Then I saw a bloke in
overalls
with a bag of tools coming along and tried again.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
After thinking it over I
took young Saunders, who travels for Glisso Floor Polish, partly into my confidence.
He’d happened to mention that he’d be passing through Birmingham on the eighteenth of
June, and I got him to promise that he’d stop on his way and post a letter from me to
Hilda, addressed from Rowbottom’s. This was to tell her that I might be called away and
she’d better not write. Saunders understood, or thought he did. He gave me a wink and
said I was wonderful for my age. So that settled Hilda. She hadn’t asked any questions,
and even if she turned suspicious later, an alibi like that would take some breaking.
I drove through Westerham. It was a wonderful June morning. A faint breeze blowing,
and the elm tops swaying in the sun, little white clouds streaming across the sky like a
flock of sheep, and the shadows chasing each other across the fields. Outside Westerham
a Walls’ Ice Cream lad, with cheeks like apples, came tearing towards me on his bike,
whistling so that it went through your head. It suddenly reminded me of the time when
I’d been an errand boy myself (though in those days we didn’t have free-wheel bikes) and
I very nearly stopped him and took one. They’d cut the hay in places, but they hadn’t got
it in yet. It lay drying in long shiny rows, and the smell of it drifted across the road and
got mixed up with the petrol.
I drove along at a gentle fifteen. The morning had a kind of peaceful, dreamy feeling. The
ducks floated about on the ponds as if they felt too satisfied to eat. In Nettlefield, the
village beyond Westerham, a little man in a white apron, with grey hair and a huge grey
moustache, darted across the green, planted himself in the middle of the road and began
doing physical jerks to attract my attention. My car’s kn own all along this road, of
course. I pulled up. It’s only Mr Weaver, who keeps the village general shop. No, he
doesn’t want to insure his life, nor his shop either. He’s merely run out of change and
wants to know whether I’ve got a quid’s worth of Targe silver’. They never have any
change in Nettlefield, not even at the pub.
I drove on. The wheat would have been as tall as your waist. It went undulating up and
down the hills like a great green carpet, with the wind rippling it a little, kind of thick and
silky- looking. It’s like a woman, I thought. It makes you want to lie on it. And a bit
ahead of me I saw the sign-post where the road forks right for Pudley and left for Oxford.
I was still on my usual beat, inside the boundary of my own ‘district’, as the firm calls it.
The natural thing, as I was going westward, would have been to leave London along the
Uxbridge Road. But by a kind of instinct I’d followed my usual route. The fact was I was
feeling guilty about the whole business. I wanted to get well away before I headed for
Oxfordshire. And in spite of the fact that I’d fixed things so neatly with Hilda and the
firm, in spite of the twelve quid in my pocket-book and the suitcase in the back of the car,
as I got nearer the crossroads I actually felt a temptation — I knew I wasn’t going to
succumb to it, and yet it was a temptation — to chuck the whole thing up. I had a sort of
feeling that so long as I was driving along my nonnal beat I was still inside the law. It’s
not too late, I thought. There’s still time to do the respectable thing. I could run into
Pudley, for instance, see the manager of Barclay’s Bank (he’s our agent at Pudley) and
find out if any new business had come in. For that matter I could even turn round, go
back to Hilda, and make a clean breast of the plot.
I slowed down as I got to the comer. Should I or shouldn’t I? For about a second I was
really tempted. But no! I tooted the klaxon and swung the car westward, on to the Oxford
road.
Well, I’d done it. I was on the forbidden ground. It was true that five miles farther on, if I
wanted to, I could turn to the left again and get back to Westerham. But for the moment I
was headed westward. Strictly speaking I was in flight. And what was curious, I was no
sooner on the Oxford road than I felt perfectly certain that THEY knew all about it. When
I say THEY I mean all the people who wouldn’t approve of a trip of this kind and who’d
have stopped me if they could — which, I suppose, would include pretty well everybody.
What was more, I actually had a feeling that they were after me already. The whole lot of
them! All the people who couldn’t understand why a middle-aged man with false teeth
should sneak away for a quiet week in the place where he spent his boyhood. And all the
mean-minded bastards who COULD understand only too well, and who’d raise heaven
and earth to prevent it. They were all on my track. It was as if a huge army were
streaming up the road behind me. I seemed to see them in my mind’s eye. Hilda was in
front, of course, with the kids tagging after her, and Mrs Wheeler driving her forward
with a grim, vindictive expression, and Miss Minns rushing along in the rear, with her
pince-nez slipping down and a look of distress on her face, like the hen that gets left
behind when the others have got hold of the bacon rind. And Sir Herbert Crum and the
higher-ups of the Flying Salamander in their Rolls- Royces and Hispano-Suizas. And all
the chaps at the office, and all the poor down-trodden pen-pushers from Ellesmere Road
and from all such other roads, some of them wheeling prams and mowing- machines and
concrete garden-rollers, some of them chugging along in little Austin Sevens. And all the
soul-savers and Nosey Parkers, the people whom you’ve never seen but who rule your
destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Temperance League, the
Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of
Bishops, Mussolini, the Pope — they were all of them after me. I could almost hear them
shouting:
‘There’s a chap who thinks he’s going to escape! There’s a chap who says he won’t be
streamlined! He’s going back to Lower Binfield! After him! Stop him! ’
It’s queer. The impression was so strong that I actually took a peep through the little
window at the back of the car to make sure I wasn’t being followed. Guilty conscience, I
suppose. But there was nobody. Only the dusty white road and the long line of the elms
dwindling out behind me.
I trod on the gas and the old car rattled into the thirties. A few minutes later I was past the
Westerham turning. So that was that. I’d burnt my boats. This was the idea which, in a
dim sort of way, had begun to fonn itself in my mind the day I got my new false teeth.
PART IV
1
I came towards Lower Binficld over Chamford Hill. There are four roads into Lower
Binfield, and it would have been more direct to go through Walton. But I’d wanted to
come over Chamford Hill, the way we used to go when we hiked home from fishing in
the Thames. When you get just past the crown of the hill the trees open out and you can
see Lower Binfield lying in the valley below you.
It’s a queer experience to go over a bit of country you haven’t seen in twenty years. You
remember it in great detail, and you remember it all wrong. All the distances are
different, and the landmarks seem to have moved about. Y ou keep feeling, surely this hill
used to be a lot steeper — surely that turning was on the other side of the road? And on the
other hand you’ll have memories which are perfectly accurate, but which only belong to
one particular occasion. You’ll remember, for instance, a corner of a field, on a wet day
in winter, with the grass so green that it’s almost blue, and a rotten gatepost covered with
lichen and a cow standing in the grass and looking at you. And you’ll go back after
twenty years and be surprised because the cow isn’t standing in the same place and
looking at you with the same expression.
