Slamming the lid on a century

An intercalary chapter, and the opening of Part Two. The narrator stops at the boundary of 1900 to listen to what people said about the century they were leaving. Old men remember it as sweeter and simpler than it was, and complain that ladies are no longer ladies and a gentleman's word is worth nothing; the narrator answers by listing what the hundred years actually held — the British war and its ten thousand widows, the "painful picnic" in Mexico that doubled the country and trained its generals, the argument over whether a man may own a man, the "sad self-murder" that followed, then boom, bust and the great public thieves. Everyone agrees to slam the lid on it and start clean. Twice the refrain comes back: strawberries will never taste so good again, and the thighs of women have lost their clutch.

The book changes voice to open Part Two: no characters, no scene, just a crowd of opinions in the middle distance. The nostalgia is quoted rather than endorsed, then punctured by the century's actual record, and the twice-repeated joke about strawberries makes the point that people misremember on purpose.