A feeling of security, even when they
weren’t
secure.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
The cars got commoner
on the roads and cross-country motor-buses began to run. An aeroplane — a flimsy,
rickety-looking thing with a chap sitting in the middle on a kind of chair — flew over
Lower Binfield and the whole town rushed out of their houses to yell at it. People began
to say rather vaguely that this here German Emperor was getting too big for his boots and
‘it’ (meaning war with Germany) was ‘coming some time’. My wages went gradually up,
until finally, just before the war, they were twenty-eight shillings a week. I paid Mother
ten shillings a week for my board, and later, when times got worse, fifteen shillings, and
even that left me feeling richer than I’ve felt since. I grew another inch, my moustache
began to sprout, I wore button boots and collars three inches high. In church on Sundays,
in my natty dark grey suit, with my bowler hat and black dogskin gloves on the pew
beside me, I looked the perfect gent, so that Mother could hardly contain her pride in me.
In between work and ‘walking out’ on Thursdays, and thinking about clothes and girls, I
had fits of ambition and saw myself developing into a Big Business Man like Lever or
William Whiteley. Between sixteen and eighteen I made serious efforts to ‘improve my
mind’ and train myself for a business career. I cured myself of dropping aitches and got
rid of most of my Cockney accent. (In the Thames Valley the country accents were going
out. Except for the fann lads, nearly everyone who was born later than 1890 talked
Cockney. ) I did a correspondence course with Littleburns’ Commercial Academy, learnt
bookkeeping and business English, read solemnly through a book of frightful blah called
The Art of Salesmanship, and improved my arithmetic and even my handwriting. When I
was as old as seventeen I’ve sat up late at night with my tongue hanging out of my
mouth, practising copperplate by the little oil-lamp on the bedroom table. At times I read
enonnously, generally crime and adventure stories, and sometimes paper-covered books
which were furtively passed round by the chaps at the shop and described as ‘hot’. (They
were translations of Maupassant and Paul de Kock. ) But when I was eighteen I suddenly
turned highbrow, got a ticket for the County Library, and began to stodge through books
by Marie Corelli and Hall Caine and Anthony Hope. It was at about that time that I joined
the Lower Binfield Reading Circle, which was run by the vicar and met one evening a
week all through the winter for what was called ‘literary discussion’. Under pressure
from the vicar I read bits of Sesame and Lilies and even had a go at Browning.
And time was slipping away. 1910, 1911, 1912. And Father’s business was going
down — not slumping suddenly into the gutter, but it was going down. Neither Father nor
Mother was ever quite the same after Joe ran away from home. This happened not long
after I went to work at Grimmett’s.
Joe, at eighteen, had grown into an ugly ruffian. He was a hefty chap, much bigger than
the rest of the family, with tremendous shoulders, a big head, and a sulky, lowering kind
of face on which he already had a respectable moustache. When he wasn’t in the tap-
room of the George he was loafing in the shop doorway, with his hands dug deep into his
pockets, scowling at the people who passed, except when they happened to be girls, as
though he’d like to knock them down. If anyone came into the shop he’d move aside just
enough to let them pass, and, without taking his hands out of his pockets, yell over his
shoulders ‘Da-ad! Shop! ’ This was as near as he ever got to helping. Father and Mother
said despairingly that they ‘didn’t know what to do with him’, and he was costing the
devil of a lot with his drinking and endless smoking. Fate one night he walked out of the
house and was never heard of again. He’d prised open the till and taken all the money
that was in it, luckily not much, about eight pounds. That was enough to get him a
steerage passage to America. He’d always wanted to go to America, and I think he
probably did so, though we never knew for certain. It made a bit of a scandal in the town.
The official theory was that Joe had bolted because he’d put a girl in the family way.