As I drove up Chamford Hill I realized that the picture I’d had of it in my mind was
almost entirely imaginary. But it was a fact that certain things had changed. The road was
tannac, whereas in the old days it used to be macadam (I remember the bumpy feeling of
it under the bike), and it seemed to have got a lot wider. And there were far less trees. In
the old days there used to be huge beeches growing in the hedgerows, and in places their
boughs met across the road and made a kind of arch. Now they were all gone. I’d nearly
got to the top of the hill when I came on something which was certainly new. To the right
of the road there was a whole lot of fake -picturesque houses, with overhanging eaves and
rose pergolas and what-not. You know the kind of houses that are just a little too high-
class to stand in a row, and so they’re dotted about in a kind of colony, with private roads
leading up to them. And at the entrance to one of the private roads there was a huge white
board which said:
THE KENNELS
PEDIGREE SEALYHAM PUPS
DOGS BOARDED
Surely THAT usen’t to be there?
I thought for a moment. Yes, I remembered! Where those houses stood there used to be a
little oak plantation, and the trees grew too close together, so that they were very tall and
thin, and in spring the ground underneath them used to be smothered in anemones.
Certainly there were never any houses as far out of the town as this.
I got to the top of the hill. Another minute and Lower Binfield would be in sight. Lower
Binfield! Why should I pretend I wasn’t excited? At the very thought of seeing it again an
extraordinary feeling that started in my guts crept upwards and did something to my
heart. Five seconds more and I’d be seeing it. Yes, here we are! I declutched, trod on the
foot-brake, and — Jesus!
Oh, yes, I know you knew what was coming. But / didn’t. You can say I was a bloody
fool not to expect it, and so I was. But it hadn’t even occurred to me.
The first question was, where WAS Lower Binfield?
I don’t mean that it had been demolished. It had merely been swallowed. The thing I was
looking down at was a good-sized manufacturing town. I remember — Gosh, how I
remember! and in this case I don’t think my memory is far out — what Lower Binfield
used to look like from the top of Chamford Hill. I suppose the High Street was about a
quarter of a mile long, and except for a few outlying houses the town was roughly the
shape of a cross. The chief landmarks were the church tower and the chimney of the
brewery. At this moment I couldn’t distinguish either of them. All I could see was an
enonnous river of brand-new houses which flowed along the valley in both directions and
half-way up the hills on either side. Over to the right there were what looked like several
acres of bright red roofs all exactly alike. A big Council housing estate, by the look of it.
But where was Lower Binfield? Where was the town I used to know? It might have been
anywhere. All I knew was that it was buried somewhere in the middle of that sea of
bricks. Of the five or six factory chimneys that I could see, I couldn’t even make a guess
at which belonged to the brewery. Towards the eastern end of the town there were two
enonnous factories of glass and concrete. That accounts for the growth of the town, I
thought, as I began to take it in. It occurred to me that the population of this place (it used
to be about two thousand in the old days) must be a good twenty-five thousand. The only
thing that hadn’t changed, seemingly, was Binfield House. It wasn’t much more than a
dot at that distance, but you could see it on the hillside opposite, with the beech trees
round it, and the town hadn’t climbed that high. As I looked a fleet of black bombing
planes came over the hill and zoomed across the town.
I shoved the clutch in and started slowly down the hill. The houses had climbed half-way
up it. You know those very cheap small houses which run up a hillside in one continuous
row, with the roofs rising one above the other like a flight of steps, all exactly the same.
But a little before I got to the houses I stopped again. On the left of the road there was
something else that was quite new. The cemetery. I stopped opposite the lych- gate to
have a look at it.
It was enonnous, twenty acres, I should think. There’s always a kind of jumped-up
unhomelike look about a new cemetery, with its raw gravel paths and its rough green
sods, and the machine-made marble angels that look like something off a wedding-cake.
But what chiefly struck me at the moment was that in the old days this place hadn’t
existed. There was no separate cemetery then, only the churchyard. I could vaguely
remember the farmer these fields used to belong to — Blackett, his name was, and he was
a dairy- farmer. And somehow the raw look of the place brought it home to me how
things have changed. It wasn’t only that the town had grown so vast that they needed
twenty acres to dump their corpses in. It was their putting the cemetery out here, on the
edge of the town. Have you noticed that they always do that nowadays? Every new town
puts its cemetery on the outskirts. Shove it away — keep it out of sight! Can’t bear to be
reminded of death. Even the tombstones tell you the same story. They never say that the
chap underneath them ‘died’, it’s always ‘passed away’ or ‘fell asleep’. It wasn’t so in the
old days. We had our churchyard plumb in the middle of the town, you passed it every
day, you saw the spot where your grandfather was lying and where some day you were
going to lie yourself. We didn’t mind looking at the dead. In hot weather, I admit, we also
had to smell them, because some of the family vaults weren’t too well sealed.
I let the car run down the hill slowly. Queer! You can’t imagine how queer! All the way
down the hill I was seeing ghosts, chiefly the ghosts of hedges and trees and cows. It was
as if I was looking at two worlds at once, a kind of thin bubble of the thing that used to
be, with the thing that actually existed shining through it. There’s the field where the bull
chased Ginger Rodgers! And there’s the place where the horse-mushrooms used to grow!
But there weren’t any fields or any bulls or any mushrooms. It was houses, houses
everywhere, little raw red houses with their grubby window-curtains and their scraps of
back-garden that hadn’t anything in them except a patch of rank grass or a few larkspurs
struggling among the weeds. And blokes walking up and down, and women shaking out
mats, and snotty-nosed kids playing along the pavement. All strangers! They’d all come
crowding in while my back was turned. And yet it was they who’d have looked on me as
a stranger, they didn’t know anything about the old Lower Binfield, they’d never heard of
Shooter and Wetherall, or Mr Grimmett and Uncle Ezekiel, and cared less, you bet.
It’s funny how quickly one adjusts. I suppose it was five minutes since I’d halted at the
top of the hill, actually a bit out of breath at the thought of seeing Lower Binfield again.
And already I’d got used to the idea that Lower Binfield had been swallowed up and
buried like the lost cities of Peru. I braced up and faced it. After all, what else do you
expect? Towns have got to grow, people have got to live somewhere. Besides, the old
town hadn’t been annihilated. Somewhere or other it still existed, though it had houses
round it instead of fields. In a few minutes I’d be seeing it again, the church and the
brewery chimney and Father’s shop- window and the horse-trough in the market-place. I
got to the bottom of the hill, and the road forked. I took the left-hand turning, and a
minute later I was lost.
I could remember nothing. I couldn’t even remember whether it was hereabouts that the
town used to begin. All I knew was that in the old days this street hadn’t existed. For
hundreds of yards I was running along it — a rather mean, shabby kind of street, with the
houses giving straight on the pavement and here and there a comer grocery or a dingy
little pub — and wondering where the hell it led to. Finally I pulled up beside a woman in
a dirty apron and no hat who was walking down the pavement. I stuck my head out of the
window.
‘Beg pardon — can you tell me the way to the market-place? ’
She ‘couldn’t tell’. Answered in an accent you could cut with a spade. Lancashire.
