I felt further and encountered only the soft cotton of pants and my own bare skin; my trousers, or rather John’s trousers, were virtually crotchless and I was twenty minutes off an important interview. The tram stopped at the traffic lights. I threw my cigarette butt over the side; it landed on the open top of a lorry alongside loaded with large objects wrapped in straw. As the lights changed I saw with rising disbelief the lorry speeding up the hill in front, thick smoke rising from the straw and a flicker of flame half visible in the bright sunshine. It was then I concluded that I must be dreaming. Too many impossible things were happening simultaneously.

Soon my stop arrived. I got off the tram and walked across a big paved area and up the steps to ring the bell and be admitted by a porter who, on my shyly admitting my name and purpose, led me to a Miss Someone, a shortish lady in her fifties with a wind-battered face, grey hair pulled back into a would-be casual bun, and conspicuously short skirts showing rather bony knees. She took me to the coffee room and chatted amicably about the job and the prospects and potential colleagues. Then she checked her watch and said “Mr Hewett, I think it’s about time we went up” and led me to the bottom of a very steep and narrow stone staircase. She invited me to precede her up the stair, and I insisted that she went first. Very soon we were waving at one another like Punch and Judy, she insisting with rising firmness that I went in front so as not to receive inevitable glimpses of hidden treasures beyond those very short skirts, and I equally insistent with a kind of quiet doggedness which I’m sure she took for utter stupidity and insensitivity as well as rudeness that I should follow her. Better, I thought, a glimpse of her maiden underwear than a full frontal – or backtal – view of my totally unclothed privates. I won in the end and she went up first with some difficulty, knees together: I followed equally spavined and was led across a very long interview room, knees banging, to a solitary seat in front of the board, which I greeted briefly before sitting down smiling and then nearly shouting aloud as I lowered myself onto the very chill leather-topped chair.

The interview was, of course, a disaster. My ignorance of recent developments in Speech Therapy was revealed in all its richness and I pictured them saying after I left what an incredibly awkward and shy young man the last applicant had been. But when I got home and exposed my plight to John and Diana they showed no pity at all but merely howled with cruel laughter.