There was a girl named Sally Chivers who lived in the same street as the Simmonses and
was going to have a baby, and Joe had certainly been with her, but so had about a dozen
others, and nobody knew whose baby it was. Mother and Father accepted the baby theory
and even, in private, used it to excuse their ‘poor boy’ for stealing the eight pounds and
running away. They weren’t capable of grasping that Joe had cleared out because he
couldn’t stand a decent respectable life in a little country town and wanted a life of
loafing, fights, and women. We never heard of him again. Perhaps he went utterly to the
bad, perhaps he was killed in the war, perhaps he merely didn’t bother to write. Luckily
the baby was born dead, so there were no complications. As for the fact that Joe had
stolen the eight pounds. Mother and Father managed to keep it a secret till they died. In
their eyes it was a much worse disgrace than Sally Chivers’s baby.
The trouble over Joe aged Father a great deal. To lose Joe was merely to cut a loss, but it
hurt him and made him ashamed. From that time forward his moustache was much greyer
and he seemed to have grown a lot smaller. Perhaps my memory of him as a little grey
man, with a round, lined, anxious face and dusty spectacles, really dates from that time.
By slow degrees he was getting more and more involved in money worries and less and
less interested in other things. He talked less about politics and the Sunday papers, and
more about the badness of trade. Mother seemed to have shrunk a little, too. In my
childhood I’d kn own her as something vast and overflowing, with her yellow hair and her
beaming face and her enormous bosom, a sort of great opulent creature like the figure-
head of a battleship. Now she’d got smaller and more anxious and older than her years.
She was less lordly in the kitchen, went in more for neck of mutton, worried over the
price of coal, and began to use margarine, a thing which in the old days she’d never have
allowed into the house. After Joe had gone Father had to hire an errand boy again, but
from then on he employed very young boys whom he only kept for a year or two and who
couldn’t lift heavy weights. I sometimes lent him a hand when I was at home. I was too
selfish to do it regularly. I can still see him working his way slowly across the yard, bent
double and almost hidden under an enonnous sack, like a snail under its shell. The huge,
monstrous sack, weighing a hundred and fifty pounds, I suppose, pressing his neck and
shoulders almost to the ground, and the anxious, spectacled face looking up from
underneath it. In 1911 he ruptured himself and had to spend weeks in hospital and hire a
temporary manager for the shop, which ate another hole in his capital. A small
shopkeeper going down the hill is a dreadful thing to watch, but it isn’t sudden and
obvious like the fate of a working man who gets the sack and promptly finds himself on
the dole. It’s just a gradual chipping away of trade, with little ups and downs, a few
shillings to the bad here, a few sixpences to the good there. Somebody who’s dealt with
you for years suddenly deserts and goes to Sarazins’. Somebody else buys a dozen hens
and gives you a weekly order for com. You can still keep going. You’re still ‘your own
master’, always a little more worried and a little shabbier, with your capital shrinking all
the time. You can go on like that for years, for a lifetime if you’re lucky. Uncle Ezekiel
died in 1911, leaving 120 pounds which must have made a lot of difference to Father. It
wasn’t till 1913 that he had to mortgage his life-insurance policy. That I didn’t hear about
at the time, or I’d have understood what it meant. As it was I don’t think I ever got
further than realizing that Father ‘wasn’t doing well’, trade was ‘slack’, there’d be a bit
longer to wait before I had the money to ‘set up’. Fike Father himself, I looked on the
shop as something permanent, and I was a bit inclined to be angry with him for not
managing things better. I wasn’t capable of seeing, and neither was he nor anyone else,
that he was being slowly ruined, that his business would never pick up again and if he
lived to be seventy he’d certainly end in the workhouse. Many a time I’ve passed
Sarazins’ shop in the market-place and merely thought how much I preferred their slick
window-front to Father’s dusty old shop, with the ‘S. Bowling’ which you could hardly
read, the chipped white lettering, and the faded packets of bird-seed. It didn’t occur to me
that Sarazins’ were tapeworms who were eating him alive. Sometimes I used to repeat to
him some of the stuff I’d been reading in my correspondence-course textbooks, about
salesmanship and modern methods. He never paid much attention. He’d inherited an old-
established business, he’d always worked hard, done a fair trade, and supplied sound
goods, and things would look up presently. It’s a fact that very few shopkeepers in those
days actually ended in the workhouse. With any luck you died with a few pounds still
your own. It was a race between death and bankruptcy, and, thank God, death got Father
first, and Mother too.