There’s lots of them in the south of England now. Overflow from the distressed areas.
Then I saw a bloke in overalls with a bag of tools coming along and tried again. This time
I got the answer in Cockney, but he had to think for a moment.
‘Market-place? Market-place? Lessee, now. Oh — you mean the OLE Market? ’
I supposed I did mean the Old Market.
‘Oh, well — you take the right ‘and turning — ’
It was a long way. Miles, it seemed to me, though really it wasn’t a mile. Houses, shops,
cinemas, chapels, football grounds — new, all new. Again I had that feeling of a kind of
enemy invasion having happened behind my back. All these people flooding in from
Lancashire and the London suburbs, planting themselves down in this beastly chaos, not
even bothering to know the chief landmarks of the town by name. But I grasped presently
why what we used to call the market-place was now known as the Old Market. There was
a big square, though you couldn’t properly call it a square, because it was no particular
shape, in the middle of the new town, with traffic-lights and a huge bronze statue of a
lion worrying an eagle — the war-memorial, I suppose. And the newness of everything!
The raw, mean look! Do you know the look of these new towns that have suddenly
swelled up like balloons in the last few years, Hayes, Slough, Dagenham, and so forth?
The kind of chilliness, the bright red brick everywhere, the temporary-looking shop-
windows full of cut-price chocolates and radio parts. It was just like that. But suddenly I
swung into a street with older houses. Gosh! The High Street!
After all my memory hadn’t played tricks on me. I knew every inch of it now. Another
couple of hundred yards and I’d be in the market-place. The old shop was down the other
end of the High Street. I’d go there after lunch — I was going to put up at the George. And
every inch a memory! I knew all the shops, though all the names had changed, and the
stuff they dealt in had mostly changed as well. There’s Lovegrove’s! And there’s Todd’s!
And a big dark shop with beams and dormer windows. Used to be Lilywhite’s the
draper’s, where Elsie used to work. And Grimmett’s! Still a grocer’s apparently. Now for
the horse-trough in the market-place. There was another car ahead of me and I couldn’t
see.
It turned aside as we got into the market-place. The horse-trough was gone.
There was an A. A. man on traffic-duty where it used to stand. He gave a glance at the
car, saw that it hadn’t the A. A. sign, and decided not to salute.
I turned the corner and ran down to the George. The horse-trough being gone had thrown
me out to such an extent that I hadn’t even looked to see whether the brewery chimney
was still standing. The George had altered too, all except the name. The front had been
dolled up till it looked like one of those riverside hotels, and the sign was different. It was
curious that although till that moment I hadn’t thought of it once in twenty years, I
suddenly found that I could remember every detail of the old sign, which had swung there
ever since I could remember. It was a crude kind of picture, with St George on a very thin
horse trampling on a very fat dragon, and in the comer, though it was cracked and faded,
you could read the little signature, ‘Wm. Sandford, Painter & Carpenter’. The new sign
was kind of artistic-looking. You could see it had been painted by a real artist. St George
looked a regular pansy. The cobbled yard, where the fanners’ traps used to stand and the
drunks used to puke on Saturday nights, had been enlarged to about three times its size
and concreted over, with garages all round it. I backed the car into one of the garages and
got out.
One thing I’ve noticed about the human mind is that it goes in jerks. There’s no emotion
that stays by you for any length of time. During the last quarter of an hour I’d had what
you could fairly describe as a shock. I’d felt it almost like a sock in the guts when I
stopped at the top of Chamford Hill and suddenly realized that Lower Binfield had
vanished, and there ’d been another little stab when I saw the horse-trough was gone. I’d
driven through the streets with a gloomy, Ichabod kind of feeling. But as I stepped out of
the car and hitched my trilby hat on to my head I suddenly felt that it didn’t matter a
damn. It was such a lovely sunny day, and the hotel yard had a kind of summery look,
with its flowers in green tubs and what-not. Besides, I was hungry and looking forward to
a spot of lunch.
I strolled into the hotel with a consequential kind of air, with the boots, who’d already
nipped out to meet me, following with the suitcase. I felt pretty prosperous, and probably
I looked it. A solid business man, you’d have said, at any rate if you hadn’t seen the car. I
was glad I’d come in my new suit — blue flannel with a thin white stripe, which suits my
style. It has what the tailor calls a ‘reducing effect’. I believe that day I could have passed
for a stockbroker. And say what you like it’s a very pleasant thing, on a June day when
the sun’s shining on the pink geraniums in the window-boxes, to walk into a nice country
hotel with roast lamb and mint sauce ahead of you. Not that it’s any treat to me to stay in
hotels, Lord knows I see all too much of them — but ninety- nine times out of a hundred
it’s those godless ‘family and commercial’ hotels, like Rowbottom’s, where I was
supposed to be staying at present, the kind of places where you pay five bob for bed and
breakfast, and the sheets are always damp and the bath taps never work. The George had
got so smart I wouldn’t have known it. In the old days it had hardly been a hotel, only a
pub, though it had a room or two to let and used to do a farmers’ lunch (roast beef and
Yorkshire, suet dumpling and Stilton cheese) on market days. It all seemed different
except for the public bar, which I got a glimpse of as I went past, and which looked the
same as ever. I went up a passage with a soft carpet, and hunting prints and copper
warming-pans and such-like junk hanging on the walls. And dimly I could remember the
passage as it used to be, the hollowed- out flags underfoot, and the smell of plaster mixed
up with the smell of beer. A smart-looking young woman, with frizzed hair and a black
dress, who I suppose was the clerk or something, took my name at the office.
‘You wish for a room, sir? Certainly, sir. What name shall I put down, sir? ’
I paused. After all, this was my big moment. She’d be pretty sure to know the name. It
isn’t common, and there are a lot of us in the churchyard. We were one of the old Lower
Binfield families, the Bowlings of Lower Binfield. And though in a way it’s painful to be
recognized, I’d been rather looking forward to it.
‘Bowling,’ I said very distinctly. ‘Mr George Bowling. ’
‘Bowling, sir. B-O-A — oh! B-O-W? Yes, sir. And you are coming from London, sir? ’
No response. Nothing registered. She’d never heard of me. Never heard of George
Bowling, son of Samuel Bowling — Samuel Bowling who, damn it! had had his half-pint
in this same pub every Saturday for over thirty years.
2
The dining-room had changed, too.
I could remember the old room, though I’d never had a meal there, with its brown
mantelpiece and its bronzy-yellow wallpaper — I never knew whether it was meant to be
that colour, or had just got like that from age and smoke — and the oil-painting, also by
Wm. Sandford, Painter & Carpenter, of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir. Now they’d got the
place up in a kind of medieval style. Brick fireplace with inglenooks, a huge beam across
the ceiling, oak panelling on the walls, and every bit of it a fake that you could have
spotted fifty yards away. The beam was genuine oak, came out of some old sailing-ship,
probably, but it didn’t hold anything up, and I had my suspicions of the panels as soon as
I set eyes on them. As I sat down at my table, and the slick young waiter came towards
me fiddling with his napkin, I tapped the wall behind me. Yes! Thought so! Not even
wood. They fake it up with some kind of composition and then paint it over.
