‘Oh, so
you’re
back already, are you?
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
The planes were flying over to do a bit of bombing
practice — at any rate they were carrying bombs — and somebody had put his hands on the
lever by mistake. I expect he got a good ticking off for it. By the time that the postmaster
had rung up London to ask whether there was a war on, and been told that there wasn’t,
everyone had grasped that it was an accident. But there’d been a space of time, something
between a minute and five minutes, when several thousand people believed we were at
war. A good job it didn’t last any longer. Another quarter of an hour and we’d have been
lynching our first spy.
I followed the crowd. The bomb had dropped in a little side-street off the High Street, the
one where Uncle Ezekiel used to have his shop. It wasn’t fifty yards from where the shop
used to be. As I came round the comer I could hear voices murmuring ‘Oo-oo! ’ — a kind
of awed noise, as if they were frightened and getting a big kick out of it. Luckily I got
there a few minutes before the ambulance and the fire-engine, and in spite of the fifty
people or so that had already collected I saw everything.
At first sight it looked as if the sky had been raining bricks and vegetables. There were
cabbage leaves everywhere. The bomb had blown a greengrocer’s shop out of existence.
The house to the right of it had part of its roof blown off, and the roof beams were on fire,
and all the houses round had been more or less damaged and had their windows smashed.
But what everyone was looking at was the house on the left. Its wall, the one that joined
the greengrocer’s shop, was ripped off as neatly as if someone had done it with a knife.
And what was extraordinary was that in the upstairs rooms nothing had been touched. It
was just like looking into a doll’s house. Chests-of-drawers, bedroom chairs, faded
wallpaper, a bed not yet made, and a jerry under the bed — all exactly as it had been lived
in, except that one wall was gone. But the lower rooms had caught the force of the
explosion. There was a frightful smashed-up mess of bricks, plaster, chair-legs, bits of a
varnished dresser, rags of tablecloth, piles of broken plates, and chu nks of a scullery sink.
A jar of marmalade had rolled across the floor, leaving a long streak of marmalade
behind, and running side by side with it there was a ribbon of blood. But in among the
broken crockery there was lying a leg. Just a leg, with the trouser still on it and a black
boot with a Wood-Milne rubber heel. This was what people were oo-ing and ah-ing at.
I had a good look at it and took it in. The blood was beginning to get mixed up with the
marmalade. When the fire-engine arrived I cleared off to the George to pack my bag.
This finishes me with Lower Binfield, I thought. I’m going home. But as a matter of fact
I didn’t shake the dust off my shoes and leave immediately. One never does. When
anything like that happens, people always stand about and discuss it for hours. There
wasn’t much work done in the old part of Lower Binfield that day, everyone was too
busy talking about the bomb, what it sounded like and what they thought when they heard
it. The bannaid at the George said it fair gave her the shudders. She said she’d never
sleep sound in her bed again, and what did you expect, it just showed that with these here
bombs you never knew. A woman had bitten off part of her tongue owing to the jump the
explosion gave her. It turned out that whereas at our end of the town everyone had
imagined it was a Gennan air-raid, everyone at the other end had taken it for granted that
it was an explosion at the stocking factory. Afterwards (I got this out of the newspaper)
the Air Ministry sent a chap to inspect the damage, and issued a report saying that the
effects of the bomb were ‘disappointing’. As a matter of fact it only killed three people,
the greengrocer, Perrott his name was, and an old couple who lived next door. The
woman wasn’t much smashed about, and they identified the old man by his boots, but
they never found a trace of Perrott. Not even a trouser-button to read the burial service
over.
In the afternoon I paid my bill and hooked it. I didn’t have much more than three quid left
after I’d paid the bill. They know how to cut it out of you these dolled-up country hotels,
and what with drinks and other odds and ends I’d been shying money about pretty freely.
I left my new rod and the rest of the fishing tackle in my bedroom. Let ‘em keep it. No
use to me. It was merely a quid that I’d chucked down the drain to teach myself a lesson.
And I’d leamt the lesson all right. Fat men of forty-five can’t go fishing. That kind of
thing doesn’t happen any longer, it’s just a dream, there’ll be no more fishing this side of
the grave.
It’s funny how things sink into you by degrees. What had I really felt when the bomb
exploded? At the actual moment, of course, it scared the wits out of me, and when I saw
the smashed-up house and the old man’s leg I’d had the kind of mild kick that you get
from seeing a street-accident. Disgusting, of course. Quite enough to make me fed-up
with this so-called holiday. But it hadn’t really made much impression.
But as I got clear of the outskirts of Lower Binfield and turned the car eastward, it all
came back to me. You know how it is when you’re in a car alone. There’s something
either in the hedges flying past you, or in the throb of the engine, that gets your thoughts
running in a certain rhythm. You have the same feeling sometimes when you’re in the
train. It’s a feeling of being able to see things in better perspective than usual. All kinds
of things that I’d been doubtful about I felt certain about now. To begin with, I’d come to
Lower Binfield with a question in my mind. What’s ahead of us? Is the game really up?
Can we get back to the life we used to live, or is it gone for ever? Well, I’d had my
answer. The old life’s finished, and to go back to Lower Binfield, you can’t put Jonah
back into the whale. I KNEW, though I don’t expect you to follow my train of thought.
