The heat was stifling. Captain Harry Bridgeman… no, he wasn’t a captain anymore. He was a civilian, enrolled in teacher’s college. He had been demobilised for almost a year. Mr Harry Bridgeman of Milton tried not to get mud on his shiny new Oxfords as he walked up Queen Street towards the river. The sun found him, even under the shop eaves; he had forgotten how the humidity did that. It felt as if he were immersed in hot, dirty washing water, circling the plug hole in the big old shed next to the privy in his parents’ back yard.