never speak to strange men . by Diana Athill . conversation , as Oscar Wilde might almost have said , is the easy art of losing friends and alienating people ; if you &apos;ve ever been inescapably bound by the threads of conversation of two such gentlemen as Mr Ball and Mr Baring , you &apos;re likely to agree . if you have n&apos;t , take warning and plan an escape route in advance . there are often too few chairs on steamers which visit Adriatic islands , and those few are shackled together , to be queued for until a morose sailor consents to unlock them . this gives them rarity value . uncomfortable though they are , it seems a privilege to have one , even if you would rather be leaning on the rail . so if two men insist on giving up their hard-won deck-chairs to two women , it would be ungracious of the women to refuse . that was how I and my cousin Laura met Mr Ball and Mr Baring . they came from Oldham , had been visiting a trade fair , and were now on a spree , intending to spend one night in the town for which we were bound . Mr Ball , who boomed and had three strands of hair trained across his skull , was about fifty-five . Mr Baring , who whispered and wore pince-nez , was seventy if he was a day . they were probably the kindest men we shall ever meet and they were both mines of information on draught-proof floor coverings and plastic paints . Mr Ball was also widely travelled and had brought back from Malaya , Peru , Queensland , and the Friendly Islands an astonishing collection of statistics concerning measurements . he could - and did - describe how high , wide , deep , thick and heavy was any object you might like to name in any of those places . Mr Baring was less enterprising . this trade fair had been his first journey abroad and his preoccupations were chiefly dietary . by the end of the first morning Laura , who has less sense of social obligation than I have , had sidled out of her deck chair and was sitting on a hatch beside a medical student with a guitar . I was still stuck , and trying to view the experiences as a salutary discipline . I hope that Laura and I travel to see new places and enjoy new beauties in nature and art , but it is true that when we have encounters we like them to be worth having . the encounters I had imagined for this journey were certainly remote from Mr Ball and Mr Baring in everything but sex ( if , in this context , you could call it that ) , but I reminded myself of how kind they were and I told myself that anyway it would be over when we reached our destination . that was the first day . on the second I was beyond thought . I was not suffering , but I had become numb in all my faculties &amp;hellip; a point of boredom I had never reached before . when lunch came round again it seemed to be by immemorial custom that I was listening , as I ate , to an account of the exact dimensions of Mr Ball &apos;s verandah in Kuala Lumpur ( some eighteen inches longer than his verandah in Lima ) , and the weight of the largest and the smallest sweet potato he had ever eaten . meanwhile , as inertia crept up on me , the venerable Mr Baring was becoming more lively . at first he had been slightly oppressed by his companion &apos;s sophistication , but when the talk turned to food he perked up to the extent of telling me which breakfast cereals his grandchildren preferred . the journey ended that evening . as the gang-plank went down , Mr Ball said to me , I suppose you have a room booked ? no , I said , without thinking . we &apos;ll get an address from the tourist office . you &apos;re in luck ! exclaimed Mr Ball . look what I &apos;ve got . a letter from the tourist chief in the capital to his man here , telling him to look after us . you just stick with us and you &apos;ll be all right . Laura began to edge backwards against the surge towards the gangway . I began to babble about being a nuisance - but it was too late . the porters had been unleashed , Mr Ball had caught one and handed over our baggage as well as his own , and there we were on the quay with our benevolent friends , obviously together . other people were borne off in large numbers towards adventure . Laura and I ( not , I suspected unhappily , on speaking terms ) got meekly into a taxi with Mr Ball and Mr Baring , the last traces of our initiative vanishing as we did so . we were visiting a small , thickly walled and lovely town with straggling outskirts . the straggle was long and thin - the mountains came too close for it to spread backwards - and unless you were careful , we knew , you could find yourself staying some way from the old town . we had hoped to find rooms within the walls , or only just outside , and before Mr Ball got to work on the tourist chief we said as much . oh no , he said , shocked . you would n&apos;t like that . you would n&apos;t like the noise . but cars are n&apos;t allowed inside , I pointed out . it is n&apos;t cars . it &apos;s the talking and the music - they go on all night in these places . and besides - the drains . we &apos;ll find a nice , clean , modern place , do n&apos;t you worry . we were not worrying , we were panicking , but I was still numb and Laura was speechless with rage . we could not think of words that would not have been rude and wounding to this kind , kind man . so before long Mr Ball , Mr Baring , Laura and I were being welcomed to an eminently respectable , exquisitely clean , comfortable , modern house , a good half-hour &apos;s walk ( the trams did not go that way ) outside the walls . and then , before the night was out , the rains came . it rained and blew for five days without stopping . since it was August , widely