out into a pattern. He meditated
resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this?
Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-
ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable
bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you
sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all
surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of
bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your
stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you
had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he
had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could
accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had
never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had
always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded,
houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-
tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except
synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was
it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart
sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters,
the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water,
the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its
strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one
had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would
still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform b