Title:      Coming Up For Air
Author:     George Orwell
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Title:      Coming Up For Air
Author:     George Orwell





'He's dead, but he won't lie down'

Popular song



PART I



1


The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

I remember the morning well.  At about a quarter to eight I'd
nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut
the kids out.  It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty
yellowish-grey sky.  Down below, out of the little square of
bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with
a privet hedge round it and a bare patch in the middle, that we call
the back garden.  There's the same back garden, some privets, and
same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road.  Only difference--
where there are no kids there's no bare patch in the middle.

I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor-blade while the water
ran into the bath.  My face looked back at me out of the mirror,
and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the
washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face.  It was the
temporary set that Warner, my dentist, had given me to wear while
the new ones were being made.  I haven't such a bad face, really.
It's one of those bricky-red faces that go with butter-coloured
hair and pale-blue eyes.  I've never gone grey or bald, thank God,
and when I've got my teeth in I probably don't look my age, which
is forty-five.

Making a mental note to buy razor-blades, I got into the bath and
started soaping.  I soaped my arms (I've got those kind of pudgy
arms that are freckled up to the elbow) and then took the back-
brush and soaped my shoulder-blades, which in the ordinary way I
can't reach.  It's a nuisance, but there are several parts of my
body that I can't reach nowadays.  The truth is that I'm inclined
to be a little bit on the fat side.  I don't mean that I'm like
something in a sideshow at a fair.  My weight isn't much over
fourteen stone, and last time I measured round my waist it was
either forty-eight or forty-nine, I forget which.  And I'm not what
they call 'disgustingly' fat, I haven't got one of those bellies
that sag half-way down to the knees.  It's merely that I'm a little
bit broad in the beam, with a tendency to be barrel-shaped.  Do you
know the active, hearty kind of fat man, the athletic bouncing type
that's nicknamed Fatty or Tubby and is always the life and soul of
the party?  I'm that type.  'Fatty' they mostly call me.  Fatty
Bowling.  George Bowling is my real name.

But at that moment I didn't feel like the life and soul of the
party.  And it struck me that nowadays I nearly always do have a
morose kind of feeling in the early mornings, although I sleep well
and my digestion's good.  I knew what it was, of course--it was
those bloody false teeth.  The things were magnified by the water
in the tumbler, and they were grinning at me like the teeth in a
skull.  It gives you a rotten feeling to have your gums meet, a
sort of pinched-up, withered feeling like when you've bitten into
a sour apple.  Besides, say what you will, false teeth are a
landmark.  When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can
kid yourself that you're a Hollywood sheik, is definitely at an
end.  And I was fat as well as forty-five.  As I stood up to soap
my crutch I had a look at my figure.  It's all rot about fat men
being unable to see their feet, but it's a fact that when I stand
upright I can only see the front halves of mine.  No woman, I
thought as I worked the soap round my belly, will ever look twice
at me again, unless she's paid to.  Not that at that moment I
particularly wanted any woman to look twice at me.

But it struck me that this morning there were reasons why I ought
to have been in a better mood.  To begin with I wasn't working
today.  The old car, in which I 'cover' my district (I ought to
tell you that I'm in the insurance business.  The Flying
Salamander.  Life, fire, burglary, twins, shipwreck--everything),
was temporarily in dock, and though I'd got to look in at the
London office to drop some papers, I was really taking the day off
to go and fetch my new false teeth.  And besides, there was another
business that had been in and out of my mind for some time past.
This was that I had seventeen quid which nobody else had heard
about--nobody in the family, that is.  It had happened this way.
A chap in our firm, Mellors by name, had got hold of a book called
Astrology applied to Horse-racing which proved that it's all a
question of influence of the planets on the colours the jockey is
wearing.  Well, in some race or other there was a mare called
Corsair's Bride, a complete outsider, but her jockey's colour was
green, which it seemed was just the colour for the planets that
happened to be in the ascendant.  Mellors, who was deeply bitten
with this astrology business, was putting several quid on the horse
and went down on his knees to me to do the same.  In the end,
chiefly to shut him up, I risked ten bob, though I don't bet as a
general rule.  Sure enough Corsair's Bride came home in a walk.  I
forget the exact odds, but my share worked out at seventeen quid.
By a kind of instinct--rather queer, and probably indicating
another landmark in my life--I just quietly put the money in the
bank and said nothing to anybody.  I'd never done anything of this
kind before.  A good husband and father would have spent it on a
dress for Hilda (that's my wife) and boots for the kids.  But I'd
been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was
beginning to get fed up with it.

After I'd soaped myself all over I felt better and lay down in the
bath to think about my seventeen quid and what to spend it on.  The
alternatives, it seemed to me, were either a week-end with a woman
or dribbling it quietly away on odds and ends such as cigars and
double whiskies.  I'd just turned on some more hot water and was
thinking about women and cigars when there was a noise like a herd
of buffaloes coming down the two steps that lead to the bathroom.
It was the kids, of course.  Two kids in a house the size of ours
is like a quart of beer in a pint mug.  There was a frantic
stamping outside and then a yell of agony.

'Dadda!  I wanna come in!'

'Well, you can't.  Clear out!'

'But dadda!  I wanna go somewhere!'

'Go somewhere else, then.  Hop it.  I'm having my bath.'

'Dad-DA!  I wanna GO SOME--WHERE!'

No use!  I knew the danger signal.  The W.C. is in the bathroom--it
would be, of course, in a house like ours.  I hooked the plug out
of the bath and got partially dry as quickly as I could.  As I
opened the door, little Billy--my youngest, aged seven--shot past
me, dodging the smack which I aimed at his head.  It was only when
I was nearly dressed and looking for a tie that I discovered that
my neck was still soapy.

It's a rotten thing to have a soapy neck.  It gives you a disgusting
sticky feeling, and the queer thing is that, however carefully you
sponge it away, when you've once discovered that your neck is soapy
you feel sticky for the rest of the day.  I went downstairs in a bad
temper and ready to make myself disagreeable.

Our dining-room, like the other dining-rooms in Ellesmere Road, is
a poky little place, fourteen feet by twelve, or maybe it's twelve
by ten, and the Japanese oak sideboard, with the two empty
decanters and the silver egg-stand that Hilda's mother gave us for
a wedding present, doesn't leave much room.  Old Hilda was glooming
behind the teapot, in her usual state of alarm and dismay because
the News Chronicle had announced that the price of butter was going
up, or something.  She hadn't lighted the gas-fire, and though the
windows were shut it was beastly cold.  I bent down and put a match
to the fire, breathing rather loudly through my nose (bending
always makes me puff and blow) as a kind of hint to Hilda.  She
gave me the little sidelong glance that she always gives me when
she thinks I'm doing something extravagant.

Hilda is thirty-nine, and when I first knew her she looked just
like a hare.  So she does still, but she's got very thin and rather
wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes, and
when she's more upset than usual she's got a trick of humping her
shoulders and folding her arms across her breast, like an old gypsy
woman over her fire.  She's one of those people who get their main
kick in life out of foreseeing disasters.  Only petty disasters,
of course.  As for wars, earthquakes, plagues, famines, and
revolutions, she pays no attention to them.  Butter is going up,
and the gas-bill is enormous, and the kids' boots are wearing out,
and there's another instalment due on the radio--that's Hilda's
litany.  She gets what I've finally decided is a definite pleasure
out of rocking herself to and fro with her arms across her breast,
and glooming at me, 'But, George, it's very SERIOUS!  I don't know
what we're going to DO!  I don't know where the money's coming
from!  You don't seem to realize how serious it IS!' and so on and
so forth.  It's fixed firmly in her head that we shall end up in
the workhouse.  The funny thing is that if we ever do get to the
workhouse Hilda won't mind it a quarter as much as I shall, in fact
she'll probably rather enjoy the feeling of security.

The kids were downstairs already, having washed and dressed at
lightning speed, as they always do when there's no chance to keep
anyone else out of the bathroom.  When I got to the breakfast table
they were having an argument which went to the tune of 'Yes, you
did!' 'No, I didn't!' 'Yes, you did!' 'No, I didn't!' and looked
like going on for the rest of the morning, until I told them to
cheese it.  There are only the two of them, Billy, aged seven, and
Lorna, aged eleven.  It's a peculiar feeling that I have towards
the kids.  A great deal of the time I can hardly stick the sight of
them.  As for their conversation, it's just unbearable.  They're at
that dreary bread-and-butter age when a kid's mind revolves round
things like rulers, pencil-boxes, and who got top marks in French.
At other times, especially when they're asleep, I have quite a
different feeling.  Sometimes I've stood over their cots, on summer
evenings when it's light, and watched them sleeping, with their
round faces and their tow-coloured hair, several shades lighter
than mine, and it's given me that feeling you read about in the
Bible when it says your bowels yearn.  At such times I feel that
I'm just a kind of dried-up seed-pod that doesn't matter twopence
and that my sole importance has been to bring these creatures into
the world and feed them while they're growing.  But that's only at
moments.  Most of the time my separate existence looks pretty
important to me, I feel that there's life in the old dog yet and
plenty of good times ahead, and the notion of myself as a kind of
tame dairy-cow for a lot of women and kids to chase up and down
doesn't appeal to me.

We didn't talk much at breakfast.  Hilda was in her 'I don't know
what we're going to DO!' mood, partly owing to the price of butter
and partly because the Christmas holidays were nearly over and
there was still five pounds owing on the school fees for last term.
I ate my boiled egg and spread a piece of bread with Golden Crown
marmalade.  Hilda will persist in buying the stuff.  It's
fivepence-halfpenny a pound, and the label tells you, in the
smallest print the law allows, that it contains 'a certain
proportion of neutral fruit-juice'.  This started me off, in the
rather irritating way I have sometimes, talking about neutral
fruit-trees, wondering what they looked like and what countries
they grew in, until finally Hilda got angry.  It's not that she
minds me chipping her, it's only that in some obscure way she
thinks it's wicked to make jokes about anything you save money on.

I had a look at the paper, but there wasn't much news.  Down in
Spain and over in China they were murdering one another as usual,
a woman's legs had been found in a railway waiting-room, and King
Zog's wedding was wavering in the balance.  Finally, at about ten
o'clock, rather earlier than I'd intended, I started out for town.
The kids had gone off to play in the public gardens.  It was a
beastly raw morning.  As I stepped out of the front door a nasty
little gust of wind caught the soapy patch on my neck and made me
suddenly feel that my clothes didn't fit and that I was sticky all
over.



2


Do you know the road I live in--Ellesmere Road, West Bletchley?
Even if you don't, you know fifty others exactly like it.

You know how these streets fester all over the inner-outer suburbs.
Always the same.  Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses--
the numbers in Ellesmere Road run to 212 and ours is 191--as much
alike as council houses and generally uglier.  The stucco front,
the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door.  The
Laurels, the Myrtles, the Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle
Vue.  At perhaps one house in fifty some anti-social type who'll
probably end in the workhouse has painted his front door blue
instead of green.

That sticky feeling round my neck had put me into a demoralized
kind of mood.  It's curious how it gets you down to have a sticky
neck.  It seems to take all the bounce out of you, like when you
suddenly discover in a public place that the sole of one of your
shoes is coming off.  I had no illusions about myself that morning.
It was almost as if I could stand at a distance and watch myself
coming down the road, with my fat, red face and my false teeth and
my vulgar clothes.  A chap like me is incapable of looking like a
gentleman.  Even if you saw me at two hundred yards' distance you'd
know immediately--not, perhaps, that I was in the insurance
business, but that I was some kind of tout or salesman.  The
clothes I was wearing were practically the uniform of the tribe.
Grey herring-bone suit, a bit the worse for wear, blue overcoat
costing fifty shillings, bowler hat, and no gloves.  And I've got
the look that's peculiar to people who sell things on commission, a
kind of coarse, brazen look.  At my best moments, when I've got a
new suit or when I'm smoking a cigar, I might pass for a bookie or
a publican, and when things are very bad I might be touting vacuum
cleaners, but at ordinary times you'd place me correctly.  'Five to
ten quid a week', you'd say as soon as you saw me.  Economically
and socially I'm about at the average level of Ellesmere Road.

I had the street pretty much to myself.  The men had bunked to
catch the 8.21 and the women were fiddling with the gas-stoves.
When you've time to look about you, and when you happen to be in
the right mood, it's a thing that makes you laugh inside to walk
down these streets in the inner-outer suburbs and to think of the
lives that go on there.  Because, after all, what IS a road like
Ellesmere Road?  Just a prison with the cells all in a row.  A line
of semidetached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-
pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss
twisting his tail and his wife riding him like the nightmare and
the kids sucking his blood like leeches.  There's a lot of rot
talked about the sufferings of the working class.  I'm not so sorry
for the proles myself.  Did you ever know a navvy who lay awake
thinking about the sack?  The prole suffers physically, but he's a
free man when he isn't working.  But in every one of those little
stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's NEVER free except when
he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the
bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.