And it was a queer thing I’d done coming here. All those years Lower Binfield had been
tucked away somewhere or other in my mind, a sort of quiet comer that I could step back
into when I felt like it, and finally I’d stepped back into it and found that it didn’t exist.
I’d chucked a pineapple into my dreams, and lest there should be any mistake the Royal
Air Force had followed up with five hundred pounds of T. N. T.
War is coming. 1941, they say. And there’ll be plenty of broken crockery, and little
houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant’s clerk
plastered over the piano that he’s buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of
thing matter, anyway? I’ 11 tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it
was this. IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you’ve got at the back of your
mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare
or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons,
the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enonnous faces, the machine-guns
squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it — at any rate, I
knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and
pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing
along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.
I trod on the gas, and the old car whizzed up and down the little hills, and the cows and
elm trees and fields of wheat rushed past till the engine was pretty nearly red-hot. I felt in
much the same mood as I’d felt that day in January when I was coming down the Strand,
the day I got my new false teeth. It was as though the power of prophecy had been given
me. It seemed to me that I could see the whole of England, and all the people in it, and all
the things that’ll happen to all of them. Sometimes, of course, even then, I had a doubt or
two. The world is very large, that’s a thing you notice when you’re driving about in a car,
and in a way it’s reassuring. Think of the enonnous stretches of land you pass over when
you cross a comer of a single English county. It’s like Siberia. And the fields and beech
spinneys and farmhouses and churches, and the villages with their little grocers’ shops
and the parish hall and the ducks walking across the green. Surely it’s too big to be
changed? Bound to remain more or less the same. And presently I struck into outer
London and followed the Uxbridge Road as far as Southall. Miles and miles of ugly
houses, with people living dull decent lives inside them. And beyond it London stretching
on and on, streets, squares, back-alleys, tenements, blocks of flats, pubs, fried-fish shops,
picture-houses, on and on for twenty miles, and all the eight million people with their
little private lives which they don’t want to have altered. The bombs aren’t made that
could smash it out of existence. And the chaos of it! The privateness of all those lives!
John Smith cutting out the football coupons, Bill Williams swapping stories in the
barber’s. Mrs Jones coming home with the supper beer. Eight million of them! Surely
they’ll manage somehow, bombs or no bombs, to keep on with the life that they’ve been
used to?
Illusion! Baloney! It doesn’t matter how many of them there are, they’re all for it. The
bad times are coming, and the streamlined men are coming too. What’s coming
afterwards I don’t know, it hardly even interests me. I only know that if there’s anything
you care a curse about, better say good-bye to it now, because everything you’ve ever
known is going down, down, into the muck, with the machine-guns rattling all the time.
But when I got back to the suburb my mood suddenly changed.
It suddenly struck me — and it hadn’t even crossed my mind till that moment — that Hilda
might really be ill after all.
That’s the effect of environment, you see. In Lower Binfield I’d taken it absolutely for
granted that she wasn’t ill and was merely shamming in order to get me home. It had
seemed natural at the time, I don’t know why. But as I drove into West Bletchley and the
Hesperides Estate closed round me like a kind of red-brick prison, which is what it is, the
ordinary habits of thought came back. I had this kind of Monday morning feeling when
everything seems bleak and sensible. I saw what bloody rot it was, this business that I’d
wasted the last five days on. Sneaking off to Lower Binfield to try and recover the past,
and then, in the car coming home, thinking a lot of prophetic baloney about the future.
The future! What’s the future got to do with chaps like you and me? Holding down our
jobs — that’s our future. As for Hilda, even when the bombs are dropping she’ll be still
thinking about the price of butter.
And suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to think she’d do a thing like that. Of course the
S. O. S. wasn’t a fake! As though she’d have the imagination! It was just the plain cold
truth. She wasn’t shamming at all, she was really ill. And Gosh! at this moment she might
be lying somewhere in ghastly pain, or even dead, for all I knew. The thought sent a most
horrible pang of fright through me, a sort of dreadful cold feeling in my guts. I whizzed
down Ellesmere Road at nearly forty miles an hour, and instead of taking the car to the
lock-up garage as usual I stopped outside the house and jumped out.
So I’m fond of Hilda after all, you say! I don’t know exactly what you mean by fond. Are
you fond of your own face? Probably not, but you can’t imagine yourself without it. It’s
part of you. Well, that’s how I felt about Hilda. When things are going well I can’t stick
the sight of her, but the thought that she might be dead or even in pain sent the shivers
through me.
I fumbled with the key, got the door open, and the familiar smell of old mackintoshes hit
me.
‘Hilda! ’ I yelled. ‘Hilda! ’
No answer. For a moment I was yelling ‘Hilda! Hilda! ’ into utter silence, and some cold
sweat started out on my backbone. Maybe they carted her away to hospital already —
maybe there was a corpse lying upstairs in the empty house.
I started to dash up the stairs, but at the same moment the two kids, in their pyjamas,
came out of their rooms on either side of the landing. It was eight or nine o’clock, I
suppose — at any rate the light was just beginning to fail. Lorna hung over the banisters.
