suit, issued when I left the army three years before. This was a heavy serge three-piece which combined blue with a foxy red and was always mentioned as my unemployed tram driver’s suit. It was on a hanger, but it was hopelessly crumpled and had obviously been gardened in if not worse. There was no time to have it cleaned – no time, even, to press it. Then our frequent visitor, John Longdon, said that he had a perfectly good grey suit which he had worn in Burma when he was in the army there, and – triumph – it had been cleaned and hung up in his wardrobe, still in its paper overcoat, and therefore immaculate. We arranged for him to bring it round next morning. The interview was at eleven. We thought we were roughly the same size, and in any case, I reflected, it wasn’t a beauty competition.

I was up early, had a bath and a rather meticulous shave, and John arrived holding the suit well off the ground by its wooden clothes hanger. It didn’t fit very well – a bit “proud” in the behind and waist, and a trifle narrow across the chest; but with a “sincere” tie (I’d just been introduced to the American comic writer S.J.Perelman) it looked tolerable, and in any case there was no alternative. I put a coloured handkerchief in the top pocket in a desperate attempt to distract attention from sartorial inadequacies elsewhere, stuffed a packet of Players Weights and some matches into the rather tight pocket, hung my scruffy mac over my arm, and launched forth to the interview.

As I climbed up the little curved stairway of the tram I was aware of being a trifle nervous – it was my first job application and I felt a bit stiff and unnatural in this grey but rather fibrous hairy suit the material of which was unpleasing to my bare legs. So of course I lit a cigarette and looked out at the bright morning from the open top of the tram. I was sitting in the front and thus had a Cortez-like view of three sides of the landscape all the way to New Cross. My own body really did look strange, like somebody else’s. On the crotch I noticed a bit of red cotton had caught on the slightly bristly material. I pulled, and pulled, until I had a couple of feet of red cotton in my right hand, my left still holding the cigarette. At last – or at length – there was no more and in attempting to tidy up the area I touched my own skin. I felt the area thoroughly. There were many square inches where there was no grey heavy protective suit material but only a gaping hole. Then with a sudden rush of dark blood to my face, I remembered that if you sent anything to the cleaners and they found a hole, slit or burn, they stitched round with red cotton to draw attention to the need for repair and to absolve themselves from any responsibility.