But the lunch wasn’t bad. I had my lamb and mint sauce, and I had a bottle of some white
wine or other with a French name which made me belch a bit but made me feel happy.
There was one other person lunching there, a woman of about thirty with fair hair, looked
like a widow. I wondered whether she was staying at the George, and made vague plans
to get off with her. It’s funny how your feelings get mixed up. Half the time I was seeing
ghosts. The past was sticking out into the present, Market day, and the great solid farmers
throwing their legs under the long table, with their hobnails grating on the stone floor,
and working their way through a quantity of beef and dumpling you wouldn’t believe the
human frame could hold. And then the little tables with their shiny white cloths and wine-
glasses and folded napkins, and the faked-up decorations and the general expensiveness
would blot it out again. And I’d think, ‘I’ve got twelve quid and a new suit. I’m little
Georgie Bowling, and who’d have believed I’d ever come back to Lower Binfield in my
own motorcar? ’ And then the wine would send a kind of wann feeling upwards from my
stomach, and I’d run an eye over the woman with fair hair and mentally take her clothes
off.
It was the same in the afternoon as I lay about in the lounge — fake-medieval again, but it
had streamlined leather armchairs and glass-topped tables — with some brandy and a
cigar. I was seeing ghosts, but on the whole I was enjoying it. As a matter of fact I was a
tiny bit boozed and hoping that the woman with fair hair would come in so that I could
scrape acquaintance. She never showed up, however. It wasn’t till nearly tea-time that I
went out.
I strolled up to the market-place and turned to the left. The shop! It was funny. Twenty-
one years ago, the day of Mother’s funeral, I’d passed it in the station fly, and seen it all
shut up and dusty, with the sign burnt off with a plumber’s blowflame, and I hadn’t cared
a damn. And now, when I was so much further away from it, when there were actually
details about the inside of the house that I couldn’t remember, the thought of seeing it
again did things to my heart and guts. I passed the barber’s shop. Still a barber’s, though
the name was different. A wann, soapy, ahnondy smell came out of the door. Not quite
so good as the old smell of bay rum and latakia. The shop — our shop — was twenty yards
farther down. Ah!
An arty-looking sign — painted by the same chap as did the one at the George, I shouldn’t
wonder — hanging out over the pavement:
WENDY’S TEASHOP
MORNING COFFEE
HOME-MADE CAKES
A tea-shop!
I suppose if it had been a butcher’s or an ironmonger’s, or anything else except a
seedsman’s, it would have given me the same kind of jolt. It’s absurd that because you
happen to have been born in a certain house you should feel that you’ve got rights over it
for the rest of your life, but so you do. The place lived up to its name, all right. Blue
curtains in the window, and a cake or two standing about, the kind of cake that’s covered
with chocolate and has just one walnut stuck somewhere on the top. I went in. I didn’t
really want any tea, but I had to see the inside.
They’d evidently turned both the shop and what used to be the parlour into tea-rooms. As
for the yard at the back where the dustbin used to stand and Father’s little patch of weeds
used to grow, they’d paved it all over and dolled it up with rustic tables and hydrangeas
and things. I went through into the parlour. More ghosts! The piano and the texts on the
wall, and the two lumpy old red armchairs where Father and Mother used to sit on
opposite sides of the fireplace, reading the People and the News of the World on Sunday
afternoons! They’d got the place up in an even more antique style than the George, with
gateleg tables and a hammered-iron chandelier and pewter plates hanging on the wall and
what-not. Do you notice how dark they always manage to make it in these arty tea-
rooms? It’s part of the antiqueness, I suppose. And instead of an ordinary waitress there
was a young woman in a kind of print wrapper who met me with a sour expression. I
asked her for tea, and she was ten minutes getting it. You know the kind of tea — China
tea, so weak that you could think it’s water till you put the milk in. I was sitting almost
exactly where Father’s armchair used to stand. I could almost hear his voice, reading out
a ‘piece’, as he used to call it, from the People, about the new flying machines, or the
chap who was swallowed by a whale, or something. It gave me a most peculiar feeling
that I was there on false pretences and they could kick me out if they discovered who I
was, and yet simultaneously I had a kind of longing to tell somebody that I’d been born
here, that I belonged to this house, or rather (what I really felt) that the house belonged to
me. There was nobody else having tea. The girl in the print wrapper was hanging about
by the window, and I could see that if I hadn’t been there she’d have been picking her
teeth. I bit into one of the slices of cake she’d brought me. Home-made cakes! You bet
they were. Home-made with margarine and egg-substitute. But in the end I had to speak.
I said:
‘Have you been in Lower Binfield long? ’
She started, looked surprised, and didn’t answer. I tried again:
‘I used to live in Lower Binfield myself, a good while ago. ’
Again no answer, or only something that I couldn’t hear. She gave me a kind of frigid
look and then gazed out of the window again. I saw how it was. Too much of a lady to go
in for back-chat with customers. Besides, she probably thought I was trying to get off
with her. What was the good of telling her I’d been born in the house? Even if she
believed it, it wouldn’t interest her. She’d never heard of Samuel Bowling, Corn & Seed
Merchant. I paid the bill and cleared out.
I wandered up to the church. One thing that I’d been half afraid of, and half looking
forward to, was being recognized by people I used to know. But I needn’t have worried,
there wasn’t a face I knew anywhere in the streets. It seemed as if the whole town had got
a new population.
When I got to the church I saw why they’d had to have a new cemetery. The churchyard
was full to the brim, and half the graves had names on them that I didn’t know. But the
names I did know were easy enough to find. I wandered round among the graves. The
sexton had just scythed the grass and there was a smell of summer even there. They were
all alone, all the older folks I’d known. Gravitt the butcher, and Winkle the other
seedsman, and Trew, who used to keep the George, and Mrs Wheeler from the sweet-
shop — they were all lying there. Shooter and Wetherall were opposite one another on
either side of the path, just as if they were still singing at each other across the aisle. So
Wetherall hadn’t got his hundred after all. Bom in ‘43 and ‘departed his life’ in 1928. But
he’d beaten Shooter, as usual. Shooter died in ‘26. What a time old Wetherall must have
had those last two years when there was nobody to sing against him! And old Grimmett
under a huge marble thing shaped rather like a veal-and-ham pie, with an iron railing
round it, and in the comer a whole batch of Simmonses under cheap little crosses. All
gone to dust. Old Hodges with his tobacco-coloured teeth, and Lovegrove with his big
brown beard, and Lady Rampling with the coachman and the tiger, and Harry Barnes’s
aunt who had a glass eye, and Brewer of the Mill Fann with his wicked old face like
something carved out of a nut — nothing left of any of them except a slab of stone and
God knows what underneath.
