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    Coming Up for Air
    Coming Up for Air
    Coming Up for Air
    Ebook276 pages5 hours

    Coming Up for Air

    By George Orwell

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An insurance salesman desperately tries to recapture his youth in this “charming” comic novel by the iconic British author (The New York Times).

    George Bowling is having a crisis. Not a loud, unsightly one, but a small, desperate one. His days are occupied by an unfulfilling insurance job; his nights spent worrying about his mortgage, marriage, expanding waistline, and what seems to be a certain prospect of World War II looming on the horizon. So when George unexpectedly hits it big on a lucky horse, he spends the windfall on the only thing he ever knew to make him happy: his childhood.
     
    George travels back to his boyhood home of Lower Binfield, swimming in vivid memories of worry-free bliss, sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of a pre-war world. But while the idyllic village in George’s head may not have seen battle, the reality may be more sobering than he is prepared to deal with.
     
    Penned with Orwell’s trademark insight and passion, Coming Up for Air is an elegiac look at memory and desire at a desperate moment in England’s history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 22, 1969
    ISBN9780547564029
    Author

    George Orwell

    George Orwell (1903–1950), the pen name of Eric Arthur Blaire, was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and literary critic. He is best known for his works of social criticism and opposition to totalitarianism. He also wrote nonfiction about his experiences in the working class and as a solder. His work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective “Orwellian,"describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices, has become part of the English language. In 2008, the London Times named him the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

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    Reviews for Coming Up for Air

    3.5/5

    411 ratings15 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Beautufully written pre war cynicism from suburbia with social history of england
    • 5/5
      Set against the backdrop of the inevitable approach of war (WW2) in Europe and the political turmoil running rampant through England at the time, this is the very small story of a very small man who has lost himself and his attempt to recover something of his life by searching out a favourite childhood haunt. Moving and real, one of my all time favourites.
    • 3/5
      Nostalgic account of a trip to a non-exstant past; Fatty Bowling as a pessimistic insurance salesman
    • 5/5
      When I was 15 and living in 1970 Essex suburbia my English teacher chose this Orwell novel (not Animal Farm or 1984) and made us read it. It has remained fresh in my mind throughout my life and when I reached 45 I thought it would be a good idea to check back in with George Bowling. This rates as one of my most loved books, funny, moving and inspiring.
    • 3/5
      Not the greatest of Orwell, and definitely doesn't follow that 'typical Orwell' feel to it. I love how the quote on the cover says its a "Charming, cheerful, minor masterpiece" when the entirety of the novel is pessimistic and about how horrible suburban life is, how bad married life is, with kids, and nothing but bills, and how the future (and not just WWII but the after-war) will be likewise horrible if not worse. Definitely not a 'charming and cheerful' novel. Not a BAD novel.... but slow, plodding, pessimistic, and altogether forgettable.
    • 4/5

      Seven out of ten. eBook.

      Set in the days immediately leading up to WWII, this novel follows George Bowling as he temporarily escapes from his average life. He returns to the village where he grew up, only to find that everything had changed and he couldn't return to his younger, thinner days.

      Strangely enjoyable for someone essentially having a mid-life crisis.

    • 3/5
      Coming Up for Air is a character-driven novel about the life of forty-five-year-old insurance salesman George Bowling. Bowling tells his story in first person, starting with his early memories of growing up in the English village of Lower Binfield, the son of a grain merchant. He remembers the wars in his life – the Boer War of his childhood and his service in the Great War. The story shows how life changed for the worse in the aftermath of those two wars. It also portrays life in England in the lead-up to WWII and the rise of totalitarianism. The book was published in 1939, and it is interesting to look back now knowing what actually happened.

      George Bowling is a coarse low-key character and there is not much interaction among the characters. The plot is minimal. One of the highlights of the book is his return to Lower Binfield as an adult, and the realization that everything has changed: “One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I’m finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches up to the stratosphere.”

