“'Look at 'em, dearie,’ said my mother. ‘Like sojers.’
“I think I was still very young when that happened, but I was not so young that I had not often seen soldiers with their helmets and bayonets marching by.”
“That,” said Radiant, “was some time before the Great War, then, and the Social Collapse.”
“Some time before,” said Sarnac. He considered. “Twenty-one years before. This house in which I was born was less than two miles from the great military camp of the British at Lowcliff in England, and Lowcliff railway station was only a few hundred yards away. ‘Sojers’ were the most conspicuous objects in my world outside my home. They were more brightly coloured than other people. My mother used to wheel me out for air every day in a thing called a perambulator, and whenever there were soldiers to be seen she used to say, ‘Oh! Pritty sojers!’
“ Sojers’ must have been one of my earliest words, I used to point my little wool-encased finger—for they wrapped up children tremendously in those days and I wore even gloves—and I would say: ‘Sosher.’
“Let me try and describe to you what sort of home this was of mine and what manner of people my father and mother were. Such homes and houses and places have long since vanished from the world, not many relics of them have been kept, and though you have probably learnt most of the facts concerning them, I doubt if you can fully realise the feel and the reality of the things I found about me. The
