What’s
he
doing?
doing?
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
Sometimes the way she’s caught me out would have made
me believe in telepathy, if it wasn’t that she’s often been equally suspicious when I didn’t
happen to be guilty. I’m more or less pennanently under suspicion, though, God knows,
in the last few years — the last live years, anyway — I’ve been innocent enough. You have
to be, when you’re as fat as I am.
Taking it by and large, I suppose Hilda and I don’t get on worse than about half the
couples in Ellesmere Road. There’ve been times when I’ve thought of separation or
divorce, but in our walk of life you don’t do those things. You can’t afford to. And then
time goes on, and you kind of give up struggling. When you’ve lived with a woman for
fifteen years, it’s difficult to imagine life without her. She’s part of the order of things. I
dare say you might find things to object to in the sun and the moon, but do you really
want to change them? Besides, there were the kids. Kids are a ‘link’, as they say. Or a
‘tie’. Not to say a ball and fetter.
Of late years Hilda has made two great friends called Mrs Wheeler and Miss Minns. Mrs
Wheeler is a widow, and I gather she’s got very bitter ideas about the male sex. I can feel
her kind of quivering with disapproval if I so much as come into the room. She’s a faded
little woman and gives you a curious impression that she’s the same colour all over, a
kind of greyish dust-colour, but she’s full of energy. She’s a bad influence on Hilda,
because she’s got the same passion for ‘saving’ and ‘making things do’, though in a
slightly different form. With her it takes the form of thinking that you can have a good
time without paying for it. She’s for ever nosing out bargains and amusements that don’t
cost money. With people like that it doesn’t matter a damn whether they want a thing or
not, it’s merely a question of whether they can get it on the cheap. When the big shops
have their remnant sales Mrs Wheeler’s always at the head of the queue, and it’s her
greatest pride, after a day’s hard fighting round the counter, to come out without having
bought anything. Miss Minns is quite a different sort. She’s really a sad case, poor Miss
Minns. She’s a tall thin woman of about thirty-eight, with black patent-leather hair and a
very GOOD, trusting kind of face. She lives on some kind of tiny fixed income, an
annuity or something, and I fancy she’s a left- over from the old society of West
Bletchley, when it was a little country town, before the suburb grew up. It’s written all
over her that her father was a clergyman and sat on her pretty heavily while he lived.
They’re a special by-product of the middle classes, these women who turn into withered
bags before they even manage to escape from home. Poor old Miss Minns, for all her
wrinkles, still looks exactly like a child. It’s still a tremendous adventure to her not to go
to church. She’s always burbling about ‘modem progress’ and ‘the woman’s movement’,
and she’s got a vague yearning to do something she calls ‘developing her mind’, only she
doesn’t quite know how to start. I think in the beginning she cottoned on to Hilda and
Mrs Wheeler out of pure loneliness, but now they take her with them wherever they go.
And the times they’ve had together, those three! Sometimes I’ve almost envied them.
Mrs Wheeler is the leading spirit. You couldn’t name a kind of idiocy that she hasn’t
dragged them into at one time or another. Anything from theosophy to cat’s-cradle,
provided you can do it on the cheap. For months they went in for the food-crank business.
Mrs Wheeler had picked up a second-hand copy of some book called Radiant Energy
which proved that you should live on lettuces and other things that don’t cost money. Of
course this appealed to Hilda, who immediately began starving herself. She’d have tried
it on me and the kids as well, only I put my foot down. Then they had a go at faith-
healing. Then they thought of tackling Pelmanism, but after a lot of correspondence they
found that they couldn’t get the booklets free, which had been Mrs Wheeler’s idea. Then
it was hay-box cookery. Then it was some filthy stuff called bee wine, which was
supposed to cost nothing at all because you made it out of water. They dropped that after
they’d read an article in the paper saying that bee wine gives you cancer. Then they
nearly joined one of those women’s clubs which go for conducted tours round factories,
but after a lot of arithmetic Mrs Wheeler decided that the free teas the factories gave you
didn’t quite equal the subscription. Then Mrs Wheeler scraped acquaintance with
somebody who gave away free tickets for plays produced by some stage society or other.
I’ve known the three of them sit for hours listening to some highbrow play of which they
didn’t even pretend to understand a word — couldn’t even tell you the name of the play
afterwards — but they felt that they were getting something for nothing. Once they even
took up spiritualism. Mrs Wheeler had run across some down-and-out medium who was
so desperate that he’d give seances for eighteenpence, so that the three of them could
have a glimpse beyond the veil for a tanner a time. I saw him once when he came to give
a seance at our house. He was a seedy-looking old devil and obviously in mortal terror of
D. T. s. He was so shaky that when he was taking his overcoat off in the hall he had a sort
of spasm and a hank of butter-muslin dropped out of his trouser-leg. I managed to shove
it back to him before the women saw. Butter-muslin is what they make the ectoplasm
with, so I’m told. I suppose he was going on to another seance afterwards. You don’t get
manifestations for eighteen pence. Mrs Wheeler’s biggest find of the last few years is the
Left Book Club. I think it was in ‘36 that the news of the Left Book Club got to West
Bletchley. I joined it soon afterwards, and it’s almost the only time I can remember
spending money without Hilda protesting. She can see some sense in buying a book when
you’re getting it for a third of its proper price. These women’s attitude is curious, really.
