[…] gleaned from their activity: one group they dubbed “whales,” the highest-value customers, who bought shave cream and wipes as well as razors; […]

The overground is ten minutes walk through the gloom. Anna finds a seat in the third carriage she tries.

On once more we swung, bumping uneasily along in the antique narrow-gauge coach, with gloomy woods and gathering night outside, shouts and songs (and quacks) inside—this was not at all the sort of train ordained by the logical strategists in Paris—then grinding to a stop at a mysterious halt which was no more than a nameboard in the pinewoods, without even a footpath leading to it, but nevertheless with a solitary passenger stolidly waiting.

When I started lifting in 1970, I was the skinniest thirteen-year-old I knew.