'I had by this time [his mid-teens] also struck up a friendship with a young, unemployed, linotype operator, six or seven years older than myself. He lived in a street at the back of the Lodging House, was a member of the Left book Club, and lent me (among much else) his copy of Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier". Somehow, too, I came upon the poems of Auden, Spender, Day-Lewis, MacNeice; Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin".'