The world lived in terms of headlines. Up to then Guy, with many million others, had lived his postwar life independently of big events. The General Strike of 1926, the abandonment of the gold standard in 1931, were the only clear dates in those fifteen years. He remembered separate years in terms of the cricket champions and the Derby winner: the marriage of that friend, the divorce of this: the years blurred one into another against the fabric of a personal existence. But after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, each individual had the sense of leading his private life under the shadow of a public cloud: there was a sense of omen. Each day had its fresh sensation: Hitler was planning this, Mussolini was plotting that, and the Left Wing propagandists harnessed the anti-war temper of the country against the threat to peace implied in Fascism. Accusing fingers pointed to Abyssinia. ‘This is where Fascism leads.’ The Socialists and fellow travellers of the Left were vocal with their arguments: capitalism led to unemployment, through its spiral of booms and slumps; in self-defence capitalism resorted to a totalitarian régime which again in self-defence resorted to aggressive war to obtain new markets.