Miss Minns certainly had a try at reading one or two of the books, but this wouldn’t even
have occurred to the other two. They’ve never had any direct connexion with the Left
Book Club or any notion what it’s all about — in fact I believe at the beginning Mrs
Wheeler thought it had something to do with books which had been left in railway
carriages and were being sold off cheap. But they do know that it means seven and
sixpenny books for half a crown, and so they’re always saying that it’s ‘such a good
idea’. Now and again the local Left Book Club branch holds meetings and gets people
down to speak, and Mrs Wheeler always takes the others along. She’s a great one for
public meetings of any kind, always provided that it’s indoors and admission free. The
three of them sit there like lumps of pudding. They don’t know what the meeting’s about
and they don’t care, but they’ve got a vague feeling, especially Miss Minns, that they’re
improving their minds, and it isn’t costing them anything.
Well, that’s Hilda. You see what she’s like. Take it by and large, I suppose she’s no
worse than I am. Sometimes when we were first married I felt I’d like to strangle her, but
later I got so that I didn’t care. And then I got fat and settled down. It must have been in
1930 that I got fat. It happened so suddenly that it was as if a cannon ball had hit me and
got stuck inside. You know how it is. One night you go to bed, still feeling more or less
young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and next morning you wake up in the full
consciousness that you’re just a poor old fatty with nothing ahead of you this side the
grave except sweating your guts out to buy boots for the kids.
And now it’s ‘38, and in every shipyard in the world they’re riveting up the battleships
for another war, and a name I chanced to see on a poster had stirred up in me a whole lot
of stuff which ought to have been buried God knows how many years ago.
PART III
1
When I came home that evening I was still in doubt as to what I’d spend my seventeen
quid on.
Hilda said she was going to the Left Book Club meeting. It seemed that there was a chap
coming down from London to lecture, though needless to say Hilda didn’t know what the
lecture was going to be about. I told her I’d go with her. In a general way I’m not much
of a one for lectures, but the visions of war I’d had that morning, starting with the bomber
flying over the train, had put me into a kind of thoughtful mood. After the usual argument
we got the kids to bed early and cleared off in time for the lecture, which was billed for
eight o’clock.
It was a misty kind of evening, and the hall was cold and not too well lighted. It’s a little
wooden hall with a tin roof, the property of some Nonconformist sect or other, and you
can hire it for ten bob. The usual crowd of fifteen or sixteen people had rolled up. On the
front of the platform there was a yellow placard announcing that the lecture was on ‘The
Menace of Fascism’. This didn’t altogether surprise me. Mr Witchett, who acts as
chairman of these meetings and who in private life is something in an architect’s office,
was taking the lecturer round, introducing him to everyone as Mr So-and-so (I forget his
name) ‘the well-known anti-Fascist’, very much as you might call somebody ‘the well-
known pianist’. The lecturer was a little chap of about forty, in a dark suit, with a bald
head which he’d tried rather unsuccessfully to cover up with wisps of hair.
Meetings of this kind never start on time. There’s always a period of hanging about on
the pretence that perhaps a few more people are going to turn up. It was about twenty-
five past eight when Witchett tapped on the table and did his stuff. Witchett’s a mild-
looking chap, with a pink, baby’s bottom kind of face that’s always covered in smiles. I
believe he’s secretary of the local Liberal Party, and he’s also on the Parish Council and
acts as M. C. at the magic lantern lectures for the Mothers’ Union. He’s what you might
call a born chairman. When he tells you how delighted we all are to have Mr So-and-so
on the platform tonight, you can see that he believes it. I never look at him without
thinking that he’s probably a virgin. The little lecturer took out a wad of notes, chiefly
newspaper cuttings, and pinned them down with his glass of water. Then he gave a quick
lick at his lips and began to shoot.
Do you ever go to lectures, public meetings, and what-not?
When I go to one myself, there’s always a moment during the evening when I find myself
thinking the same thought: Why the hell are we doing this? Why is it that people will turn
out on a winter night for this kind of thing? I looked round the hall. I was sitting in the
back row. I don’t ever remember going to any kind of public meeting when I didn’t sit in
the back row if I could manage it. Hilda and the others had planked themselves in front,
as usual. It was rather a gloomy little hall. You know the kind of place. Pitch-pine walls,
corrugated iron roof, and enough draughts to make you want to keep your overcoat on.
The little knot of us were sitting in the light round the platform, with about thirty rows of
empty chairs behind us. And the seats of all the chairs were dusty. On the platform
behind the lecturer there was a huge square thing draped in dust-cloths which might have
been an enormous coffin under a pall. Actually it was a piano.
At the beginning I wasn’t exactly listening. The lecturer was rather a mean-looking little
chap, but a good speaker. White face, very mobile mouth, and the rather grating voice
that they get from constant speaking. Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis.
I wasn’t particularly keen to hear what he was saying — get the same stuff in the News
Chronicle every morning — but his voice came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr,
with now and again a phrase that struck out and caught my attention.
‘Bestial atrocities. . . . Hideous outbursts of sadism. . . . Rubber truncheons. . . .
Concentration camps. . . . Iniquitous persecution of the Jews. . . . Back to the Dark Ages. .
