within me so that I almost quivered with a strange mixture of excitement and pleasure. On another day I might feel absolutely prostrated, and so weak that I had to get up and dress in easy stages. It would be almost too much of an effort to move about sufficiently to keep my self-winding watch going. Twice I had very mild attacks of amnesia. On each occasion I was out walking when I suddenly realised that I had no recollection at all of the last half mile or so. I must have continued to walk automatically, but for some reason my conscious mind had just stopped working, as though I had been asleep. It was a very unpleasant experience, and I dreaded a recurrence, but there were only these two attacks. They happened within a few days of each other. I was steadily putting on more and more weight, and my craving for the wrong sorts of food increased. Obviously something drastic had to be done about it, and I started to diet. This was the first time I had ever attempted anything which could possibly be classified under the heading of ‘beautifying.’ For the first time, but not by any means the last, I found myself confronted with a mass of conflicting advice. Expert opinion advised no eating between meals, other equally expert opinion advised plenty of eating between meals, in order to avoid getting extremely hungry. Lots of water, no water. Take exercise, it slims you; take no exercise, it makes you hungry. Eat no butter at all, it’s very fattening. Some butter is essential; it stops you from getting too hungry and helps you burn up other food. Vegetables and fruit are essential to the slimmer; cut out vegetables and fruit completely, a fluid-free diet is required. Drink milk. Never touch milk. Eat no bananas. Live on bananas! So it went. My hunger was pathological, not genuine. It was decided to try to reduce it with drugs during the diet period. Benzedrine had no effect at all. Amphetamine did lessen my appetite to some degree, but it had a peculiar side effect. I was driving fast in an open sports car, wearing Polaroid glasses, when I noticed spots of what appeared to be rain on the lenses. I whipped off the glasses, and discovered that there was no rain. I slowed down and tried the glasses again. It was exactly as though drops of rain were falling on them. I borrowed a pair of non-Polaroid glasses from my passenger and the strange effect ceased. It was not imagination, but there was no scientific explanation that I could find. By dint of cutting out obviously fattening foods, under careful medical supervision, I managed to streamline my figure to the correct proportions. The distribution of the comparatively modest amount of fat had become very different, and was now typically feminine. My chest and hip measurements were greatly increased, and my waist as much narrower. A definite change in the functioning of my mentality began to become apparent. My mental processes seemed to be slightly slower, and at the same time I also showed signs of greatly heightened powers of intuition. It had been expected that the change of hormone balance might very well be manifested in changed mental processes, but I realised that it would be impossible to differentiate between the effects of mental and physical changes. Whatever the cause, I quite definitely began to be intuitive. This evidenced itself in many ways. The first time it happened I was walking along when I suddenly saw George-P., a man I had known well during the war. A moment later, with my second glance, I saw that he was not in the least like GeorgeP. Ten minutes afterwards I ran into the real George-P. The same sort of thing happened several times—too often to be attributed to coincidence. Sometimes when the telephone rang I would get a feeling that I knew who was calling, and I would be right.
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