Philip’s other letter was much slenderer and had been posted only one day after its precursor. It opened with his amazed account of the collapse of the General Strike. “Everything has happened as Uncle Robert foretold, and so far I am proved a fool,” it began.

He went on to express a quite extravagant contempt for the leaders of the Labour Party who had “neither the grit to prevent the General Strike nor the grit to keep on with it.” It was clear that he had a little lost his equanimity over the struggle and that his criticisms of selfish toryism had tilted him heavily towards the side of the strikers in the struggle. And he was intensely annoyed to find his uncle’s estimate of the situation so completely confirmed. The time had come to call out the second line, stop light and power and food distribution and bring matters to a crisis, and there was little reason to suppose that most of the men of the second line would not have stood by their unions.

But it would have meant the beginning of real violence and a grimmer phase of the struggle and the trade union leaders were tired, frightened and consciously second-rate men. They were far more terrified by the possibilities of victory than by the certainty of defeat. They had snatched at the opportunity offered by a new memorandum by “that Kosher Liberal, Herbert Samuel”—“Tut tut!” said Mrs. Rylands; “but this is real bad temper, Philip!"— which nobody had accepted or promised to stand by, and unconditionally, trusting the whole future of the men they stood for, to a government that could publish the British Gazette, they had called the strike off. They had given in and repented like naughty children “and here we are — with men being victimised right and left and the miners in the cart! Nothing has been done, nothing has been settled. The railway workers are eating humble pie and the red ties of the Southern railway guards are to be replaced by blue ones. (Probably Jix thought of that.) The miners have already refused to accept Samuel’s memorandum, and Uncle Robert’s little deal is almost the only hopeful thing in the situation. He gets his laugh out of it sure enough.”

Even the writing showed Philip in a phase of anti-climax. He was irritated, perplexed.

“Is all life a comedy of fools? Am I taking myself too seriously and all that? Here is a crisis in the history of one of the greatest, most intelligent, best educated countries in the world, and it is an imbecile crisis! It does nothing. It states nothing. It does not even clear up how things are. By great good luck it did not lead to bloodshed or bitterness — except among the miners. Who aren’t supposed to count. And Catherine’s kill of course. There was no plan in it and no idea to it. It was a little different in form and it altered the look of the streets; but otherwise it was just in the vein of affairs as they go on month by month and year by year, coming to no point, signifying nothing. Burbling along. Just, as you say old Sempack said, just Carnival. Where are we going? — all the hundreds of millions that we are on this earth? Is this all and has it always been such drifting as this? Are the shapes of history like the shapes of clouds, fancies of Polonius the historian? Now we expand and increase and now we falter and fail. Boom years and dark ages until the stars grow tired of us and shy some half-brick of a planet out of space to end the whole silly business.

“I cannot believe that, and so I come back to old Sempack again with his story of a............