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done more than your fair whack in keeping her shipshape and Bristol fashion. You go off down to

the school gates and I'll pick you u there in ten minutes.'
    And so for an hour they bowled along country lanes with the wind in their faces and the great

exhaust murmuring gently behind them.
    'You drive jolly well,' said Peregrine, as they swung round corner and headed through an

overhang of oaks, 'and she goes like a dream.'
    Beside him, Glodstone smiled. 'This is the life, eh. Can't beat vintage Bentley. She's a

warhorse just raring to go.'
    They came to a village and on the same impulse that had carried him so far, Glodstone stopped

outside a pub. 'Two pints of you best bitter, landlord,' said Glodstone loudly, provoking the man

into enquiring if Peregrine was eighteen.
    'No...' said Peregrine but his answer was drowned by the boom of Glodstone's voice.
    'Of course he is. Damnation, man, you don't imagine I'd bring an under-age drinker into your

place?'
    'I've known it happen,' said the barman, 'so I'll make it on bitter and a lemonade shandy and

you can take your glass outside to a table.'
    'We can do better than that and take our custom elsewhere said Glodstone and stalked out of

the pub. 'That's the trouble wit the damned world today, people don't know their place any more

In my father's day, that fellow would have lost his licence and no mistake. Anyway, with a manner

like that, the beer was probably flat.'
    They drove on to the next village and stopped again. This time Glodstone lowered his voice and

they were served. As they sat on bench outside admiring their reflections in the shining waxed

coachwork of the great car and basking in the comments it caused Glodstone cheered up.
    'You can say what you like but there's nothing to touch a pint of the best British bitter,' he

said.
    'Yes,' said Peregrine, who had hardly touched his beer and didn't much like it anyway.
    'That's something you won't find in any other country. The Hun swills lager by the gallon and

the Dutch have their own brew which isn't bad but it's got no body to it. Same with the Belgians,

but it's all bottled beer. Mind you, it's better than the Frog muck. Charge the earth for the

stuff too but that's the French all over. Dashed odd, when you come to think of it, that the

wine-drinking countries have never been a match for the beer ones when it comes to a good scrap.

Probably something in the saying they've got no guts and no stomach for a fight.'
    Peregrine drank some more beer to mark his allegiance while Glodstone spouted his prejudices

and the world shrank until there was only one decent place to be, and that was sitting in the

summer twilight in an English village drinking English beer and gazing at one's reflection in the

coachwork of an English car that had been made in 1927. But as they drove back to the school,

Glodstone's melancholy returned. 'I'm going to miss you,' he said. 'You're my sort of chap.

Dependable. So if there's anything I can ever do for you, you've only to ask.'
    'That's jolly good of you, sir,' said Peregrine.
    'And another thing. We can forget the "sir" bit from now on. I mean, it's the end of term and

all that. All the same, I think you'd better hop out when we get to the school gates. No need to

give the Head any reason to complain, eh?'
    So Peregrine walked back up the avenue of beeches to the school while Glodstone parked the

Bentley and morosely considered his future. 'You and I are out of place here, old girl,' he

murmured, patting the Bentley's headlight affectionately, 'we were born in a different

world.'
    He went up to his room and poured himself a whisky and sat in the darkening twilight wondering

what the devil he was going to do with himself during the holidays. If only he'd been younger,

he'd be inclined to join Major Fetherington's walkabout in Wales. But no, he'd look damned silly

now and anyway the Major didn't like anyone poaching on his own private