1911, 1912, 1913. I tell you it was a good time to be alive. It was late in 1912, through
the vicar’s Reading Circle, that I first met Elsie Waters. Till then, although, like all the
rest of the boys in the town. I’d gone out looking for girls and occasionally managed to
connect up with this girl or that and ‘walk out’ a few Sunday afternoons, I’d never really
had a girl of my own. It’s a queer business, that chasing of girls when you’re about
sixteen. At some recognized part of the town the boys stroll up and down in pairs,
watching the girls, and the girls stroll up and down in pairs, pretending not to notice the
boys, and presently some kind of contact is established and instead of twos they’re
trailing along in fours, all four utterly speechless. The chief feature of those walks — and
it was worse the second time, when you went out with the girl alone — was the ghastly
failure to make any kind of conversation. But Elsie Waters seemed different. The truth
was that I was growing up.
I don’t want to tell the story of myself and Elsie Waters, even if there was any story to
tell. It’s merely that she’s part of the picture, part of ‘before the war’. Before the war it
was always summer — a delusion, as I’ve remarked before, but that’s how I remember it.
the white dusty road stretching out between the chestnut trees, the smell of night-stocks,
the green pools under the willows, the splash of Burford Weir — that’s what I see when I
shut my eyes and think of ‘before the war’, and towards the end Elsie Waters is part of it.
I don’t know whether Elsie would be considered pretty now. She was then. She was tall
for a girl, about as tall as I am, with pale gold, heavy kind of hair which she wore
somehow plaited and coiled round her head, and a delicate, curiously gentle face. She
was one of those girls that always look their best in black, especially the very plain black
dresses they made them wear in the drapery — she worked at Lilywhite’s, the drapers,
though she came originally from London. I suppose she would have been two years older
than I was.
I’m grateful to Elsie, because she was the first person who taught me to care about a
woman. I don’t mean women in general, I mean an individual woman. I’d met her at the
Reading Circle and hardly noticed her, and then one day I went into Lilywhite’s during
working hours, a thing I wouldn’t normally have been able to do, but as it happened we’d
run out of butter muslin and old Grimmett sent me to buy some. You know the
atmosphere of a draper’s shop. It’s something peculiarly feminine. There’s a hushed
feeling, a subdued light, a cool smell of cloth, and a faint whirring from the wooden balls
of change rolling to and fro. Elsie was leaning against the counter, cutting off a length of
cloth with the big scissors. There was something about her black dress and the curve of
her breast against the counter — I can’t describe it, something curiously soft, curiously
feminine. As soon as you saw her you knew that you could take her in your arms and do
what you wanted with her. She was really deeply feminine, very gentle, very submissive,
the kind that would always do what a man told her, though she wasn’t either small or
weak. She wasn’t even stupid, only rather silent and, at times, dreadfully refined. But in
those days I was rather refined myself.
We were living together for about a year. Of course in a town like Lower Binfield you
could only live together in a figurative sense. Officially we were ‘walking out’, which
was a recognized custom and not quite the same as being engaged. There was a road that
branched off from the road to Upper Binfield and ran along under the edge of the hills.
There was a long stretch of it, nearly a mile, that was quite straight and fringed with
enonnous horse- chestnut trees, and on the grass at the side there was a footpath under
the boughs that was known as Lovers’ Lane. We used to go there on the May evenings,
when the chestnuts were in blossom. Then the short nights came on, and it was light for
hours after we’d left the shop. You know the feeling of a June evening. The kind of blue
twilight that goes on and on, and the air brushing against your face like silk. Sometimes
on Sunday afternoons we went over Chamford Hill and down to the water-meadows
along the Thames. 1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the
weir! It’ll never come again. I don’t mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the
feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling
you’ve either had and don’t need to be told about, or haven’t had and won’t ever have the
chance to leam.
