It was only June and already his fingers were numb. As he fired up the small gas fire he looked out over Hyde Park. He was on the second floor and just beneath his window he could hear the mini-prophets on their soap boxes preaching to the passers by. He opened the door to his postage-stamp-sized balcony and closed it immediately behind him. He looked down. In spite of the winter chill the street was full of brown clad, shuffling humanity. Men, women and children foraged for scraps, accompanied by the orchestra of babbling voices preaching their truths, like bent messiahs, to anyone who would listen. And many were. Whole families clustered around speakers upon old milk crates, listening and nodding to recounts of the horror of their lives and of how it could all be fixed if only . . . If only, Leslie thought: if only the original ideals of the new world had been adopted. Why weren’t most people taught to read? There were books. They were limited, but there were books. He had read them.
