Christie’s wages themselves were minimal: it was explained to him that this was to compensate for the utter security of his job. Other companies and institutions were fly-by-night, compared. A man might work for them for forty years and then find himself on the street, unemployed. What a prospect!

Christie still found it hard to take, hard to live. He looked forward to his eighteenth birthday when a small rise was promised, if not due. When it came, he found it was cancelled out with a book-keeping preciseness and copperplate neatness by an increase, now he counted as adult, in the amount of his contributions to national health insurance and the Staff Association.

At Xmas there was a bonus, which in Christie’s case amounted to enough for him to buy his mother a bottle of sherry. Christie was there for Xmas, it so happened, he had not yet acquired sufficient courage to give and serve notice: this was to come, in the spring.