It wasn’t till late summer that we began what’s called living together. I’d been too shy
and clumsy to begin, and too ignorant to realize that there’d been others before me. One
Sunday afternoon we went into the beech woods round Upper Binfield. Up there you
could always be alone. I wanted her very badly, and I knew quite well that she was only
waiting for me to begin. Something, I don’t know what, put it into my head to go into the
grounds of Binfield House. Old Hodges, who was past seventy and getting very crusty,
was capable of turning us out, but he’d probably be asleep on a Sunday afternoon. We
slipped through a gap in the fence and down the footpath between the beeches to the big
pool. It was four years or more since I’d been that way. Nothing had changed. Still the
utter solitude, the hidden feeling with the great trees all round you, the old boat-house
rotting among the bulrushes. We lay down in the little grass hollow beside the wild
peppermint, and we were as much alone as if we’d been in Central Africa. I’d kissed her
God knows how many times, and then I’d got up and was wandering about again. I
wanted her very badly, and wanted to take the plunge, only I was half-frightened. And
curiously enough there was another thought in my mind at the same time. It suddenly
struck me that for years I’d meant to come back here and had never come. Now I was so
near, it seemed a pity not to go down to the other pool and have a look at the big carp. I
felt I’d kick myself afterwards if I missed the chance, in fact I couldn’t think why I hadn’t
been back before. The carp were stored away in my mind, nobody knew about them
except me, I was going to catch them some time. Practically they were MY carp. I
actually started wandering along the bank in that direction, and then when I’d gone about
ten yards I turned back. It meant crashing your way through a kind of jungle of brambles
and rotten brushwood, and I was dressed up in my Sunday best. Dark-grey suit, bowler
hat, button boots, and a collar that almost cut my ears off. That was how people dressed
for Sunday afternoon walks in those days. And I wanted Elsie very badly. I went back
and stood over her for a moment. She was lying on the grass with her arm over her face,
and she didn’t stir when she heard me come. In her black dress she looked — I don’t kn ow
how, kind of soft, kind of yielding, as though her body was a kind of malleable stuff that
you could do what you liked with. She was mine and I could have her, this minute if I
wanted to. Suddenly I stopped being frightened, I chucked my hat on to the grass (it
bounced, I remember), knelt down, and took hold of her. I can smell the wild peppennint
yet. It was my first time, but it wasn’t hers, and we didn’t make such a mess of it as you
might expect. So that was that. The big carp faded out of my mind again, and in fact for
years afterwards I hardly thought about them.
1913. 1914. The spring of 1914. First the blackthorn, then the hawthorn, then the
chestnuts in blossom. Sunday afternoons along the towpath, and the wind rippling the
beds of rushes so that they swayed all together in great thick masses and looked somehow
like a woman’s hair. The endless June evenings, the path under the chestnut trees, an owl
hooting somewhere and Elsie’s body against me. It was a hot July that year. How we
sweated in the shop, and how the cheese and the ground coffee smelt! And then the cool
of the evening outside, the smell of night-stocks and pipe-tobacco in the lane behind the
allotments, the soft dust underfoot, and the nightjars hawking after the cockchafers.
Christ! What’s the use of saying that one oughtn’t to be sentimental about ‘before the
war’? I AM sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It’s quite true that if you
look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That’s
true even of the war. But it’s also true that people then had something that we haven’t got
now.
