Homecomings by C.P. Snow

AT White's that night, Gilbert Cooke and I had a convivial dinner. He had invited me for a specific reason and yet, despite his unselfconscious raids into other people's business, he could not confess this bit of his own until I helped him out. Then he was loose and easy, a man with an embarrassing task behind him; he ordered another bottle of wine and began to talk more confidentially and imperiously.

The favour he asked would not have weighed so heavy on most men. It appeared that he had been trying all ways to get into uniform, but he kept being turned down because he had once had an operation for mastoid. Gilbert was ashamed and sorry. He wanted to fight, with a lack of pretence that men of our age had felt twenty-five years before; in 1939 the climate, the social pressures, had changed; most other men I met in Gilbert's situation blessed their luck, but he felt deprived.