Of course, the basic trouble with people like us, I said to myself,
is that we all imagine we've got something to lose.  To begin with,
nine-tenths of the people in Ellesmere Road are under the
impression that they own their houses.  Ellesmere Road, and the
whole quarter surrounding it, until you get to the High Street, is
part of a huge racket called the Hesperides Estate, the property of
the Cheerful Credit Building Society.  Building societies are
probably the cleverest racket of modern times.  My own line,
insurance, is a swindle, I admit, but it's an open swindle with the
cards on the table.  But the beauty of the building society
swindles is that your victims think you're doing them a kindness.
You wallop them, and they lick your hand.  I sometimes think I'd
like to have the Hesperides Estate surmounted by an enormous statue
to the god of building societies.  It would be a queer sort of god.
Among other things it would be bisexual.  The top half would be a
managing director and the bottom half would be a wife in the family
way.  In one hand it would carry an enormous key--the key of the
workhouse, of course--and in the other--what do they call those
things like French horns with presents coming out of them?--a
cornucopia, out of which would be pouring portable radios, life-
insurance policies, false teeth, aspirins, French letters, and
concrete garden rollers.

As a matter of fact, in Ellesmere Road we don't own our houses,
even when we've finished paying for them.  They're not freehold,
only leasehold.  They're priced at five-fifty, payable over a
period of sixteen years, and they're a class of house, which, if
you bought them for cash down, would cost round about three-eighty.
That represents a profit of a hundred and seventy for the Cheerful
Credit, but needless to say that Cheerful Credit makes a lot more
out of it than that.  Three-eighty includes the builder's profit,
but the Cheerful Credit, under the name of Wilson & Bloom, builds
the houses itself and scoops the builder's profit.  All it has to
pay for is the materials.  But it also scoops the profit on the
materials, because under the name of Brookes & Scatterby it sells
itself the bricks, tiles, doors, window-frames, sand, cement, and,
I think, glass.  And it wouldn't altogether surprise me to learn
that under yet another alias it sells itself the timber to make the
doors and window-frames.  Also--and this was something which we
really might have foreseen, though it gave us all a knock when we
discovered it--the Cheerful Credit doesn't always keep to its end
of the bargain.  When Ellesmere Road was built it gave on some open
fields--nothing very wonderful, but good for the kids to play in--
known as Platt's Meadows.  There was nothing in black and white,
but it had always been understood that Platt's Meadows weren't to
be built on.  However, West Bletchley was a growing suburb,
Rothwell's jam factory had opened in '28 and the Anglo-American
All-Steel Bicycle factory started in '33, and the population was
increasing and rents were going up.  I've never seen Sir Herbert
Crum or any other of the big noises of the Cheerful Credit in the
flesh, but in my mind's eye I could see their mouths watering.
Suddenly the builders arrived and houses began to go up on Platt's
Meadows.  There was a howl of agony from the Hesperides, and a
tenants' defence association was set up.  No use!  Crum's lawyers
had knocked the stuffing out of us in five minutes, and Platt's
Meadows were built over.  But the really subtle swindle, the one
that makes me feel old Crum deserved his baronetcy, is the mental
one.  Merely because of the illusion that we own our houses and
have what's called 'a stake in the country', we poor saps in the
Hesperides, and in all such places, are turned into Crum's devoted
slaves for ever.  We're all respectable householders--that's to say
Tories, yes-men, and bumsuckers.  Daren't kill the goose that lays
the gilded eggs!  And the fact that actually we aren't householders,
that we're all in the middle of paying for our houses and eaten up
with the ghastly fear that something might happen before we've made
the last payment, merely increases the effect. We're all bought, and
what's more we're bought with our own money.  Every one of those poor
downtrodden bastards, sweating his guts out to pay twice the proper
price for a brick doll's house that's called Belle Vue because
there's no view and the bell doesn't ring--every one of those poor
suckers would die on the field of battle to save his country from
Bolshevism.

I turned down Walpole Road and got into the High Street.  There's a
train to London at 10.14.  I was just passing the Sixpenny Bazaar
when I remembered the mental note I'd made that morning to buy a
packet of razor-blades.  When I got to the soap counter the floor-
manager, or whatever his proper title is, was cursing the girl in
charge there.  Generally there aren't many people in the Sixpenny
at that hour of the morning.  Sometimes if you go in just after
opening-time you see all the girls lined up in a row and given
their morning curse, just to get them into trim for the day.  They
say these big chain-stores have chaps with special powers of
sarcasm and abuse who are sent from branch to branch to ginger the
girls up.  The floor-manager was an ugly little devil, under-sized,
with very square shoulders and a spiky grey moustache.  He'd just
pounced on her about something, some mistake in the change
evidently, and was going for her with a voice like a circular saw.

'Ho, no!  Course you couldn't count it!  COURSE you couldn't.  Too
much trouble, that'd be.  Ho, no!'

Before I could stop myself I'd caught the girl's eye.  It wasn't
so nice for her to have a fat middle-aged bloke with a red face
looking on while she took her cursing.  I turned away as quickly as
I could and pretended to be interested in some stuff at the next
counter, curtain rings or something.  He was on to her again.  He
was one of those people who turn away and then suddenly dart back
at you, like a dragon-fly.

'COURSE you couldn't count it!  Doesn't matter to YOU if we're two
bob out.  Doesn't matter at all.  What's two bob to YOU?  Couldn't
ask YOU to go to the trouble of counting it properly.  Ho, no!
Nothing matters 'ere 'cept YOUR convenience.  You don't think about
others, do you?'

This went on for about five minutes in a voice you could hear half
across the shop.  He kept turning away to make her think he'd
finished with her and then darting back to have another go.  As I
edged a bit farther off I had a glance at them.  The girl was a kid
about eighteen, rather fat, with a sort of moony face, the kind
that would never get the change right anyway.  She'd turned pale
pink and she was wriggling, actually wriggling with pain.  It was
just the same as if he'd been cutting into her with a whip.  The
girls at the other counters were pretending not to hear.  He was an
ugly, stiff-built little devil, the sort of cock-sparrow type of
man that sticks his chest out and puts his hands under his
coattails--the type that'd be a sergeant-major only they aren't
tall enough.  Do you notice how often they have under-sized men for
these bullying jobs?  He was sticking his face, moustaches and all,
almost into hers so as to scream at her better.  And the girl all
pink and wriggling.

Finally he decided that he'd said enough and strutted off like an
admiral on the quarter-deck, and I came up to the counter for my
razor-blades.  He knew I'd heard every word, and so did she, and
both of them knew I knew they knew.  But the worst of it was that
for my benefit she'd got to pretend that nothing had happened and
put on the standoffish keep-your-distance attitude that a shopgirl's
supposed to keep up with male customers.  Had to act the grown-up
young lady half a minute after I'd seen her cursed like a skivvy!
Her face was still pink and her hands were trembling.  I asked her
for penny blades and she started fumbling in the threepenny tray.
Then the little devil of a floor-manager turned our way and for a
moment both of us thought he was coming back to begin again.  The
girl flinched like a dog that sees the whip.  But she was looking at
me out of the corner of her eye.  I could see that because I'd seen
her cursed she hated me like the devil. Queer!

I cleared out with my razor-blades.  Why do they stand it? I was
thinking.  Pure funk, of course.  One back-answer and you get the
sack.  It's the same everywhere.  I thought of the lad that
sometimes serves me at the chain-store grocery we deal at.  A great
hefty lump of twenty, with cheeks like roses and enormous fore-
arms, ought to be working in a blacksmith's shop.  And there he is
in his white jacket, bent double across the counter, rubbing his
hands together with his 'Yes, sir!  Very true, sir!  Pleasant
weather for the time of the year, sir!  What can I have the
pleasure of getting you today, sir?' practically asking you to kick
his bum.  Orders, of course.  The customer is always right.  The
thing you can see in his face is mortal dread that you might report
him for impertinence and get him sacked.  Besides, how's he to know
you aren't one of the narks the company sends round?  Fear!  We
swim in it.  It's our element.  Everyone that isn't scared stiff of
losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or
something.  Jews sweating when they think of Hitler.  It crossed my
mind that that little bastard with the spiky moustache was probably
a damn sight more scared for his job than the girl was.  Probably
got a family to support.  And perhaps, who knows, at home he's meek
and mild, grows cucumbers in the back garden, lets his wife sit on
him and the kids pull his moustache.  And by the same token you
never read about a Spanish Inquisitor or one of these higher-ups in
the Russian Ogpu without being told that in private life he was
such a good kind man, best of husbands and fathers, devoted to his
tame canary, and so forth.

The girl at the soap counter was looking after me as I went out of
the door.  She'd have murdered me if she could.  How she hated me
because of what I'd seen!  Much more than she hated the floor-
manager.



3


There was a bombing plane flying low overhead.  For a minute or two
it seemed to be keeping pace with the train.  Two vulgar kind of
blokes in shabby overcoats, obviously commercials of the lowest
type, newspaper canvassers probably, were sitting opposite me.  One
of them was reading the Mail and the other was reading the Express.
I could see by their manner that they'd spotted me for one of their
kind.  Up at the other end of the carriage two lawyers' clerks with
black bags were keeping up a conversation full of legal baloney
that was meant to impress the rest of us and show that they didn't
belong to the common herd.

I was watching the backs of the houses sliding past.  The line from
West Bletchley runs most of the way through slums, but it's kind of
peaceful, the glimpses you get of little backyards with bits of
flowers stuck in boxes and the flat roofs where the women peg out
the washing and the bird-cage on the wall.  The great black bombing
plane swayed a little in the air and zoomed ahead so that I
couldn't see it.  I was sitting with my back to the engine.  One of
the commercials cocked his eye at it for just a second.  I knew
what he was thinking.  For that matter it's what everybody else is
thinking.  You don't have to be a highbrow to think such thoughts
nowadays.  In two years' time, one year's time, what shall we be
doing when we see one of those things?  Making a dive for the
cellar, wetting our bags with fright.

The commercial bloke put down his Daily Mail.

'Templegate's winner come in,' he said.

The lawyers' clerks were sprouting some learned rot about fee-
simple and peppercorns.  The other commercial felt in his waistcoat
pocket and took out a bent Woodbine.  He felt in the other pocket
and then leaned across to me.

'Got a match, Tubby?'

I felt for my matches.  'Tubby', you notice.  That's interesting,
really.  For about a couple of minutes I stopped thinking about
bombs and began thinking about my figure as I'd studied it in my
bath that morning.

It's quite true I'm tubby, in fact my upper half is almost exactly
the shape of a tub.  But what's interesting, I think, is that
merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost anyone,
even a total, stranger, will take it for granted to give you a
nickname that's an insulting comment on your personal appearance.
Suppose a chap was a hunchback or had a squint or a hare-lip--would
you give him a nickname to remind him of it?  But every fat man's
labelled as a matter of course.  I'm the type that people
automatically slap on the back and punch in the ribs, and nearly
all of them think I like it.  I never go into the saloon bar of the
Crown at Pudley (I pass that way once a week on business) without
that ass Waters, who travels for the Seafoam Soap people but who's
more or less a permanency in the saloon bar of the Crown, prodding
me in the ribs and singing out 'Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom
Bowling!' which is a joke the bloody fools in the bar never get
tired of.  Waters has got a finger like a bar of iron.  They all
think a fat man doesn't have any feelings.

The commercial took another of my matches, to pick his teeth with,
and chucked the box back.  The train whizzed on to an iron bridge.
Down below I got a glimpse of a baker's van and a long string of
lorries loaded with cement.  The queer thing, I was thinking, is
that in a way they're right about fat men.  It's a fact that a fat
man, particularly a man who's been fat from birth--from childhood,
that's to say--isn't quite like other men.  He goes through his
life on a different plane, a sort of light-comedy plane, though in
the case of blokes in side-shows at fairs, or in fact anyone over
twenty stone, it isn't so much light comedy as low farce.  I've
been both fat and thin in my life, and I know the difference
fatness makes to your outlook.  It kind of prevents you from taking
things too hard.  I doubt whether a man who's never been anything
but fat, a man who's been called Fatty ever since he could walk,
even knows of the existence of any really deep emotions.  How could
he?  He's got no experience of such things.  He can't ever be
present at a tragic scene, because a scene where there's a fat man
present isn't tragic, it's comic.  Just imagine a fat Hamlet, for
instance!  Or Oliver Hardy acting Romeo.  Funnily enough I'd been
thinking something of the kind only a few days earlier when I was
reading a novel I'd got out of Boots.  Wasted Passion, it was
called.  The chap in the story finds out that his girl has gone off
with another chap.  He's one of these chaps you read about in
novels, that have pale sensitive faces and dark hair and a private
income.  I remember more or less how the passage went:


David paced up and down the room, his hands pressed to his
forehead.  The news seemed to have stunned him.  For a long time
he could not believe it.  Sheila untrue to him!  It could not be!
Suddenly realization rushed over him, and he saw the fact in all
its stark horror.  It was too much.  He flung himself down in a
paroxysm of weeping.


Anyway, it went something like that.  And even at the time it
started me thinking.  There you have it, you see.  That's how
people--some people--are expected to behave.  But how about a chap
like me?  Suppose Hilda went off for a week-end with somebody else-
-not that I'd care a damn, in fact it would rather please me to
find that she'd still got that much kick left in her--but suppose I
did care, would I fling myself down in a paroxysm of weeping?
Would anyone expect me to?  You couldn't, with a figure like mine.
It would be downright obscene.