What? It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of. It
isn’t that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole
worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. The fann hands worked
frightful hours for fourteen shillings a week and ended up as worn-out cripples with a
five-shilling old-age pension and an occasional half-crown from the parish. And what
was called ‘respectable’ poverty was even worse. When little Watson, a small draper at
the other end of the High Street, ‘failed’ after years of struggling, his personal assets were
L2 9s. 6d. , and he died almost immediately of what was called ‘gastric trouble’, but the
doctor let it out that it was starvation. Yet he’d clung to his frock coat to the last. Old
Crimp, the watchmaker’s assistant, a skilled workman who’d been at the job, man and
boy, for fifty years, got cataract and had to go into the workhouse. His grandchildren
were howling in the street when they took him away. His wife went out charing, and by
desperate efforts managed to send him a shilling a week for pocket-money. You saw
ghastly things happening sometimes. Small businesses sliding down the hill, solid
tradesmen turning gradually into broken-down bankrupts, people dying by inches of
cancer and liver disease, drunken husbands signing the pledge every Monday and
breaking it every Saturday, girls ruined for life by an illegitimate baby. The houses had
no bathrooms, you broke the ice in your basin on winter mornings, the back streets stank
like the devil in hot weather, and the churchyard was bang in the middle of the town, so
that you never went a day without remembering how you’d got to end. And yet what was
it that people had in those days?
A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure.
More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I
suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know
was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things
would go on as they’d known them. I don’t believe it made very much difference that
what’s called religious belief was still prevalent in those days. It’s true that nearly
everyone went to church, at any rate in the country — Elsie and I still went to church as a
matter of course, even when we were living in what the vicar would have called sin — and
if you asked people whether they believed in a life after death they generally answered
that they did. But I’ve never met anyone who gave me the impression of really believing
in a future life. I think that, at most, people believe in that kind of thing in the same way
as kids believe in Father Christmas. But it’s precisely in a settled period, a period when
civilization seems to stand on its four legs like an elephant, that such things as a future
life don’t matter. It’s easy enough to die if the things you care about are going to survive.
You’ve had your life, you’re getting tired, it’s time to go underground — that’s how
people used to see it. Individually they were finished, but their way of life would
continue. Their good and evil would remain good and evil. They didn’t feel the ground
they stood on shifting under their feet.
Father was failing, and he didn’t know it. It was merely that times were very bad, trade
seemed to dwindle and dwindle, his bills were harder and harder to meet. Thank God, he
never even knew that he was ruined, never actually went bankrupt, because he died very
suddenly (it was influenza that turned into pneumonia) at the beginning of 1915. To the
end he believed that with thrift, hard work, and fair dealing a man can’t go wrong. There
must have been plenty of small shopkeepers who carried that belief not merely on to
bankrupt deathbeds but even into the workhouse. Even Fovegrove the saddler, with cars
and motor-vans staring him in the face, didn’t realize that he was as out of date as the
rhinoceros. And Mother too — Mother never lived to know that the life she’d been
brought up to, the life of a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s daughter and a decent God-
fearing shopkeeper’s wife in the reign of good Queen Vic, was finished for ever. Times
were difficult and trade was bad, Father was worried and this and that was ‘aggravating’,
but you carried on much the same as usual. The old English order of life couldn’t change.
For ever and ever decent God-fearing women would cook Yorkshire pudding and apple
dumplings on enormous coal ranges, wear woollen underclothes and sleep on feathers,
make plum jam in July and pickles in October, and read Hilda’s Home Companion in the
afternoons, with the flies buzzing round, in a sort of cosy little underworld of stewed tea,
bad legs, and happy endings. I don’t say that either Father or Mother was quite the same
to the end. They were a bit shaken, and sometimes a little dispirited. But at least they
never lived to know that everything they’d believed in was just so much junk. They lived
at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and
they didn’t know it. They thought it was eternity. You couldn’t blame them. That was
what it felt like.
Then came the end of July, and even Lower Binlield grasped that things were happening.