I found Mother’s grave, and Father’s beside it. Both of them in pretty good repair. The
sexton had kept the grass clipped.
took young Saunders, who travels for Glisso Floor Polish, partly into my confidence.
He’d happened to mention that he’d be passing through Birmingham on the eighteenth of
June, and I got him to promise that he’d stop on his way and post a letter from me to
Hilda, addressed from Rowbottom’s. This was to tell her that I might be called away and
she’d better not write. Saunders understood, or thought he did. He gave me a wink and
said I was wonderful for my age. So that settled Hilda. She hadn’t asked any questions,
and even if she turned suspicious later, an alibi like that would take some breaking.
I drove through Westerham. It was a wonderful June morning. A faint breeze blowing,
and the elm tops swaying in the sun, little white clouds streaming across the sky like a
flock of sheep, and the shadows chasing each other across the fields. Outside Westerham
a Walls’ Ice Cream lad, with cheeks like apples, came tearing towards me on his bike,
whistling so that it went through your head. It suddenly reminded me of the time when
I’d been an errand boy myself (though in those days we didn’t have free-wheel bikes) and
I very nearly stopped him and took one. They’d cut the hay in places, but they hadn’t got
it in yet. It lay drying in long shiny rows, and the smell of it drifted across the road and
got mixed up with the petrol.
I drove along at a gentle fifteen. The morning had a kind of peaceful, dreamy feeling. The
ducks floated about on the ponds as if they felt too satisfied to eat. In Nettlefield, the
village beyond Westerham, a little man in a white apron, with grey hair and a huge grey
moustache, darted across the green, planted himself in the middle of the road and began
doing physical jerks to attract my attention. My car’s kn own all along this road, of
course. I pulled up. It’s only Mr Weaver, who keeps the village general shop. No, he
doesn’t want to insure his life, nor his shop either. He’s merely run out of change and
wants to know whether I’ve got a quid’s worth of Targe silver’. They never have any
change in Nettlefield, not even at the pub.
I drove on. The wheat would have been as tall as your waist. It went undulating up and
down the hills like a great green carpet, with the wind rippling it a little, kind of thick and
silky- looking. It’s like a woman, I thought. It makes you want to lie on it. And a bit
ahead of me I saw the sign-post where the road forks right for Pudley and left for Oxford.
I was still on my usual beat, inside the boundary of my own ‘district’, as the firm calls it.
The natural thing, as I was going westward, would have been to leave London along the
Uxbridge Road. But by a kind of instinct I’d followed my usual route. The fact was I was
feeling guilty about the whole business. I wanted to get well away before I headed for
Oxfordshire. And in spite of the fact that I’d fixed things so neatly with Hilda and the
firm, in spite of the twelve quid in my pocket-book and the suitcase in the back of the car,
as I got nearer the crossroads I actually felt a temptation — I knew I wasn’t going to
succumb to it, and yet it was a temptation — to chuck the whole thing up. I had a sort of
feeling that so long as I was driving along my nonnal beat I was still inside the law. It’s
not too late, I thought. There’s still time to do the respectable thing. I could run into
Pudley, for instance, see the manager of Barclay’s Bank (he’s our agent at Pudley) and
find out if any new business had come in. For that matter I could even turn round, go
back to Hilda, and make a clean breast of the plot.
I slowed down as I got to the comer. Should I or shouldn’t I? For about a second I was
really tempted. But no! I tooted the klaxon and swung the car westward, on to the Oxford
road.
Well, I’d done it. I was on the forbidden ground. It was true that five miles farther on, if I
wanted to, I could turn to the left again and get back to Westerham. But for the moment I
was headed westward. Strictly speaking I was in flight. And what was curious, I was no
sooner on the Oxford road than I felt perfectly certain that THEY knew all about it. When
I say THEY I mean all the people who wouldn’t approve of a trip of this kind and who’d
have stopped me if they could — which, I suppose, would include pretty well everybody.
What was more, I actually had a feeling that they were after me already. The whole lot of
them! All the people who couldn’t understand why a middle-aged man with false teeth
should sneak away for a quiet week in the place where he spent his boyhood. And all the
mean-minded bastards who COULD understand only too well, and who’d raise heaven
and earth to prevent it. They were all on my track. It was as if a huge army were
streaming up the road behind me. I seemed to see them in my mind’s eye. Hilda was in
front, of course, with the kids tagging after her, and Mrs Wheeler driving her forward
with a grim, vindictive expression, and Miss Minns rushing along in the rear, with her
pince-nez slipping down and a look of distress on her face, like the hen that gets left
behind when the others have got hold of the bacon rind. And Sir Herbert Crum and the
higher-ups of the Flying Salamander in their Rolls- Royces and Hispano-Suizas. And all
the chaps at the office, and all the poor down-trodden pen-pushers from Ellesmere Road
and from all such other roads, some of them wheeling prams and mowing- machines and
concrete garden-rollers, some of them chugging along in little Austin Sevens. And all the
soul-savers and Nosey Parkers, the people whom you’ve never seen but who rule your
destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Temperance League, the
Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of
Bishops, Mussolini, the Pope — they were all of them after me. I could almost hear them
shouting:
‘There’s a chap who thinks he’s going to escape! There’s a chap who says he won’t be
streamlined! He’s going back to Lower Binfield! After him! Stop him! ’
It’s queer. The impression was so strong that I actually took a peep through the little
window at the back of the car to make sure I wasn’t being followed. Guilty conscience, I
suppose. But there was nobody. Only the dusty white road and the long line of the elms
dwindling out behind me.
I trod on the gas and the old car rattled into the thirties. A few minutes later I was past the
Westerham turning. So that was that. I’d burnt my boats. This was the idea which, in a
dim sort of way, had begun to fonn itself in my mind the day I got my new false teeth.
PART IV
1
I came towards Lower Binficld over Chamford Hill. There are four roads into Lower
Binfield, and it would have been more direct to go through Walton. But I’d wanted to
come over Chamford Hill, the way we used to go when we hiked home from fishing in
the Thames. When you get just past the crown of the hill the trees open out and you can
see Lower Binfield lying in the valley below you.
It’s a queer experience to go over a bit of country you haven’t seen in twenty years. You
remember it in great detail, and you remember it all wrong. All the distances are
different, and the landmarks seem to have moved about. Y ou keep feeling, surely this hill
used to be a lot steeper — surely that turning was on the other side of the road? And on the
other hand you’ll have memories which are perfectly accurate, but which only belong to
one particular occasion. You’ll remember, for instance, a corner of a field, on a wet day
in winter, with the grass so green that it’s almost blue, and a rotten gatepost covered with
lichen and a cow standing in the grass and looking at you. And you’ll go back after
twenty years and be surprised because the cow isn’t standing in the same place and
looking at you with the same expression.