The train was running along an embankment.  A little below us you
could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, the little
red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a bit lighted up at
this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them.  Funny how
we keep on thinking about bombs.  Of course there's no question
that it's coming soon.  You can tell how close it is by the cheer-
up stuff they're talking about it in the newspaper.  I was reading
a piece in the News Chronicle the other day where it said that
bombing planes can't do any damage nowadays.  The anti-aircraft
guns have got so good that the bomber has to stay at twenty
thousand feet.  The chap thinks, you notice, that if an aeroplane's
high enough the bombs don't reach the ground.  Or more likely what
he really meant was that they'll miss Woolwich Arsenal and only hit
places like Ellesmere Road.

But taking it by and large, I thought, it's not so bad to be fat.
One thing about a fat man is that he's always popular.  There's
really no kind of company, from bookies to bishops, where a fat man
doesn't fit in and feel at home.  As for women, fat men have more
luck with them than people seem to think.  It's all bunk to
imagine, as some people do, that a woman looks on a fat man as just
a joke.  The truth is that a woman doesn't look on ANY man as a
joke if he can kid her that he's in love with her.

Mind you, I haven't always been fat.  I've been fat for eight or
nine years, and I suppose I've developed most of the characteristics.
But it's also a fact that internally, mentally, I'm not altogether
fat.  No!  Don't mistake me.  I'm not trying to put myself over as a
kind of tender flower, the aching heart behind the smiling face and
so forth.  You couldn't get on in the insurance business if you were
anything like that.  I'm vulgar, I'm insensitive, and I fit in with
my environment.  So long as anywhere in the world things are being
sold on commission and livings are picked up by sheer brass and lack
of finer feelings, chaps like me will be doing it.  In almost all
circumstances I'd manage to make a living--always a living and never
a fortune--and even in war, revolution, plague, and famine I'd back
myself to stay alive longer than most people.  I'm that type.  But
also I've got something else inside me, chiefly a hangover from the
past.  I'll tell you about that later.  I'm fat, but I'm thin
inside.  Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every
fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of
stone?

The chap who'd borrowed my matches was having a good pick at his
teeth over the Express.

'Legs case don't seem to get much forrader,' he said.

'They'll never get 'im,' said the other. ''Ow could you identify a
pair of legs?  They're all the bleeding same, aren't they?'

'Might trace 'im through the piece of paper 'e wrapped 'em up in,'
said the first.

Down below you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and
on, twisting this way and that with the streets, but stretching on
and on, like an enormous plain that you could have ridden over.
Whichever way you cross London it's twenty miles of houses almost
without a break.  Christ! how can the bombers miss us when they
come?  We're just one great big bull's-eye.  And no warning,
probably.  Because who's going to be such a bloody fool as to
declare war nowadays?  If I was Hitler I'd send my bombers across
in the middle of a disarmament conference.  Some quiet morning,
when the clerks are streaming across London Bridge, and the
canary's singing, and the old woman's pegging the bloomers on the
line--zoom, whizz, plonk!  Houses going up into the air, bloomers
soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses.

Seems a pity somehow, I thought.  I looked at the great sea of
roofs stretching on and on.  Miles and miles of streets, fried-fish
shops, tin chapels, picture houses, little printing-shops up back
alleys, factories, blocks of flats, whelk stalls, dairies, power
stations--on and on and on.  Enormous!  And the peacefulness of it!
Like a great wilderness with no wild beasts.  No guns firing,
nobody chucking pineapples, nobody beating anybody else up with a
rubber truncheon.  If you come to think of it, in the whole of
England at this moment there probably isn't a single bedroom window
from which anyone's firing a machine-gun.

But how about five years from now?  Or two years?  Or one year?



4


I'd dropped my papers at the office.  Warner is one of these cheap
American dentists, and he has his consulting-room, or 'parlour' as
he likes to call it, halfway up a big block of offices, between a
photographer and a rubber-goods wholesaler.  I was early for my
appointment, but it was time for a bit of grub.  I don't know what
put it into my head to go into a milk-bar.  They're places I
generally avoid.  We five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers aren't well served
in the way of eating-places in London.  If your idea of the amount
to spend on a meal is one and threepence, it's either Lyons, the
Express Dairy, or the A.B.C., or else it's the kind of funeral
snack they serve you in the saloon bar, a pint of bitter and a slab
of cold pie, so cold that it's colder than the beer.  Outside the
milk-bar the boys were yelling the first editions of the evening
papers.

Behind the bright red counter a girl in a tall white cap was
fiddling with an ice-box, and somewhere at the back a radio was
playing, plonk-tiddle-tiddle-plonk, a kind of tinny sound.  Why the
hell am I coming here? I thought to myself as I went in.  There's a
kind of atmosphere about these places that gets me down.  Everything
slick and shiny and streamlined; mirrors, enamel, and chromium plate
whichever direction you look in.  Everything spent on the decorations
and nothing on the food.  No real food at all.  Just lists of stuff
with American names, sort of phantom stuff that you can't taste and
can hardly believe in the existence of.  Everything comes out of a
carton or a tin, or it's hauled out of a refrigerator or squirted
out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube.  No comfort, no privacy.
Tall stools to sit on, a kind of narrow ledge to eat off, mirrors
all round you.  A sort of propaganda floating round, mixed up with
the noise of the radio, to the effect that food doesn't matter,
comfort doesn't matter, nothing matters except slickness and
shininess and streamlining.  Everything's streamlined nowadays, even
the bullet Hitler's keeping for you.  I ordered a large coffee and a
couple of frankfurters.  The girl in the white cap jerked them at me
with about as much interest as you'd throw ants' eggs to a goldfish.

Outside the door a newsboy yelled 'StarnoosstanNERD!'  I saw the
poster flapping against his knees:  LEGS.  FRESH DISCOVERIES.  Just
'legs', you notice.  It had got down to that.  Two days earlier
they'd found a woman's legs in a railway waiting-room, done up in a
brown-paper parcel, and what with successive editions of the
papers, the whole nation was supposed to be so passionately
interested in these blasted legs that they didn't need any further
introduction.  They were the only legs that were news at the
moment.  It's queer, I thought, as I ate a bit of roll, how dull
the murders are getting nowadays.  All this cutting people up and
leaving bits of them about the countryside.  Not a patch on the old
domestic poisoning dramas, Crippen, Seddon, Mrs Maybrick; the truth
being, I suppose, that you can't do a good murder unless you
believe you're going to roast in hell for it.

At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and--Christ!

I can't honestly say that I'd expected the thing to have a pleasant
taste.  I'd expected it to taste of nothing, like the roll.  But
this--well, it was quite an experience.  Let me try and describe it
to you.

The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary
teeth weren't much of a fit.  I had to do a kind of sawing movement
before I could get my teeth through the skin.  And then suddenly--
pop!  The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear.  A sort of
horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue.  But the taste!
For a moment I just couldn't believe it.  Then I rolled my tongue
round it again and had another try.  It was FISH!  A sausage, a
thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish!  I got up and
walked straight out without touching my coffee.  God knows what
that might have tasted of.

Outside the newsboy shoved the Standard into my face and yelled,
'Legs!  'Orrible revelations!  All the winners!  Legs!  Legs!'  I
was still rolling the stuff round my tongue, wondering where I
could spit it out.  I remembered a bit I'd read in the paper
somewhere about these food-factories in Germany where everything's
made out of something else.  Ersatz, they call it.  I remembered
reading that THEY were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no
doubt, out of something different.  It gave me the feeling that I'd
bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made
of.  That's the way we're going nowadays.  Everything slick and
streamlined, everything made out of something else.  Celluloid,
rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night,
glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no
vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing
under the neutral fruit-trees.  But when you come down to brass
tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for
instance, that's what you get.  Rotten fish in a rubber skin.
Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.

When I'd got the new teeth in I felt a lot better.  They sat nice
and smooth over the gums, and though very likely it sounds absurd
to say that false teeth can make you feel younger, it's a fact that
they did so.  I tried a smile at myself in a shop window.  They
weren't half bad.  Warner, though cheap, is a bit of an artist and
doesn't aim at making you look like a toothpaste advert.  He's got
huge cabinets full of false teeth--he showed them to me once--all
graded according to size and colour, and he picks them out like a
jeweller choosing stones for a necklace.  Nine people out of ten
would have taken my teeth for natural.

I caught a full-length glimpse of myself in another window I was
passing, and it struck me that really I wasn't such a bad figure of
a man.  A bit on the fat side, admittedly, but nothing offensive,
only what the tailors call a 'full figure', and some women like a
man to have a red face.  There's life in the old dog yet, I
thought.  I remembered my seventeen quid, and definitely made up my
mind that I'd spend it on a woman.  There was time to have a pint
before the pubs shut, just to baptize the teeth, and feeling rich
because of my seventeen quid I stopped at a tobacconist's and
bought myself a sixpenny cigar of a kind I'm rather partial to.
They're eight inches long and guaranteed pure Havana leaf all
through.  I suppose cabbages grow in Havana the same as anywhere
else.

When I came out of the pub I felt quite different.

I'd had a couple of pints, they'd warmed me up inside, and the
cigar smoke oozing round my new teeth gave me a fresh, clean,
peaceful sort of feeling.  All of a sudden I felt kind of
thoughtful and philosophic.  It was partly because I didn't have
any work to do.  My mind went back to the thoughts of war I'd been
having earlier that morning, when the bomber flew over the train.
I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you foresee
the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it.

I was walking westward up the Strand, and though it was coldish I
went slowly to get the pleasure of my cigar.  The usual crowd that
you can hardly fight your way through was streaming up the
pavement, all of them with that insane fixed expression on their
faces that people have in London streets, and there was the usual
jam of traffic with the great red buses nosing their way between
the cars, and the engines roaring and horns tooting.  Enough noise
to waken the dead, but not to waken this lot, I thought.  I felt as
if I was the only person awake in a city of sleep-walkers.  That's
an illusion, of course.  When you walk through a crowd of strangers
it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all
waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.
And this kind of prophetic feeling that keeps coming over me
nowadays, the feeling that war's just round the corner and that
war's the end of all things, isn't peculiar to me.  We've all got
it, more or less.  I suppose even among the people passing at that
moment there must have been chaps who were seeing mental pictures
of the shellbursts and the mud.  Whatever thought you think there's
always a million people thinking it at the same moment.  But that
was how I felt.  We're all on the burning deck and nobody knows it
except me.  I looked at the dumb-bell faces streaming past.  Like
turkeys in November, I thought.  Not a notion of what's coming to
them.  It was as if I'd got X-rays in my eyes and could see the
skeletons walking.

I looked forward a few years.  I saw this street as it'll be in
five years' time, say, or three years' time (1941 they say it's
booked for), after the fighting's started.

No, not all smashed to pieces.  Only a little altered, kind of
chipped and dirty-looking, the shop-windows almost empty and so
dusty that you can't see into them.  Down a side street there's an
enormous bomb-crater and a block of buildings burnt out so that it
looks like a hollow tooth.  Thermite.  It's all curiously quiet,
and everyone's very thin.  A platoon of soldiers comes marching up
the street.  They're all as thin as rakes and their boots are
dragging.  The sergeant's got corkscrew moustaches and holds
himself like a ramrod, but he's thin too and he's got a cough that
almost tears him open.  Between his coughs he's trying to bawl at
them in the old parade-ground style.  'Nah then, Jones!  Lift yer
'ed up!  What yer keep starin' at the ground for?  All them fag-
ends was picked up years ago.'  Suddenly a fit of coughing catches
him.  He tries to stop it, can't, doubles up like a ruler, and
almost coughs his guts out.  His face turns pink and purple, his
moustache goes limp, and the water runs out of his eyes.

I can hear the air-raid sirens blowing and the loud-speakers
bellowing that our glorious troops have taken a hundred thousand
prisoners.  I see a top-floor-back in Birmingham and a child of
five howling and howling for a bit of bread.  And suddenly the
mother can't stand it any longer, and she yells at it, 'Shut your
trap, you little bastard!' and then she ups the child's frock and
smacks its bottom hard, because there isn't any bread and isn't
going to be any bread.  I see it all.  I see the posters and the
food-queues, and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the
machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows.

Is it going to happen?  No knowing.  Some days it's impossible to
believe it.  Some days I say to myself that it's just a scare got
up by the newspapers.  Some days I know in my bones there's no
escaping it.

When I got down near Charing Cross the boys were yelling a later
edition of the evening papers.  There was some more drivel about
the murder.  LEGS.  FAMOUS SURGEON'S STATEMENT.  Then another
poster caught my eye:  KING ZOG'S WEDDING POSTPONED.  King Zog!
What a name!  It's next door to impossible to believe a chap with a
name like that isn't a jet-black Negro.

But just at that moment a queer thing happened.  King Zog's name--
but I suppose, as I'd already seen the name several times that day,
it was mixed up with some sound in the traffic or the smell of
horse-dung or something--had started memories in me.

The past is a curious thing.  It's with you all the time.  I
suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that
happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got
no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a
lot of stuff in a history book.  Then some chance sight or sound or
smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't
merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past.  It was like
that at this moment.