. . European civilization. . . . Act before it is too late. . . . Indignation of all decent
peoples. . . . Alliance of the democratic nations. . . . Firm stand. . . . Defence of
democracy. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. .
You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a
gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button, and it starts. Democracy, Fascism,
Democracy. But somehow it interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a
white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans.
What’s he
doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he’s stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest
to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It’s a queer thing, I thought, to be
known as ‘Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist’. A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This
fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do
before Hitler came along? And what’ll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question
applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers, and so forth, of course. But the grating voice
went on and on, and another thought struck me. He MEANS it. Not faking at all — feels
every word he’s saying. He’s trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that’s nothing
to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan’s gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all
you’d find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a chap
like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from
platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.
As well as I could from the back row I had a look at the audience. I suppose, if you come
to think of it, we people who’ll turn out on winter nights to sit in draughty halls listening
to Feft Book Club lectures (and I consider that I’m entitled to the ‘we’, seeing that I’d
done it myself on this occasion) have a certain significance. We’re the West Bletchley
revolutionaries. Doesn’t look hopeful at first sight. It struck me as I looked round the
audience that only about half a dozen of them had really grasped what the lecturer was
talking about, though by this time he’d been pitching into Hitler and the Nazis for over
half an hour. It’s always like that with meetings of this kind. Invariably half the people
come away without a notion of what it’s all about. In his chair beside the table Witchett
was watching the lecturer with a delighted smile, and his face looked a little like a pink
geranium. You could hear in advance the speech he’d make as soon as the lecturer sat
down — same speech as he makes at the end of the magic lantern lecture in aid of trousers
for the Melanesians: ‘Express our thanks — voicing the opinion of all of us — most
interesting — give us all a lot to think about — most stimulating evening! ’ In the front row
Miss Minns was sitting very upright, with her head cocked a little on one side, like a bird.
The lecturer had taken a sheet of paper from under the tumbler and was reading out
statistics about the Gennan suicide-rate. You could see by the look of Miss Minns’s long
thin neck that she wasn’t feeling happy. Was this improving her mind, or wasn’t it? If
only she could make out what it was all about! The other two were sitting there like
lumps of pudding. Next to them a little woman with red hair was knitting a jumper. One
plain, two purl, drop one, and knit two together. The lecturer was describing how the
Nazis chop people’s heads off for treason and sometimes the executioner makes a bosh
shot. There was one other woman in the audience, a girl with dark hair, one of the
teachers at the Council School. Unlike the other she was really listening, sitting forward
with her big round eyes fixed on the lecturer and her mouth a little bit open, drinking it
all in.
Just behind her two old blokes from the local Labour Party were sitting. One had grey
hair cropped very short, the other had a bald head and a droopy moustache. Both wearing
their overcoats. You know the type. Been in the Labour Party since the year dot. Lives
given up to the movement. Twenty years of being blacklisted by employers, and another
ten of badgering the Council to do something about the slums. Suddenly everything’s
changed, the old Labour Party stuff doesn’t matter any longer. Lind themselves
pitchforked into foreign politics — Hitler, Stalin, bombs, machine- guns, rubber
truncheons, Rome-Berlin axis, Popular Lront, anti- Comintern pact. Can’t make head or
tail of it. Immediately in front of me the local Communist Party branch were sitting. All
three of them very young. One of them’s got money and is something in the Hesperides
Estate Company, in fact I believe he’s old Crum’s nephew. Another’s a clerk at one of
the banks. He cashes cheques for me occasionally. A nice boy, with a round, very young,
eager face, blue eyes like a baby, and hair so fair that you’d think he peroxided it. He
only looks about seventeen, though I suppose he’s twenty. He was wearing a cheap blue
suit and a bright blue tie that went with his hair. Next to these three another Communist
was sitting. But this one, it seems, is a different kind of Communist and not-quite,
because he’s what they call a Trotskyist. The others have got a down on him. He’s even
younger, a very thin, very dark, nervous-looking boy. Clever face. Jew, of course. These
four were taking the lecture quite differently from the others. You knew they’d be on
their feet the moment question-time started. You could see them kind of twitching
already. And the little Trotskyist working himself from side to side on his bum in his
anxiety to get in ahead of the others.
I’d stopped listening to the actual words of the lecture. But there are more ways than one
of listening. I shut my eyes for a moment. The effect of that was curious. I seemed to see
the fellow much better when I could only hear his voice.
It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It’s a
ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by
the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s all get together and
have a good hate. Over and over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside
your skull and is hammering down on your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I
managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside HIS skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For
about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I WAS him. At any rate, I felt
what he was feeling.
I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn’t at all the kind of vision that can be
talked about. What he’s SAYING is merely that Hitler’s after us and we must all get
together and have a good hate. Doesn’t go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what
he’s SEEING is something quite different. It’s a picture of himself smashing people’s
faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. I KNOW that’s what he was seeing. It
was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him. Smash! Right in the
middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a
great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That’s what’s in his mind,
waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it’s all O. K.
because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his
voice.
But why? Likeliest explanation, because he’s scared. Every thinking person nowadays is
stiff with fright. This is merely a chap who’s got sufficient foresight to be a little more
frightened than the others. Hitler’s after us! Quick! Let’s all grab a spanner and get
together, and perhaps if we smash in enough faces they won’t smash ours. Gang up,
choose your Leader. Hitler’s black and Stalin’s white. But it might just as well be the
other way about, because in the little chap’s mind both Hitler and Stalin are the same.
