For nearly a year I lived in a Polish manorial house on a

large estate, read little, wrote next to nothing, met few people,
more or less stagnated.
At the end of that time I got a job helping with an evening
school in the Upper Silesian mining and industrial town of
Katowice. When I got there I found that it was not really an
evening school at all; only a lecturer in English at Cracow
University, a cautious, dapper little man, had started evening
courses in English at Katowice, where he came by train two or
three times a week to run them. The courses prospered. There
was a boom in English owing to American industrial investment.
He was glad to have an Englishman, and an Oxford graduate at
that, to help him, but was too prudent to mention the fact in
his advertisements only his own name appeared. Next year,
however, the beginnings of the postwar crisis began to be felt.
The demand for English slumped and the courses could no
longer support two.
Within three years of leaving Oxford I had come right
down to the nadir no job, no profession, no prospects, just
making a living by giving private lessons to foreigners. Apart
from the outer conditions, I was degenerating in myself also,
tending to become superficial in life and cynical in outlook.
The attempt to find an answer in religion had failed, and I no
longer even went to church or read religious or philosophical
books. The dream of being a professional writer had not
materialised.