I was back in the parish church at Lower Binfield, and it was
thirty-eight years ago.  To outward appearances, I suppose, I was
still walking down the Strand, fat and forty-five, with false teeth
and a bowler hat, but inside me I was Georgie Bowling, aged seven,
younger son of Samuel Bowling, corn and seed merchant, of 57 High
Street, Lower Binfield.  And it was Sunday morning, and I could
smell the church.  How I could smell it!  You know the smell
churches have, a peculiar, dank, dusty, decaying, sweetish sort of
smell.  There's a touch of candle-grease in it, and perhaps a whiff
of incense and a suspicion of mice, and on Sunday mornings it's a
bit overlaid by yellow soap and serge dresses, but predominantly
it's that sweet, dusty, musty smell that's like the smell of death
and life mixed up together.  It's powdered corpses, really.

In those days I was about four feet high.  I was standing on the
hassock so as to see over the pew in front, and I could feel
Mother's black serge dress under my hand.  I could also feel my
stockings pulled up over my knees--we used to wear them like that
then--and the saw edge of the Eton collar they used to buckle me
into on Sunday mornings.  And I could hear the organ wheezing and
two enormous voices bellowing out the psalm.  In our church there
were two men who led the singing, in fact they did so much of the
singing that nobody else got much of a chance.  One was Shooter,
the fishmonger, and the other was old Wetherall, the joiner and
undertaker.  They used to sit opposite one another on either side
of the nave, in the pews nearest the pulpit.  Shooter was a short
fat man with a very pink, smooth face, a big nose, drooping
moustache, and a chin that kind of fell away beneath his mouth.
Wetherall was quite different.  He was a great, gaunt, powerful old
devil of about sixty, with a face like a death's-head and stiff
grey hair half an inch long all over his head.  I've never seen a
living man who looked so exactly like a skeleton.  You could see
every line of the skull in his face, his skin was like parchment,
and his great lantern jaw full of yellow teeth worked up and down
just like the jaw of a skeleton in an anatomical museum.  And yet
with all his leanness he looked as strong as iron, as though he'd
live to be a hundred and make coffins for everyone in that church
before he'd finished.  Their voices were quite different, too.
Shooter had a kind of desperate, agonized bellow, as though someone
had a knife at his throat and he was just letting out his last yell
for help.  But Wetherall had a tremendous, churning, rumbling noise
that happened deep down inside him, like enormous barrels being
rolled to and fro underground.  However much noise he let out, you
always knew he'd got plenty more in reserve.  The kids nicknamed
him Rumbletummy.

They used to get up a kind of antiphonal effect, especially in the
psalms.  It was always Wetherall who had the last word.  I suppose
really they were friends in private life, but in my kid's way I
used to imagine that they were deadly enemies and trying to shout
one another down.  Shooter would roar out 'The Lord is my
shepherd', and then Wetherall would come in with 'Therefore can I
lack nothing', drowning him completely.  You always knew which of
the two was master.  I used especially to look forward to that
psalm that has the bit about Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the
king of Bashan (this was what King Zog's name had reminded me of).
Shooter would start off with 'Sihon king of the Amorites', then
perhaps for half a second you could hear the rest of the
congregation singing the 'and', and then Wetherall's enormous bass
would come in like a tidal wave and swallow everybody up with 'Og
the king of Bashan'.  I wish I could make you hear the tremendous,
rumbling, subterranean barrel-noise that he could get into that
word 'Og'.  He even used to clip off the end of the 'and', so that
when I was a very small kid I used to think it was Dog the king of
Bashan.  But later, when I got the names right, I formed a picture
in my mind's eye of Sihon and Og.  I saw them as a couple of those
great Egyptian statues that I'd seen pictures of in the penny
encyclopedia, enormous stone statues thirty feet high, sitting on
their thrones opposite one another, with their hands on their knees
and a faint mysterious smile on their faces.

How it came back to me!  That peculiar feeling--it was only a
feeling, you couldn't describe it as an activity--that we used to
call 'Church'.  The sweet corpsy smell, the rustle of Sunday
dresses, the wheeze of the organ and the roaring voices, the spot
of light from the hole in the window creeping slowly up the nave.
In some way the grown-ups could put it across that this extraordinary
performance was necessary.  You took it for granted, just as you
took the Bible, which you got in big doses in those days.  There
were texts on every wall and you knew whole chapters of the O.T. by
heart.  Even now my head's stuffed full of bits out of the Bible.
And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord.
And Asher abode in his breeches.  Followed them from Dan until thou
come unto Beersheba.  Smote him under the fifth rib, so that he
died.  You never understood it, you didn't try to or want to, it was
just a kind of medicine, a queer-tasting stuff that you had to
swallow and knew to be in some way necessary.  An extraordinary
rigmarole about people with names like Shimei and Nebuchadnezzar and
Ahithophel and Hashbadada; people with long stiff garments and
Assyrian beards, riding up and down on camels among temples and
cedar trees and doing extraordinary things.  Sacrificing burnt
offerings, walking about in fiery furnaces, getting nailed on
crosses, getting swallowed by whales.  And all mixed up with the
sweet graveyard smell and the serge dresses and the wheeze of the
organ.

That was the world I went back to when I saw the poster about King
Zog.  For a moment I didn't merely remember it, I was IN it.  Of
course such impressions don't last more than a few seconds.  A
moment later it was as though I'd opened my eyes again, and I was
forty-five and there was a traffic jam in the Strand.  But it had
left a kind of after-effect behind.  Sometimes when you come out of
a train of thought you feel as if you were coming up from deep
water, but this time it was the other way about, it was as though
it was back in 1900 that I'd been breathing real air.  Even now,
with my eyes open, so to speak, all those bloody fools hustling to
and fro, and the posters and the petrol-stink and the roar of the
engines, seemed to me less real than Sunday morning in Lower
Binfield thirty-eight years ago.

I chucked away my cigar and walked on slowly.  I could smell the
corpse-smell.  In a manner of speaking I can smell it now.  I'm
back in Lower Binfield, and the year's 1900.  Beside the horse-
trough in the market-place the carrier's horse is having its nose-
bag.  At the sweet-shop on the corner Mother Wheeler is weighing
out a ha'porth of brandy balls.  Lady Rampling's carriage is
driving by, with the tiger sitting behind in his pipeclayed
breeches with his arms folded.  Uncle Ezekiel is cursing Joe
Chamberlain.  The recruiting-sergeant in his scarlet jacket, tight
blue overalls, and pillbox hat, is strutting up and down twisting
his moustache.  The drunks are puking in the yard behind the
George.  Vicky's at Windsor, God's in heaven, Christ's on the
cross, Jonah's in the whale, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are in
the fiery furnace, and Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the king
of Bashan are sitting on their thrones looking at one another--not
doing anything exactly, just existing, keeping their appointed
place, like a couple of fire-dogs, or the Lion and the Unicorn.

Is it gone for ever?  I'm not certain.  But I tell you it was a
good world to live in.  I belong to it.  So do you.




PART II



1


The world I momentarily remembered when I saw King Zog's name on
the poster was so different from the world I live in now that you
might have a bit of difficulty in believing I ever belonged to it.

I suppose by this time you've got a kind of picture of me in your
mind--a fat middle-aged bloke with false teeth and a red face--and
subconsciously you've been imagining that I was just the same even
when I was in my cradle.  But forty-five years is a long time, and
though some people don't change and develop, others do.  I've
changed a great deal, and I've had my ups and downs, mostly ups.
It may seem queer, but my father would probably be rather proud of
me if he could see me now.  He'd think it a wonderful thing that a
son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with a
bathroom.  Even now I'm a little above my origin, and at other
times I've touched levels that we should never have dreamed of in
those old days before the war.

Before the war!  How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder?
How long before the answer will be 'Which war?'  In my case the
never-never land that people are thinking of when they say 'before
the war' might almost be before the Boer War.  I was born in '93,
and I can actually remember the outbreak of the Boer War, because
of the first-class row that Father and Uncle Ezekiel had about it.
I've several other memories that would date from about a year
earlier than that.

The very first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin chaff.
You went up the stone passage that led from the kitchen to the
shop, and the smell of sainfoin got stronger all the way.  Mother
had fixed a wooden gate in the doorway to prevent Joe and myself
(Joe was my elder brother) from getting into the shop.  I can still
remember standing there clutching the bars, and the smell of
sainfoin mixed up with the damp plastery smell that belonged to the
passage.  It wasn't till years later that I somehow managed to
crash the gate and get into the shop when nobody was there.  A
mouse that had been having a go at one of the meal-bins suddenly
plopped out and ran between my feet.  It was quite white with meal.
This must have happened when I was about six.

When you're very young you seem to suddenly become conscious of
things that have been under your nose for a long time past.  The
things round about you swim into your mind one at a time, rather as
they do when you're waking from sleep.  For instance, it was only
when I was nearly four that I suddenly realized that we owned a
dog.  Nailer, his name was, an old white English terrier of the
breed that's gone out nowadays.  I met him under the kitchen table
and in some way seemed to grasp, having only learnt it that moment,
that he belonged to us and that his name was Nailer.  In the same
way, a bit earlier, I'd discovered that beyond the gate at the end
of the passage there was a place where the smell of sainfoin came
from.  And the shop itself, with the huge scales and the wooden
measures and the tin shovel, and the white lettering on the window,
and the bullfinch in its cage--which you couldn't see very well
even from the pavement, because the window was always dusty--all
these things dropped into place in my mind one by one, like bits of
a jig-saw puzzle.

Time goes on, you get stronger on your legs, and by degrees you
begin to get a grasp of geography.  I suppose Lower Binfield was
just like any other market town of about two thousand inhabitants.
It was in Oxfordshire--I keep saying WAS, you notice, though after
all the place still exists--about five miles from the Thames.  It
lay in a bit of a valley, with a low ripple of hills between itself
and the Thames, and higher hills behind.  On top of the hills there
were woods in sort of dim blue masses among which you could see a
great white house with a colonnade.  This was Binfield House ('The
Hall', everybody called it), and the top of the hill was known as
Upper Binfield, though there was no village there and hadn't been
for a hundred years or more.  I must have been nearly seven before
I noticed the existence of Binfield House.  When you're very small
you don't look into the distance.  But by that time I knew every
inch of the town, which was shaped roughly like a cross with the
market-place in the middle.  Our shop was in the High Street a
little before you got to the market-place, and on the corner there
was Mrs Wheeler's sweet-shop where you spent a halfpenny when you
had one.  Mother Wheeler was a dirty old witch and people suspected
her of sucking the bull's-eyes and putting them back in the bottle,
though this was never proved.  Farther down there was the barber's
shop with the advert for Abdulla cigarettes--the one with the
Egyptian soldiers on it, and curiously enough they're using the
same advert to this day--and the rich boozy smell of bay rum and
latakia.  Behind the houses you could see the chimneys of the
brewery.  In the middle of the market-place there was the stone
horse-trough, and on top of the water there was always a fine film
of dust and chaff.

Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer
all the year round.  I'm quite aware that that's a delusion.  I'm
merely trying to tell you how things come back to me.  If I shut my
eyes and think of Lower Binfield any time before I was, say, eight,
it's always in summer weather that I remember it.  Either it's the
market-place at dinner-time, with a sort of sleepy dusty hush over
everything and the carrier's horse with his nose dug well into his
nose-bag, munching away, or it's a hot afternoon in the great green
juicy meadows round the town, or it's about dusk in the lane behind
the allotments, and there's a smell of pipe-tobacco and night-
stocks floating through the hedge.  But in a sense I do remember
different seasons, because all my memories are bound up with things
to eat, which varied at different times of the year.  Especially
the things you used to find in the hedges.  In July there were
dewberries--but they're very rare--and the blackberries were
getting red enough to eat.  In September there were sloes and
hazel-nuts.  The best hazelnuts were always out of reach.  Later on
there were beech-nuts and crab-apples.  Then there were the kind of
minor foods that you used to eat when there was nothing better
going.  Haws--but they're not much good--and hips, which have a
nice sharp taste if you clean the hairs out of them.  Angelica is
good in early summer, especially when you're thirsty, and so are
the stems of various grasses.  Then there's sorrel, which is good
with bread and butter, and pig-nuts, and a kind of wood shamrock
which has a sour taste.  Even plantain seeds are better than
nothing when you're a long way from home and very hungry.

Joe was two years older than myself.  When we were very small
Mother used to pay Katie Simmons eighteen pence a week to take us
out for walks in the afternoons.  Katie's father worked in the
brewery and had fourteen children, so that the family were always
on the lookout for odd jobs.  She was only twelve when Joe was
seven and I was five, and her mental level wasn't very different
from ours.  She used to drag me by the arm and call me 'Baby', and
she had just enough authority over us to prevent us from being run
over by dogcarts or chased by bulls, but so far as conversation
went we were almost on equal terms.  We used to go for long,
trailing kind of walks--always, of course, picking and eating
things all the way--down the lane past the allotments, across
Roper's Meadows, and down to the Mill Farm, where there was a pool
with newts and tiny carp in it (Joe and I used to go fishing there
when we were a bit older), and back by the Upper Binfield Road so
as to pass the sweet-shop that stood on the edge of the town.  This
shop was in such a bad position that anyone who took it went
bankrupt, and to my own knowledge it was three times a sweet-shop,
once a grocer's, and once a bicycle-repair shop, but it had a
peculiar fascination for children.  Even when we had no money, we'd
go that way so as to glue our noses against the window.  Katie
wasn't in the least above sharing a farthing's worth of sweets and
quarrelling over her share.  You could buy things worth having for
a farthing in those days.  Most sweets were four ounces a penny,
and there was even some stuff called Paradise Mixture, mostly
broken sweets from other bottles, which was six.  Then there were
Farthing Everlastings, which were a yard long and couldn't be
finished inside half an hour.  Sugar mice and sugar pigs were eight
a penny, and so were liquorice pistols, popcorn was a halfpenny for
a large bag, and a prize packet which contained several different
kinds of sweets, a gold ring, and sometimes a whistle, was a penny.
You don't see prize packets nowadays.  A whole lot of the kinds of
sweets we had in those days have gone out.  There was a kind of
flat white sweet with mottoes printed on them, and also a kind of
sticky pink stuff in an oval matchwood box with a tiny tin spoon to
eat it with, which cost a halfpenny.  Both of those have disappeared.
So have Caraway Comfits, and so have chocolate pipes and sugar
matches, and even Hundreds and Thousands you hardly ever see.
Hundreds and Thousands were a great standby when you'd only a
farthing.  And what about Penny Monsters?  Does one ever see a Penny
Monster nowadays?  It was a huge bottle, holding more than a quart
of fizzy lemonade, all for a penny.  That's another thing that the
war killed stone dead.

