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brighter. As a result, the pre-Second World War inhabitants of Lukeborough were bitter about the town’s new population, and the newcomers swore that it was the last place God made and were only anxious to get away from it for ever as soon as possible.
    Lukeborough’s growth during the last forty years had been due entirely to its commerce; all its large new buildings were factories, and its small ones were bungalows or rows of neat, boring little houses built to house the factory workers. There was not even a core of gracious country-town architecture buried in the heart of the place, for it had only been a sprawling village with a strong Dissenting tradition, and all that was left of the village was one or two weather-boarded cottages in the High Street which had been turned into cafés and wireless shops, and the Corn Exchange, a hall built in 1882. The sky seemed to be grey for five days out of the seven above Lukeborough, and when it was blue it only stirred in the hearts of the few romantics in the town an echo of loveliness, an aching longing, as they glanced away over the low, mean houses and unpicturesque streets towards the clear, ethereal turquoise heaven.
    But although nine out of ten of the inhabitants of Lukeborough were permanently cross and on the defensive, this does not mean that they were discontented with their lot, and pined to make Lukeborough the Athens of North Bedfordshire, flashing with concrete mansions and gracious with gardens where civic pride grew like flowers. So long as buses ran regularly, and the electric light and gas worked properly, and the streets were kept moderately clean, and there were up-to-date films at the Roxy and the Lukeborough Plaza, they did not ask for much else; and if the evacuees and the war-workers could have been removed overnight, their pipkin of happiness would have been full. Life certainly did run on a very low voltage in Lukeborough; we pride ourselves on being able to perceive romance and beauty in the common scene, but even we are bound to admit that at Lukeborough the streets were usually covered with a thin greasy paste that was not quite mud, the air was usually windless and muggy, and the rise in the ground from one end of the town to the other was about half an inch in five hundred yards.
    Margaret came out of the station on a typical Lukeborough afternoon, grey and moist, and walked along to the end of the road to catch the bus. It was exactly half-past three. She would arrive at her home – which was on the outskirts of the town – in time for tea at four o’clock.
    Her mind was still full of pictures of London, and she felt half-enchanted. She had been there before, but this was the first time that she had been able to wander about by herself and let the spell of the capital sink into her heart. She had stood for half an hour on Chelsea Embankment and watched the sullen pearly river running roughly past the Egyptian massif of the Battersea Power Station, the only beautiful modern building in London; she had seen the rows of ruined houses with their blind windows of black paper, and the charred wood in the doorways of Soho that was like quilted black satin. For a week she had wandered about, searching for a house for her parents to live in, and conscientiously doing what she had been sent by them to London to do; but she had also dreamed more, and found richer food for her imagination, than she had ever found before. London had changed her. The knowledge that in a few weeks she would be returning to London, to live there, was full of wonder and delight.
    The bus was entering a road with small detached redbrick houses standing at the end of long narrow gardens. At the next stop she got down.
    The houses, which were fairly new and three-storied, had names like Coombe Dene, and Wycombe, and Fiona. Margaret pushed open the gate of one called Ilsa, and walked up the path. The windows were draped with soft curtains of pale yellow, frilled at the edges and