-class people.
Many of these would be eager for news, and willing to give help and even
scraps of queer meat, or crusts of grey and doughy bread, in return for
it. They would listen to Bert's story with avidity, and attempt to
keep him with them for a day or so. The virtual cessation of postal
distribution and the collapse of all newspaper enterprise had left an
immense and aching gap in the mental life of this time. Men had suddenly
lost sight of the ends of the earth and had still to recover the
rumour-spreading habits of the Middle Ages. In their eyes, in their
bearing, in their talk, was the quality of lost and deoriented souls.

As Bert travelled from parish to parish, and from district to district,
avoiding as far as possible those festering centres of violence and
despair, the larger towns, he found the condition of affairs varying
widely. In one parish he would find the large house burnt, the vicarage
wrecked, evidently in violent conflict for some suspected and perhaps
imaginary store of food unburied dead everywhere, and the whole
mechanism of the community at a standstill. In another he would find
organising forces stoutly at work, newly-painted notice boards warning
off vagrants, the roads and still cultivated fields policed by armed
men, the pestilence under control, even nursing going on, a store of
food husbanded, the cattle and sheep well guarded, and a group of two
or three justices, the village doctor or a farmer, dominating the
whole place; a reversion, in fact, to the autonomous community of the
fifteenth century. But at any time such a village would be liable to a
raid of Asiatics or Africans or such-like air-pirates, demanding
petrol and alcohol or provisions. The price of its order was an almost
intolerable watchfulness and tension.

Then the approach to the confused problems of some larger centre of
population and the presence of a more intricate conflict would be marked
by roughly smeared notices of "Quarantine" or "Strangers Shot," or by a
string of decaying plunderers dangling from the telephone poles at the
roadside. About Oxford big boards were put on the roofs warning all air
wanderers off with the single word, "Guns."

Taking their risks amidst these things, cyclists still kept abroad, and
once or twice during Bert's long tramp powerful motor cars containing
masked and goggled figures went tearing past him. There were few
police in evidence, but ever and again squads of gaunt and tattere