Wright pulled a face, as if to say: ‘Don’t come it.’

‘You’ll be training at Hull,’ he said. ‘They’ve commandeered Alexandra Dock.’

I figured the docks at Hull, and could picture nothing but rain.

Wright himself was out of it, of course, being in the middle sixties, as was the Chief. The difference was that the Chief resented the fact. The first Kitchener appeals posted up about York had asked for men aged up to thirty, which had put me out of it as well, since I was thirty-two, but the Chief had offered – with no prompting on my part – to write me a special letter of recommendation to get round the difficulty. That would not now be necessary, since the War Office seemed to be raising the upper age limit by the week.

‘I must do my duty,’ I said to Old Man Wright, ‘England’s in peril.’

‘Too bloody true,’ he said, sitting down at his desk and unfolding that day’s edition of the Yorkshire Evening Press. His head was grey, bald and too small – like a turkey’s head, which he now began moving from side to side.

‘A hundred and sixty-three killed…’ he said. Looking up at me, he added, ‘Over four thousand wounded… Peer’s son dies of wounds received at Mons,’ he was saying as I quit the police office.

According to the Yorkshire Evening Press, we kept thrashing the Germans; they kept reaching ‘the limit of their effort’, and yet our men would keep dying. Something was amiss – the Chief had told me as much himself.

I decided to scout him out, and as I stepped out onto platform four, a train came in and I caught a small shower of condensed steam. Our little girl, Sylvia, had a word for this: a ‘train cloud’. Not a rain cloud, but a train cloud. She was clever with words. The fireman, leaning off the footplate, gave me a grin, which might have been by way of apology. I gave him a wave back anyhow. Footplate men were in reserved occupations, so he could afford to smile.