Michael Henderson suggests

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Notebook

Sunday, 18th May 2008

This, she saw, was as much part of the war as the soldiering, the sailoring, the bombing, the queuing, the black-out, the crowding, and all the grey deprivations, No imaginable combination of peace-time circumstances could have brought about such a composition of characters as now filled the car and sat on each other's knees - the ill-looking driver, the German woman, her lonely self and the three Americans, of presumably totally different classes in civil life, and presumably going to their deaths when the second front began. And yet, she was aware, all over the countryside around, all over the country, cars were racing along with just such noisy loads to just such destinations. If it wasn't Americans, it was Poles, or Norwegians, or Dutch, and if it wasn't sitting on each other's knees it was singing, and if it wasn't singing it was sitting on each other's knees, and whatever it was it was drinking and drinking and screaming and desperate. The war, amongst the innumerable other guises it had assumed, had taken on the character of the inventor and proprietor of some awful low, cosmopolitan night-club.

Patrick Hamilton, "The Slaves of Solitude".