Both mean spanners and smashed faces.
War! I started thinking about it again. It’s coming soon, that’s certain. But who’s afraid
of war? That’s to say, who’s afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? ‘You are’, you
say. Yes, I am, and so’s anybody who’s ever seen them. But it isn’t the war that matters,
it’s the after- war. 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 for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they
really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.
It’s all going to happen. Or isn’t it? Some days I know it’s impossible, other days I know
it’s inevitable. That night, at any rate, I knew it was going to happen. It was all in the
sound of the little lecturer’s voice.
So perhaps after all there IS a significance in this mingy little crowd that’ll turn out on a
winter night to listen to a lecture of this kind. Or at any rate in the five or six who can
grasp what it’s all about. They’re simply the outposts of an enonnous anny. They’re the
long-sighted ones, the first rats to spot that the ship is sinking. Quick, quick! The Fascists
are coming! Spanners ready, boys! Smash others or they’ll smash you. So terrified of the
future that we’re jumping straight into it like a rabbit diving down a boa-constrictor’s
throat.
And what’ll happen to chaps like me when we get Fascism in England? The truth is it
probably won’t make the slightest difference. As for the lecturer and those four
Communists in the audience, yes, it’ll make plenty of difference to them. They’ll be
smashing faces, or having their own smashed, according to who’s winning. But the
ordinary middling chaps like me will be carrying on just as usual. And yet it frightens
me — I tell you it frightens me. I’d just started to wonder why when the lecturer stopped
and sat down.
There was the usual hollow little sound of clapping that you get when there are only
about fifteen people in the audience, and then old Witchett said his piece, and before you
could say Jack Robinson the four Communists were on their feet together. They had a
good dog-fight that went on for about ten minutes, full of a lot of stuff that nobody else
understood, such as dialectical materialism and the destiny of the proletariat and what
Lenin said in 1918. Then the lecturer, who’d had a drink of water, stood up and gave a
summing-up that made the Trotskyist wriggle about on his chair but pleased the other
three, and the dog-fight went on unofficially for a bit longer. Nobody else did any talking.
Hilda and the others had cleared off the moment the lecture ended. Probably they were
afraid there was going to be a collection to pay for the hire of the hall. The little woman
with red hair was staying to finish her row. You could hear her counting her stitches in a
whisper while the others argued. And Witchett sat and beamed at whoever happened to
be speaking, and you could see him thinking how interesting it all was and making
mental notes, and the girl with black hair looked from one to the other with her mouth a
little open, and the old Labour man, looking rather like a seal with his droopy moustache
and his overcoat up to his ears, sat looking up at them, wondering what the hell it was all
about. And finally I got up and began to put on my overcoat.
The dog-fight had turned into a private row between the little Trotskyist and the boy with
fair hair. They were arguing about whether you ought to join the Anny if war broke out.
As I edged my way along the row of chairs to get out, the fair-haired one appealed to me.
‘Mr Bowling! Look here. If war broke out and we had the chance to smash Fascism once
and for all, wouldn’t you fight? If you were young, I mean. ’
I suppose he thinks I’m about sixty.
‘You bet I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I had enough to go on with last time. ’
‘But to smash Fascism! ’
‘Oh, b — Fascism! There’s been enough smashing done already, if you ask me. ’
The little Trotskyist chips in with social-patriotism and betrayal of the workers, but the
others cut him short:
‘But you’re thinking of 1914. That was just an ordinary imperialist war. This time it’s
different. Look here. When you hear about what’s going on in Germany, and the
concentration camps and the Nazis beating people up with rubber truncheons and making
the Jews spit in each other’s faces — doesn’t it make your blood boil? ’
They’re always going on about your blood boiling. Just the same phrase during the war, I
remember.
‘I went off the boil in 1916,’ I told him. ‘And so ’ll you when you know what a trench
smells like. ’
And then all of a sudden I seemed to see him. It was as if I hadn’t properly seen him till
that moment.
A very young eager face, might have belonged to a good-looking schoolboy, with blue
eyes and tow-coloured hair, gazing into mine, and for a moment actually he’d got tears in
his eyes! Felt as strongly as all that about the Gennan Jews! But as a matter of fact I
knew just what he felt. He’s a hefty lad, probably plays rugger for the bank. Got brains,
too. And here he is, a bank clerk in a godless suburb, sitting behind the frosted window,
entering figures in a ledger, counting piles of notes, bumsucking to the manager. Feels his
life rotting away. And all the while, over in Europe, the big stuffs happening. Shells
bursting over the trenches and waves of infantry charging through the drifts of smoke.
Probably some of his pals are fighting in Spain. Of course he’s spoiling for a war. How
can you blame him? For a moment I had a peculiar feeling that he was my son, which in
point of years he might have been. And I thought of that sweltering hot day in August
when the newsboy stuck up the poster ENGLAND DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY,
and we all rushed out on to the pavement in our white aprons and cheered.