For days there was tremendous vague excitement and endless leading articles in the
papers, which Father actually brought in from the shop to read aloud to Mother. And then
suddenly the posters everywhere:
GERMAN ULTIMATUM. FRANCE MOBILIZING
For several days (four days, wasn’t it? I forget the exact dates) there was a strange stifled
feeling, a kind of waiting hush, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks, as though
the whole of England was silent and listening. It was very hot, I remember. In the shop it
was as though we couldn’t work, though already everyone in the neighbourhood who had
five bob to spare was rushing in to buy quantities of tinned stuff and flour and oatmeal. It
was as if we were too feverish to work, we only sweated and waited. In the evenings
people went down to the railway station and fought like devils over the evening papers
which arrived on the London train. And then one afternoon a boy came rushing down the
High Street with an armful of papers, and people were coming into their doorways to
shout across the street. Everyone was shouting ‘We’ve come in! We’ve come in! ’ The
boy grabbed a poster from his bundle and stuck it on the shop-front opposite:
ENGLAND DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY
We rushed out on to the pavement, all three assistants, and cheered. Everybody was
cheering. Yes, cheering. But old Grimmett, though he’d already done pretty well out of
the war- scare, still held on to a little of his Liberal principles, ‘didn’t hold’ with the war,
and said it would be a bad business.
Two months later I was in the Anny. Seven months later I was in France.
8
I wasn’t wounded till late in 1916.
We’d just come out of the trenches and were marching over a bit of road a mile or so
back which was supposed to be safe, but which the Germans must have got the range of
some time earlier. Suddenly they started putting a few shells over — it was heavy H. E.
stuff, and they were only firing about one a minute. There was the usual zwee-e-e-e! and
then BOOM! in a field somewhere over to the right. I think it was the third shell that got
me. I knew as soon as I heard it coming that it had my name written on it. They say you
always know. It didn’t say what an ordinary shell says. It said ‘I’m after you, you b — ,
YOU, you b — , YOU! ’ — all this in the space of about three seconds. And the last you
was the explosion.
I felt as if an enormous hand made of air were sweeping me along. And presently I came
down with a sort of burst, shattered feeling among a lot of old tin cans, splinters of wood,
rusty barbed wire, turds, empty cartridge cases, and other muck in the ditch at the side of
the road. When they’d hauled me out and cleaned some of the dirt off me they found that
I wasn’t very badly hurt. It was only a lot of small shell-splinters that had lodged in one
side of my bottom and down the backs of my legs. But luckily I’d broken a rib in falling,
which made it just bad enough to get me back to England. I spent that winter in a hospital
camp on the downs near Eastbourne.
Do you remember those war-time hospital camps? The long rows of wooden huts like
chicken-houses stuck right on top of those beastly icy downs — the ‘south coast’, people
used to call it, which made me wonder what the north coast could be like — where the
wind seems to blow at you from all directions at once. And the droves of blokes in their
pale-blue flannel suits and red ties, wandering up and down looking for a place out of the
wind and never finding one. Sometimes the kids from the slap-up boys’ schools in
Eastbourne used to be led round in crocodiles to hand out fags and peppermint creams to
the ‘wounded Tommies’, as they called us. A pink-faced kid of about eight would walk
up to a knot of wounded men sitting on the grass, split open a packet of Woodbines and
solemnly hand one fag to each man, just like feeding the monkeys at the zoo. Anyone
who was strong enough used to wander for miles over the downs in hopes of meeting
girls. There were never enough girls to go round. In the valley below the camp there was
a bit of a spinney, and long before dusk you’d see a couple glued against every tree, and
sometimes, if it happened to be a thick tree, one on each side of it. My chief memory of
that time is sitting against a gorse-bush in the freezing wind, with my fingers so cold I
couldn’t bend them and the taste of a peppermint cream in my mouth. That’s a typical
soldier’s memory. But I was getting away from a Tommy’s life, all the same. The C. O.
had sent my name in for a commission a little before I was wounded. By this time they
were desperate for officers and anyone who wasn’t actually illiterate could have a
commission if he wanted one. I went straight from the hospital to an officers’ training
camp near Colchester.
It’s very strange, the things the war did to people. It was less than three years since I’d
been a spry young shop-assistant, bending over the counter in my white apron with ‘Yes,
madam! Certainly, madam! AND the next order, madam? ’ with a grocer’s life ahead of
me and about as much notion of becoming an Army officer as of getting a knighthood.
