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My father and I were trying to see into the shop window. A large woman suddenly stepped back into me. She turned her angry face up to mine. “What the bloody hell!” Although only eighteen I was heavy and solidly built, but a moment's scrutiny of my moonface as I raised my cap and stammered out an apology satisfied her curiosity. She and her companion laughed, linked arms and moved off. My father, who had drawn in his breath sharply as if to say something, thought better of it; we went back to my mother at the hotel.
It was November 1915, gloomy and drizzling. We went up to our rooms, ostensibly to change but really to pass the intolerable hours until the evening meal. One cannot make a change of clothes last for ever; I found my parents in their room waiting.
My mother looked up, but her affectionate greeting could not hide her anxiety. There was plenty of time before dinner to continue the family debate. Their debate and mine differed but overlapped in a way which seemed to make each an interference with the other. Their debate, I suspected, was about me, my hostility, misery, resentment and self-centredness. After a while my father picked up the paper and pretended to read; my mother knitted, which was awkward because it did not remove her from the scene enough to relieve my guilt that she was available for conversation; I did not want to talk.
My idiotic cap! Of course the woman, being sensible, laughed. Anyone knew it was a symbol of humiliation – not officer quality. My father had been flabbergasted by my rejection; he was very good at being flabbergasted. But the ‘stout party’ of the kind of Punch joke with which he was familiar differed from the kind who had bumped
into me. Two flabbergasts in one day had put him out; I could feel him wondering which one to start with.
He put down his paper. He had decided to start at the “Cannot possibly understand how you could fail to be accepted by a nation at war” end. The storm beat around my head. Finally it let up enoug