‘Listen son,’ I said, ‘you’ve got it all wrong. In 1914 WE thought it was going to be a
glorious business. Well, it wasn’t. It was just a bloody mess. If it comes again, you keep
out of it.
me believe in telepathy, if it wasn’t that she’s often been equally suspicious when I didn’t
happen to be guilty. I’m more or less pennanently under suspicion, though, God knows,
in the last few years — the last live years, anyway — I’ve been innocent enough. You have
to be, when you’re as fat as I am.
Taking it by and large, I suppose Hilda and I don’t get on worse than about half the
couples in Ellesmere Road. There’ve been times when I’ve thought of separation or
divorce, but in our walk of life you don’t do those things. You can’t afford to. And then
time goes on, and you kind of give up struggling. When you’ve lived with a woman for
fifteen years, it’s difficult to imagine life without her. She’s part of the order of things. I
dare say you might find things to object to in the sun and the moon, but do you really
want to change them? Besides, there were the kids. Kids are a ‘link’, as they say. Or a
‘tie’. Not to say a ball and fetter.
Of late years Hilda has made two great friends called Mrs Wheeler and Miss Minns. Mrs
Wheeler is a widow, and I gather she’s got very bitter ideas about the male sex. I can feel
her kind of quivering with disapproval if I so much as come into the room. She’s a faded
little woman and gives you a curious impression that she’s the same colour all over, a
kind of greyish dust-colour, but she’s full of energy. She’s a bad influence on Hilda,
because she’s got the same passion for ‘saving’ and ‘making things do’, though in a
slightly different form. With her it takes the form of thinking that you can have a good
time without paying for it. She’s for ever nosing out bargains and amusements that don’t
cost money. With people like that it doesn’t matter a damn whether they want a thing or
not, it’s merely a question of whether they can get it on the cheap. When the big shops
have their remnant sales Mrs Wheeler’s always at the head of the queue, and it’s her
greatest pride, after a day’s hard fighting round the counter, to come out without having
bought anything. Miss Minns is quite a different sort. She’s really a sad case, poor Miss
Minns. She’s a tall thin woman of about thirty-eight, with black patent-leather hair and a
very GOOD, trusting kind of face. She lives on some kind of tiny fixed income, an
annuity or something, and I fancy she’s a left- over from the old society of West
Bletchley, when it was a little country town, before the suburb grew up. It’s written all
over her that her father was a clergyman and sat on her pretty heavily while he lived.
They’re a special by-product of the middle classes, these women who turn into withered
bags before they even manage to escape from home. Poor old Miss Minns, for all her
wrinkles, still looks exactly like a child. It’s still a tremendous adventure to her not to go
to church. She’s always burbling about ‘modem progress’ and ‘the woman’s movement’,
and she’s got a vague yearning to do something she calls ‘developing her mind’, only she
doesn’t quite know how to start. I think in the beginning she cottoned on to Hilda and
Mrs Wheeler out of pure loneliness, but now they take her with them wherever they go.
And the times they’ve had together, those three! Sometimes I’ve almost envied them.
Mrs Wheeler is the leading spirit. You couldn’t name a kind of idiocy that she hasn’t
dragged them into at one time or another. Anything from theosophy to cat’s-cradle,
provided you can do it on the cheap. For months they went in for the food-crank business.
Mrs Wheeler had picked up a second-hand copy of some book called Radiant Energy
which proved that you should live on lettuces and other things that don’t cost money. Of
course this appealed to Hilda, who immediately began starving herself. She’d have tried
it on me and the kids as well, only I put my foot down. Then they had a go at faith-
healing. Then they thought of tackling Pelmanism, but after a lot of correspondence they
found that they couldn’t get the booklets free, which had been Mrs Wheeler’s idea. Then
it was hay-box cookery. Then it was some filthy stuff called bee wine, which was
supposed to cost nothing at all because you made it out of water. They dropped that after
they’d read an article in the paper saying that bee wine gives you cancer. Then they
nearly joined one of those women’s clubs which go for conducted tours round factories,
but after a lot of arithmetic Mrs Wheeler decided that the free teas the factories gave you
didn’t quite equal the subscription. Then Mrs Wheeler scraped acquaintance with
somebody who gave away free tickets for plays produced by some stage society or other.
I’ve known the three of them sit for hours listening to some highbrow play of which they
didn’t even pretend to understand a word — couldn’t even tell you the name of the play
afterwards — but they felt that they were getting something for nothing. Once they even
took up spiritualism. Mrs Wheeler had run across some down-and-out medium who was
so desperate that he’d give seances for eighteenpence, so that the three of them could
have a glimpse beyond the veil for a tanner a time. I saw him once when he came to give
a seance at our house. He was a seedy-looking old devil and obviously in mortal terror of
D. T. s. He was so shaky that when he was taking his overcoat off in the hall he had a sort
of spasm and a hank of butter-muslin dropped out of his trouser-leg. I managed to shove
it back to him before the women saw. Butter-muslin is what they make the ectoplasm
with, so I’m told. I suppose he was going on to another seance afterwards. You don’t get
manifestations for eighteen pence. Mrs Wheeler’s biggest find of the last few years is the
Left Book Club. I think it was in ‘36 that the news of the Left Book Club got to West
Bletchley. I joined it soon afterwards, and it’s almost the only time I can remember
spending money without Hilda protesting. She can see some sense in buying a book when
you’re getting it for a third of its proper price. These women’s attitude is curious, really.
