One morning I stood with my after-breakfast cigarette — I allowed myself this one real cigarette a day — and through clouds of blue coiling smoke looked at how the yellowness of the sun stretched in a foreshortened oblong, making the wall itself seem higher in the middle than at its ends. I looked at the glow and the pulse of the yellow, looked as if I were listening, thinking how, as the seasons changed, so did the shape and extent and position of this patch of morning light — and then I was through the wall and I knew what was there. I did not at that first time achieve much more than that there were a set of rooms. The rooms were disused, had been for some time. Years, perhaps. There was no furniture. Paint had flaked off the wall in places, and lay in tiny shards on the floorboards with scraps of paper and dead flies and dust. I did not go in, but stood there on the margin between the two worlds, my familiar flat and these rooms which had been quietly waiting there all this time. I stood and looked, feeding with my eyes. I felt the most vivid expectancy, a longing: this place held what I needed, knew was there, had been waiting for — oh yes, all my life, all my life. I knew this place, recognised it, and before I had actually absorbed the information through my eyes that the walls were much higher than mine, there were many windows and doors, and that it was a large, light, airy, delightful flat, or house. In a further room I glimpsed a painter's ladder; and then, just as the sunlight faded out on my wall when a cloud absorbed the sun, I saw someone in white painter's overalls lifting a roller to lay white paint over the faded and stained surface.

I forgot this occurrence. I went on with the little routines of my life, conscious of the life behind the wall, but not remembering my visit there. It was not until a few days later that I again stood, cigarette in hand, in the mid-morning hour, looking through drifting smoke at the sunlight laid there on the wall, and I thought: Hello! I've been through there, of course I have.