‘Oo, Daddy! Oo, it’s Daddy! Why have you come back today? Mummy said you weren’t
coming till Friday. ’
‘Where’s your mother? ’ I said.
‘Mummy’s out. She went out with Mrs Wheeler. Why have you come home today,
Daddy? ’
‘Then your mother hasn’t been ill? ’
‘No. Who said she’d been ill? Daddy! Have you been in Birmingham? ’
‘Yes. Get back to bed, now. You’ll be catching cold. ’
‘But where’s our presents, Daddy? ’
‘What presents? ’
‘The presents you’ve bought us from Birmingham. ’
‘You’ll see them in the morning,’ I said.
‘Oo, Daddy! Can’t we see them tonight? ’
‘No. Dry up. Get back to bed or I’ll wallop the pair of you. ’
So she wasn’t ill after all. She HAD been shamming. And really I hardly knew whether to
be glad or sorry. I turned back to the front door, which I’d left open, and there, as large as
life, was Hilda coming up the garden path.
I looked at her as she came towards me in the last of the evening light. It was queer to
think that less than three minutes earlier I’d been in the devil of a stew, with actual cold
sweat on my backbone, at the thought that she might be dead. Well, she wasn’t dead, she
was just as usual. Old Hilda with her thin shoulders and her anxious face, and the gas bill
and the school-fees, and the mackintoshy smell and the office on Monday — all the
bedrock facts that you invariably come back to, the eternal verities as old Porteous calls
them. I could see that Hilda wasn’t in too good a temper. She darted me a little quick
look, like she does sometimes when she’s got something on her mind, the kind of look
some little thin animal, a weasel for instance, might give you. She didn’t seem surprised
to see me back, however.
‘Oh, so you’re back already, are you? ’ she said.
It seemed pretty obvious that I was back, and I didn’t answer. She didn’t make any move
to kiss me.
‘There’s nothing for your supper,’ she went on promptly. That’s Hilda all over. Always
manages to say something depressing the instant you set foot inside the house. ‘I wasn’t
expecting you. You’ll just have to have bread and cheese — but I don’t think we’ve got
any cheese. ’
I followed her indoors, into the smell of mackintoshes. We went into the sitting-room. I
shut the door and switched on the light. I meant to get my say in first, and I knew it
would make things better if I took a strong line from the start.
‘Now’, I said, ‘what the bloody hell do you mean by playing that trick on me? ’
She’d just laid her bag down on top of the radio, and for a moment she looked genuinely
surprised.
‘What trick? What do you mean? ’
‘Sending out that S. O. S. ! ’
‘What S. O. S. ? What are you TALKING about, George? ’
‘Are you trying to tell me you didn’t get them to send out an S. O. S. saying you were
seriously ill? ’
‘Of course I didn’t! How could I? I wasn’t ill. What would I do a thing like that for? ’
I began to explain, but almost before I began I saw what had happened. It was all a
mistake. I’d only heard the last few words of the S. O. S. and obviously it was some other
Hilda Bowling. I suppose there’d be scores of Hilda Bowlings if you looked the name up
in the directory. It just was the kind of dull stupid mistake that’s always happening. Hilda
hadn’t even showed that little bit of imagination I’d credited her with. The sole interest in
the whole affair had been the five minutes or so when I thought she was dead, and found
that I cared after all. But that was over and done with. While I explained she was
watching me, and I could see in her eye that there was trouble of some kind coming. And
then she began questioning me in what I call her third-degree voice, which isn’t, as you
might expect, angry and nagging, but quiet and kind of watchful.
‘So you heard this S. O. S. in the hotel at Birmingham? ’
‘Yes. Last night, on the National Broadcast. ’
‘When did you leave Birmingham, then? ’
‘This morning, of course. ’ (I’d planned out the journey in my mind, just in case there
should be any need to lie my way out of it. Left at ten, lunch at Coventry, tea at
Bedford — I’d got it all mapped out. )
‘So you thought last night I was seriously ill, and you didn’t even leave till this
morning? ’
‘But I tell you I didn’t think you were ill. Haven’t I explained? I thought it was just
another of your tricks. It sounded a damn sight more likely. ’
‘Then I’m rather surprised you left at all! ’ she said with so much vinegar in her voice that
I knew there was something more coming. But she went on more quietly: ‘So you left
this morning, did you? ’
‘Yes. I left about ten. I had lunch at Coventry — ’
‘Then how do you account for THIS? ’ she suddenly shot out at me, and in the same
instant she ripped her bag open, took out a piece of paper, and held it out as if it had been
a forged cheque, or something.
I felt as if someone had hit me a sock in the wind. I might have known it! She’d caught
me after all. And there was the evidence, the dossier of the case. I didn’t even know what
it was, except that it was something that proved I’d been off with a woman. All the
stuffing went out of me. A moment earlier I’d been kind of bullying her, making out to be
angry because I’d been dragged back from Birmingham for nothing, and now she’d
suddenly turned the tables on me. You don’t have to tell me what I look like at that
moment. I know. Guilt written all over me in big letters — I know. And I wasn’t even
guilty! But it’s a matter of habit. I’m used to being in the wrong. For a hundred quid I
couldn’t have kept the guilt out of my voice as I answered:
‘What do you mean? What’s that thing you’ve got there? ’
‘You read it and you’ll see what it is. ’
I took it. It was a letter from what seemed to be a firm of solicitors, and it was addressed
from the same street as Rowbottom’s Hotel, I noticed.
‘Dear Madam,’ I read, ‘With reference to your letter of the 18th inst. , we think there must
be some mistake. Rowbottom’s Hotel was closed down two years ago and has been
converted into a block of offices. No one answering the description of your husband has
been here. Possibly — ’
I didn’t read any further. Of course I saw it all in a flash. I’d been a little bit too clever
and put my foot in it. There was just one faint ray of hope — young Saunders might have
forgotten to post the letter I’d addressed from Rowbottom’s, in which case it was just
possible I could brazen it out. But Hilda soon put the lid on that idea.
‘Well, George, you see what the letter says? The day you left here I wrote to
Rowbottom’s Hotel — oh, just a little note, asking them whether you’d arrived there. And
you see the answer I got! There isn’t even any such place as Rowbottom’s Hotel. And the
same day, the very same post, I got your letter saying you were at the hotel. You got
someone to post it for you, I suppose. THAT was your business in Birmingham! ’
‘But look here, Hilda! You’ve got all this wrong. It isn’t what you think at all. You don’t
understand. ’
‘Oh, yes, I do, George. I understand PERFECTLY. ’
‘But look here, Hilda — ’
Wasn’t any use, of course. It was a fair cop. I couldn’t even meet her eye. I turned and
tried to make for the door.
‘I’ll have to take the car round to the garage,’ I said.
‘Oh, no George! You don’t get out of it like that. You’ll stay here and listen to what I’ve
got to say, please. ’
‘But, damn it! I’ve got to switch the lights on, haven’t I? It’s past lighting-up time. You
don’t want us to get fined? ’
At that she let me go, and I went out and switched the car lights on, but when I came back
she was still standing there like a figure of doom, with the two letters, mine and the
solicitor’s on the table in front of her. I’d got a little of my nerve back, and I had another
try:
‘Listen, Hilda. You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick about this business. I can
explain the whole thing. ’
‘I’m sure YOU could explain anything, George. The question is whether I’d believe you. ’
‘But you’re just jumping to conclusions! What made you write to these hotel people,
anyway? ’
‘It was Mrs Wheeler’s idea. And a very good idea too, as it turned out. ’
‘Oh, Mrs Wheeler, was it? So you don’t mind letting that blasted woman into our private
affairs? ’
‘She didn’t need any letting in. It was she who warned me what you were up to this week.
Something seemed to tell her, she said. And she was right, you see. She knows all about
you, George. She used to have a husband JUST like you. ’
‘But, Hilda — ’
I looked at her. Her face had gone a kind of white under the surface, the way it does when
she thinks of me with another woman. A woman. If only it had been true!
And Gosh! what I could see ahead of me! You know what it’s like. The weeks on end of
ghastly nagging and sulking, and the catty remarks after you think peace has been signed,
and the meals always late, and the kids wanting to know what it’s all about. But what
really got me down was the kind of mental squalor, the kind of mental atmosphere in
which the real reason why I’d gone to Lower Binfield wouldn’t even be conceivable.
That was what chiefly struck me at the moment. If I spent a week explaining to Hilda
WHY I’d been to Lower B infield, she’d never understand. And who WOULD
understand, here in Ellesmere Road? Gosh! did I even understand myself? The whole
thing seemed to be fading out of my mind. Why had I gone to Lower Binfield? HAD I
gone there? In this atmosphere it just seemed meaningless. Nothing’s real in Ellesmere
Road except gas bills, school-fees, boiled cabbage, and the office on Monday.
One more try:
‘But look here, Hilda! I know what you think. But you’re absolutely wrong. I swear to
you you’re wrong. ’
‘Oh, no, George. If I was wrong why did you have to tell all those lies? ’
No getting away from that, of course.
I took a pace or two up and down. The smell of old mackintoshes was very strong. Why
had I run away like that? Why had I bothered about the future and the past, seeing that
the future and the past don’t matter? Whatever motives I might have had, I could hardly
remember them now. The old life in Lower Binficld, the war and the after-war, Hitler,
Stalin, bombs, machine-guns, food-queues, rubber truncheons — it was fading out, all
fading out. Nothing remained except a vulgar low-down row in a smell of old
mackintoshes.
One last try:
‘Hilda! Just listen to me a minute. Look here, you don’t know where I’ve been all this
week, do you? ’
‘I don’t want to know where you’ve been. I know WHAT you’ve been doing. That’s
quite enough for me. ’
‘But dash it — ’
Quite useless, of course. She’d found me guilty and now she was going to tell me what
she thought of me. That might take a couple of hours. And after that there was further
trouble looming up, because presently it would occur to her to wonder where I’d got the
money for this trip, and then she’d discover that I’d been holding out on her about the
seventeen quid. Really there was no reason why this row shouldn’t go on till three in the
morning. No use playing injured innocence any longer. All I wanted was the line of least
resistance. And in my mind I ran over the three possibilities, which were:
A. To tell her what I’d really been doing and somehow make her believe me.
B. To pull the old gag about losing my memory.
C. To let her go on thinking it was a woman, and take my medicine.
But, damn it! I knew which it would have to be.
practice — at any rate they were carrying bombs — and somebody had put his hands on the
lever by mistake. I expect he got a good ticking off for it. By the time that the postmaster
had rung up London to ask whether there was a war on, and been told that there wasn’t,
everyone had grasped that it was an accident. But there’d been a space of time, something
between a minute and five minutes, when several thousand people believed we were at
war. A good job it didn’t last any longer. Another quarter of an hour and we’d have been
lynching our first spy.
I followed the crowd. The bomb had dropped in a little side-street off the High Street, the
one where Uncle Ezekiel used to have his shop. It wasn’t fifty yards from where the shop
used to be. As I came round the comer I could hear voices murmuring ‘Oo-oo! ’ — a kind
of awed noise, as if they were frightened and getting a big kick out of it. Luckily I got
there a few minutes before the ambulance and the fire-engine, and in spite of the fifty
people or so that had already collected I saw everything.
At first sight it looked as if the sky had been raining bricks and vegetables. There were
cabbage leaves everywhere. The bomb had blown a greengrocer’s shop out of existence.
The house to the right of it had part of its roof blown off, and the roof beams were on fire,
and all the houses round had been more or less damaged and had their windows smashed.
But what everyone was looking at was the house on the left. Its wall, the one that joined
the greengrocer’s shop, was ripped off as neatly as if someone had done it with a knife.
And what was extraordinary was that in the upstairs rooms nothing had been touched. It
was just like looking into a doll’s house. Chests-of-drawers, bedroom chairs, faded
wallpaper, a bed not yet made, and a jerry under the bed — all exactly as it had been lived
in, except that one wall was gone. But the lower rooms had caught the force of the
explosion. There was a frightful smashed-up mess of bricks, plaster, chair-legs, bits of a
varnished dresser, rags of tablecloth, piles of broken plates, and chu nks of a scullery sink.
A jar of marmalade had rolled across the floor, leaving a long streak of marmalade
behind, and running side by side with it there was a ribbon of blood. But in among the
broken crockery there was lying a leg. Just a leg, with the trouser still on it and a black
boot with a Wood-Milne rubber heel. This was what people were oo-ing and ah-ing at.
I had a good look at it and took it in. The blood was beginning to get mixed up with the
marmalade. When the fire-engine arrived I cleared off to the George to pack my bag.
This finishes me with Lower Binfield, I thought. I’m going home. But as a matter of fact
I didn’t shake the dust off my shoes and leave immediately. One never does. When
anything like that happens, people always stand about and discuss it for hours. There
wasn’t much work done in the old part of Lower Binfield that day, everyone was too
busy talking about the bomb, what it sounded like and what they thought when they heard
it. The bannaid at the George said it fair gave her the shudders. She said she’d never
sleep sound in her bed again, and what did you expect, it just showed that with these here
bombs you never knew. A woman had bitten off part of her tongue owing to the jump the
explosion gave her. It turned out that whereas at our end of the town everyone had
imagined it was a Gennan air-raid, everyone at the other end had taken it for granted that
it was an explosion at the stocking factory. Afterwards (I got this out of the newspaper)
the Air Ministry sent a chap to inspect the damage, and issued a report saying that the
effects of the bomb were ‘disappointing’. As a matter of fact it only killed three people,
the greengrocer, Perrott his name was, and an old couple who lived next door. The
woman wasn’t much smashed about, and they identified the old man by his boots, but
they never found a trace of Perrott. Not even a trouser-button to read the burial service
over.
In the afternoon I paid my bill and hooked it. I didn’t have much more than three quid left
after I’d paid the bill. They know how to cut it out of you these dolled-up country hotels,
and what with drinks and other odds and ends I’d been shying money about pretty freely.
I left my new rod and the rest of the fishing tackle in my bedroom. Let ‘em keep it. No
use to me. It was merely a quid that I’d chucked down the drain to teach myself a lesson.
And I’d leamt the lesson all right. Fat men of forty-five can’t go fishing. That kind of
thing doesn’t happen any longer, it’s just a dream, there’ll be no more fishing this side of
the grave.
It’s funny how things sink into you by degrees. What had I really felt when the bomb
exploded? At the actual moment, of course, it scared the wits out of me, and when I saw
the smashed-up house and the old man’s leg I’d had the kind of mild kick that you get
from seeing a street-accident. Disgusting, of course. Quite enough to make me fed-up
with this so-called holiday. But it hadn’t really made much impression.
But as I got clear of the outskirts of Lower Binfield and turned the car eastward, it all
came back to me. You know how it is when you’re in a car alone. There’s something
either in the hedges flying past you, or in the throb of the engine, that gets your thoughts
running in a certain rhythm. You have the same feeling sometimes when you’re in the
train. It’s a feeling of being able to see things in better perspective than usual. All kinds
of things that I’d been doubtful about I felt certain about now. To begin with, I’d come to
Lower Binfield with a question in my mind. What’s ahead of us? Is the game really up?
Can we get back to the life we used to live, or is it gone for ever? Well, I’d had my
answer. The old life’s finished, and to go back to Lower Binfield, you can’t put Jonah
back into the whale. I KNEW, though I don’t expect you to follow my train of thought.
And it was a queer thing I’d done coming here. All those years Lower Binfield had been
tucked away somewhere or other in my mind, a sort of quiet comer that I could step back
into when I felt like it, and finally I’d stepped back into it and found that it didn’t exist.
I’d chucked a pineapple into my dreams, and lest there should be any mistake the Royal
Air Force had followed up with five hundred pounds of T. N. T.
War is coming. 1941, they say. And there’ll be plenty of broken crockery, and little
houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant’s clerk
plastered over the piano that he’s buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of
thing matter, anyway? I’ 11 tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it
was this. IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you’ve got at the back of your
mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare
or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons,
the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enonnous faces, the machine-guns
squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it — at any rate, I
knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and
pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing
along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.
I trod on the gas, and the old car whizzed up and down the little hills, and the cows and
elm trees and fields of wheat rushed past till the engine was pretty nearly red-hot. I felt in
much the same mood as I’d felt that day in January when I was coming down the Strand,
the day I got my new false teeth. It was as though the power of prophecy had been given
me. It seemed to me that I could see the whole of England, and all the people in it, and all
the things that’ll happen to all of them. Sometimes, of course, even then, I had a doubt or
two. The world is very large, that’s a thing you notice when you’re driving about in a car,
and in a way it’s reassuring. Think of the enonnous stretches of land you pass over when
you cross a comer of a single English county. It’s like Siberia. And the fields and beech
spinneys and farmhouses and churches, and the villages with their little grocers’ shops
and the parish hall and the ducks walking across the green. Surely it’s too big to be
changed? Bound to remain more or less the same. And presently I struck into outer
London and followed the Uxbridge Road as far as Southall. Miles and miles of ugly
houses, with people living dull decent lives inside them. And beyond it London stretching
on and on, streets, squares, back-alleys, tenements, blocks of flats, pubs, fried-fish shops,
picture-houses, on and on for twenty miles, and all the eight million people with their
little private lives which they don’t want to have altered. The bombs aren’t made that
could smash it out of existence. And the chaos of it! The privateness of all those lives!
John Smith cutting out the football coupons, Bill Williams swapping stories in the
barber’s. Mrs Jones coming home with the supper beer. Eight million of them! Surely
they’ll manage somehow, bombs or no bombs, to keep on with the life that they’ve been
used to?
Illusion! Baloney! It doesn’t matter how many of them there are, they’re all for it. The
bad times are coming, and the streamlined men are coming too. What’s coming
afterwards I don’t know, it hardly even interests me. I only know that if there’s anything
you care a curse about, better say good-bye to it now, because everything you’ve ever
known is going down, down, into the muck, with the machine-guns rattling all the time.
But when I got back to the suburb my mood suddenly changed.
It suddenly struck me — and it hadn’t even crossed my mind till that moment — that Hilda
might really be ill after all.
That’s the effect of environment, you see. In Lower Binfield I’d taken it absolutely for
granted that she wasn’t ill and was merely shamming in order to get me home. It had
seemed natural at the time, I don’t know why. But as I drove into West Bletchley and the
Hesperides Estate closed round me like a kind of red-brick prison, which is what it is, the
ordinary habits of thought came back. I had this kind of Monday morning feeling when
everything seems bleak and sensible. I saw what bloody rot it was, this business that I’d
wasted the last five days on. Sneaking off to Lower Binfield to try and recover the past,
and then, in the car coming home, thinking a lot of prophetic baloney about the future.
The future! What’s the future got to do with chaps like you and me? Holding down our
jobs — that’s our future. As for Hilda, even when the bombs are dropping she’ll be still
thinking about the price of butter.
And suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to think she’d do a thing like that. Of course the
S. O. S. wasn’t a fake! As though she’d have the imagination! It was just the plain cold
truth. She wasn’t shamming at all, she was really ill. And Gosh! at this moment she might
be lying somewhere in ghastly pain, or even dead, for all I knew. The thought sent a most
horrible pang of fright through me, a sort of dreadful cold feeling in my guts. I whizzed
down Ellesmere Road at nearly forty miles an hour, and instead of taking the car to the
lock-up garage as usual I stopped outside the house and jumped out.
So I’m fond of Hilda after all, you say! I don’t know exactly what you mean by fond. Are
you fond of your own face? Probably not, but you can’t imagine yourself without it. It’s
part of you. Well, that’s how I felt about Hilda. When things are going well I can’t stick
the sight of her, but the thought that she might be dead or even in pain sent the shivers
through me.
I fumbled with the key, got the door open, and the familiar smell of old mackintoshes hit
me.
‘Hilda! ’ I yelled. ‘Hilda! ’
No answer. For a moment I was yelling ‘Hilda! Hilda! ’ into utter silence, and some cold
sweat started out on my backbone. Maybe they carted her away to hospital already —
maybe there was a corpse lying upstairs in the empty house.
I started to dash up the stairs, but at the same moment the two kids, in their pyjamas,
came out of their rooms on either side of the landing. It was eight or nine o’clock, I
suppose — at any rate the light was just beginning to fail. Lorna hung over the banisters.
‘Oo, Daddy! Oo, it’s Daddy! Why have you come back today? Mummy said you weren’t
coming till Friday. ’
‘Where’s your mother? ’ I said.
