Once I wandered away from my brothers and sisters and went into a near-by field, and right out in the middle of it I lay down in grass so high that n… - Howard Spring

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.

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 unpleasant voices shouted "Hurry along! Hurry along!" and the sight of all these people hurrying along - Why? Where to? - amid clanging gates and roaring wheels, out from and in to holes bored in the earth, left him sick for another way of living. Never, never, he thought, could he be happy in the world about him: the world that the war had knocked sideways and that seemed to his frightened imagination as though it would not be straight again but must topple right over.

Though blind chance took me to a newspaper office, I was happy there at once; and I have been happy in newspaper offices ever since.
It was clear from the first that the way up was through the reporters’ room; and the way to the reporters’ room in those days was by learning shorthand. It was a lucky thing for me that there was another boy in the office who shared my passion for learning shorthand. It is the easiest thing in the world to learn; but when we had learned the principles there came the question of practice.
We solved this by coming to the office at eight each morning. Our work began at nine, and for an hour before that time we harangued and declaimed to one another from a volume of Sir Edward Clarke’s speeches, borrowed from the office library.