As I drove up Chamford Hill I realized that the picture I’d had of it in my mind was
almost entirely imaginary. But it was a fact that certain things had changed. The road was
tannac, whereas in the old days it used to be macadam (I remember the bumpy feeling of
it under the bike), and it seemed to have got a lot wider. And there were far less trees. In
the old days there used to be huge beeches growing in the hedgerows, and in places their
boughs met across the road and made a kind of arch. Now they were all gone. I’d nearly
got to the top of the hill when I came on something which was certainly new. To the right
of the road there was a whole lot of fake -picturesque houses, with overhanging eaves and
rose pergolas and what-not. You know the kind of houses that are just a little too high-
class to stand in a row, and so they’re dotted about in a kind of colony, with private roads
leading up to them. And at the entrance to one of the private roads there was a huge white
board which said:
THE KENNELS
PEDIGREE SEALYHAM PUPS
DOGS BOARDED
Surely THAT usen’t to be there?
I thought for a moment. Yes, I remembered! Where those houses stood there used to be a
little oak plantation, and the trees grew too close together, so that they were very tall and
thin, and in spring the ground underneath them used to be smothered in anemones.
Certainly there were never any houses as far out of the town as this.
I got to the top of the hill. Another minute and Lower Binfield would be in sight. Lower
Binfield! Why should I pretend I wasn’t excited? At the very thought of seeing it again an
extraordinary feeling that started in my guts crept upwards and did something to my
heart. Five seconds more and I’d be seeing it. Yes, here we are! I declutched, trod on the
foot-brake, and — Jesus!
Oh, yes, I know you knew what was coming. But / didn’t. You can say I was a bloody
fool not to expect it, and so I was. But it hadn’t even occurred to me.
The first question was, where WAS Lower Binfield?
I don’t mean that it had been demolished. It had merely been swallowed. The thing I was
looking down at was a good-sized manufacturing town. I remember — Gosh, how I
remember! and in this case I don’t think my memory is far out — what Lower Binfield
used to look like from the top of Chamford Hill. I suppose the High Street was about a
quarter of a mile long, and except for a few outlying houses the town was roughly the
shape of a cross. The chief landmarks were the church tower and the chimney of the
brewery. At this moment I couldn’t distinguish either of them. All I could see was an
enonnous river of brand-new houses which flowed along the valley in both directions and
half-way up the hills on either side. Over to the right there were what looked like several
acres of bright red roofs all exactly alike. A big Council housing estate, by the look of it.
But where was Lower Binfield? Where was the town I used to know? It might have been
anywhere. All I knew was that it was buried somewhere in the middle of that sea of
bricks. Of the five or six factory chimneys that I could see, I couldn’t even make a guess
at which belonged to the brewery. Towards the eastern end of the town there were two
enonnous factories of glass and concrete. That accounts for the growth of the town, I
thought, as I began to take it in. It occurred to me that the population of this place (it used
to be about two thousand in the old days) must be a good twenty-five thousand. The only
thing that hadn’t changed, seemingly, was Binfield House. It wasn’t much more than a
dot at that distance, but you could see it on the hillside opposite, with the beech trees
round it, and the town hadn’t climbed that high. As I looked a fleet of black bombing
planes came over the hill and zoomed across the town.
I shoved the clutch in and started slowly down the hill. The houses had climbed half-way
up it. You know those very cheap small houses which run up a hillside in one continuous
row, with the roofs rising one above the other like a flight of steps, all exactly the same.
But a little before I got to the houses I stopped again. On the left of the road there was
something else that was quite new. The cemetery. I stopped opposite the lych- gate to
have a look at it.
It was enonnous, twenty acres, I should think. There’s always a kind of jumped-up
unhomelike look about a new cemetery, with its raw gravel paths and its rough green
sods, and the machine-made marble angels that look like something off a wedding-cake.
But what chiefly struck me at the moment was that in the old days this place hadn’t
existed. There was no separate cemetery then, only the churchyard. I could vaguely
remember the farmer these fields used to belong to — Blackett, his name was, and he was
a dairy- farmer. And somehow the raw look of the place brought it home to me how
things have changed. It wasn’t only that the town had grown so vast that they needed
twenty acres to dump their corpses in. It was their putting the cemetery out here, on the
edge of the town. Have you noticed that they always do that nowadays? Every new town
puts its cemetery on the outskirts. Shove it away — keep it out of sight! Can’t bear to be
reminded of death. Even the tombstones tell you the same story. They never say that the
chap underneath them ‘died’, it’s always ‘passed away’ or ‘fell asleep’. It wasn’t so in the
old days. We had our churchyard plumb in the middle of the town, you passed it every
day, you saw the spot where your grandfather was lying and where some day you were
going to lie yourself. We didn’t mind looking at the dead. In hot weather, I admit, we also
had to smell them, because some of the family vaults weren’t too well sealed.
I let the car run down the hill slowly. Queer! You can’t imagine how queer! All the way
down the hill I was seeing ghosts, chiefly the ghosts of hedges and trees and cows. It was
as if I was looking at two worlds at once, a kind of thin bubble of the thing that used to
be, with the thing that actually existed shining through it. There’s the field where the bull
chased Ginger Rodgers! And there’s the place where the horse-mushrooms used to grow!
But there weren’t any fields or any bulls or any mushrooms. It was houses, houses
everywhere, little raw red houses with their grubby window-curtains and their scraps of
back-garden that hadn’t anything in them except a patch of rank grass or a few larkspurs
struggling among the weeds. And blokes walking up and down, and women shaking out
mats, and snotty-nosed kids playing along the pavement. All strangers! They’d all come
crowding in while my back was turned. And yet it was they who’d have looked on me as
a stranger, they didn’t know anything about the old Lower Binfield, they’d never heard of
Shooter and Wetherall, or Mr Grimmett and Uncle Ezekiel, and cared less, you bet.
It’s funny how quickly one adjusts. I suppose it was five minutes since I’d halted at the
top of the hill, actually a bit out of breath at the thought of seeing Lower Binfield again.
And already I’d got used to the idea that Lower Binfield had been swallowed up and
buried like the lost cities of Peru. I braced up and faced it. After all, what else do you
expect? Towns have got to grow, people have got to live somewhere. Besides, the old
town hadn’t been annihilated. Somewhere or other it still existed, though it had houses
round it instead of fields. In a few minutes I’d be seeing it again, the church and the
brewery chimney and Father’s shop- window and the horse-trough in the market-place. I
got to the bottom of the hill, and the road forked. I took the left-hand turning, and a
minute later I was lost.
I could remember nothing. I couldn’t even remember whether it was hereabouts that the
town used to begin. All I knew was that in the old days this street hadn’t existed. For
hundreds of yards I was running along it — a rather mean, shabby kind of street, with the
houses giving straight on the pavement and here and there a comer grocery or a dingy
little pub — and wondering where the hell it led to. Finally I pulled up beside a woman in
a dirty apron and no hat who was walking down the pavement. I stuck my head out of the
window.
‘Beg pardon — can you tell me the way to the market-place? ’
She ‘couldn’t tell’. Answered in an accent you could cut with a spade. Lancashire.
There’s lots of them in the south of England now. Overflow from the distressed areas.
