Rosely ran all the way to the clothing factory, where my mother worked as a machinist, and reported what she had seen. My mother telephoned my father and they both headed for home. But Lennie got there first—I heard Evie gabbling tearfully to him in the lounge room. Then he came hammering on the dunny door.
“Come on, kid. No one’s gonna hurt yer.”
    He just had time for one unsuccessful go at putting his shoulder to the door before my mother came storming into the house.

One day we walked down to Trafalgar Square. The tide was in, and the water reached nearly to the top of the wall on the northern side below the National Gallery. We leant on the balustrade, looking at the water washing around Landseer’s lions, wondering what Nelson would think of the view his statue was getting now...
   Close to our feet, the edge of the flood was fringed with scum and a fascinatingly varied collection of flotsam. Further away, fountains, lamp-posts, traffic-lights and statues thrust up here and there. On the far side, and down as much as we could see of Whitehall, the surface was as smooth as a canal. A few trees stood, and in them sparrows chattered. Starlings had not yet deserted St Martin’s church, but the pigeons were all gone, and on many of their customary perches gulls stood instead. We surveyed the scene and listened to the slip-slop of the water in silence for some minutes. Then I asked:
“Didn’t somebody or other once say: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper?””
Phyllis looked shocked. “Somebody or other!” she exclaimed. “That was Mr. Eliot.!”
“Well, it certainly looks as if he had the idea that time,” I said.
“It’s the job of poets to have the idea,” she told me.
“H’m. It might also be that it is the job of poets to have enough ideas to provide a quotation for any given set of circumstances, but never mind. On this occasion let us honour Mr. Eliot.”…
… “I wouldn’t say that coming to places like this does me any good.”
“There aren’t places like this. This is—was—one of the unique. That’s the trouble. And it’s a bit more than dead, but not yet ready for a museum. Soon, perhaps, we may be able to feel. “Lo! All our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyne”—soon, but not quite yet.”
“You seem to be on unusually happy terms with other people’s muses today. Whose was that?” Phyllis inquired.
“Well,” I admitted, “I’m not sure whether you would class her as a muse at all—more, perhaps, of a bent. Mr. Kipling’s.”
“Oh poor Mr. Kipling. Of course he had a Muse, and she probably played a jolly good game of Hockey too.”
“Cat,” I remarked. “However, let us honour Mr. Kipling.”
There was a pause. It lengthened.
“Mike,” she said, suddenly. “Let’s go away from here—now.”
I nodded. “It might be better. We’ll have to get a little tougher yet, darling, I’m afraid.”
    John Wyndham bobbed up with an absolute beauty, making use of that Tennyson poem while he was about it—The Kraken Wakes. The best thing about it, apart from some great monster stuff, is the character of Phyllis, the narrator’s wife, and their fascinating intellectual relationship, as sexy as all get out despite fifties morality and a prudish author. Anyone who ever thought cerebral people to be cold and unromantic should be made to read this book. I think the reason I never married was because I couldn’t find a woman like her.