It always seems to be summer when I look back.  I can feel the
grass round me as tall as myself, and the heat coming out of the
earth.  And the dust in the lane, and the warm greeny light coming
through the hazel boughs.  I can see the three of us trailing
along, eating stuff out of the hedge, with Katie dragging at my arm
and saying 'Come on, Baby!' and sometimes yelling ahead to Joe,
'Joe!  You come back 'ere this minute!  You'll catch it!'  Joe was
a hefty boy with a big, lumpy sort of head and tremendous calves,
the kind of boy who's always doing something dangerous.  At seven
he'd already got into short trousers, with the thick black
stockings drawn up over the knee and the great clumping boots that
boys had to wear in those days.  I was still in frocks--a kind of
holland overall that Mother used to make for me.  Katie used to
wear a dreadful ragged parody of a grown-up dress that descended
from sister to sister in her family.  She had a ridiculous great
hat with her pigtails hanging down behind it, and a long, draggled
skirt which trailed on the ground, and button boots with the heels
trodden down.  She was a tiny thing, not much taller than Joe, but
not bad at 'minding' children.  In a family like that a child is
'minding' other children about as soon as it's weaned.  At times
she'd try to be grown-up and ladylike, and she had a way of cutting
you short with a proverb, which to her mind was something
unanswerable.  If you said 'Don't care', she'd answer immediately:


'Don't care was made to care,
Don't care was hung,
Don't care was put in a pot
And boiled till he was done.'


Or if you called her names it would be 'Hard words break no bones',
or, when you'd been boasting, 'Pride comes before a fall'.  This
came very true one day when I was strutting along pretending to be
a soldier and fell into a cowpat.  Her family lived in a filthy
little rat-hole of a place in the slummy street behind the brewery.
The place swarmed with children like a kind of vermin.  The whole
family had managed to dodge going to school, which was fairly easy
to do in those days, and started running errands and doing other
odd jobs as soon as they could walk.  One of the elder brothers got
a month for stealing turnips.  She stopped taking us out for walks
a year later when Joe was eight and getting too tough for a girl to
handle.  He'd discovered that in Katie's home they slept five in a
bed, and used to tease the life out of her about it.

Poor Katie!  She had her first baby when she was fifteen.  No one
knew who was the father, and probably Katie wasn't too certain
herself.  Most people believe it was one of her brothers.  The
workhouse people took the baby, and Katie went into service in
Walton.  Some time afterwards she married a tinker, which even by
the standards of her family was a come-down.  The last time I saw
her was in 1913.  I was biking through Walton, and I passed some
dreadful wooden shacks beside the railway line, with fences round
them made out of barrel-staves, where the gypsies used to camp at
certain times of the year, when the police would let them.  A
wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair coming down and a smoky
face, looking at least fifty years old, came out of one of the huts
and began shaking out a rag mat.  It was Katie, who must have been
twenty-seven.



2


Thursday was market day.  Chaps with round red faces like pumpkins
and dirty smocks and huge boots covered with dry cow-dung, carrying
long hazel switches, used to drive their brutes into the market-
place early in the morning.  For hours there'd be a terrific
hullabaloo: dogs barking, pigs squealing, chaps in tradesmen's vans
who wanted to get through the crush cracking their whips and
cursing, and everyone who had anything to do with the cattle
shouting and throwing sticks.  The big noise was always when they
brought a bull to market.  Even at that age it struck me that most
of the bulls were harmless law-abiding brutes that only wanted to
get to their stalls in peace, but a bull wouldn't have been
regarded as a bull if half the town hadn't had to turn out and
chase it.  Sometimes some terrified brute, generally a half-grown
heifer, used to break loose and charge down a side street, and then
anyone who happened to be in the way would stand in the middle of
the road and swing his arms backwards like the sails of a windmill,
shouting, 'Woo! Woo!'  This was supposed to have a kind of hypnotic
effect on an animal and certainly it did frighten them.

Half-way through the morning some of the farmers would come into
the shop and run samples of seed through their fingers.  Actually
Father did very little business with the farmers, because he had no
delivery van and couldn't afford to give long credits.  Mostly he
did a rather petty class of business, poultry food and fodder for
the tradesmen's horses and so forth.  Old Brewer, of the Mill Farm,
who was a stingy old bastard with a grey chin-beard, used to stand
there for half an hour, fingering samples of chicken corn and
letting them drop into his pocket in an absent-minded manner, after
which, of course, he finally used to make off without buying
anything.  In the evenings the pubs were full of drunken men.  In
those days beer cost twopence a pint, and unlike the beer nowadays
it had some guts in it.  All through the Boer War the recruiting
sergeant used to be in the four-ale bar of the George every
Thursday and Saturday night, dressed up to the nines and very free
with his money.  Sometimes next morning you'd see him leading off
some great sheepish, red-faced lump of a farm lad who'd taken the
shilling when he was too drunk to see and found in the morning that
it would cost him twenty pounds to get out of it.  People used to
stand in their doorways and shake their heads when they saw them go
past, almost as if it had been a funeral.  'Well now!  Listed for a
soldier!  Just think of it!  A fine young fellow like that!'  It
just shocked them.  Listing for a soldier, in their eyes, was the
exact equivalent of a girl's going on the streets.  Their attitude
to the war, and to the Army, was very curious.  They had the good
old English notions that the red-coats are the scum of the earth
and anyone who joins the Army will die of drink and go straight to
hell, but at the same time they were good patriots, stuck Union
Jacks in their windows, and held it as an article of faith that the
English had never been beaten in battle and never could be.  At
that time everyone, even the Nonconformists, used to sing
sentimental songs about the thin red line and the soldier boy who
died on the battlefield far away.  These soldier boys always used
to die 'when the shot and shell were flying', I remember.  It
puzzled me as a kid.  Shot I could understand, but it produced a
queer picture in my mind to think of cockle-shells flying through
the air.  When Mafeking was relieved the people nearly yelled the
roof off, and there were at any rate times when they believed the
tales about the Boers chucking babies into the air and skewering
them on their bayonets.  Old Brewer got so fed up with the kids
yelling 'Krooger!' after him that towards the end of the war he
shaved his beard off.  The people's attitude towards the Government
was really the same.  They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore
that Vicky was the best queen that ever lived and foreigners were
dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of paying a tax, not
even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.

Before and after the war Lower Binfield was a Liberal constituency.
During the war there was a by-election which the Conservatives won.
I was too young to grasp what it was all about, I only knew that I
was a Conservative because I liked the blue streamers better than
the red ones, and I chiefly remember it because of a drunken man
who fell on his nose on the pavement outside the George.  In the
general excitement nobody took any notice of him, and he lay there
for hours in the hot sun with his blood drying round him, and when
it dried it was purple.  By the time the 1906 election came along I
was old enough to understand it, more or less, and this time I was
a Liberal because everybody else was.  The people chased the
Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a pond full
of duckweed.  People took politics seriously in those days.  They
used to begin storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.

Very early in life, when the Boer War broke out, I remember the big
row between Father and Uncle Ezekiel.  Uncle Ezekiel had a little
boot-shop in one of the streets off the High Street, and also did
some cobbling.  It was a small business and tended to get smaller,
which didn't matter greatly because Uncle Ezekiel wasn't married.
He was only a half-brother and much older than Father, twenty years
older at least, and for the fifteen years or so that I knew him he
always looked exactly the same.  He was a fine-looking old chap,
rather tall, with white hair and the whitest whiskers I ever saw--
white as thistledown.  He had a way of slapping his leather apron
and standing up very straight--a reaction from bending over the
last, I suppose--after which he'd bark his opinions straight in
your face, ending up with a sort of ghostly cackle.  He was a real
old nineteenth-century Liberal, the kind that not only used to ask
you what Gladstone said in '78 but could tell you the answer, and
one of the very few people in Lower Binfield who stuck to the same
opinions all through the war.  He was always denouncing Joe
Chamberlain and some gang of people that he referred to as 'the
Park Lane riff-raff'.  I can hear him now, having one of his
arguments with Father.  'Them and their far-flung Empire!  Can't
fling it too far for me.  He-he-he!'  And then Father's voice, a
quiet, worried, conscientious kind of voice, coming back at him
with the white man's burden and our dooty to the pore blacks whom
these here Boars treated something shameful.  For a week or so
after Uncle Ezekiel gave it out that he was a pro-Boer and a Little
Englander they were hardly on speaking terms.  They had another row
when the atrocity stories started.  Father was very worried by the
tales he'd heard, and he tackled Uncle Ezekiel about it.  Little
Englander or no, surely he couldn't think it right for these here
Boars to throw babies in the air and catch them on their bayonets,
even if they WERE only nigger babies?  But Uncle Ezekiel just
laughed in his face.  Father had got it all wrong!  It wasn't the
Boars who threw babies in the air, it was the British soldiers!
He kept grabbing hold of me--I must have been about five--to
illustrate.  'Throw them in the air and skewer them like frogs, I
tell you!  Same as I might throw this youngster here!'  And then
he'd swing me up and almost let go of me, and I had a vivid picture
of myself flying through the air and landing plonk on the end of a
bayonet.

Father was quite different from Uncle Ezekiel.  I don't know much
about my grandparents, they were dead before I was born, I only
know that my grandfather had been a cobbler and late in life he
married the widow of a seedsman, which was how we came to have the
shop.  It was a job that didn't really suit Father, though he knew
the business inside out and was everlastingly working.  Except on
Sunday and very occasionally on week-day evenings I never remember
him without meal on the backs of his hands and in the lines of his
face and in what was left of his hair.  He'd married when he was in
his thirties and must have been nearly forty when I first remember
him.  He was a small man, a sort of grey, quiet little man, always
in shirtsleeves and white apron and always dusty-looking because of
the meal.  He had a round head, a blunt nose, a rather bushy
moustache, spectacles, and butter-coloured hair, the same colour
as mine, but he'd lost most of it and it was always mealy.  My
grandfather had bettered himself a good deal by marrying the
seedsman's widow, and Father had been educated at Walton Grammar
School, where the farmers and the better-off tradesmen sent their
sons, whereas Uncle Ezekiel liked to boast that he'd never been to
school in his life and had taught himself to read by a tallow
candle after working hours.  But he was a much quicker-witted man
than Father, he could argue with anybody, and he used to quote
Carlyle and Spencer by the yard.  Father had a slow sort of mind,
he'd never taken to 'book-learning', as he called it, and his
English wasn't good.  On Sunday afternoons, the only time when he
really took things easy, he'd settle down by the parlour fireplace
to have what he called a 'good read' at the Sunday paper.  His
favourite paper was The People--Mother preferred the News of the
World, which she considered had more murders in it.  I can see them
now.  A Sunday afternoon--summer, of course, always summer--a smell
of roast pork and greens still floating in the air, and Mother on
one side of the fireplace, starting off to read the latest murder
but gradually falling asleep with her mouth open, and Father on the
other, in slippers and spectacles, working his way slowly through
the yards of smudgy print.  And the soft feeling of summer all
round you, the geranium in the window, a starling cooing somewhere,
and myself under the table with the B.O.P., making believe that the
tablecloth is a tent.  Afterwards, at tea, as he chewed his way
through the radishes and spring onions, Father would talk in a
ruminative kind of way about the stuff he'd been reading, the fires
and shipwrecks and scandals in high society, and these here new
flying machines and the chap (I notice that to this day he turns up
in the Sunday papers about once in three years) who was swallowed
by a whale in the Red Sea and taken out three days later, alive but
bleached white by the whale's gastric juice.  Father was always a
bit sceptical of this story, and of the new flying machines,
otherwise he believed everything he read.  Until 1909 no one in
Lower Binfield believed that human beings would ever learn to fly.
The official doctrine was that if God had meant us to fly He'd have
given us wings.  Uncle Ezekiel couldn't help retorting that if God
had meant us to ride He'd have given us wheels, but even he didn't
believe in the new flying machines.

