deserves. If nothing else, it boasts a brilliantly filmed eclipse of the sun at the beginning—a real one shot in Nice.
    Of interest though is the idea that Barabbas might have marked the end of religiosity as a valid subject for popular drama. Can it be true that, in the same year (1962), the western and the religious drama both died—the real mythology and the invented one (assign the tags according to your preference) fading away together while in October the USA and USSR stood toe-to-toe, ready to blast us all to oblivion? Is there a connection? Is it that humanity at large suddenly matured as a result of that crisis, and was forced to adopt a more adult attitude to life if we were to survive?