Miss Minns certainly had a try at reading one or two of the books, but this wouldn’t even
have occurred to the other two. They’ve never had any direct connexion with the Left
Book Club or any notion what it’s all about — in fact I believe at the beginning Mrs
Wheeler thought it had something to do with books which had been left in railway
carriages and were being sold off cheap. But they do know that it means seven and
sixpenny books for half a crown, and so they’re always saying that it’s ‘such a good
idea’. Now and again the local Left Book Club branch holds meetings and gets people
down to speak, and Mrs Wheeler always takes the others along. She’s a great one for
public meetings of any kind, always provided that it’s indoors and admission free. The
three of them sit there like lumps of pudding. They don’t know what the meeting’s about
and they don’t care, but they’ve got a vague feeling, especially Miss Minns, that they’re
improving their minds, and it isn’t costing them anything.
Well, that’s Hilda. You see what she’s like. Take it by and large, I suppose she’s no
worse than I am. Sometimes when we were first married I felt I’d like to strangle her, but
later I got so that I didn’t care. And then I got fat and settled down. It must have been in
1930 that I got fat. It happened so suddenly that it was as if a cannon ball had hit me and
got stuck inside. You know how it is. One night you go to bed, still feeling more or less
young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and next morning you wake up in the full
consciousness that you’re just a poor old fatty with nothing ahead of you this side the
grave except sweating your guts out to buy boots for the kids.
And now it’s ‘38, and in every shipyard in the world they’re riveting up the battleships
for another war, and a name I chanced to see on a poster had stirred up in me a whole lot
of stuff which ought to have been buried God knows how many years ago.
PART III
1
When I came home that evening I was still in doubt as to what I’d spend my seventeen
quid on.
Hilda said she was going to the Left Book Club meeting. It seemed that there was a chap
coming down from London to lecture, though needless to say Hilda didn’t know what the
lecture was going to be about. I told her I’d go with her. In a general way I’m not much
of a one for lectures, but the visions of war I’d had that morning, starting with the bomber
flying over the train, had put me into a kind of thoughtful mood. After the usual argument
we got the kids to bed early and cleared off in time for the lecture, which was billed for
eight o’clock.
It was a misty kind of evening, and the hall was cold and not too well lighted. It’s a little
wooden hall with a tin roof, the property of some Nonconformist sect or other, and you
can hire it for ten bob. The usual crowd of fifteen or sixteen people had rolled up. On the
front of the platform there was a yellow placard announcing that the lecture was on ‘The
Menace of Fascism’. This didn’t altogether surprise me. Mr Witchett, who acts as
chairman of these meetings and who in private life is something in an architect’s office,
was taking the lecturer round, introducing him to everyone as Mr So-and-so (I forget his
name) ‘the well-known anti-Fascist’, very much as you might call somebody ‘the well-
known pianist’. The lecturer was a little chap of about forty, in a dark suit, with a bald
head which he’d tried rather unsuccessfully to cover up with wisps of hair.
Meetings of this kind never start on time. There’s always a period of hanging about on
the pretence that perhaps a few more people are going to turn up. It was about twenty-
five past eight when Witchett tapped on the table and did his stuff. Witchett’s a mild-
looking chap, with a pink, baby’s bottom kind of face that’s always covered in smiles. I
believe he’s secretary of the local Liberal Party, and he’s also on the Parish Council and
acts as M. C. at the magic lantern lectures for the Mothers’ Union. He’s what you might
call a born chairman. When he tells you how delighted we all are to have Mr So-and-so
on the platform tonight, you can see that he believes it. I never look at him without
thinking that he’s probably a virgin. The little lecturer took out a wad of notes, chiefly
newspaper cuttings, and pinned them down with his glass of water. Then he gave a quick
lick at his lips and began to shoot.
Do you ever go to lectures, public meetings, and what-not?
When I go to one myself, there’s always a moment during the evening when I find myself
thinking the same thought: Why the hell are we doing this? Why is it that people will turn
out on a winter night for this kind of thing? I looked round the hall. I was sitting in the
back row. I don’t ever remember going to any kind of public meeting when I didn’t sit in
the back row if I could manage it. Hilda and the others had planked themselves in front,
as usual. It was rather a gloomy little hall. You know the kind of place. Pitch-pine walls,
corrugated iron roof, and enough draughts to make you want to keep your overcoat on.
The little knot of us were sitting in the light round the platform, with about thirty rows of
empty chairs behind us. And the seats of all the chairs were dusty. On the platform
behind the lecturer there was a huge square thing draped in dust-cloths which might have
been an enormous coffin under a pall. Actually it was a piano.
At the beginning I wasn’t exactly listening. The lecturer was rather a mean-looking little
chap, but a good speaker. White face, very mobile mouth, and the rather grating voice
that they get from constant speaking. Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis.
I wasn’t particularly keen to hear what he was saying — get the same stuff in the News
Chronicle every morning — but his voice came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr,
with now and again a phrase that struck out and caught my attention.
‘Bestial atrocities. . . . Hideous outbursts of sadism. . . . Rubber truncheons. . . .
Concentration camps. . . . Iniquitous persecution of the Jews. . . . Back to the Dark Ages. .