It was only on Sunday afternoons, and perhaps on the one evening a
week when he looked in at the George for a half-pint, that Father
turned his mind to such things.  At other times he was always more
or less overwhelmed by business.  There wasn't really such a lot to
do, but he seemed to be always busy, either in the loft behind the
yard, struggling about with sacks and bales, or in the kind of
dusty little cubby-hole behind the counter in the shop, adding
figures up in a notebook with a stump of pencil.  He was a very
honest man and a very obliging man, very anxious to provide good
stuff and swindle nobody, which even in those days wasn't the best
way to get on in business.  He would have been just the man for
some small official job, a postmaster, for instance, or station-
master of a country station.  But he hadn't either the cheek and
enterprise to borrow money and expand the business, or the
imagination to think of new selling-lines.  It was characteristic
of him that the only streak of imagination he ever showed, the
invention of a new seed mixture for cage-birds (Bowling's Mixture
it was called, and it was famous over a radius of nearly five
miles) was really due to Uncle Ezekiel.  Uncle Ezekiel was a bit of
a bird-fancier and had quantities of goldfinches in his dark little
shop.  It was his theory that cage-birds lose their colour because
of lack of variation in their diet.  In the yard behind the shop
Father had a tiny plot of ground in which he used to grow about
twenty kinds of weed under wire-netting, and he used to dry them
and mix their seeds with ordinary canary seed.  Jackie, the
bullfinch who hung in the shop-window, was supposed to be an
advertisement for Bowling's Mixture.  Certainly, unlike most
bullfinches in cages, Jackie never turned black.

Mother was fat ever since I remember her.  No doubt it's from her
that I inherit my pituitary deficiency, or whatever it is that
makes you get fat.

She was a largish woman, a bit taller than Father, with hair a good
deal fairer than his and a tendency to wear black dresses.  But
except on Sundays I never remember her without an apron.  It would
be an exaggeration, but not a very big one, to say that I never
remember her when she wasn't cooking.  When you look back over a
long period you seem to see human beings always fixed in some
special place and some characteristic attitude.  It seems to you
that they were always doing exactly the same thing.  Well, just as
when I think of Father I remember him always behind the counter,
with his hair all mealy, adding up figures with a stump of pencil
which he moistens between his lips, and just as I remember Uncle
Ezekiel, with his ghostly white whiskers, straightening himself out
and slapping his leather apron, so when I think of Mother I
remember her at the kitchen table, with her forearms covered with
flour, rolling out a lump of dough.

You know the kind of kitchen people had in those days.  A huge
place, rather dark and low, with a great beam across the ceiling
and a stone floor and cellars underneath.  Everything enormous, or
so it seemed to me when I was a kid.  A vast stone sink which
didn't have a tap but an iron pump, a dresser covering one wall and
going right up to the ceiling, a gigantic range which burned half a
ton a month and took God knows how long to blacklead.  Mother at
the table rolling out a huge flap of dough.  And myself crawling
round, messing about with bundles of firewood and lumps of coal and
tin beetle-traps (we had them in all the dark corners and they used
to be baited with beer) and now and again coming up to the table to
try and cadge a bit of food.  Mother 'didn't hold with' eating
between meals.  You generally got the same answer:  'Get along with
you, now!  I'm not going to have you spoiling your dinner.  Your
eye's bigger than your belly.'  Very occasionally, however, she'd
cut you off a thin strip of candied peel.

I used to like to watch Mother rolling pastry.  There's always a
fascination in watching anybody do a job which he really
understands.  Watch a woman--a woman who really knows how to cook,
I mean--rolling dough.  She's got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air,
a satisfied kind of air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred
rite.  And in her own mind, of course, that's exactly what she is.
Mother had thick, pink, strong forearms which were generally
mottled with flour.  When she was cooking, all her movements were
wonderfully precise and firm.  In her hands egg-whisks and mincers
and rolling-pins did exactly what they were meant to do.  When you
saw her cooking you knew that she was in a world where she
belonged, among things she really understood.  Except through the
Sunday papers and an occasional bit of gossip the outside world
didn't really exist for her.  Although she read more easily than
Father, and unlike him used to read novelettes as well as
newspapers, she was unbelievably ignorant.  I realized this even by
the time I was ten years old.  She certainly couldn't have told you
whether Ireland was east or west of England, and I doubt whether
any time up to the outbreak of the Great War she could have told
you who was Prime Minister.  Moreover she hadn't the smallest wish
to know such things.  Later on when I read books about Eastern
countries where they practise polygamy, and the secret harems where
the women are locked up with black eunuchs mounting guard over
them, I used to think how shocked Mother would have been if she'd
heard of it.  I can almost hear her voice--'Well, now!  Shutting
their wives up like that!  The IDEA!'  Not that she'd have known
what a eunuch was.  But in reality she lived her life in a space
that must have been as small and almost as private as the average
zenana.  Even in our own house there were parts where she never set
foot.  She never went into the loft behind the yard and very seldom
into the shop.  I don't think I ever remember her serving a
customer.  She wouldn't have known where any of the things were
kept, and until they were milled into flour she probably didn't
know the difference between wheat and oats.  Why should she?  The
shop was Father's business, it was 'the man's work', and even about
the money side of it she hadn't very much curiosity.  Her job, 'the
woman's work', was to look after the house and the meals and the
laundry and the children.  She'd have had a fit if she'd seen
Father or anyone else of the male sex trying to sew on a button for
himself.

So far as the meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses
where everything goes like clockwork.  Or no, not like clockwork,
which suggests something mechanical.  It was more like some kind of
natural process.  You knew that breakfast would be on the table
tomorrow morning in much the same way as you knew the sun would
rise.  All through her life Mother went to bed at nine and got up
at five, and she'd have thought it vaguely wicked--sort of decadent
and foreign and aristocratic--to keep later hours.  Although she
didn't mind paying Katie Simmons to take Joe and me out for walks,
she would never tolerate the idea of having a woman in to help with
the housework.  It was her firm belief that a hired woman always
sweeps the dirt under the dresser.  Our meals were always ready on
the tick.  Enormous meals--boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef
and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig's head, apple pie,
spotted dog, and jam roly-poly--with grace before and after.  The
old ideas about bringing up children still held good, though they
were going out fast.  In theory children were still thrashed and
put to bed on bread and water, and certainly you were liable to be
sent away from table if you made too much noise eating, or choked,
or refused something that was 'good for you', or 'answered back'.
In practice there wasn't much discipline in our family, and of the
two Mother was the firmer.  Father, though he was always quoting
'Spare the rod and spoil the child', was really much too weak with
us, especially with Joe, who was a hard case from the start.  He
was always 'going to' give Joe a good hiding, and he used to tell
us stories, which I now believe were lies, about the frightful
thrashings his own father used to give him with a leather strap,
but nothing ever came of it.  By the time Joe was twelve he was too
strong for Mother to get him across her knee, and after that there
was no doing anything with him.

At that time it was still thought proper for parents to say 'don't'
to their children all day long.  You'd often hear a man boasting
that he'd 'thrash the life out of' his son if he caught him
smoking, or stealing apples, or robbing a bird's nest.  In some
families these thrashings actually took place.  Old Lovegrove, the
saddler, caught his two sons, great lumps aged sixteen and fifteen,
smoking in the garden shed and walloped them so that you could hear
it all over the town.  Lovegrove was a very heavy smoker.  The
thrashings never seemed to have any effect, all boys stole apples,
robbed birds' nests, and learned to smoke sooner or later, but the
idea was still knocking around that children should be treated
rough.  Practically everything worth doing was forbidden, in theory
anyway.  According to Mother, everything that a boy ever wants to
do was 'dangerous'.  Swimming was dangerous, climbing trees was
dangerous, and so were sliding, snowballing, hanging on behind
carts, using catapults and squailers, and even fishing.  All
animals were dangerous, except Nailer, the two cats, and Jackie the
bullfinch.  Every animal had its special recognized methods of
attacking you.  Horses bit, bats got into your hair, earwigs got
into your ears, swans broke your leg with a blow of their wings,
bulls tossed you, and snakes 'stung'.  All snakes stung, according
to Mother, and when I quoted the penny encyclopedia to the effect
that they didn't sting but bit, she only told me not to answer
back.  Lizards, slow-worms, toads, frogs, and newts also stung.
All insects stung, except flies and blackbeetles.  Practically all
kinds of food, except the food you had at meals, were either
poisonous or 'bad for you'.  Raw potatoes were deadly poison, and
so were mushrooms unless you bought them at the greengrocer's.  Raw
gooseberries gave you colic and raw raspberries gave you a skin-
rash.  If you had a bath after a meal you died of cramp, if you cut
yourself between the thumb and forefinger you got lockjaw, and if
you washed your hands in the water eggs were boiled in you got
warts.  Nearly everything in the shop was poisonous, which was why
Mother had put the gate in the doorway.  Cowcake was poisonous, and
so was chicken corn, and so were mustard seed and Karswood poultry
spice.  Sweets were bad for you and eating between meals was bad
for you, though curiously enough there were certain kinds of eating
between meals that Mother always allowed.  When she was making plum
jam she used to let us eat the syrupy stuff that was skimmed off
the top, and we used to gorge ourselves with it till we were sick.
Although nearly everything in the world was either dangerous or
poisonous, there were certain things that had mysterious virtues.
Raw onions were a cure for almost everything.  A stocking tied
round your neck was a cure for a sore throat.  Sulphur in a dog's
drinking water acted as a tonic, and old Nailer's bowl behind the
back door always had a lump of sulphur in it which stayed there
year after year, never dissolving.

We used to have tea at six.  By four Mother had generally finished
the housework, and between four and six she used to have a quiet
cup of tea and 'read her paper', as she called it.  As a matter of
fact she didn't often read the newspaper except on Sundays.  The
week-day papers only had the day's news, and it was only
occasionally that there was a murder.  But the editors of the
Sunday papers had grasped that people don't really mind whether
their murders are up to date and when there was no new murder on
hand they'd hash up an old one, sometimes going as far back as Dr
Palmer and Mrs Manning.  I think Mother thought of the world
outside Lower Binfleld chiefly as a place where murders were
committed.  Murders had a terrible fascination for her, because, as
she often said, she just didn't know how people could BE so wicked.
Cutting their wives' throats, burying their fathers under cement
floors, throwing babies down wells!  How anyone could DO such
things!  The Jack the Ripper scare had happened about the time when
Father and Mother were married, and the big wooden shutters we used
to draw over the shop windows every night dated from then.
Shutters for shop windows were going out, most of the shops in the
High Street didn't have them, but Mother felt safe behind them.
All along, she said, she'd had a dreadful feeling that Jack the
Ripper was hiding in Lower Binfield.  The Crippen case--but that
was years later, when I was almost grown up--upset her badly.  I
can hear her voice now.  'Gutting his poor wife up and burying her
in the coal cellar!  The IDEA!  What I'd do to that man if I got
hold of him!'  And curiously enough, when she thought of the
dreadful wickedness of that little American doctor who dismembered
his wife (and made a very neat job of it by taking all the bones
out and chucking the head into the sea, if I remember rightly) the
tears actually came into her eyes.

But what she mostly read on week-days was Hilda's Home Companion.
In those days it was part of the regular furnishing of any home
like ours, and as a matter of fact it still exists, though it's
been a bit crowded out by the more streamlined women's papers that
have come up since the war.  I had a look at a copy only the other
day.  It's changed, but less than most things.  There are still the
same enormous serial stories that go on for six months (and it all
comes right in the end with orange blossoms to follow), and the
same Household Hints, and the same ads for sewing-machines and
remedies for bad legs.  It's chiefly the print and the illustrations
that have changed.  In those days the heroine had to look like an
egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder.  Mother was a slow
reader and believed in getting her threepennyworth out of Hilda's
Home Companion.  Sitting in the old yellow armchair beside the
hearth, with her feet on the iron fender and the little pot of
strong tea stewing on the hob, she'd work her way steadily from
cover to cover, right through the serial, the two short stories,
the Household Hints, the ads for Zam-Buk, and the answers to
correspondents.  Hilda's Home Companion generally lasted her the
week out, and some weeks she didn't even finish it.  Sometimes the
heat of the fire, or the buzzing of the bluebottles on summer
afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at about a quarter
to six she'd wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on
the mantelpiece, and then get into a stew because tea was going to
be late.  But tea was never late.

In those days--till 1909, to be exact--Father could still afford an
errand boy, and he used to leave the shop to him and come in to tea
with the backs of his hands all mealy.  Then Mother would stop
cutting slices of bread for a moment and say, 'If you'll give us
grace, Father', and Father, while we all bent our heads on our
chests, would mumble reverently, 'Fwat we bout to receive--Lord
make us truly thankful--Amen.'  Later on, when Joe was a bit older,
it would be 'YOU give us grace today, Joe', and Joe would pipe it
out.  Mother never said grace: it had to be someone of the male
sex.

There were always bluebottles buzzing on summer afternoons.  Ours
wasn't a sanitary house, precious few houses in Lower Binfield
were.  I suppose the town must have contained five hundred houses
and there certainly can't have been more than ten with bathrooms or
fifty with what we should now describe as a W.C.  In summer our
backyard always smelt of dustbins.  And all houses had insects in
them.  We had blackbeetles in the wainscoting and crickets
somewhere behind the kitchen range, besides, of course, the meal-
worms in the shop.  In those days even a house-proud woman like
Mother didn't see anything to object to in blackbeetles.  They were
as much a part of the kitchen as the dresser or the rolling-pin.
But there were insects and insects.  The houses in the bad street
behind the brewery, where Katie Simmons lived, were overrun by
bugs.  Mother or any of the shopkeepers' wives would have died of
shame if they'd had bugs in the house.  In fact it was considered
proper to say that you didn't even know a bug by sight.

