The commercial bloke put down his Daily Mail. ‘Templegate’s winner come in,’ he said.
The lawyers’ clerks were sprouting some learned rot about fee-simple and peppercorns. The other commercial felt in his waistcoat pocket and took out a bent Woodbine. He felt in the other pocket and then leaned across to me.
‘Got a match, Tubby?’
I felt for my matches. ‘Tubby’, you notice. That’s interesting, really. For about a couple of minutes I stopped thinking about bombs and began thinking about my figure as I’d studied it in my bath that morning.
It’s quite true I’m tubby, in fact my upper half is almost exactly the shape of a tub. But what’s interesting, I think, is that merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost anyone, even a total, stranger, will take it for granted to give you
