sweet Aero bubbles suddenly sickly . . as the Hawker Hart banks hard right, drops into an air pocket, then is lifted, so it soars up and around in a thermal carrying him and PO Murgatroyd out over the downs in a widening circle. Far below there’s the soft seethe of beeches and the azure-and-brown roundel of the dew pond at Chanctonbury Ring. — It’s the flying, Kins, Michael says as they shamble on up the lane that debouches into St Anne’s Gate, not the dying. Dying! Kins snorts. I should’ve thought it was the killing that’d bother you more, Ape — the Ape I knew was a vegetarian beast, not at all happy with killing in the main. . They stroll on along Birdcage Walk and turn into the park. — At the Lyons’ in Trafalgar Square, Michael watches moodily as Sirbert’s sub’ starts to disappear by the forkful into Kins’s ever-moist mouth. There is something, he thinks, rather sickening about the concentration his brother brings to bear on making little bite-sized sandwiches of egg white, bacon and fried bread, then mopping up the yolky grease in. . widening circles. Charles the First’s dainty horse is mounted on a thick cloud of steam and fag smoke — beyond this Michael can make out the Whitehall Theatre, while to the right a barrage balloon bumbles obscenely against the opening of Admiralty Arch as some AA types cack-handedly winch it aloft. Sirbert . . Bumbly . . Kins . . Everyone except me, Michael reflects, gets a nickname. . which was why, when one was bestowed on him at the OTU, he felt his conscience. . crumble a bit more. Links, the chaps call him, or Creamy, by reason of the biscuit that shares his nom de guerre. — The De’Ath Watch, a weekly round-up of cinema visits and sports fixtures, appeared during the Easter and summer vacs. To begin with it was a single typewritten page, but soon enough it was four, then eight, and multiple copies were cranked out on the Gestetner in Sirbert’s study. Kins had written the review of Things to Come, and Michael had typed the stencil. Kins’s dismissal of the flick had been trenchant: Like the work of speculative fiction on which it is based, this film demonstrates the shallowness of a socialistic ethic when it is divorced from any Christian morality. Raymond Massey’s performance seeks to establish as incontestable the patently threadbare idea that the only foundation necessary for civilisation is a stiff enough lip. . or words to that eff ect. This was when Kins was seventeen. Three years later he’d be the only person Michael knew — besides Sirbert — who wasn’t surprised when Commissar Molotov and Herr von Ribbentrop declared their respective nations. . desirous of strengthening the cause of peace. Kins had been Publisher, Editor and Chief Correspondent of the De’Ath Watch — Michael was compositor and ginger-beer boy. As the sun set and the shadow of the All Saints’ steeple stretched across the heath, Kins would still be hitting Michael’s perfectly adequate deliveries. . all over the shop. It’d been more humiliating on the golf course — by the time they were fourteen and fifteen Kins was awarding his younger brother six strokes. . and still thrashing me. At Lancing, Michael should by all that’s sacred have been more popular: he was a good average chap in the classroom, and a solid player at rugger. Kins by contrast was. . an oddball, who wouldn’t play rugger or footer at all, and made letter-perfect translations from Cicero and Demosthenes. Worse still. . surely. . when they both joined the sixth, Kins cold-shouldered his peers — instead of gathering with them at the common-room settle on winter evenings to toast bread on twists of barbed wire, as Michael did, he hid himself away in his study — the Anchorite they called him — and palled up still more with Ape, who prepared him for confirmation, and with a history master called Venables, who was a terrific Bolshie. All this, yet still Kins. . got their vote. He was so very popular that when he set himself up as the College’s very own Steel-Maitland, the resolution was easily passed that none of them would fight for. . anything much. Michael had been the most energetic of canvassers: he’d do anything for his revered older brother and fears. . I still might. The pale-blue Oxford entrance paper had a single-word question on it: Why? Michael felt the compulsion to write an essay explaining he’d applied purely in order to be closer to Kins. — They’d gone up together the previous autumn, and at last the gap that had been widening between them since Highers was confirmed. Parting on Beaumont Street, Kins brayed in terribly accented French, C’est magnifique, mais n’est ce pas la gare. . then turned on his heel, heading towards Balliol. — At the beginning of the long vac Kins and Venables bought a banger from a grocer in Kemptown for a tenner and had it shipped to Dieppe on the Newhaven packet. Winched down into the white dust, they’d hammered along. . underneath the ar-ches of the planes, a Grande Armée of two, so rapidly mobilised that they soon reached the limits of Michael’s imagination. He pictured them sitting at Parisian café tables, drinking cloudy Pernods, while they watched ladies of high fashion and drooping garters promenade. . with their lapdogs and lobsters. The stiffly prosaic truths were cartes postales, the first showing the table decoration of the Place de la Bastille with model motor-cars revolving round it. Michael pored over this for evidence of loose morals and discovered only the long hoardings exposed on the rooftops — SAVON CADUM pour la Toilette — flanked by electrified cherubs. Kins had written: Smooth crossing, Bumbly. . the banger, christened in her honour. . running well. Fell in last night with two Germans who stood us a drink! One was Manager of Berlin Chemicals en route to do business with Imperial Airways. Address here, Hotel Burgundy, 8 rue Duphot. — Address there: The Paragon, Blackheath, where, having been passed over for the trip, Michael spent the whole summer — apart from a short walking tour of the Suffolk coast with some pals from the Corps. He chanced his arm at the tennis club, and in the evenings swayed away from Gwen Cudlip’s embrace at gramophone parties. . I can’t give you the ocean — or deep and tender devotion . . thankful his one decent pair of white flannels at least had. . substantial pleats . . These fragments I have shored against my ruins . . — Whozzat? Kins has finished his breakfast and pats his sluggish bottom lip with the triangle of a paper napkin. To be frank I don’t altogether fancy a flick, he says, screeching his chair back. Nor a show, got in the way of spending rather a lot of time in the great outdoors when I was with the CLTA wallahs, seems I lived out there in the wilderness forever —. Kins does a lousy Clark Gable and his brother thinks, I myself could do a better Loretta Young, then remembers the De’Ath Watch gave the flick two out of a possible four stars, then interrupts: Where did you spend last night? Kins grins apishly at the girl who’s plastered their scrap of a bill to the sticky tabletop. All in good time, Ape, he says. — Time, Kins thought, had been a by-product of the coal he’d found in the bunker in the mews off the Euston Road — a bunker that. . rather counter-intuitively was also full of damp clods, though it hadn’t rained for days. . with the exception of bombs. Kins supposed some Camden sparrow had dumped the clayey earth in there when he dug in a galvanised nest for his own brood — or possibly it was for the quality in the mansion blocks. Either way, it made a satisfactory settee for. .