The New Men by C.P. Snow

One night soon after, coming out of the theatre at Stratford, I was forced to remember how – the evening the news of Hiroshima came through – I had walked through the West End streets in something like wretchedness. Now I was leaving the play, the sense of outrage had left me alone for days, I was one among a crowd, lively and content in the riverside lights. Around me was a knot of elderly women whom I had noticed in the theatre, who looked like schoolteachers and to whom, by some standard, life had not given much; yet their faces were kind, shining with a girlish, earnest happiness, they were making haste to their boarding house to look up the text.

It was there by the river, which was why I was forced to remember, why I became uncomfortable at being content under the lamplit trees, that Martin and Mounteney and I, on the dark wartime night, so tunnel-like by the side of this, agreed that there was no serious chance that the bomb could be used.