"Only a month or two. Then I volunteered to join the army. They needed engineers and they put me into R.E.M.E." He touched his striped tie; it was regimental. "Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. After Dunkirk, the British army realised that it was using sub-standard equipment in most departments: guns that jammed, turrets that failed to rotate, lorries that broke down in not very extreme conditions. I was asked to figure out what was wrong with a water-carrying truck which kept breaking its back in the desert. It tested perfectly well, they told me, on the factory test-bed, but once it was in Egypt . . . eshnap! Guess what I found."

"Tell me," I said.

"The manufacturers tested their lorries with the water-tank empty, of course. Out in the desert, fully loaded, the chassis snapped like a twig. So, I advised inserting two steel bars the full length of the lorry and, what do you know: no more problems. They made me an acting-major and put me in charge of everything that came out of the depots in the whole of the North of England. Did I ever tell you how I came to be a British subject?"

I looked at my watch. "Tell me," I said.

"My colonel was a pukkah sahib who, against type, as you might say, thought Jews were the most intelligent people in the world. He was even some kind of a Zionist like General Orde Wingate. Not everyone liked me but they knew that I knew what I was doing and Colonel Garnett backed me all the way. Soon after he was promoted brigadier, he called me up and asked me to dine with him at the best restaurant in Kendal. We ate well and drank better, as can happen in your country, and we talked about this and that, eshpecially that—I told him about my Danish lady and her unusual positional preferences—and finally I stood up and said, ‘Work to do in the morning, sir.' ‘Sit down, Schosch,' he said, ‘because I've got a proposition for you. Why else would I get them to break out the '26 Armagnac? The War House want to make you colonel in command of the whole shooting match up here. What do you say?' I said, ‘Very flattering, sir, but there is a problem.' ‘Which is?' ‘I'm not a British citizen' ‘You mean subject,' he said. ‘Not a problem, not a problem. That can be taken care of, if you'll agree.' ‘I'll . . . think about it, sir, and give you a bell, if I may, in the morning.' ‘No, no, no. No, no, no. I promised their nibs I'd let them know tonight.' ‘It's one thirty in the morning, sir.' ‘You're quite right, aren't you? As so often. And they're probably getting a bit impatient. So, if you could possibly see your way to becoming British right away, we'd all be much gratified.' What could I say? We went into the lobby of the hotel and he dialled a number he fetched out from inside the rim of his cap. ‘I've had a word to Schosch, Sir Gerald, and he's very graciously agreed to become British, at least for the duration. So that's that taken care of.' I put my cap on, saluted the brigadier and walked out to my car, as true blue British as any Austrian Jew could ever hope to be. Not boring you, am I?"

"In truth," I said, "not at all, Herbert; not one bit."

"By the end of the war," he said, "I was in charge of equipment maintenance for the South of England. When peace broke out in Europe there was eshtill trouble, to put it mildly, in Palestine. My brigadier phoned me up and asked me to evaluate, in due course, the serviceability of the mobile radar trucks they'd used to track doodlebugs. Middle East HQ wanted them sent out to help catch ships trying to sneak Jewish refugees into Eretz Israel. Due course can be quite a long time in the army, if you want it to be; but a month later the brigadier called to ask when he could start sending the stuff out. I told him I was very sorry but none of the mobile radars were up to snuff. ‘None of them, Herbert? As in not a one?' ‘Wear and tear, sir,' I said, ‘it's been a long war.'