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flap of the laying box, and fill a bowl with warm brown speckled eggs. They were not fertile, because there was no cockerel. There had once been a cockerel, but he had strayed too near the woods at dusk and met a fox, and left only a draggle of feathers to tell the tale. Observing that the hens seemed if anything rather relieved by his departure, we had not replaced him. The eggs, then, were innocent of life: they contained no baby chickens. Eating them was not an act of murder.
    I put this to Simon as we washed our plates one evening. He considered it carefully.
    â€˜It’s a very strong argument,’ he said. ‘On rational grounds, I cannot answer it.’
    I waited.
    â€˜However,’ he said, ‘perhaps there is another kind of answer. “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not understand.” Would you accept that?’
    It was absolutely fair. It was also a challenge. His blue eyes rested on me, to see if I would take it up. He was asking me to make an imaginative leap. No one outside the group, of course, would have accepted that answer for a moment. I examined it and saw its profundity.
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, that will do.’
    The eggs, uncollected, were eaten by rats until the discouraged hens ceased laying.
    Non-interference went much further than abstention from involvement in the grosser forms of killing. Size means nothing. Therefore if it is wrong to kill a bullock for its meat, it is equally wrong to kill a caterpillar on a lettuce. Accordingly, before vegetables were picked from the kitchen garden any feeding insects were carefully removed from them first. Often it was impossible to do this without damaging the insect unless one removed part of the plant as well, and thus the lettuce leaves that appeared on the table were apt to be a very odd shape and full of holes. The process was time-consuming: sometimes Dao and Coral would spend well over an hour preparing enough lettuce-lattice for lunch. This, of course, was not important. And, as Coral pointed out, the insects had as much right to a meal as we had, and how unkind to deprive them of it when it was really quite easy to tear off a small piece of leaf. I wondered whether city-bred Coral would speak in quite the same way if she had herself dug the seed-bed, sown the seed, thinned and watered the seedlings and carefully, on a cool evening, transplanted the young lettuces. I regretted the thought immediately: it was not how one felt that mattered but what one did;and personal knowledge of a thing often made one unfit to judge it.
    A consciousness of the immense gulf between the things taken for granted by the group and the things taken for granted by the world outside sometimes made my head reel. Returning home from work one day I found Simon, Alex, Dao and Coral earnestly bending over a sack of flour with matchboxes in their hands. The flour had been given to Simon and Dao by a friendly baker whose gift had subsequently been found wanting: there were weevils in it. Simon, Alex, Dao and Coral were catching the weevils in matchboxes, and proposed to take them out into the woods with enough flour to ensure immediate survival. After that, it was up to the weevils.
    I went outside quickly before my smile was seen. For a long time I wrestled alternately with my sense of humour and my sense of logic, trying to force them to come to an agreement. They would not, I simply could not bring them to occupy the same mental space. I still had not resolved the problem a week later, when Simon found me on the point of lighting a bonfire with a pile of rotten floorboards. He looked at one of the boards carefully.
    â€˜It has woodworm,’ he said.
    â€˜Yes,’ I said brightly. ‘That’s why I’m going to burn it.’
    â€˜But there is woodworm in it,’ he said.
    I opened my mouth, and shut it again as I understood.
    â€˜Some people think it matters,’ said Simon. ‘Some people