Then I saw a bloke in overalls with a bag of tools coming along and tried again. This time
I got the answer in Cockney, but he had to think for a moment.
‘Market-place? Market-place? Lessee, now. Oh — you mean the OLE Market? ’
I supposed I did mean the Old Market.
‘Oh, well — you take the right ‘and turning — ’
It was a long way. Miles, it seemed to me, though really it wasn’t a mile. Houses, shops,
cinemas, chapels, football grounds — new, all new. Again I had that feeling of a kind of
enemy invasion having happened behind my back. All these people flooding in from
Lancashire and the London suburbs, planting themselves down in this beastly chaos, not
even bothering to know the chief landmarks of the town by name. But I grasped presently
why what we used to call the market-place was now known as the Old Market. There was
a big square, though you couldn’t properly call it a square, because it was no particular
shape, in the middle of the new town, with traffic-lights and a huge bronze statue of a
lion worrying an eagle — the war-memorial, I suppose. And the newness of everything!
The raw, mean look! Do you know the look of these new towns that have suddenly
swelled up like balloons in the last few years, Hayes, Slough, Dagenham, and so forth?
The kind of chilliness, the bright red brick everywhere, the temporary-looking shop-
windows full of cut-price chocolates and radio parts. It was just like that. But suddenly I
swung into a street with older houses. Gosh! The High Street!
After all my memory hadn’t played tricks on me. I knew every inch of it now. Another
couple of hundred yards and I’d be in the market-place. The old shop was down the other
end of the High Street. I’d go there after lunch — I was going to put up at the George. And
every inch a memory! I knew all the shops, though all the names had changed, and the
stuff they dealt in had mostly changed as well. There’s Lovegrove’s! And there’s Todd’s!
And a big dark shop with beams and dormer windows. Used to be Lilywhite’s the
draper’s, where Elsie used to work. And Grimmett’s! Still a grocer’s apparently. Now for
the horse-trough in the market-place. There was another car ahead of me and I couldn’t
see.
It turned aside as we got into the market-place. The horse-trough was gone.
There was an A. A. man on traffic-duty where it used to stand. He gave a glance at the
car, saw that it hadn’t the A. A. sign, and decided not to salute.
I turned the corner and ran down to the George. The horse-trough being gone had thrown
me out to such an extent that I hadn’t even looked to see whether the brewery chimney
was still standing. The George had altered too, all except the name. The front had been
dolled up till it looked like one of those riverside hotels, and the sign was different. It was
curious that although till that moment I hadn’t thought of it once in twenty years, I
suddenly found that I could remember every detail of the old sign, which had swung there
ever since I could remember. It was a crude kind of picture, with St George on a very thin
horse trampling on a very fat dragon, and in the comer, though it was cracked and faded,
you could read the little signature, ‘Wm. Sandford, Painter & Carpenter’. The new sign
was kind of artistic-looking. You could see it had been painted by a real artist. St George
looked a regular pansy. The cobbled yard, where the fanners’ traps used to stand and the
drunks used to puke on Saturday nights, had been enlarged to about three times its size
and concreted over, with garages all round it. I backed the car into one of the garages and
got out.
One thing I’ve noticed about the human mind is that it goes in jerks. There’s no emotion
that stays by you for any length of time. During the last quarter of an hour I’d had what
you could fairly describe as a shock. I’d felt it almost like a sock in the guts when I
stopped at the top of Chamford Hill and suddenly realized that Lower Binfield had
vanished, and there ’d been another little stab when I saw the horse-trough was gone. I’d
driven through the streets with a gloomy, Ichabod kind of feeling. But as I stepped out of
the car and hitched my trilby hat on to my head I suddenly felt that it didn’t matter a
damn. It was such a lovely sunny day, and the hotel yard had a kind of summery look,
with its flowers in green tubs and what-not. Besides, I was hungry and looking forward to
a spot of lunch.
I strolled into the hotel with a consequential kind of air, with the boots, who’d already
nipped out to meet me, following with the suitcase. I felt pretty prosperous, and probably
I looked it. A solid business man, you’d have said, at any rate if you hadn’t seen the car. I
was glad I’d come in my new suit — blue flannel with a thin white stripe, which suits my
style. It has what the tailor calls a ‘reducing effect’. I believe that day I could have passed
for a stockbroker. And say what you like it’s a very pleasant thing, on a June day when
the sun’s shining on the pink geraniums in the window-boxes, to walk into a nice country
hotel with roast lamb and mint sauce ahead of you. Not that it’s any treat to me to stay in
hotels, Lord knows I see all too much of them — but ninety- nine times out of a hundred
it’s those godless ‘family and commercial’ hotels, like Rowbottom’s, where I was
supposed to be staying at present, the kind of places where you pay five bob for bed and
breakfast, and the sheets are always damp and the bath taps never work. The George had
got so smart I wouldn’t have known it. In the old days it had hardly been a hotel, only a
pub, though it had a room or two to let and used to do a farmers’ lunch (roast beef and
Yorkshire, suet dumpling and Stilton cheese) on market days. It all seemed different
except for the public bar, which I got a glimpse of as I went past, and which looked the
same as ever. I went up a passage with a soft carpet, and hunting prints and copper
warming-pans and such-like junk hanging on the walls. And dimly I could remember the
passage as it used to be, the hollowed- out flags underfoot, and the smell of plaster mixed
up with the smell of beer. A smart-looking young woman, with frizzed hair and a black
dress, who I suppose was the clerk or something, took my name at the office.
‘You wish for a room, sir? Certainly, sir. What name shall I put down, sir? ’
I paused. After all, this was my big moment. She’d be pretty sure to know the name. It
isn’t common, and there are a lot of us in the churchyard. We were one of the old Lower
Binfield families, the Bowlings of Lower Binfield. And though in a way it’s painful to be
recognized, I’d been rather looking forward to it.
‘Bowling,’ I said very distinctly. ‘Mr George Bowling. ’
‘Bowling, sir. B-O-A — oh! B-O-W? Yes, sir. And you are coming from London, sir? ’
No response. Nothing registered. She’d never heard of me. Never heard of George
Bowling, son of Samuel Bowling — Samuel Bowling who, damn it! had had his half-pint
in this same pub every Saturday for over thirty years.
2
The dining-room had changed, too.
I could remember the old room, though I’d never had a meal there, with its brown
mantelpiece and its bronzy-yellow wallpaper — I never knew whether it was meant to be
that colour, or had just got like that from age and smoke — and the oil-painting, also by
Wm. Sandford, Painter & Carpenter, of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir. Now they’d got the
place up in a kind of medieval style. Brick fireplace with inglenooks, a huge beam across
the ceiling, oak panelling on the walls, and every bit of it a fake that you could have
spotted fifty yards away. The beam was genuine oak, came out of some old sailing-ship,
probably, but it didn’t hold anything up, and I had my suspicions of the panels as soon as
I set eyes on them. As I sat down at my table, and the slick young waiter came towards
me fiddling with his napkin, I tapped the wall behind me. Yes! Thought so! Not even
wood. They fake it up with some kind of composition and then paint it over.
