how could it’ve ended up here?. . Tiny Procter’s Mennonites in Morris chairs recited their own catechism. For the Quaker, as much as for the communist, agricultural self-sufficiency was merely a means — for him the end was emancipation from interest: Usssury, Procter’s boiling face gently hissed, is an unparalleled evil, one that you, my children, will live to see torn up from the land, root and branch. . He spoke as if they were. . seed already sown: the printer, the glazier, the boiler-house-keeper and the four wayward students — Kins pictured them planted waist-deep in what was at best marginal land, the soil claggy and richest in . . stones . . 250 acres of arable, sixty more of grassland. Kins understood the practicalities, knew from the accounts the farm was only. . a touch on the right side: 105 tons of potatoes, 150 of sugar beastly, 2½ of dried peas, 12 of wheat, 9 of oats, 6 of barley, 300-odd lambs — and of course Brockleby’s beloved Friesians, whose lush udders the singing farmer — as he was known throughout the north of the county — would suck upon. . a nightjar in a Norfolk jacket slithering over the damp grass. . if he could. This is no super-abundance — no revolutionary bread basket. Kins has read The General Theory — he knows much of it by heart. Havering in the dark corridor, a thoughtful moth drawn to neither flame, he sees Cornwallis’s views on employment and Procter’s on interest for what they are: hopelessly naive, and ignorant of the third and prime factor, which is money . . — Kins’s and Annette’s tongues thrash. . round annaround in their coralline cave, scraping against teethy reefs . . He cannot restrain that mutinous part of himself, he’s bemused, his muzzle is. . foam-flecked. After so much in the way of vegetables her meat is strong in his hands. . aitch bone, rump. . As he wrestles with her, Kins pedantically notes. . for the umpteenth time! that were Cornwallis not a pacifist, he’d be delighted to have Bevin’s ukase, since it’d give him all the control over persons and their property. . any revolutionary may desire! — Is it sheer wantonness or bracing for an escape attempt . . Annette has parted her thighs. Fighting for control, Kins thinks of the dismal week he spent in Oxford after receiving his call-up papers. . round annaround I went. — Never at ease on a bike, as he wobbled off each morning over the cobbles in the Broad, he’d to concentrate on every push of the pedals — then wavering down Holywell Street, then teetering along beside Magdalen, then turning on to the High Street, then huffing his way up it to the Turl, along which he wobbled back towards Balliol. — But once he’d completed one circuit he found he couldn’t stop, for the concentration he’d mustered at least muffled the symposium in his head, the rhetorical flights of which were, in essence. . balderdash, for when it came right down to it there was only the one stark question: Should I, or shouldn’t I? So long as Kins kept pedalling, kept going round and round the town. . the arrow remained in flight. The prosperous-looking matrons rolling across his path towards the Cornmarket, the blazered hearties aiming for the river, the dons. . their black wings flapping — if he stopped pedalling and made a decision then, all at once, the vividness, the colour and the motion would be drained from this scene, leaving pen strokes sketchily describing their dropping jaws and widening eyes, their outstretched arms and horrified hands, for before them would be standing, astride his bone-shaker, the preposterous figure of THE MAN WHO SAID HE WOULDN’T FIGHT. So, even as ARP volunteers were painting thick white lines along the kerbstones and up the walls of these ancient halls, Kins kept on pedalling, round annaround. . he kept on cycling. . round annaround. — The tribunal was held in the Pitt Rivers Museum, an oddity for which no explanation was forthcoming, although Kins intuited this was only the beginning. Wartime — for him, at least — would be characterised by such improvised billets: a trestle table covered with moth-eaten baize, on it, propped against a stack of books, a coat of arms borrowed from some council office that. . kept sliding down and rucking up the cloth. . Honi soit qui billiards y pense. As the chairman harrumphed his way through his opening remarks: No definition in the Act of conscientious objector per se. . Convened here rather to assess gradations of sincerity. . A tricky notion, indeed. . — He wafted away into slight mystifications of G. E. Moore, the Naturalistic Fallacy, the reductio implicit in any concept of a belief sincerely held. Kins, standing to attention at an odd little lectern, thought, I can win this trick at least. He’d heard tell of the chairman — a blinking little moley-man who wore a queer moustacheless beard — as a fairly typical supernumerary, loosely attached to Teddy Hall, who’d published a single book on Thomas à Kempis so long ago the saint. . had checked the proofs himself!