And here I was already, swaggering about in a gorblimey hat and a yellow collar and
more or less keeping my end up among a crowd of other temporary gents and some who
weren’t even temporary. And — this is really the point — not feeling it in any way strange.
Nothing seemed strange in those days.
It was like an enormous machine that had got hold of you. You’d no sense of acting of
your own free will, and at the same time no notion of trying to resist. If people didn’t
have some such feeling as that, no war could last three months. The annies would just
pack up and go home. Why had I joined the Army? Or the million other idiots who joined
up before conscription came in? Partly for a lark and partly because of England my
England and Britons never never and all that stuff. But how long did that last? Most of
the chaps I knew had forgotten all about it long before they got as far as France. The men
in the trenches weren’t patriotic, didn’t hate the Kaiser, didn’t care a damn about gallant
little Belgium and the Germans raping nuns on tables (it was always ‘on tables’, as
though that made it worse) in the streets of Brussels. On the other hand it didn’t occur to
them to try and escape. The machine had got hold of you and it could do what it liked
with you. It lifted you up and dumped you down among places and things you’d never
dreamed of, and if it had dumped you down on the surface of the moon it wouldn’t have
seemed particularly strange. The day I joined the Army the old life was finished. It was as
though it didn’t concern me any longer. I wonder if you’d believe that from that day
forward I only once went back to Lower Bin Held, and that was to Mother’s funeral? It
sounds incredible now, but it seemed natural enough at the time. Partly, I admit, it was on
account of Elsie, whom, of course, I’d stopped writing to after two or three months. No
doubt she’d picked up with someone else, but I didn’t want to meet her. Otherwise,
perhaps, when I got a bit of leave I’d have gone down and seen Mother, who’d had fits
when I joined the Army but would have been proud of a son in uniform.
Father died in 1915. I was in France at the time. I don’t exaggerate when I say that
Father’s death hurts me more now than it did then. At the time it was just a bit of bad
news which I accepted almost without interest, in the sort of empty-headed apathetic way
in which one accepted everything in the trenches. I remember crawling into the doorway
of the dugout to get enough light to read the letter, and I remember Mother’s tear-stains
on the letter, and the aching feeling in my knees and the smell of mud. Father’s life-
insurance policy had been mortgaged for most of its value, but there was a little money in
the bank and Sarazins’ were going to buy up the stock and even pay some tiny amount
for the good-will. Anyway, Mother had a bit over two hundred pounds, besides the
furniture. She went for the time being to lodge with her cousin, the wife of a small-holder
who was doing pretty well out of the war, near Doxley, a few miles the other side of
Walton. It was only ‘for the time being’. There was a temporary feeling about everything.
In the old days, which as a matter of fact were barely a year old, the whole thing would
have been an appalling disaster. With Father dead, the shop sold and Mother with two
hundred pounds in the world, you’d have seen stretching out in front of you a kind of
fifteen-act tragedy, the last act being a pauper’s funeral. But now the war and the feeling
of not being one’s own master overshadowed everything. People hardly thought in terms
of things like bankruptcy and the workhouse any longer. This was the case even with
Mother, who, God knows, had only very dim notions about the war. Besides, she was
already dying, though neither of us knew it.
She came across to see me in the hospital at Eastbourne. It was over two years since I’d
seen her, and her appearance gave me a bit of a shock. She seemed to have faded and
somehow to have shrunken. Partly it was because by this time I was grown-up, I’d
travelled, and everything looked smaller to me, but there was no question that she’d got
thinner, and also yellower. She talked in the old rambling way about Aunt Martha (that
was the cousin she was staying with), and the changes in Fower Binfield since the war,
and all the boys who’d ‘gone’ (meaning joined the Anny), and her indigestion which was
‘aggravating’, and poor Father’s tombstone and what a lovely corpse he made. It was the
old talk, the talk I’d listened to for years, and yet somehow it was like a ghost talking. It
didn’t concern me any longer. I’d kn own her as a great splendid protecting kind of
creature, a bit like a ship’s figure-head and a bit like a broody hen, and after all she was
only a little old woman in a black dress. Everything was changing and fading. That was
the last time I saw her alive. I got the wire saying she was seriously ill when I was at the
training school at Colchester, and put in for a week’s urgent leave immediately. But it
was too late. She was dead by the time I got to Doxley. What she and everyone else had
imagined to be indigestion was some kind of internal growth, and a sudden chill on the
stomach put the final touch. The doctor tried to cheer me up by telling me that the growth
was ‘benevolent’, which struck me as a queer thing to call it, seeing that it had killed her.