‘Mummy’s out. She went out with Mrs Wheeler. Why have you come home today,
Daddy? ’
‘Then your mother hasn’t been ill? ’
‘No. Who said she’d been ill? Daddy! Have you been in Birmingham? ’
‘Yes. Get back to bed, now. You’ll be catching cold. ’
‘But where’s our presents, Daddy? ’
‘What presents? ’
‘The presents you’ve bought us from Birmingham. ’
‘You’ll see them in the morning,’ I said.
‘Oo, Daddy! Can’t we see them tonight? ’
‘No. Dry up. Get back to bed or I’ll wallop the pair of you. ’
So she wasn’t ill after all. She HAD been shamming. And really I hardly knew whether to
be glad or sorry. I turned back to the front door, which I’d left open, and there, as large as
life, was Hilda coming up the garden path.
I looked at her as she came towards me in the last of the evening light. It was queer to
think that less than three minutes earlier I’d been in the devil of a stew, with actual cold
sweat on my backbone, at the thought that she might be dead. Well, she wasn’t dead, she
was just as usual. Old Hilda with her thin shoulders and her anxious face, and the gas bill
and the school-fees, and the mackintoshy smell and the office on Monday — all the
bedrock facts that you invariably come back to, the eternal verities as old Porteous calls
them. I could see that Hilda wasn’t in too good a temper. She darted me a little quick
look, like she does sometimes when she’s got something on her mind, the kind of look
some little thin animal, a weasel for instance, might give you. She didn’t seem surprised
to see me back, however.
‘Oh, so you’re back already, are you? ’ she said.
It seemed pretty obvious that I was back, and I didn’t answer. She didn’t make any move
to kiss me.
‘There’s nothing for your supper,’ she went on promptly. That’s Hilda all over. Always
manages to say something depressing the instant you set foot inside the house. ‘I wasn’t
expecting you. You’ll just have to have bread and cheese — but I don’t think we’ve got
any cheese. ’
I followed her indoors, into the smell of mackintoshes. We went into the sitting-room. I
shut the door and switched on the light. I meant to get my say in first, and I knew it
would make things better if I took a strong line from the start.
‘Now’, I said, ‘what the bloody hell do you mean by playing that trick on me? ’
She’d just laid her bag down on top of the radio, and for a moment she looked genuinely
surprised.
‘What trick? What do you mean? ’
‘Sending out that S. O. S. ! ’
‘What S. O. S. ? What are you TALKING about, George? ’
‘Are you trying to tell me you didn’t get them to send out an S. O. S. saying you were
seriously ill? ’
‘Of course I didn’t! How could I? I wasn’t ill. What would I do a thing like that for? ’
I began to explain, but almost before I began I saw what had happened. It was all a
mistake. I’d only heard the last few words of the S. O. S. and obviously it was some other
Hilda Bowling. I suppose there’d be scores of Hilda Bowlings if you looked the name up
in the directory. It just was the kind of dull stupid mistake that’s always happening. Hilda
hadn’t even showed that little bit of imagination I’d credited her with. The sole interest in
the whole affair had been the five minutes or so when I thought she was dead, and found
that I cared after all. But that was over and done with. While I explained she was
watching me, and I could see in her eye that there was trouble of some kind coming. And
then she began questioning me in what I call her third-degree voice, which isn’t, as you
might expect, angry and nagging, but quiet and kind of watchful.
‘So you heard this S. O. S. in the hotel at Birmingham? ’
‘Yes. Last night, on the National Broadcast. ’
‘When did you leave Birmingham, then? ’
‘This morning, of course. ’ (I’d planned out the journey in my mind, just in case there
should be any need to lie my way out of it. Left at ten, lunch at Coventry, tea at
Bedford — I’d got it all mapped out. )
‘So you thought last night I was seriously ill, and you didn’t even leave till this
morning? ’
‘But I tell you I didn’t think you were ill. Haven’t I explained? I thought it was just
another of your tricks. It sounded a damn sight more likely. ’
‘Then I’m rather surprised you left at all! ’ she said with so much vinegar in her voice that
I knew there was something more coming. But she went on more quietly: ‘So you left
this morning, did you? ’
‘Yes. I left about ten. I had lunch at Coventry — ’
‘Then how do you account for THIS? ’ she suddenly shot out at me, and in the same
instant she ripped her bag open, took out a piece of paper, and held it out as if it had been
a forged cheque, or something.
I felt as if someone had hit me a sock in the wind. I might have known it! She’d caught
me after all. And there was the evidence, the dossier of the case. I didn’t even know what
it was, except that it was something that proved I’d been off with a woman. All the
stuffing went out of me. A moment earlier I’d been kind of bullying her, making out to be
angry because I’d been dragged back from Birmingham for nothing, and now she’d
suddenly turned the tables on me. You don’t have to tell me what I look like at that
moment. I know. Guilt written all over me in big letters — I know. And I wasn’t even
guilty! But it’s a matter of habit. I’m used to being in the wrong. For a hundred quid I
couldn’t have kept the guilt out of my voice as I answered:
‘What do you mean? What’s that thing you’ve got there? ’
‘You read it and you’ll see what it is. ’
I took it. It was a letter from what seemed to be a firm of solicitors, and it was addressed
from the same street as Rowbottom’s Hotel, I noticed.
