H.E. Bates Companion

Bates reflects on his visits with soldiers, evacuees, and others during train trips to both North and South: "As the daily exodus from London went on I found myself becoming interested in, sympathetic towards, attached to a great number of people. Death is a leveller; but death by bombing is, in more senses than one, the greatest leveller of all. It has smashed the silence of the English railway carriage." Bates notes in particular an instance where a railway waiter castigates an inconsiderate passenger. In The Spectator (October 18, 1940, 165, pp. 386-7).