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afternoon in his room threading minute cords through little blocks upon the yards and securing them with tiny dabs of seccotine. He was pleased with his work. His imagination showed the ship to him as she would have been; she became real to him, magnified. Studying the bluff lines of her hull, he felt that he could hear the bubbling of the bow wave at her stem, see the long trail of eddies in her wake. He could feel her deck heaving gently beneath his feet. He could hear the yards creaking and complaining as she rolled. To him she was a real little ship. He was immensely pleased with her.
    Presently he went down to tea, then got his car and drove into Portsmouth. He had one or two small items of shopping to do. For one thing he wanted an electric torch: he was tired of falling over bicycles each time he parked his car. But torches were scarce. He tried three shops without success; the black-out had created a demand that had swept torches off the market.
    Finally he went into a large chemist’s and stood looking around him for a moment, uncertainly. It did not look a likely place to buy a torch. It was largely devoted to soap and perfumes, and all manner of feminine cosmetics. He stood irresolute, a tall figure in an Air Force blue greatcoat, pink-cheeked and rather embarrassed.
    A girl came up to him from the beauty stand. “Can I get you anything, sir?”
    He said: “I’m not quite sure. I wanted an electric torch.”
    “I think we’re out of torches. We have lamps.”
    He brightened. “A lamp would do. Could I see them?” He followed her down the shop. “I didn’t really think you’d keep that sort of thing. Like trying to buy a lipstick at the ironmonger’s.”
    She said: “We always keep a fancy line.” She opened a carton. “This is the only lamp we have at the moment.”
    It was a moulded glass rabbit with red eyes. It stood upon a round chromium base with a little handle; when you turned the switch a bulb lit up inside it and the rabbit glowed with light.
    The pilot said: “My God, that’s wizard. Just look at its eyes! What sort of battery does it use?”
    He made her take it to bits to show him; then he bought it and took it away, very pleased with himself. He went on to a cinema and sat for a couple of hours watching a gangster melodrama; at about nine o’clock he was in the snack-bar of the Royal Clarence Hotel.
    It was the busiest hour of the day; the long room was crammed with people. Most of them were young, most of the men were in uniform. There were naval officers, a fair sprinkling of naval surgeons, a good many sub-lieutenants and lieutenants of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, the Wavy Navy. There were lieutenants and captains of Marines, and anti-aircraft-gunners, and young Sapper officers. There were young Air Force pilots with the drooping silver wings upon their chests, and young Fleet Air Arm pilots with the golden wings upon their sleeve.
    The room was filled with smoke, a smell of grilled food and a great babel of conversation. There were two bars serving drinks, and a snack bar with stools arranged around a grill. The centre of the room was filled with tables and the walls were lined with settees. There were perhaps a hundred people there, all talking and smoking and eating and drinking.
    Chambers took off his coat and hung it on an overloaded stand and pushed his way to the bar where Mona was at work. There were two other barmaids with her, all immensely busy. She gave him a swift smile and served him deftly with a gin and Italian.
    He said: “Dancing?”
    She smiled brilliantly and nodded. He took his glass and elbowed backwards from the crowd into a corner.
    A man behind his back said: “We never got that signal. I got it from Purvis in T.87. He flashed it to me by lamp round about one o’clock.”
    Chambers turned: there was a little knot of R.N.V.R. officers standing beneath a blue poster warning them not to discuss naval matters in public places. He judged them to be off