. . European civilization. . . . Act before it is too late. . . . Indignation of all decent
peoples. . . . Alliance of the democratic nations. . . . Firm stand. . . . Defence of
democracy. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. .
You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a
gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button, and it starts. Democracy, Fascism,
Democracy. But somehow it interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a
white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans.
What’s he
doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he’s stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest
to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It’s a queer thing, I thought, to be
known as ‘Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist’. A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This
fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do
before Hitler came along? And what’ll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question
applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers, and so forth, of course. But the grating voice
went on and on, and another thought struck me. He MEANS it. Not faking at all — feels
every word he’s saying. He’s trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that’s nothing
to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan’s gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all
you’d find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a chap
like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from
platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.
As well as I could from the back row I had a look at the audience. I suppose, if you come
to think of it, we people who’ll turn out on winter nights to sit in draughty halls listening
to Feft Book Club lectures (and I consider that I’m entitled to the ‘we’, seeing that I’d
done it myself on this occasion) have a certain significance. We’re the West Bletchley
revolutionaries. Doesn’t look hopeful at first sight. It struck me as I looked round the
audience that only about half a dozen of them had really grasped what the lecturer was
talking about, though by this time he’d been pitching into Hitler and the Nazis for over
half an hour. It’s always like that with meetings of this kind. Invariably half the people
come away without a notion of what it’s all about. In his chair beside the table Witchett
was watching the lecturer with a delighted smile, and his face looked a little like a pink
geranium. You could hear in advance the speech he’d make as soon as the lecturer sat
down — same speech as he makes at the end of the magic lantern lecture in aid of trousers
for the Melanesians: ‘Express our thanks — voicing the opinion of all of us — most
interesting — give us all a lot to think about — most stimulating evening! ’ In the front row
Miss Minns was sitting very upright, with her head cocked a little on one side, like a bird.
The lecturer had taken a sheet of paper from under the tumbler and was reading out
statistics about the Gennan suicide-rate. You could see by the look of Miss Minns’s long
thin neck that she wasn’t feeling happy. Was this improving her mind, or wasn’t it? If
only she could make out what it was all about! The other two were sitting there like
lumps of pudding. Next to them a little woman with red hair was knitting a jumper. One
plain, two purl, drop one, and knit two together. The lecturer was describing how the
Nazis chop people’s heads off for treason and sometimes the executioner makes a bosh
shot. There was one other woman in the audience, a girl with dark hair, one of the
teachers at the Council School. Unlike the other she was really listening, sitting forward
with her big round eyes fixed on the lecturer and her mouth a little bit open, drinking it
all in.
Just behind her two old blokes from the local Labour Party were sitting. One had grey
hair cropped very short, the other had a bald head and a droopy moustache. Both wearing
their overcoats. You know the type. Been in the Labour Party since the year dot. Lives
given up to the movement. Twenty years of being blacklisted by employers, and another
ten of badgering the Council to do something about the slums. Suddenly everything’s
changed, the old Labour Party stuff doesn’t matter any longer. Lind themselves
pitchforked into foreign politics — Hitler, Stalin, bombs, machine- guns, rubber
truncheons, Rome-Berlin axis, Popular Lront, anti- Comintern pact. Can’t make head or
tail of it. Immediately in front of me the local Communist Party branch were sitting. All
three of them very young. One of them’s got money and is something in the Hesperides
Estate Company, in fact I believe he’s old Crum’s nephew. Another’s a clerk at one of
the banks. He cashes cheques for me occasionally. A nice boy, with a round, very young,
eager face, blue eyes like a baby, and hair so fair that you’d think he peroxided it. He
only looks about seventeen, though I suppose he’s twenty. He was wearing a cheap blue
suit and a bright blue tie that went with his hair. Next to these three another Communist
was sitting. But this one, it seems, is a different kind of Communist and not-quite,
because he’s what they call a Trotskyist. The others have got a down on him. He’s even
younger, a very thin, very dark, nervous-looking boy. Clever face. Jew, of course. These
four were taking the lecture quite differently from the others. You knew they’d be on
their feet the moment question-time started. You could see them kind of twitching
already. And the little Trotskyist working himself from side to side on his bum in his
anxiety to get in ahead of the others.
I’d stopped listening to the actual words of the lecture. But there are more ways than one
of listening. I shut my eyes for a moment. The effect of that was curious. I seemed to see
the fellow much better when I could only hear his voice.
It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It’s a
ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by
the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s all get together and
have a good hate. Over and over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside
your skull and is hammering down on your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I
managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside HIS skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For
about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I WAS him. At any rate, I felt
what he was feeling.
I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn’t at all the kind of vision that can be
talked about. What he’s SAYING is merely that Hitler’s after us and we must all get
together and have a good hate. Doesn’t go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what
he’s SEEING is something quite different. It’s a picture of himself smashing people’s
faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. I KNOW that’s what he was seeing. It
was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him. Smash! Right in the
middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a
great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That’s what’s in his mind,
waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it’s all O. K.
because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his
voice.
But why? Likeliest explanation, because he’s scared. Every thinking person nowadays is
stiff with fright. This is merely a chap who’s got sufficient foresight to be a little more
frightened than the others. Hitler’s after us! Quick! Let’s all grab a spanner and get
together, and perhaps if we smash in enough faces they won’t smash ours. Gang up,
choose your Leader. Hitler’s black and Stalin’s white. But it might just as well be the
other way about, because in the little chap’s mind both Hitler and Stalin are the same.