The great blue flies used to come sailing into the larder and sit
longingly on the wire covers over the meat.  'Drat the flies!'
people used to say, but the flies were an act of God and apart from
meat-covers and fly-papers you couldn't do much about them.  I said
a little while back that the first thing I remember is the smell of
sainfoin, but the smell of dustbins is also a pretty early memory.
When I think of Mother's kitchen, with the stone floor and the
beetle-traps and the steel fender and the blackleaded range, I
always seem to hear the bluebottles buzzing and smell the dustbin,
and also old Nailer, who carried a pretty powerful smell of dog.
And God knows there are worse smells and sounds.  Which would you
sooner listen to, a bluebottle or a bombing plane?



3


Joe started going to Walton Grammar School two years before I did.
Neither us went there till we were nine.  It meant a four-mile bike
ride morning and evening, and Mother was scared of allowing us
among the traffic, which by that time included a very few motor-
cars.

For several years we went to the dame-school kept by old Mrs
Howlett.  Most of the shopkeepers' children went there, to save
them from the shame and come-down of going to the board school,
though everyone knew that Mother Howlett was an old imposter and
worse than useless as a teacher.  She was over seventy, she was
very deaf, she could hardly see through her spectacles, and all she
owned in the way of equipment was a cane, a blackboard, a few dog-
eared grammar books, and a couple of dozen smelly slates.  She
could just manage the girls, but the boys simply laughed at her and
played truant as often as they felt like it.  Once there was a
frightful scandal cause a boy put his hand up a girl's dress, a
thing I didn't understand at the time.  Mother Howlett succeeded in
hushing it up.  When you did something particularly bad her formula
was 'I'll tell your father', and on very rare occasions she did so.
But we were quite sharp enough to see that she daren't do it too
often, and even when she let out at you with the cane she was so
old and clumsy that it was easy to dodge.

Joe was only eight when he got in with a tough gang of boys who
called themselves the Black Hand.  The leader was Sid Lovegrove,
the saddler's younger son, who was about thirteen, and there were
two other shopkeepers' sons, an errand boy from the brewery, and
two farm lads who sometimes managed to cut work and go off with
the gang for a couple of hours.  The farm lads were great lumps
bursting out of corduroy breeches, with very broad accents and
rather looked down on by the rest of the gang, but they were
tolerated because they knew twice as much about animals as any of
the others.  One of them, nicknamed Ginger, would even catch a
rabbit in his hands occasionally.  If he saw one lying in the grass
he used to fling himself on it like a spread-eagle.  There was a
big social distinction between the shopkeepers' sons and the sons
of labourers and farm-hands, but the local boys didn't usually pay
much attention to it till they were about sixteen.  The gang had a
secret password and an 'ordeal' which included cutting your finger
and eating an earthworm, and they gave themselves out to be
frightful desperadoes.  Certainly they managed to make a nuisance
of themselves, broke windows chased cows, tore the knockers off
doors, and stole fruit by the hundredweight.  Sometimes in winter
they managed to borrow a couple of ferrets and go ratting, when the
farmers would let them.  They all had catapults and squailers, and
they were always saving up to buy a saloon pistol, which in those
days cost five shillings, but the savings never amounted to more
than about threepence.  In summer they used to go fishing and bird-
nesting.  When Joe was at Mrs Howlett's he used to cut school at
least once a week, and even at the Grammar School he managed it
about once a fortnight.  There was a boy at the Grammar School, an
auctioneer's son, who could copy any handwriting and for a penny
he'd forge a letter from your mother saying you'd been ill
yesterday.  Of course I was wild to join the Black Hand, but Joe
always choked me off and said they didn't want any blasted kids
hanging round.

It was the thought of going fishing that really appealed to me.  At
eight years old I hadn't yet been fishing, except with a penny net,
with which you can sometimes catch a stickleback.  Mother was
always terrified of letting us go anywhere near water.  She
'forbade' fishing, in the way in which parents in those days
'forbade' almost everything, and I hadn't yet grasped that grownups
can't see round corners.  But the thought of fishing sent me wild
with excitement.  Many a time I'd been past the pool at the Mill
Farm and watched the small carp basking on the surface, and
sometimes under the willow tree at the corner a great diamond-
shaped carp that to my eyes looked enormous--six inches long, I
suppose--would suddenly rise to the surface, gulp down a grub, and
sink again.  I'd spent hours gluing my nose against the window of
Wallace's in the High Street, where fishing tackle and guns and
bicycles were sold.  I used to lie awake on summer mornings
thinking of the tales Joe had told me about fishing, how you mixed
bread paste, how your float gives a bob and plunges under and you
feel the rod bending and the fish tugging at the line.  Is it any
use talking about it, I wonder--the sort of fairy light that fish
and fishing tackle have in a kid's eyes?  Some kids feel the same
about guns and shooting, some feel it about motor-bikes or
aeroplanes or horses.  It's not a thing that you can explain or
rationalize, it's merely magic.  One morning--it was in June and I
must have been eight--I knew that Joe was going to cut school and
go out fishing, and I made up my mind to follow.  In some way Joe
guessed what I was thinking about, and he started on me while we
were dressing.

'Now then, young George!  Don't you get thinking you're coming with
the gang today.  You stay back home.'

'No, I didn't.  I didn't think nothing about it.'

'Yes, you did!  You thought you were coming with the gang.'

'No, I didn't!'

'Yes, you did!'

'No, I didn't!'

'Yes, you did!  You stay back home.  We don't want any bloody kids
along.'

Joe had just learned the word 'bloody' and was always using it.
Father overheard him once and swore that he'd thrash the life out
of Joe, but as usual he didn't do so.  After breakfast Joe started
off on his bike, with his satchel and his Grammar School cap, five
minutes early as he always did when he meant to cut school, and
when it was time for me to leave for Mother Howlett's I sneaked off
and hid in the lane behind the allotments.  I knew the gang were
going to the pond at the Mill Farm, and I was going to follow them
if they murdered me for it.  Probably they'd give me a hiding, and
probably I wouldn't get home to dinner, and then Mother would know
that I'd cut school and I'd get another hiding, but I didn't care.
I was just desperate to go fishing with the gang.  I was cunning,
too.  I allowed Joe plenty of time to make a circuit round and get
to the Mill Farm by road, and then I followed down the lane and
skirted round the meadows on the far side of the hedge, so as to
get almost to the pond before the gang saw me.  It was a wonderful
June morning.  The buttercups were up to my knees.  There was a
breath of wind just stirring the tops of the elms, and the great
green clouds of leaves were sort of soft and rich like silk.  And
it was nine in the morning and I was eight years old, and all round
me it was early summer, with great tangled hedges where the wild
roses were still in bloom, and bits of soft white cloud drifting
overhead, and in the distance the low hills and the dim blue masses
of the woods round Upper Binfield.  And I didn't give a damn for
any of it.  All I was thinking of was the green pool and the carp
and the gang with their hooks and lines and bread paste.  It was as
though they were in paradise and I'd got to join them.  Presently I
managed to sneak up on them--four of them, Joe and Sid Lovegrove
and the errand boy and another shopkeeper's son, Harry Barnes I
think his name was.

Joe turned and saw me.  'Christ!' he said.  'It's the kid.'  He
walked up to me like a tom-cat that's going to start a fight.  'Now
then, you!  What'd I tell you?  You get back 'ome double quick.'

Both Joe and I were inclined to drop our aitches if we were at all
excited.  I backed away from him.

'I'm not going back 'ome.'

'Yes you are.'

'Clip his ear, Joe,' said Sid.  'We don't want no kids along.'

'ARE you going back 'ome?' said Joe.

'No.'

'Righto, my boy!  Right-HO!'

Then he started on me.  The next minute he was chasing me round,
catching me one clip after another.  But I didn't run away from the
pool, I ran in circles.  Presently he'd caught me and got me down,
and then he knelt on my upper arms and began screwing my ears,
which was his favourite torture and one I couldn't stand.  I was
blubbing by this time, but still I wouldn't give in and promise to
go home.  I wanted to stay and go fishing with the gang.  And
suddenly the others swung round in my favour and told Joe to get up
off my chest and let me stay if I wanted to.  So I stayed after
all.

The others had some hooks and lines and floats and a lump of bread
paste in a rag, and we all cut ourselves willow switches from the
tree at the corner of the pool.  The farmhouse was only about two
hundred yards away, and you had to keep out of sight because old
Brewer was very down on fishing.  Not that it made any difference
to him, he only used the pool for watering his cattle, but he hated
boys.  The others were still jealous of me and kept telling me to
get out of the light and reminding me that I was only a kid and
knew nothing about fishing.  They said that I was making such a
noise I'd scare all the fish away, though actually I was making
about half as much noise as anyone else there.  Finally they
wouldn't let me sit beside them and sent me to another part of the
pool where the water was shallower and there wasn't so much shade.
They said a kid like me was sure to keep splashing the water and
frighten the fish away.  It was a rotten part of the pool, a part
where no fish would ordinarily come.  I knew that.  I seemed to
know by a kind of instinct the places where a fish would lie.
Still, I was fishing at last.  I was sitting on the grass bank with
the rod in my hands, with the flies buzzing round, and the smell of
wild peppermint fit to knock you down, watching the red float on
the green water, and I was happy as a tinker although the tear-
marks mixed up with dirt were still all over my face.

Lord knows how long we sat there.  The morning stretched out and
out, and the sun got higher and higher, and nobody had a bite.  It
was a hot still day, too clear for fishing.  The floats lay on the
water with never a quiver.  You could see deep down into the water
as though you were looking into a kind of dark green glass.  Out in
the middle of the pool you could see the fish lying just under the
surface, sunning themselves, and sometimes in the weeds near the
side a newt would come gliding upwards and rest there with his
fingers on the weeds and his nose just out of the water.  But the
fish weren't biting.  The others kept shouting that they'd got a
nibble, but it was always a lie.  And the time stretched out and
out and it got hotter and hotter, and the flies ate you alive, and
the wild peppermint under the bank smelt like Mother Wheeler's
sweet-shop.  I was getting hungrier and hungrier, all the more
because I didn't know for certain where my dinner was coming from.
But I sat as still as a mouse and never took my eyes off the float.
The others had given me a lump of bait about the size of a marble,
telling me that would have to do for me, but for a long time I
didn't even dare to re-bait my hook, because every time I pulled my
line up they swore I was making enough noise to frighten every fish
within five miles.

I suppose we must have been there about two hours when suddenly my
float gave a quiver.  I knew it was a fish.  It must have been a
fish that was just passing accidentally and saw my bait.  There's
no mistaking the movement your float gives when it's a real bite.
It's quite different from the way it moves when you twitch your
line accidentally.  The next moment it gave a sharp bob and almost
went under.  I couldn't hold myself in any longer.  I yelled to the
others:

'I've got a bite!'

'Rats!' yelled Sid Lovegrove instantly.

But the next moment there wasn't any doubt about it.  The float
dived straight down, I could still see it under the water, kind of
dim red, and I felt the rod tighten in my hand.  Christ, that
feeling!  The line jerking and straining and a fish on the other
end of it!  The others saw my rod bending, and the next moment
they'd all flung their rods down and rushed round to me.  I gave a
terrific haul and the fish--a great huge silvery fish--came flying
up through the air.  The same moment all of us gave a yell of
agony.  The fish had slipped off the hook and fallen into the wild
peppermint under the bank.  But he'd fallen into shallow water
where he couldn't turn over, and for perhaps a second he lay there
on his side helpless.  Joe flung himself into the water, splashing
us all over, and grabbed him in both hands.  'I got 'im!' he
yelled.  The next moment he'd flung the fish on to the grass and we
were all kneeling round it.  How we gloated!  The poor dying brute
flapped up and down and his scales glistened all the colours of the
rainbow.  It was a huge carp, seven inches long at least, and must
have weighed a quarter of a pound.  How we shouted to see him!  But
the next moment it was as though a shadow had fallen across us.  We
looked up, and there was old Brewer standing over us, with his tall
billycock hat--one of those hats they used to wear that were a
cross between a top hat and a bowler--and his cowhide gaiters and a
thick hazel stick in his hand.

We suddenly cowered like partridges when there's a hawk overhead.
He looked from one to other of us.  He had a wicked old mouth with
no teeth in it, and since he'd shaved his beard off his chin looked
like a nutcracker.

'What are you boys doing here?' he said.

There wasn't much doubt about what we were doing.  Nobody answered.

'I'll learn 'ee come fishing in my pool!' he suddenly roared, and
the next moment he was on us, whacking out in all directions.

The Black Hand broke and fled.  We left all the rods behind and
also the fish.  Old Brewer chased us half across the meadow.  His
legs were stiff and he couldn't move fast, but he got in some good
swipes before we were out of his reach.  We left him in the middle
of the field, yelling after us that he knew all our names and was
going to tell our fathers.  I'd been at the back and most of the
wallops had landed on me.  I had some nasty red weals on the calves
of my legs when we got to the other side of the hedge.

