She stood aside and looked away as I dragged my box through the doorway. On the floor was brown linoleum, and the wallpaper was black, with big, glowing orange flowers. This continued up the stairs, which were so narrow that my landlady's skirts touched both walls at once. She opened a door and showed me into a room.

'It's quite commodious,' I remarked after a while, for this was the best that could be said. The wallpaper was a design of roses on a trellis; there were two windows opposite each other, not at all clean. I walked towards one of them and my landlady said, 'As you see, they give on to the garden.'

There being no grass or plants of any description, but just bricks and a coal shed, this was more of a yard, I thought. I knew about yards because we had one at home. Immediately beyond this one was a brick wall that must have been sixty foot in height, if not greater, with an oil lamp burning towards the top of it. I was just trying to think of a way of asking about it when the landlady said, with a faraway look, 'Soap works. You'll have no trouble from it.'

There was a truckle bed and a broken bamboo table with a candle end in a saucer. No gas. There was one picture over the bed which showed a glum sort of castle in a brown field with two sad-looking men standing alongside it. I walked a little way towards the bed, and saw that underneath this scene were the words 'Harrow School, 1723'.

My landlady said, 'It's a pound down,' and then, as I gazed at a small pool of water on the floor, 'I believe that you have a start on the railways?' 'I'm to begin as a cleaner,' I said.

But people don't understand how it lies with engine cleaners – they didn't then and they don't now – and I could never leave it at that. 'Cleaning', I went on, as my landlady looked down at her boots, 'is the first stage on the road that leads to firing an engine. After some months, I anticipate becoming a passed cleaner, which will mean I can do some firing duties, and then, if all goes satisfactorily, I will perhaps move on to driving on a low link: shunting work, I mean, little goods and the like. At the top of the mountain that I am endeavouring to climb -'