Free For the Time Being by Dirk Bogarde

just talk to these women and they talk right back and we have a conversation and that releases them, you know? Stuck on that base, hostile women in the woods … well, they have the PX and movies and the medics and so on … but they don’t feel at home in the United Kingdom. They never go out. It’s spooky and sad. Those hostile people just outside the wire.’
    I nod and agree. What else?
    â€˜I say to them when I visit, now look: there are so many wonderful compensations you got. You have your husbin, you have your children. I mean that is just so right, so traditional, so wonderful.
    Now then. You have your husbin, you have kids, and they all love you, and that is one helluva deal. Do you know that? You want proof of that? Well, the very first proof of that love is the very first gift your kid gives you. Know what? That gift which the child will offer to the giver of life. You, its mother. And you know what that is? It is shit.’
    She sat back and glittered at me in the dim room, triumphantly.
    â€˜Defecation is the very first “thank you” from your child. It is just automatic. I think it’s kinda marvellous. Uplifting. Of course, in our terms we’d say it was an automatic reflex, but I say that it’s the deep psychological desire, buried way deep down in the subconscious of the new-born, that insists on giving thanks for our life. Isn’t that a marvellous thought? Sure you won’t take mint tea? I’m making a fresh pot.’
    I left Mae-Ellen’s a little earlier than she had intended. But enough was enough. I pleaded the walk home and having to take it easy, and some shopping I’d remembered I had to do before the shop closed. I got out exhausted and grateful for the air outside.
    The King’s Road was still the King’s Road. By that I mean that I first walked it in wonderment at seventeen and now, at seventy, it still has the same effect. In some strange way, it still
feels
the same. I still
feel
seventeen. I am surrounded by familiars, altered but recognizable. I said, earlier on, that I walked with ghosts. And so I do. Not all of whom I knew, or even met, but they must still be about. Oscar Wilde coming from Tite Street, Lillie Langtry going up to the Cadogans’, Carlyle hurrying to his tobacconist, Augustus John in sagging dressing gown off to the Five Bells.
    My parents were here too; when they were young and I just born. Walking down to the Good Intent, or to the Blue Cockatoo on the Embankment. Henry Moore bought his packets of vine-charcoal from the shop on the corner; and Graham and Kathleen Sutherland, elegance far beyond anything I had ever seen before. And Danuta must bounce along somewhere. I can see her now, heavy Polish breasts jiggling under her loose shirt, broad feet in flat sandals striding to the squalid little studio she had in a crumbling terrace of Regency houses where the fire station stands today. ButI very well remember her removing my virginity there, on the rug before her plopping gas-fire, and casting it, and finally me, aside as contemptuously as an old jacket. In 1939 she went home to Warsaw for the summer recess. And that was that.
    So I am not unfamiliar with my area. It fits me, and even though the players have altered out of all recognition, the game, as it were, remains the same. There are black faces now among the white. Bedraggled girls in black tights and Doc Martens, shaven-headed youths crashing the kick-starts of their motor-bikes. There is a stink of greasy food, of cheap coffee, the beat of heavy metal thumping in the air. All, really, familiar. Different from the people we were at their age. But, remember, at their age I was making birdcages for a linnet.
    The shop is still open. I take a wire basket and wander in, wondering what to eat for my supper. A fraught business. A tin of soup? Easy. No mess. One dish to wash. Perhaps some ham? Cold ham and boiled potatoes. Perhaps with a bit of chutney. I was,