Half-an-hour of this kind of thing produced in me a strong desire for peace and seclusion. A taxi would have solved my difficulty (had I been able to solve the taxi difficulty first), but George himself anticipated me by suddenly holding up a private car and asking for a lift. I could have smiled at this further lapse had not the owner, a detestable club acquaintance whom I had been trying to keep at a distance for years, been the driver. He was delighted, and I was borne away conscious of twenty years' work undone by a single stroke.
Peace and seclusion at the club afforded no relief however. George was really very trying at tea. He accused the bread because the crust had not a hairy exterior (generally accumulated by its conveyance in a blanket or sandbag). He ridiculed the sugar ration—I don't believe he has ever been short in his life; and the resources of the place were unequal to the task of providing tea of sufficient strength to admit of the spoon being stood upright in it—a consistency to which, he said, he had grown accustomed. When I left him he was bullying the hall-porter of the club for a soft-nosed pencil; ink, he explained, being an abomination.
I also saw him pay 2½d. for a Daily Mail.
I got a letter from George just before he went back. He patronized me delightfully—seemed more than half a Colonial already. He said he was glad to have seen us all again, but was equally glad to be getting back, as he was beginning to feel a little homesick. He hinted we were dull dogs and treated people we didn't know like strangers. Didn't we ever cheer up? He became very unjust, I thought, when he said that France was at war, but that we had only an Army and Navy.
Incidentally I had to pay twopence on the letter, the postman insisting that George's neat signature in the bottom left-hand corner of the envelope was an insufficient substitute for a penny stamp.
"The raiders came in three suctions."—Evening News.
So that was what blocked the Tubes.