I think that was the most pleasant room I have been in in all my life. The Boothbys had built it because there was no public hall at this station, and they were always having to clear their dining-room for dances or political meetings. But they had built it from good-nature, as a gift to the district, and not for profit.

It was as large as a big hall, but it looked like a living-room, with walls of polished red brick and a floor of dark red cement. The pillars - there were eight great pillars supporting the deep thatched roof - were of unpolished reddish-orange brick. The fireplaces at either end were both large enough to roast an ox. The wood of the rafters was thorn, and had a slightly bitter tang, whose flavour changed according to whether the air was dry or damp. At one end was a grand piano on a small platform, and at the other a radiogram with a stack of records. Each side had a dozen windows, one set showing the piled granite boulders behind the station, and the other miles across country to the blue mountains.

Johnnie was playing the piano at the far end, with Stanley Lett and Ted beside him. He was oblivious of both. His shoulders and feet tapped and shrugged to the jazz, his rather puffy white face blank as he stared away to the mountains. Stanley did not mind that Johnnie was indifferent to him: Johnnie was his meal-ticket, his invitation to parties where Johnnie played, his passport to a good time. He made no secret of why he was with Johnnie - he was the frankest of petty crooks. In return he saw that Johnnie had plenty of ‘organized’ cigarettes, beer and girls, all for nothing. I said he was a crook, but this is nonsense of course. He was a man who had understood from the beginning that there is one law for the rich and one for the poor. This was purely theoretical knowledge for me until I actually lived in a working-class area in London. That was when I understood Stanley Lett. He had the profoundest instinctive contempt for the law; contempt, in short, for the State about which we talked so much. I suppose that was why Ted was intrigued with him? He used to say: ‘But he’s so intelligent!’ - the inference being that if the intelligence were used, he could be harnessed to the cause. And I suppose Ted wasn’t so far wrong. There is a type of trade union official like Stanley: tough, controlled, efficient, unscrupulous. I never saw Stanley out of a shrewd control of himself, used as a weapon to get everything he could out of a world he took for granted was organized for the profit of others. He was frightening. He certainly frightened me, with his big hard bulk, hard clear features, and cold analytical grey eyes. And why did he tolerate the fervent and idealistic Ted? Not, I think, for what he could get out of him. He was genuinely touched that Ted, ‘a scholarship boy’, was still concerned about his class. At the same time he thought him mad. He would say: ‘Look, mate, you’ve been lucky, got more brains than most of us. You use your chances and don’t go mucking about. The workers don’t give a muck for anyone but themselves. You know it’s true. I know it’s true.’ ‘But Stan,’ Ted harangued him, his eyes flashing, his black hair in agitated motion all over his head: ‘Stan, if enough of us cared for the others, we could change it all - don’t you see?’ Stanley even read the books Ted gave him, and returned them saying: ‘I’ve got nothing against it. Good luck to you, that’s all I can say.’