Basic and Supplementary Rummaging the other day in a drawer,
looking for some- thing which I did not find, I came across some old petrol coupons. My first impulse was to throw them away. Though by nature improvident, I have enough sense to know that these particular slips of paper will never again, however critical or austere our future, be what bureaucrats call " valid " for any part of it; and I suppose it was sentiment which saved them from the waste-paper basket. You can—and I was brought up to believe that you invariably should—jettison old love- letters; but such missives are "valid," unless potential black- mailers are included, only for the writer and for one other person. Petrol coupons had once a wider relevance. Millions yearned for them, thousands were paid to regulate their issue, a few devoted specialists forged them. They were a bottleneck governing alike reunions and elopements, visits to the cinema and visits to the sick. The British in their time have felt strongly about many things; but few material objects can have been the focus of such varied, or such deep, emotions as these little scraps of paper. As I put them back in the drawer I remembered the humorous, deprecating way in which, years ago, outlandish hosts in a remote part of Asia had produced, from chests at the back of their tents, fat bundles of Tsarist hundred-rouble notes. They knew that the currency had long been worthless; and although the fugitives to whom its possession had once seemed vitally important—men from the broken armies of Annenkov, Dutov and others—had used it, consciously or unconsciously, to swindle them with, the Mongols still did not like to discard what had once been so precious to so many, and went on harbouring the Imperial eagles among their lares et penates. I suppose my attitude to the petrol coupons is roughly analogous to theirs.
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