      I found the message of powerlessness in the face of global events particularly relevant to today. I enjoyed the masterful writing style, but it is unevenly paced. At times I was drawn into the story and at other times I found my mind wandering. The ending is extremely odd. I have now read three of Orwell’s works. This book is realistic, and therefore, much different from his dystopian novels, 1984 and Animal Farm. I liked it but not as much as the other two.
    • 4/5
      George Bowling, in his mid forties and a WWI vet looking at the approach of a new war in the late Thirties reminisces about his life and times. An ordinary guy, not very educated, a commercial traveler with a wife in a slightly higher social cast. He starts out telling the reader about his new false teeth and ends of telling the story of his life. He’s not a terribly interesting guy, but he’s honest and not too hung up on himself. And the everyday detail of someone born at the turn of the twentieth century is great. Historians should read it too
    • 4/5
      Orwell drops the simpering sensibilities and experimental narration of the earlier novels, developing here the vigorous delivery of plain words and thoughts so effective in his later essays and in 'Animal Farm' and '1984'.  A suburban clerk everyman looks back nostalgically to an already distant Edwardian golden age, and too to the timeless pleasures of boyhood; but also prefigures the war and upheaval that's round the corner (the book came out in 1939). A memorable portrayal, and a snapshot of the bullish spirit of the English, as well as their chippiness, the latent fear and tension within the bland calm and continuity of the age (that reliable and comforting social order still familiar in the satirical world of Profesor Branestawm's stories, which I note were written in this period too).
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It had the most marvelous old-world feeling to it. It's about a middle-aged insurance salesman named George Bowling. He lives in a suburb called West Bletchley and more or less hates his wife and kids, but he's used to them. He kind of accepts his lot in life. He's got to scrape by and keep on plugging to meet the bills with his wife worrying and nagging at him.

      One day he gets nostalgic for his childhood and starts to review his life. He grew up in a village of about 2,000 souls and was a child at the time of the Boer War. His youth is rather idyllic without being too romantic. He runs around the countryside with other boys, fishing and ratting with ferrets, and not really having a care in the world.

      When he's Sixteen his father sends him to work at a grocer's to earn his keep and he does so for a few years with the idea of learning the business and maybe having his own shop one day.

      Then bam it's World War I and he goes off to fight without a thought. It's what good Britons do. The war disillusions him greatly and after an injury sends him to the Home Guard, he's more then happy to wait out the last couple of years reading books in a backwater.

      He can no longer imagine going back to his village after the war and he starts selling insurance presently. Gets married and finds himself stuck in the rat race.

      One day he wants to go back to the simplicity of life before the war and he basically discovers that you can't go home again.

      The beauty of the book is in the language and the homely sort of philosophy of the main character. His love of nature and the things he's seen pass away in his lifetime. The coming of cars and planes and bombs and radio and pictures. The growing of industry and towns and urbanization. It would be nostalgia if it wasn't such great literature. As it is I'm sad it ended.
    • 3/5
      This is one of Orwell's comic novels, but with a serious undertone. It's 1938, and there are hints that England may soon be at war again. "Fatty" Bowling is a middle-aged suburban insurance salesman. He feels oppressed by his wife--"She's one of those people who get their main lack in life out of forseeing disasters. Only petty disasters of course." Disasters such as the price of butter going up, the gas bill being enormous, the kids needing new shoes. His children are monsters: "The truth is that kids aren't in any way poetic, they're merely savage little animals, except an animal is a quarter as selfish." His life is stultifying, and his street "a prison with all the cells in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers."

      When Fatty has to get false teeth--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."--he decides to stop and run away for a week--to come up for air--to reflect on his life. He returns to his childhood village in an attempt to recapture his idyllic pre-WWI youth. Of course he finds the village irrevocably changed, and the impending war with Germany intrusive. There are even hints of 1984 here:

      "The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. and the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering the leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him..."

      We all know that you can't go home again--can't recapture the Edenic past. So while there is plenty of humor in this book, it is ultimately a downer, and even Fatty recognizes this:

      "I'm finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist! Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dust bin that we're in reaches up to the atmosphere."
    • 4/5
      The Short of It:

      An odd little book, but what a treasure.

      The Rest of It:

      I’m not sure why I enjoy Orwell’s writing so much. It may be his pessimistic take on what we call civilization, or it could be that I am a bit of a realist. I see things as they are…no imagined glory here. The same can be said for this book. Coming Up for Air is a novel about George Bowling. He’s a married, middle-aged man who after winning a horse race, decides to visit his hometown to re-live the years of his youth.

      There’s a bit of a problem though. George is married to Hilda and lives the typical suburban lifestyle that includes a house and two kids. George doesn’t seem to want to remember this though. The day-to-day that George shares with us is anything but dreadful, but the normalcy, the lack of excitement is a constant thorn in his side. With war looming in the distance, he reminisces on how life was, and how it could be.

      "There’s time for everything except the things worth doing. Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers." [Page 93]

      But Lower Binfield is not what it used to be. As you can imagine, progress can be a wicked thing to behold and George’s quaint hometown is not so little anymore and even the things that haven’t changed, seem to be different twenty years later.

      "It’s a queer experience to go over a bit of country that you haven’t seen in twenty years. You remember it in great detail, and you remember it all wrong." [Page 209]

      To add insult to injury, the people are not the same either as evidenced by this account where he happens to run into an old flame.

      "Only twenty-four years, and the girl I’d known, with her milky-white skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair, had turned into this great, round-shouldered hag, shambling along on twisted heels." [Page 243]

      What’s wonderful about this book is that everyone can relate to it. Things change. We change. There is a “George” in all of us and Orwell’s wry, sarcastic take on progress is at times very funny. This isn’t an account of a man falling apart. There is no mid-life crises per se, but what we view through George’s eyes is a quiet realization that one cannot recapture their youth and that time marches on whether or not we accept it.