But the lunch wasn’t bad. I had my lamb and mint sauce, and I had a bottle of some white
wine or other with a French name which made me belch a bit but made me feel happy.
There was one other person lunching there, a woman of about thirty with fair hair, looked
like a widow. I wondered whether she was staying at the George, and made vague plans
to get off with her. It’s funny how your feelings get mixed up. Half the time I was seeing
ghosts. The past was sticking out into the present, Market day, and the great solid farmers
throwing their legs under the long table, with their hobnails grating on the stone floor,
and working their way through a quantity of beef and dumpling you wouldn’t believe the
human frame could hold. And then the little tables with their shiny white cloths and wine-
glasses and folded napkins, and the faked-up decorations and the general expensiveness
would blot it out again. And I’d think, ‘I’ve got twelve quid and a new suit. I’m little
Georgie Bowling, and who’d have believed I’d ever come back to Lower Binfield in my
own motorcar? ’ And then the wine would send a kind of wann feeling upwards from my
stomach, and I’d run an eye over the woman with fair hair and mentally take her clothes
off.
It was the same in the afternoon as I lay about in the lounge — fake-medieval again, but it
had streamlined leather armchairs and glass-topped tables — with some brandy and a
cigar. I was seeing ghosts, but on the whole I was enjoying it. As a matter of fact I was a
tiny bit boozed and hoping that the woman with fair hair would come in so that I could
scrape acquaintance. She never showed up, however. It wasn’t till nearly tea-time that I
went out.
I strolled up to the market-place and turned to the left. The shop! It was funny. Twenty-
one years ago, the day of Mother’s funeral, I’d passed it in the station fly, and seen it all
shut up and dusty, with the sign burnt off with a plumber’s blowflame, and I hadn’t cared
a damn. And now, when I was so much further away from it, when there were actually
details about the inside of the house that I couldn’t remember, the thought of seeing it
again did things to my heart and guts. I passed the barber’s shop. Still a barber’s, though
the name was different. A wann, soapy, ahnondy smell came out of the door. Not quite
so good as the old smell of bay rum and latakia. The shop — our shop — was twenty yards
farther down. Ah!
An arty-looking sign — painted by the same chap as did the one at the George, I shouldn’t
wonder — hanging out over the pavement:
WENDY’S TEASHOP
MORNING COFFEE
HOME-MADE CAKES
A tea-shop!
I suppose if it had been a butcher’s or an ironmonger’s, or anything else except a
seedsman’s, it would have given me the same kind of jolt. It’s absurd that because you
happen to have been born in a certain house you should feel that you’ve got rights over it
for the rest of your life, but so you do. The place lived up to its name, all right. Blue
curtains in the window, and a cake or two standing about, the kind of cake that’s covered
with chocolate and has just one walnut stuck somewhere on the top. I went in. I didn’t
really want any tea, but I had to see the inside.
They’d evidently turned both the shop and what used to be the parlour into tea-rooms. As
for the yard at the back where the dustbin used to stand and Father’s little patch of weeds
used to grow, they’d paved it all over and dolled it up with rustic tables and hydrangeas
and things. I went through into the parlour. More ghosts! The piano and the texts on the
wall, and the two lumpy old red armchairs where Father and Mother used to sit on
opposite sides of the fireplace, reading the People and the News of the World on Sunday
afternoons! They’d got the place up in an even more antique style than the George, with
gateleg tables and a hammered-iron chandelier and pewter plates hanging on the wall and
what-not. Do you notice how dark they always manage to make it in these arty tea-
rooms? It’s part of the antiqueness, I suppose. And instead of an ordinary waitress there
was a young woman in a kind of print wrapper who met me with a sour expression. I
asked her for tea, and she was ten minutes getting it. You know the kind of tea — China
tea, so weak that you could think it’s water till you put the milk in. I was sitting almost
exactly where Father’s armchair used to stand. I could almost hear his voice, reading out
a ‘piece’, as he used to call it, from the People, about the new flying machines, or the
chap who was swallowed by a whale, or something. It gave me a most peculiar feeling
that I was there on false pretences and they could kick me out if they discovered who I
was, and yet simultaneously I had a kind of longing to tell somebody that I’d been born
here, that I belonged to this house, or rather (what I really felt) that the house belonged to
me. There was nobody else having tea. The girl in the print wrapper was hanging about
by the window, and I could see that if I hadn’t been there she’d have been picking her
teeth. I bit into one of the slices of cake she’d brought me. Home-made cakes! You bet
they were. Home-made with margarine and egg-substitute. But in the end I had to speak.
I said:
‘Have you been in Lower Binfield long? ’
She started, looked surprised, and didn’t answer. I tried again:
‘I used to live in Lower Binfield myself, a good while ago. ’
Again no answer, or only something that I couldn’t hear. She gave me a kind of frigid
look and then gazed out of the window again. I saw how it was. Too much of a lady to go
in for back-chat with customers. Besides, she probably thought I was trying to get off
with her. What was the good of telling her I’d been born in the house? Even if she
believed it, it wouldn’t interest her. She’d never heard of Samuel Bowling, Corn & Seed
Merchant. I paid the bill and cleared out.
I wandered up to the church. One thing that I’d been half afraid of, and half looking
forward to, was being recognized by people I used to know. But I needn’t have worried,
there wasn’t a face I knew anywhere in the streets. It seemed as if the whole town had got
a new population.
When I got to the church I saw why they’d had to have a new cemetery. The churchyard
was full to the brim, and half the graves had names on them that I didn’t know. But the
names I did know were easy enough to find. I wandered round among the graves. The
sexton had just scythed the grass and there was a smell of summer even there. They were
all alone, all the older folks I’d known. Gravitt the butcher, and Winkle the other
seedsman, and Trew, who used to keep the George, and Mrs Wheeler from the sweet-
shop — they were all lying there. Shooter and Wetherall were opposite one another on
either side of the path, just as if they were still singing at each other across the aisle. So
Wetherall hadn’t got his hundred after all. Bom in ‘43 and ‘departed his life’ in 1928. But
he’d beaten Shooter, as usual. Shooter died in ‘26. What a time old Wetherall must have
had those last two years when there was nobody to sing against him! And old Grimmett
under a huge marble thing shaped rather like a veal-and-ham pie, with an iron railing
round it, and in the comer a whole batch of Simmonses under cheap little crosses. All
gone to dust. Old Hodges with his tobacco-coloured teeth, and Lovegrove with his big
brown beard, and Lady Rampling with the coachman and the tiger, and Harry Barnes’s
aunt who had a glass eye, and Brewer of the Mill Fann with his wicked old face like
something carved out of a nut — nothing left of any of them except a slab of stone and
God knows what underneath.
I found Mother’s grave, and Father’s beside it. Both of them in pretty good repair. The
sexton had kept the grass clipped.
