Gone But Not Forgotten.

Its home may be new but it will still sing the old old song. And here a word for old friends! We doff the bowler to our new glamorous station but we cannot forget our old associates, the brothers Lambton and Thorndon. Soon they will be gone but, for nearly half a century, they have been friendly old scouts. When we were young their smoky facades spelled romance, freedom, glamour. Their walls shook with our clamour when we gathered under the eagle eye of a whiskered Sunday school superintendent to frisk in sylvan glades, to speed the parting bun and drink deep of debilitated lemonade. The old walls smiled benignly when we poured back, dishevelled, begrimed, bedevilled with a surfeit of bun, and divinely out-of-hand.

Later on, as we grew to the age of disillusion the same old walls received us in sorrow and in joy, in meetings and in partings. They were still benign, they were always friendly, and somewhow they always spelled Escape.

In years to come we will sit in the inglenook and try to tell our greatgrandchildren all about it. But nobody will ever listen to us. Still, we can remember old friends.