The theatre was then, I suppose, at a height of classical perfection it has never quite attained since. Perhaps this is partly due to the nature of the case: it is difficult for us old-fashioned folk not to regret our modern “improvements.” After all, there was something to be said for seeing the actor before you in the flesh, hearing his own words as he uttered them. “Mummy,” a small infant of my acquaintance said when he was taken to the first Cinemaphone performance in London, “I want to see ve words come out of his mouf.” And there are effects of depth and substantialness which, with all the best appliances we have invented, you cannot quite reproduce on a blank wall. Anyhow, in the London of the forties we used to expect to see the actors and actresses appear in person: and if one of them was indisposed we had to put up with an “understudy.” It is, of course, difficult for the modern generation to imagine how repeating the same part in the same theatre for four or five years on end can have failed to induce staleness and listlessness in the cast; yet I can assure my readers it was not so. Douglas Fitzgerald and Leonard Archdale never consented to perform for the screen, so that when I say I have seen them (the former in “What about it?” the latter in “Strike me!”) I can make a boast which few living people share with me. Those other giants and giantesses of the stage, Bruce Holbrook, Denys O’Leary, Vivian Stalbrooke, Olga Labadie and so on, are figures which my readers will say they have all seen: I can only reply, as Aeschines is said to have said of Demosthenes, “Quid, si ipsum audiisses?” Of the external appearance of London I do not mean to say much, since after all it has not changed in its essentials, except perhaps in the suburbs. Probably the modern reader, if he could be transported back there, would find the most unsightly aspect of it the advertisements which, before sky-writing was properly understood and developed, used to be written up on board and blank walls, as they are now on shop windows. I should like to see him cross the street on the level of the traffic, as we used to have to do in those days! But of course we did not need to cross the street so often, when we were allowed to move in either direction on either pavement: and only a few of the more crowded pavements had been mobilized, so that you could ordinarily look into a shop window while standing still. The shops themselves, before the London Improvement Act, had grown to an enormous size: they used to tell an irreverent story of a very ungodly young gentleman who died while shopping at Selfridge’s, and for quite a long time afterwards could not be persuaded that he had got further than the basement! But I should weary my readers if I prosed on about all the changes I have seen since then: after all, you can see London as it was in the forties in plenty of old prints and history-books.