e nephew. I was hanging on
to his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him in the
chemist's shop at Wimblehurst before he began. I was, you might say, the
stick of his rocket; and after our tremendous soar, after he had played
with millions, a golden rain in the sky, after my bird's-eye view of the
modern world, I fell again, a little scarred and blistered perhaps, two
and twenty years older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon,
but greatly edified, into this Thames-side yard, into these white heats
and hammerings, amidst the fine realites of steel--to think it all over
in my leisure and jot down the notes and inconsecutive observations
that make this book. It was more, you know, than a figurative soar. The
zenith of that career was surely our flight across the channel in the
Lord Roberts B....

I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration. I
want to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle's) as the main line of
my story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last,
I want to get in, too, all sorts of things that struck me, things that
amused me and impressions I got--even although they don't minister
directly to my narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer love
experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and distressed
and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all sorts of
irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headed
for getting on paper. And possibly I may even flow into descriptions of
people who are really no more than people seen in transit, just
because it amuses me to recall what they said and did to us, and
more particularly how they behaved in the brief but splendid glare of
Tono-Bungay and its still more glaring offspring. It lit some of them
up, I can assure you! Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. My
ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere....

Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in every
chemist's storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age and brightens
the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory,
its financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I,
sole scorched survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an air
that is never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a table
littered with working drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes
about velocities and air a