tremendously. I got a solid cake of snow between shoe and sock, but somehow it vanished without any intermediate wetness. Then a gang of men clearing snow came in sight and directed us to Winchcomb, the scheduled end of that day’s walk.

So we went down a tremendous hill – then there were cottages and a pleasant lane with children coming from school and a little runnel of clear water in the ditch and suddenly we were in Winchcomb High Street – a strange experience after miles of empty country – a neat self-contained sloping High Street with a few shops and dozens of guest houses and one lovely and dignified Jacobean high-shouldered house set plump on the roadside – all quiet and reserved in the afternoon sun.

We had arranged to call on an Oxford student, Judy, whose home was the schoolhouse, very small under the shadow of the church tower whose clock said 4.30, and we congratulated ourselves on timing a fifteen mile walk with such superb accuracy. Judy had only just arrived from Oxford carrying chocolates and a bunch of tulips and we gorged ourselves on bread and butter and I listened to the chatter issuing from her sweet and somehow stupid mouth and watching her eyes, which were accounted beautiful, but were exactly like two small and identical plums. Her mother was hovering round the room – full of fine superiority to the village petty-bourgeoisie and so transparently a part of them – modern and bright and broadminded and so dull and shallow – conducting an elaborate act of filial relations with her daughter for our benefit. But tea was welcome and Judy and her mother were quite nice in their stuffy way. Diana and I rushed out afterwards, very stiff in the legs, to book a room in a grubby little pub in a back street – and then, in desperation at the prospect of an evening hearing about Mrs J’s theories on education and local government we took them to see a film which was amazingly vulgar and stupid.

We left Judy and her mother to go back to a late meal of cold lamb and cheese in a frigid and over-decorated bar parlour where we had a little row – Diana maintaining that I was unnecessarily amicable to Judy if I didn’t like her. I concluded that this was due to the fug of the Winchcombe Cinema after the windiness of our walk and anyway it soon died away to nothing. Our bedroom was cold too, and more like Reading or Kensington than Winchcombe, but we slept magnificently.

Breakfast, as always, was bacon and eggs. The weather had set in to a steady uncompromising drizzle, iron grey skies and wet chimney pots, so we went back to Judy’s – her mother was teaching little girls in the church school behind – and gossipped and played her piano and taught her some revolutionary marching songs. Lunch was nice and we had a