Both mean spanners and smashed faces.
War! I started thinking about it again. It’s coming soon, that’s certain. But who’s afraid
of war? That’s to say, who’s afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? ‘You are’, you
say. Yes, I am, and so’s anybody who’s ever seen them. But it isn’t the war that matters,
it’s the after- war. 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 for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they
really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.
It’s all going to happen. Or isn’t it? Some days I know it’s impossible, other days I know
it’s inevitable. That night, at any rate, I knew it was going to happen. It was all in the
sound of the little lecturer’s voice.
So perhaps after all there IS a significance in this mingy little crowd that’ll turn out on a
winter night to listen to a lecture of this kind. Or at any rate in the five or six who can
grasp what it’s all about. They’re simply the outposts of an enonnous anny. They’re the
long-sighted ones, the first rats to spot that the ship is sinking. Quick, quick! The Fascists
are coming! Spanners ready, boys! Smash others or they’ll smash you. So terrified of the
future that we’re jumping straight into it like a rabbit diving down a boa-constrictor’s
throat.
And what’ll happen to chaps like me when we get Fascism in England? The truth is it
probably won’t make the slightest difference. As for the lecturer and those four
Communists in the audience, yes, it’ll make plenty of difference to them. They’ll be
smashing faces, or having their own smashed, according to who’s winning. But the
ordinary middling chaps like me will be carrying on just as usual. And yet it frightens
me — I tell you it frightens me. I’d just started to wonder why when the lecturer stopped
and sat down.
There was the usual hollow little sound of clapping that you get when there are only
about fifteen people in the audience, and then old Witchett said his piece, and before you
could say Jack Robinson the four Communists were on their feet together. They had a
good dog-fight that went on for about ten minutes, full of a lot of stuff that nobody else
understood, such as dialectical materialism and the destiny of the proletariat and what
Lenin said in 1918. Then the lecturer, who’d had a drink of water, stood up and gave a
summing-up that made the Trotskyist wriggle about on his chair but pleased the other
three, and the dog-fight went on unofficially for a bit longer. Nobody else did any talking.
Hilda and the others had cleared off the moment the lecture ended. Probably they were
afraid there was going to be a collection to pay for the hire of the hall. The little woman
with red hair was staying to finish her row. You could hear her counting her stitches in a
whisper while the others argued. And Witchett sat and beamed at whoever happened to
be speaking, and you could see him thinking how interesting it all was and making
mental notes, and the girl with black hair looked from one to the other with her mouth a
little open, and the old Labour man, looking rather like a seal with his droopy moustache
and his overcoat up to his ears, sat looking up at them, wondering what the hell it was all
about. And finally I got up and began to put on my overcoat.
The dog-fight had turned into a private row between the little Trotskyist and the boy with
fair hair. They were arguing about whether you ought to join the Anny if war broke out.
As I edged my way along the row of chairs to get out, the fair-haired one appealed to me.
‘Mr Bowling! Look here. If war broke out and we had the chance to smash Fascism once
and for all, wouldn’t you fight? If you were young, I mean. ’
I suppose he thinks I’m about sixty.
‘You bet I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I had enough to go on with last time. ’
‘But to smash Fascism! ’
‘Oh, b — Fascism! There’s been enough smashing done already, if you ask me. ’
The little Trotskyist chips in with social-patriotism and betrayal of the workers, but the
others cut him short:
‘But you’re thinking of 1914. That was just an ordinary imperialist war. This time it’s
different. Look here. When you hear about what’s going on in Germany, and the
concentration camps and the Nazis beating people up with rubber truncheons and making
the Jews spit in each other’s faces — doesn’t it make your blood boil? ’
They’re always going on about your blood boiling. Just the same phrase during the war, I
remember.
‘I went off the boil in 1916,’ I told him. ‘And so ’ll you when you know what a trench
smells like. ’
And then all of a sudden I seemed to see him. It was as if I hadn’t properly seen him till
that moment.
A very young eager face, might have belonged to a good-looking schoolboy, with blue
eyes and tow-coloured hair, gazing into mine, and for a moment actually he’d got tears in
his eyes! Felt as strongly as all that about the Gennan Jews! But as a matter of fact I
knew just what he felt. He’s a hefty lad, probably plays rugger for the bank. Got brains,
too. And here he is, a bank clerk in a godless suburb, sitting behind the frosted window,
entering figures in a ledger, counting piles of notes, bumsucking to the manager. Feels his
life rotting away. And all the while, over in Europe, the big stuffs happening. Shells
bursting over the trenches and waves of infantry charging through the drifts of smoke.
Probably some of his pals are fighting in Spain. Of course he’s spoiling for a war. How
can you blame him? For a moment I had a peculiar feeling that he was my son, which in
point of years he might have been. And I thought of that sweltering hot day in August
when the newsboy stuck up the poster ENGLAND DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY,
and we all rushed out on to the pavement in our white aprons and cheered.
‘Listen son,’ I said, ‘you’ve got it all wrong. In 1914 WE thought it was going to be a
glorious business. Well, it wasn’t. It was just a bloody mess. If it comes again, you keep
out of it.
