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he went into the “Sun” with the others he could never drink much if anything and that was why the downward tufts that covered his mouth were like white swan’s feathers. As I remember him and his breathing it occurs to me that what he had was lung cancer; and I notice with a certain wry amusement my instant effort to fit that uninformed guess into a pattern. But then I remember that all patterns have broken one after another, that life is random and evil unpunished. Why should I link that man, that child with this present head and heart and hands? I can call to mind a technical crime of this period, for I stole tuppence from the old man once—bought liquorice for which I still have a passion—and got clean away with it. But those were days of terrible and irresponsible innocence. I should be literary if I shaped my story to show how those two pennies have lain on the dead eyes of my spiritual sight for I am clear of them. Then why do I write? Do I still expect a pattern? What am I looking for?
    Our bed downstairs was within an arm’s reach of the chest of drawers and our alarm clock stood near the edge. It was an early make, round, on three short legs, and it held up a bell like an umbrella. It would shatter Ma into wakefulness when she had to go out charring in the early dark and my sleeping ears would note the noise and dream on. Sometimes if the night had been long and thick, Ma would take no notice or groan and bury herself. Then the clock woke me. All night it had ticked on, repressed, itsmadness held and bound in; but now the strain burst. The umbrella became a head, the clock beat its head in frenzy, trembling and jerking over the chest of drawers on three legs until it reached a point where the chest would begin to drum in sympathy, sheer madness and hysteria. Then I would wake Ma and feel very business-like and virtuous till she rose in the dark like a whale. But during the night if I woke myself or could not get to sleep the clock was always present and varied as I felt. Sometimes and most often it was friendly and placid; but if I had my seldom night terrors, then the clock had them, too. Time was inexorable then, hurrying on, driving irresistibly towards the point of madness and explosion.
    Once, near midnight, I woke with a jolt because the clock had stopped so that I was menaced and defenceless. I was frightened and I had to find Ma. There was the same compulsion on me as there is now before this paper, a compulsion irrational and deep. I fell out of bed, went scrambling and crying through the door and into the alley, along and across the gutter to the back door of the pub. There was no light from the panes of glass. The pub was blind. I scrabbled and reached up for the brass handle and swung there.
    “Ma! Ma!”
    The brass turned under my hand and pulled me into the back snug, still half-swinging. I squatted on the floor and there were shadowy people looking down at me, shadows that moved a little in the dull light from the fire. Ma was sitting on most of a settle facing the door and she held a little glass buried in her hand. The place was larger than daylight. Now I know they were only a few neighbours drinking after hours—but then they presented thewhole mystery of adult life in one shadowy picture.
    “The clock’s stopped, Ma.”
    I could not convey the impossibility of returning by myself to the dark silence; I was wholly dependent on their understanding and goodwill. They loomed and muttered. So the party broke up without much kindness but some noise so that for two or three minutes the alley rang with comfortable voices. Ma shoo’d me across the gutter and switched on our naked bulb. She took the alarm clock in one hand—it was hidden almost as the glass had been hidden—and held it to the side of her head. She set it down again with a bang and turned to me with a punitive hand lifted.
    And stopped.
    She looked slowly up at the ceiling where our lodger lay a few feet over my head and