‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘I am sure you are right to do it and I quite understand your obsession but I hope you won’t be offended if I never read it. I’ve done with all that and I can’t go back to it.’ I did not understand what he meant but I came to do so later, when I had finished the novel. I wrote the First World War out of myself and I, too, have never been able to go back to it.
