This was the time when people were walking home for dinner. People from offices had the afternoon off. But people who worked in stores were getting only their customary hour-the stores stayed open till ten or eleven o’clock on Saturday night.

Most people were going home to a hot, filling meal. Pork chops, or sausages, or boiled beef, or cottage roll. Potatoes for certain, mashed or fried; winter-stored root vegetables or cabbage or creamed onions. (A few housewives, richer or more feckless, might have opened a tin of peas or butter beans.) Bread, muffins, preserves, pie. Even those people who didn’t have a home to go to, or who for some reason didn’t want to go there, would be sitting down to much the same sort of food at the Duke of Cumberland, or the Merchants’ Hotel, or for less money behind the foggy windows of Shervill’s Dairy Bar.

Those walking home were mostly men. The women were already there-they were there all the time. But some women of middle age who worked in stores or offices for a reason that was not their fault-dead husbands or sick husbands or never any husband at all-were friends of the boys’ mothers, and they called out greetings even across the street (it was worst for Bud Salter, whom they called Buddy) in a certain amused or sprightly way that brought to mind all they knew of family matters, or distant infancies.

Men didn’t bother greeting boys by name, even if they knew them well. They called them “boys” or “young fellows” or, occa-sionally, sirs.

“Good day to you, sirs.”

“You boys going straight home now?”

“What monkey business you young fellows been up to this morning?”

All these greetings had a degree of jocularity, but there were differences. The men who said “young fellows” were better disposed-or wished to seem better disposed-than the ones who said “boys.” “Boys” could be the signal that a telling off was to follow, for offenses that could be either vague or specific. “Young fellows” indicated that the speaker had once been young himself. “Sirs” was outright mockery and disparagement but didn’t open the way to any scolding, because the person who said that could not be bothered.