Unsatisfactory indeed the world seemed to Mr Menheniot. He was pushed about in bus queues; he was snapped at by café waitresses. In the Underground u… - Howard Spring

After I had eaten my evening meal I wandered out on to the beach where the tide was coming in sharply, a tumble of white in the darkness. I walked as far as the cliff beyond the beach, and I sat down there on a tussock of sea-pinks, listening to the surge of the water, watching the stars that the clouds covered and unveiled and the cluster of humble lights half a mile away that was Penmael. I felt lonely. My body was warm, but I was chilled to the soul's marrow. This was the oddest feeling I had ever known: this loneliness. Aloneness was something else. I had sought it eagerly, welcomed it when found, but I had never been lonely in my aloneness. Now I was so lonely that I could stand it no longer.

All these things were in the “front room.” We had all that fanatical devotion to the “front room” which is peculiar to the poor. It was a sacred place. A room of our own to work in would have suited me and my brother splendidly. But the whole family, including us, still crowded into the kitchen for all purposes. It was a fine, comfortable kitchen with an open fireplace, a cheerful room to be in if you had nothing to do but read or talk. Not so good, though, if you had any other sort of work to do. The simple fact is, of course, that the use of one room for all purposes, in a house with a beggarly income and no servants, arises from the necessity to save money and labour. Using another room would mean laying fires, and fires would mean money, and so would light. That is what really lies behind all the old jokes about the unused “parlours” of the poor. But the consequence is the creation of the “sacred” feeling where the parlour is concerned. Even in the summer-time, when light and fire were not in question, one kept out of it.

There are men to whom a marriage is eternal and who are crippled for ever when it ends, largely, I think, because of the passion and completeness of their own contribution to it. They embark their all in one frail craft, and, if that goes, the wreck is total.