I spent the rest of the day with the gang.  They hadn't made up
their mind whether I was really a member yet, but for the time
being they tolerated me.  The errand boy, who'd had the morning off
on some lying pretext or other, had to go back to the brewery.  The
rest of us went for a long, meandering, scrounging kind of walk,
the sort of walk that boys go for when they're away from home all
day, and especially when they're away without permission.  It was
the first real boy's walk I'd had, quite different from the walks
we used to go with Katie Simmons.  We had our dinner in a dry ditch
on the edge of the town, full of rusty cans and wild fennel.  The
others gave me bits of their dinner, and Sid Lovegrove had a penny,
so someone fetched a Penny Monster which we had between us.  It was
very hot, and the fennel smelt very strong, and the gas of the
Penny Monster made us belch.  Afterwards we wandered up the dusty
white road to Upper Binfield, the first time I'd been that way, I
believe, and into the beech woods with the carpets of dead leaves
and the great smooth trunks that soar up into the sky so that the
birds in the upper branches look like dots.  You could go wherever
you liked in the woods in those days.  Binfield House, was shut up,
they didn't preserve the pheasants any longer, and at the worst
you'd only meet a carter with a load of wood.  There was a tree
that had been sawn down, and the rings of the trunk looked like a
target, and we had shots at it with stones.  Then the others had
shots at birds with their catapults, and Sid Lovegrove swore he'd
hit a chaffinch and it had stuck in a fork in the tree.  Joe said
he was lying, and they argued and almost fought.  Then we went down
into a chalk hollow full of beds of dead leaves and shouted to hear
the echo.  Someone shouted a dirty word, and then we said over all
the dirty words we knew, and the others jeered at me because I only
knew three.  Sid Lovegrove said he knew how babies were born and it
was just the same as rabbits except that the baby came out of the
woman's navel.  Harry Barnes started to carve the word ---- on a
beech tree, but got fed up with it after the first two letters.
Then we went round by the lodge of Binfield House.  There was a
rumour that somewhere in the grounds there was a pond with enormous
fish in it, but no one ever dared go inside because old Hodges, the
lodge-keeper who acted as a kind of caretaker, was 'down' on boys.
He was digging in his vegetable garden by the lodge when we passed.
We cheeked him over the fence until he chased us off, and then we
went down to the Walton Road and cheeked the carters, keeping on
the other side of the hedge so that they couldn't reach us with
their whips.  Beside the Walton Road there was a place that had
been a quarry and then a rubbish dump, and finally had got
overgrown with blackberry bushes.  There were great mounds of rusty
old tin cans and bicycle frames and saucepans with holes in them
and broken bottles with weeds growing all over them, and we spent
nearly an hour and got ourselves filthy from head to foot routing
out iron fence posts, because Harry Barnes swore that the
blacksmith in Lower Binfield would pay sixpence a hundredweight for
old iron.  Then Joe found a late thrush's nest with half-fledged
chicks in it in a blackberry bush.  After a lot of argument about
what to do with them we took the chicks out, had shots at them with
stones, and finally stamped on them.  There were four of them, and
we each had one to stamp on.  It was getting on towards tea-time
now.  We knew that old Brewer would be as good as his word and
there was a hiding ahead of us, but we were getting too hungry to
stay out much longer.  Finally we trailed home, with one more row
on the way, because when we were passing the allotments we saw a
rat and chased it with sticks, and old Bennet the station-master,
who worked at his allotment every night and was very proud of it,
came after us in a tearing rage because we'd trampled on his onion-
bed.

I'd walked ten miles and I wasn't tired.  All day I'd trailed after
the gang and tried to do everything they did, and they'd called me
'the kid' and snubbed me as much as they could, but I'd more or
less kept my end up.  I had a wonderful feeling inside me, a
feeling you can't know about unless you've had it--but if you're a
man you'll have had it some time.  I knew that I wasn't a kid any
longer, I was a boy at last.  And it's a wonderful thing to be a
boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can't catch you, and to chase
rats and kill birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout
dirty words.  It's a kind of strong, rank feeling, a feeling of
knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it's all bound up with
breaking rules and killing things.  The white dusty roads, the hot
sweaty feeling of one's clothes, the smell of fennel and wild
peppermint, the dirty words, the sour stink of the rubbish dump,
the taste of fizzy lemonade and the gas that made one belch, the
stamping on the young birds, the feel of the fish straining on the
line--it was all part of it.  Thank God I'm a man, because no woman
ever has that feeling.

Sure enough, old Brewer had sent round and told everybody.  Father
looked very glum, fetched a strap out of the shop, and said he was
going to 'thrash the life out of' Joe.  But Joe struggled and
yelled and kicked, and in the end Father didn't get in more than a
couple of whacks at him.  However, he got a caning from the
headmaster of the Grammar School next day.  I tried to struggle
too, but I was small enough for Mother to get me across her knee,
and she gave me what-for with the strap.  So I'd had three hidings
that day, one from Joe, one from old Brewer, and one from Mother.
Next day the gang decided that I wasn't really a member yet and
that I'd got to go through the 'ordeal' (a word they'd got out of
the Red Indian stories) after all.  They were very strict in
insisting that you had to bite the worm before you swallowed it.
Moreover, because I was the youngest and they were jealous of me
for being the only one to catch anything, they all made out
afterwards that the fish I'd caught wasn't really a big one.  In a
general way the tendency of fish, when people talk about them, is
to get bigger and bigger, but this one got smaller and smaller,
until to hear the others talk you'd have thought it was no bigger
than a minnow.

But it didn't matter.  I'd been fishing.  I'd seen the float dive
under the water and felt the fish tugging at the line, and however
many lies they told they couldn't take that away from me.



4


For the next seven years, from when I was eight to when I was
fifteen, what I chiefly remember is fishing.

Don't think that I did nothing else.  It's only that when you look
back over a long period of time, certain things seem to swell up
till they overshadow everything else.  I left Mother Howlett's and
went to the Grammar School, with a leather satchel and a black cap
with yellow stripes, and got my first bicycle and a long time
afterwards my first long trousers.  My first bike was a fixed-
wheel--free-wheel bikes were very expensive then.  When you went
downhill you put your feet up on the front rests and let the pedals
go whizzing round.  That was one of the characteristic sights of
the early nineteen-hundreds--a boy sailing downhill with his head
back and his feet up in the air.  I went to the Grammar School in
fear and trembling, because of the frightful tales Joe had told me
about old Whiskers (his name was Wicksey) the headmaster, who was
certainly a dreadful-looking little man, with a face just like a
wolf, and at the end of the big schoolroom he had a glass case with
canes in it, which he'd sometimes take out and swish through the
air in a terrifying manner.  But to my surprise I did rather well
at school.  It had never occurred to me that I might be cleverer
than Joe, who was two years older than me and had bullied me ever
since he could walk.  Actually Joe was an utter dunce, got the cane
about once a week, and stayed somewhere near the bottom of the
school till he was sixteen.  My second term I took a prize in
arithmetic and another in some queer stuff that was mostly
concerned with pressed flowers and went by the name of Science, and
by the time I was fourteen Whiskers was talking about scholarships
and Reading University.  Father, who had ambitions for Joe and me
in those days, was very anxious that I should go to 'college'.
There was an idea floating round that I was to be a schoolteacher
and Joe was to be an auctioneer.

But I haven't many memories connected with school.  When I've mixed
with chaps from the upper classes, as I did during the war, I've
been struck by the fact that they never really get over that
frightful drilling they go through at public schools.  Either it
flattens them out into half-wits or they spend the rest of their
lives kicking against it.  It wasn't so with boys of our class, the
sons of shopkeepers and farmers.  You went to the Grammar School
and you stayed there till you were sixteen, just to show that you
weren't a prole, but school was chiefly a place that you wanted to
get away from.  You'd no sentiment of loyalty, no goofy feeling
about the old grey stones (and they WERE old, right enough, the
school had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey), and there was no Old
Boy's tie and not even a school song.  You had your half-holidays
to yourself, because games weren't compulsory and as often as not
you cut them.  We played football in braces, and though it was
considered proper to play cricket in a belt, you wore your ordinary
shirt and trousers.  The only game I really cared about was the
stump cricket we used to play in the gravel yard during the break,
with a bat made out of a bit of packing case and a compo ball.

But I remember the smell of the big schoolroom, a smell of ink and
dust and boots, and the stone in the yard that had been a mounting
block and was used for sharpening knives on, and the little baker's
shop opposite where they sold a kind of Chelsea bun, twice the size
of the Chelsea buns you get nowadays, which were called Lardy
Busters and cost a halfpenny.  I did all the things you do at
school.  I carved my name on a desk and got the cane for it--you
were always caned for it if you were caught, but it was the
etiquette that you had to carve your name.  And I got inky fingers
and bit my nails and made darts out of penholders and played
conkers and passed round dirty stories and learned to masturbate
and cheeked old Blowers, the English master, and bullied the life
out of little Willy Simeon, the undertaker's son, who was half-
witted and believed everything you told him.  Our favourite trick
was to send him to shops to buy things that didn't exist.  All the
old gags--the ha'porth of penny stamps, the rubber hammer, the
left-handed screwdriver, the pot of striped paint--poor Willy fell
for all of them.  We had grand sport one afternoon, putting him in
a tub and telling him to lift himself up by the handles.  He ended
up in an asylum, poor Willy.  But it was in the holidays that one
really lived.

There were good things to do in those days.  In winter we used to
borrow a couple of ferrets--Mother would never let Joe and me keep
them at home, 'nasty smelly things' she called them--and go round
the farms and ask leave to do a bit of ratting.  Sometimes they let
us, sometimes they told us to hook it and said we were more trouble
than the rats.  Later in winter we'd follow the threshing machine
and help kill the rats when they threshed the stacks.  One winter,
1908 it must have been, the Thames flooded and then froze and there
was skating for weeks on end, and Harry Barnes broke his collar-
bone on the ice.  In early spring we went after squirrels with
squailers, and later on we went birdnesting.  We had a theory that
birds can't count and it's all right if you leave one egg, but we
were cruel little beasts and sometimes we'd just knock the nest
down and trample on the eggs or chicks.  There was another game we
had when the toads were spawning.  We used to catch toads, ram the
nozzle of a bicycle pump up their backsides, and blow them up till
they burst.  That's what boys are like, I don't know why.  In
summer we used to bike over the Burford Weir and bathe.  Wally
Lovegrove, Sid's young cousin, was drowned in 1906.  He got tangled
in the weeds at the bottom, and when the drag-hooks brought his
body to the surface his face was jet black.

But fishing was the real thing.  We went many a time to old
Brewer's pool, and took tiny carp and tench out of it, and once a
whopping eel, and there were other cow-ponds that had fish in them
and were within walking distance on Saturday afternoons.  But after
we got bicycles we started fishing in the Thames below Burford
Weir.  It seemed more grown-up than fishing in cow-ponds.  There
were no farmers chasing you away, and there are thumping fish in
the Thames--though, so far as I know, nobody's ever been known to
catch one.

It's queer, the feeling I had for fishing--and still have, really.
I can't call myself a fisherman.  I've never in my life caught a
fish two feet long, and it's thirty years now since I've had a rod
in my hands.  And yet when I look back the whole of my boyhood from
eight to fifteen seems to have revolved round the days when we went
fishing.  Every detail has stuck clear in my memory.  I can
remember individual days and individual fish, there isn't a cow-
pond or a backwater that I can't see a picture of if I shut my eyes
and think.  I could write a book on the technique of fishing.  When
we were kids we didn't have much in the way of tackle, it cost too
much and most of our threepence a week (which was the usual pocket-
money in those days) went on sweets and Lardy Busters.  Very small
kids generally fish with a bent pin, which is too blunt to be much
use, but you can make a pretty good hook (though of course it's got
no barb) by bending a needle in a candle flame with a pair of
pliers.  The farm lads knew how to plait horsehair so that it was
almost as good as gut, and you can take a small fish on a single
horsehair.  Later we got to having two-shilling fishing-rods and
even reels of sorts.  God, what hours I've spent gazing into
Wallace's window!  Even the .410 guns and saloon pistols didn't
thrill me so much as the fishing tackle.  And the copy of Gamage's
catalogue that I picked up somewhere, on a rubbish dump I think,
and studied as though it had been the Bible!  Even now I could give
you all the details about gut-substitute and gimp and Limerick
hooks and priests and disgorgers and Nottingham reels and God knows
how many other technicalities.

Then there were the kinds of bait we used to use.  In our shop
there were always plenty of mealworms, which were good but not very
good.  Gentles were better.  You had to beg them off old Gravitt,
the butcher, and the gang used to draw lots or do enamena-mina-mo
to decide who should go and ask, because Gravitt wasn't usually too
pleasant about it.  He was a big, rough-faced old devil with a
voice like a mastiff, and when he barked, as he generally did when
speaking to boys, all the knives and steels on his blue apron would
give a jingle.  You'd go in with an empty treacle-tin in your hand,
hang round till any customers had disappeared and then say very
humbly:

'Please, Mr Gravitt, y'got any gentles today?'

Generally he'd roar out:  'What!  Gentles!  Gentles in my shop!
Ain't seen such a thing in years.  Think I got blow-flies in my
shop?'

He had, of course.  They were everywhere.  He used to deal with
them with a s