Where Read had gone wrong was in exposing himself to the wife of an Alderman and the sister of the Chairman of the York Corporation Finance Committee, and there’d been nothing hysterical about that pair. They had testified that Read’s member had been clearly displayed but was ‘not in a state of tumescence’, which was an odd thing to say, as though the two were very experienced as witnesses in these sorts of cases, and usually the members were in a state of tumescence. (It was just the right word – I’d looked it up after questioning them.) But then again Read himself, a broken down man in the middle fifties, had had no answer to the charge. He’d left the Gentlemen’s, he told me, in ‘rather a hurry’. ‘Why?’ I asked him, and he kept silence for a long time before replying, ‘I wanted to go to the Post Office.’

I stuffed the papers back in the pasteboard envelope. Read had exposed himself on the day the war started, and I wondered whether the two events had been related. There’d been some strange behaviour since August 4th, and the numbers of Drunk and Incapables on the station had practically doubled.

I stood up and took off my suit-coat, which was something Scholes and Flower, being uniformed men, were not allowed to do – which perhaps served to remind them why they didn’t care for my company. Anyhow they both just then quit the office to go on station patrol. Scholes would take the ‘Up’ side, Flower the ‘Down’ (or the other way about), with many meetings for a chat on the footbridge. It was two-thirty on a hot, sleepy afternoon, and I had the place to myself.