‘You are a beast!’
She laughed. They walked on hand in hand, swishing ankle-deep through the leaves and declaiming:
Thick as the Breakfast Crisps
that strow the plates
In Welwyn Garden City!’
It was great fun. Presently they came out of the wooded area. There were plenty of people abroad now, but not many cars if you kept away from the main roads. Some- times they heard church bells ringing and made detours to avoid the churchgoers. They began to pass through straggling villages on whose outskirts pseudo-Tudor villas stood sniffishly apart, amid their garages, their laurel shrubberies and their raw-looking lawns. And Gordon had some fun railing against the villas and the godless civilization of which they were part, a civilization of stockbrokers and their lipsticked wives, of golf, w
