I moved on the coal and the same convulsion came again, only worse. My stomach was trying to do something it could not do. I thought of a short cigar taken from a cedar-wood box. It was a little dry. But what was dry? Box or cigar? At any rate the room containing the cigar was too hot, yet how could it be, for it was part of heaven? No, not quite heaven. A voice echoed in my head: 'It's turned you a bit bloody mysterious, this Paradise place.' Paradise. Somehow, a secret file was involved, a pasteboard folder containing papers that everybody looked at, and yet it was secret. I saw a jumble of razor blades, a fast-turning dial on what might have been a compass, but surely ought not to have been. My mind could hold ideas and pictures but could not make the connections between them.

I looked up again at the light strips. I raised my arm towards them, and they were a good way above the height of my hand. My arm wavered and fell; it was not long enough, and that was all about it. I was perhaps underneath the floorboards, in some species of giant coal cellar, and this notion came with a new sensation: a fearful sense of eternal falling. Some of my memories were coming back to me, and coming too fast. I closed my eyes on the great coal plain and raced down, down, down.

Chapter Two

And there in place of Scarborough was the city of York, or the outskirts thereof: our new house, 'the very last one in Thorpe- on-Ouse', as our little girl, Sylvia, used to say, the house that put off the beginning of open country. It was evening – early evening, spring coming on; a kind of green glow in the sky, and I sat in my shirt sleeves and waistcoat. They had been ploughing in the fields around the village, but I'd not seen the work carried on, for I'd passed all day in the police office in York station.

I sat on the front gate with Sylvia, and our boy Harry. They both liked to sit up high – well, it was high to them, Sylvia especially, and I had my arm around her to stop her falling, which she didn't like.