advertised as the Adriatic &apos;s most benign month , we had not stopped at bringing no raincoats and no umbrellas : we had brought no coats and no sensible shoes either . had we been staying in the town itself we could each day have darted across into the City Caf&amp;eacute; where it was possible to live a full life for hours on end without setting foot out of doors ; we should have had a choice of eating places within a few yards ; we could have danced every evening . as it was , on the rare occasions when the rain diminished to a drizzle we would hurry out in an attempt to reach the town before we were drenched . once or twice we did reach the town - but never before we were drenched , and about the only amenity not provided by the City Caf&amp;eacute; was a drying room . all this , as an act of God , might have been borne . the truly testing aspect of the situation was that no aeroplane could take off from the airfield , and Mr Ball and Mr Baring had planned to return to their fair , after only one night , by air . the local inhabitants , anxious for their district &apos;s reputation for clemency , had decided that the best thing to do about all this rain was to belittle it . yes , of course , they said every morning at the airline office , it will stop tonight , planes will certainly be leaving tomorrow . so our friends did not change their plans and go by boat . no . they were immured with us in that spotless house for five of the longest days I have ever lived through . we expected them to be fretful at this grave hitch in their plans , but they did not seem to mind it . Mr Ball had known far longer and - incredible as it seemed - duller delays on savannah and prairie , about which he now had time to tell us in detail , while Mr Baring , though gently distressed at first , in the end found his imprisonment positively rewarding . to begin with , his digestion was upset , and this led him to the discovery of yoghourt : a discovery which he was clearly going to recall throughout his declining years as an important event ; though perhaps not always at half-hourly intervals , as he did at the time . however long we stayed in bed every day , we had to get up at last - and there they would be , cheerful and kind , ready for talk and paper-games involving arithmetic of which , it turned out , the resourceful Mr Ball knew a great many . when they said charming things to us - how grateful they were for our company , how pleased to have found us such a nice house - we could not meet their eyes . Mr Baring sometimes made it worse by taking us aside and whispering that if we wished to go out and enjoy ourselves , to escape from two old fogeys , we must not hesitate to do so . conscious of our bilious rage , suppressed , we feared so badly , we were driven by guilt ( not to mention the rain ) to effusive protests . good heavens no , what nonsense , we would say , and settle down to another paper game . the climax of each day came at dinner time . we might have been listening to wild music , we might have been dancing , we might have been meeting young men with bold , flashing eyes ; and instead , because our landlady served no meals , we would splash across to the next-door pension under umbrellas held by Mr Ball and Mr Baring , there to eat Wiener schnitzel at a long table with seven middle-aged married couples from Wuppertal . relief came on the sixth day . having learned that bits of purple storm cloud look deceptively like blue sky when seen through the chinks in shutters , we had not bothered to consult the sky . the first we knew of the weather &apos;s change was when Mr Ball knocked on our door and told us that a taxi had come to take them to the airport . well , young ladies , he said , we have shared an interesting experience . the rainfall in these last five days has been half as much again as the average for the four months June to September , inclusive . as the taxi bumped away we collapsed on our beds and exchanged the first look we had dared to give each other since our arrival . we still had five more days in this legendary place . we &apos;ll move this morning , said Laura . we &apos;ll move right into the very middle of the town and we &apos;ll find a room above a caf&amp;eacute; which has music , looking on to the market place . and what &apos;s more , said I , we &apos;ll hardly ever be in it . I &apos;m only going to stop swimming in order to eat , and stop eating in order to talk , and stop talking in order to dance . but as we spoke our landlady came in . she carried a tray on which were two little glasses of cherry brandy and two big slices of home-made sponge cake . sun , yes ? she said . I am so &apos;appy for you , and she beamed with pleasure . not only was she the mistress of a respectable , clean , modern house , but she , too , was - oh ominous word - as kind as kind can be . how could we possibly run out on anyone so admirable , for no definite reason ? thus , though our holiday had begun at last , we were still under the wing of Mr Ball and Mr Baring . try as we might , no harm was going to come to us . in the small hours of each day left to us , after some nineteen hours of sight-seeing , swimming , talking , drinking , and dancing , we still had to leave those bewitching noisy streets ; we still had to trudge for half an hour back to our eminently respectable lodgings . and so respectable were they that once we had reached the door our escorts - those , that is , who were stalwart enough still to be with us - never dreamed of doing anything more than shake our hands . here , in this country village , she had spent her childhood . here she had first been in love . 