Love on the Supertax by Marghanita Laski (Cresset Press 1944)

This is the story of the spring of 1944. But it does not tell of that jocund season as you know it in Finsbury and Hoxton, where, after their day's work is done, clear-eyed, confident men and women meet to discuss the Trades Dispute Act or to visit the latest exhibition of paintings by left-wing Artists at the Klassical Kinema, nor of spring where the first warm rays of the sun strike down on the bountiful barrows of Bermondsey, the colourful backyards of Shoreditch. This is not a story of that spring of 1944 as it came to strong, vigorous citizens with an ample present and an assuarance of the future, but of spring as it came to the needy and the dispirited, to the fallen and the dispossessed, spring as it came to Mayfair.

Cupid's Dart by David Nobbs (Arrow Books 2007)

I travelled on the same train today, exactly a year after our first meeting. A year! Was it really only a year ago? Has only a fifty-sixth of my life passed since that day which changed everything? It seems a lifetime ago, and yet it also seems like yesterday. I mentioned that to Lawrence. 'That's women for you,' he said. 'That's what they do to you.' I don't think he likes women - but then, if I was married to Jane, I don't think I would like women either.

I say 'the same train'. I mean, of course, the train that left Manchester and was due at London Euston at the same time on the same day as that train a year ago. It wasn't the same train at all. Well, it might have been, I didn't check the carriage numbers or the name on the engine, such trivia have never interested me, but I think it extremely unlikely. Anyway, I don't give a damn about these linguistic minutiae. Not any more. Not after her.