‘Dear Madam,’ I read, ‘With reference to your letter of the 18th inst. , we think there must
be some mistake. Rowbottom’s Hotel was closed down two years ago and has been
converted into a block of offices. No one answering the description of your husband has
been here. Possibly — ’
I didn’t read any further. Of course I saw it all in a flash. I’d been a little bit too clever
and put my foot in it. There was just one faint ray of hope — young Saunders might have
forgotten to post the letter I’d addressed from Rowbottom’s, in which case it was just
possible I could brazen it out. But Hilda soon put the lid on that idea.
‘Well, George, you see what the letter says? The day you left here I wrote to
Rowbottom’s Hotel — oh, just a little note, asking them whether you’d arrived there. And
you see the answer I got! There isn’t even any such place as Rowbottom’s Hotel. And the
same day, the very same post, I got your letter saying you were at the hotel. You got
someone to post it for you, I suppose. THAT was your business in Birmingham! ’
‘But look here, Hilda! You’ve got all this wrong. It isn’t what you think at all. You don’t
understand. ’
‘Oh, yes, I do, George. I understand PERFECTLY. ’
‘But look here, Hilda — ’
Wasn’t any use, of course. It was a fair cop. I couldn’t even meet her eye. I turned and
tried to make for the door.
‘I’ll have to take the car round to the garage,’ I said.
‘Oh, no George! You don’t get out of it like that. You’ll stay here and listen to what I’ve
got to say, please. ’
‘But, damn it! I’ve got to switch the lights on, haven’t I? It’s past lighting-up time. You
don’t want us to get fined? ’
At that she let me go, and I went out and switched the car lights on, but when I came back
she was still standing there like a figure of doom, with the two letters, mine and the
solicitor’s on the table in front of her. I’d got a little of my nerve back, and I had another
try:
‘Listen, Hilda. You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick about this business. I can
explain the whole thing. ’
‘I’m sure YOU could explain anything, George. The question is whether I’d believe you. ’
‘But you’re just jumping to conclusions! What made you write to these hotel people,
anyway? ’
‘It was Mrs Wheeler’s idea. And a very good idea too, as it turned out. ’
‘Oh, Mrs Wheeler, was it? So you don’t mind letting that blasted woman into our private
affairs? ’
‘She didn’t need any letting in. It was she who warned me what you were up to this week.
Something seemed to tell her, she said. And she was right, you see. She knows all about
you, George. She used to have a husband JUST like you. ’
‘But, Hilda — ’
I looked at her. Her face had gone a kind of white under the surface, the way it does when
she thinks of me with another woman. A woman. If only it had been true!
And Gosh! what I could see ahead of me! You know what it’s like. The weeks on end of
ghastly nagging and sulking, and the catty remarks after you think peace has been signed,
and the meals always late, and the kids wanting to know what it’s all about. But what
really got me down was the kind of mental squalor, the kind of mental atmosphere in
which the real reason why I’d gone to Lower Binfield wouldn’t even be conceivable.
That was what chiefly struck me at the moment. If I spent a week explaining to Hilda
WHY I’d been to Lower B infield, she’d never understand. And who WOULD
understand, here in Ellesmere Road? Gosh! did I even understand myself? The whole
thing seemed to be fading out of my mind. Why had I gone to Lower Binfield? HAD I
gone there? In this atmosphere it just seemed meaningless. Nothing’s real in Ellesmere
Road except gas bills, school-fees, boiled cabbage, and the office on Monday.
One more try:
‘But look here, Hilda! I know what you think. But you’re absolutely wrong. I swear to
you you’re wrong. ’
‘Oh, no, George. If I was wrong why did you have to tell all those lies? ’
No getting away from that, of course.
I took a pace or two up and down. The smell of old mackintoshes was very strong. Why
had I run away like that? Why had I bothered about the future and the past, seeing that
the future and the past don’t matter? Whatever motives I might have had, I could hardly
remember them now. The old life in Lower Binficld, the war and the after-war, Hitler,
Stalin, bombs, machine-guns, food-queues, rubber truncheons — it was fading out, all
fading out. Nothing remained except a vulgar low-down row in a smell of old
mackintoshes.
One last try:
‘Hilda! Just listen to me a minute. Look here, you don’t know where I’ve been all this
week, do you? ’
‘I don’t want to know where you’ve been. I know WHAT you’ve been doing. That’s
quite enough for me. ’
‘But dash it — ’
Quite useless, of course. She’d found me guilty and now she was going to tell me what
she thought of me. That might take a couple of hours. And after that there was further
trouble looming up, because presently it would occur to her to wonder where I’d got the
money for this trip, and then she’d discover that I’d been holding out on her about the
seventeen quid. Really there was no reason why this row shouldn’t go on till three in the
morning. No use playing injured innocence any longer. All I wanted was the line of least
resistance. And in my mind I ran over the three possibilities, which were:
A. To tell her what I’d really been doing and somehow make her believe me.
B. To pull the old gag about losing my memory.
C. To let her go on thinking it was a woman, and take my medicine.
But, damn it! I knew which it would have to be.