      If you enjoy “day in the life” type stories you will enjoy this one.
    • 3/5
      One of the more memorable passages for me involves George Bowling's reflection on being transported in time - through memories triggered by one's sense of smell.

      "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."

      How true that is.
    • 5/5
      When I first had a look at this, I wondered if it was really by the same George Orwell. It certainly didn't seem to be anything like 1984 or Animal Farm. But it was indeed he. I spent most of the book wondering if anything was actually going to happen in this story. And nothing really did. I hated it at first, but for some reason I kept coming back to it. It grew on me.

      The protagonist, a fat and rather unlikeable father of two named George Bowling, leads a rather boring middle-class existence in the mid-1930s. He sells insurance. He lives in a suburban house. He doesn't love his wife anymore and he doesn't really like his children. The impetus for the plot is that George won seventeen pounds in a horse race and decides to keep it a secret from his family and go on a secret trip back to Lower Binfield, the village where he grew up. Another good title for the book might have been You Can't Go Home Again, but Thomas Wolfe had already taken it. When George returns to Lower Binfield, he doesn't even recognize it.

      The true beauty of the book is its description of the settings. A large chunk of the story is taken by George describing his youth and young adulthood in a time lost to us forever: before the War to End All Wars, then the world seemed a much safer place. As George puts it, it's a time you either know already and don't need to be told about, or a time you don't know and could never understand. Also important is Orwell's prescience for the future: war is looming, and George is well aware that it might change the world forever once again.

      I would recommend this books to scholars of modern English literature and also turn-of-the-century England.
    • 5/5
      I have little toleration for pessimistic people. In real life, I avoid cynics and their defeatist attitudes; likewise, in literature, I tend not to read too much of it either. Yet, there is something fascinating about George Orwell that I keep coming back to and make accommodation for.

      On so many levels, he plays into my nostalgia. No, I was not a child of the '80s,'90s and turn of the century... one-hundred-years after George Bowling grew up. I was probably of the last generation to race down to corner store only to spend unnecessary minutes anguishing over the selection of penny candies. George Orwell fictionalizes a true life phenomenon; he taps into a universality that struck close to home, even a century later.

      Boys never change. I was much like a young George Bowling. I fished as a child; somehow, the activity slowly became less a part of my life. I biked everywhere, climbing the social ladder based on the model of bike; the number of speeds determined one's independence. I too worked in a grocery as a teenager, and once thought it possible to labor amongst the aisles and goods, seeing the middle-aged men and women who had made retail their career.

      Orwell writes with all five senses in mind. For a young Bowling, there were enough similarities to my youth, there seemed no difference.

      As I began this review, cynicism has little appreciation for me, yet I for some reason give Geogre Orwell a pass. Perhaps it is my affection for his book 1984 and a nostalgia for Animal Farm? Per chance, he triggers my memories of the punk band The Subhumans. Like so much of British sensibilities, both the band and author share an overt vein that one's life is determined by those in command, and little choices provide a sense of control over one's destiny.

      Streams of 1984 were evident in Coming Up for Air, almost like a precursor to a dystopian society was just around the corner. Hitler would have been the catalyst for Big Brother to campaign on safety and slowly develop a system of Ministries.

      Overall, it is hard to imagine this book was not in some way - possibly a profound one - an autobiography, a memoir of sorts.

    Book preview

    Coming Up for Air - George Orwell

    [Image]

    Contents

    Title Page

    Contents

    Copyright

    Epigraph

    I

    One

    Two

    Three

    Four

    II

    One

    Two

    Three

    Four

    Five

    Six

    Seven

    Eight

    Nine

    Ten

    III

    One

    Two

    Three

    IV

    One

    Two

    Three

    Four

    Five

    Six

    Seven

    About the Author

    Copyright 1950 by the Estate of Sonia B. Orwell

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

    www.hmhco.com

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

    ISBN 978-0-15-619625-3

    eISBN 978-0-547-56402-9

    v3.0515

    "He’s dead, but he won’t lie down."

    POPULAR SONG

    I

    One

    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, same 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 side-show 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 crotch 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 the 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 realise 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-buttery 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 seedpod that doesn’t matter two-pence 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 five-pence-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.

    Two

    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 demoralised 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 semi-detached 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 the 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 bi-sexual. 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 the 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 Piatt’s Meadows. There was nothing in black and white, but it had always been understood that Piatt’s Meadows weren’t to be built on. However, West Bletchley was a growing suburb, Rothwells’ 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 Hubert 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 Piatt’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 Piatt’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 dolls’ 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, undersized, 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

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