Well, we buried her next to Father, and that was my last glimpse of Lower Binfield. It
had changed a lot, even in three years. Some of the shops were shut, some had different
names over them. Nearly all the men I’d known as boys were gone, and some of them
were dead. Sid Lovegrove was dead, killed on the Somme. Ginger Watson, the fann lad
who’d belonged to the Black Hand years ago, the one who used to catch rabbits alive,
was dead in Egypt. One of the chaps who’d worked with me at Grimmett’s had lost both
legs. Old Lovegrove had shut up his shop and was living in a cottage near Walton on a
tiny annuity. Old Grimmett, on the other hand, was doing well out of the war and had
turned patriotic and was a member of the local board which tried conscientious objectors.
The thing which more than anything else gave the town an empty, forlorn kind of look
was that there were practically no horses left. Every horse worth taking had been
commandeered long ago. The station fly still existed, but the brute that pulled it wouldn’t
have been able to stand up if it hadn’t been for the shafts. For the hour or so that I was
there before the funeral I wandered round the town, saying how d’you do to people and
showing off my uniform. Luckily I didn’t run into Elsie. I saw all the changes, and yet it
was as though I didn’t see them. My mind was on other things, chiefly the pleasure of
being seen in my second-loot’s unifonn, with my black armlet (a thing which looks rather
smart on khaki) and my new whipcord breeches. I distinctly remember that I was still
thinking about those whipcord breeches when we stood at the graveside. And then they
chucked some earth on to the coffin and I suddenly realized what it means for your
mother to be lying with seven feet of earth on top of her, and something kind of twitched
behind my eyes and nose, but even then the whipcord breeches weren’t altogether out of
my mind.
Don’t think I didn’t feel for Mother’s death. I did. I wasn’t in the trenches any longer, I
could feel sorry for a death. But the thing I didn’t care a damn about, didn’t even grasp to
be happening, was the passing-away of the old life I’d known. After the funeral, Aunt
Martha, who was rather proud of having a ‘real officer’ for a nephew and would have
made a splash of the funeral if I’d let her, went back to Doxley on the bus and I took the
fly down to the station, to get the train to London and then to Colchester. We drove past
the shop. No one had taken it since Father died. It was shut up and the window-pane was
black with dust, and they’d burned the ‘S. Bowling’ off the signboard with a plumber’s
blowflame. Well, there was the house where I’d been a child and a boy and a young man,
where I’d crawled about the kitchen floor and smelt the sainfoin and read ‘Donovan the
Dauntless’, where I’d done my homework for the Grammar School, mixed bread paste,
mended bicycle punctures, and tried on my first high collar. It had been as permanent to
me as the Pyramids, and now it would be just an accident if I ever set foot in it again.
Father, Mother, Joe, the errand boys, old Nailer the terrier, Spot, the one that came after
Nailer, Jackie the bullfinch, the cats, the mice in the loft — all gone, nothing left but dust.
And I didn’t care a damn. I was sorry Mother was dead, I was even sorry Father was
dead, but all the time my mind was on other things. I was a bit proud of being seen riding
in a cab, a thing I hadn’t yet got used to, and I was thinking of the sit of my new
whipcord breeches, and my nice smooth officer’s putties, so different from the gritty stuff
the Tommies had to wear, and of the other chaps at Colchester and the sixty quid Mother
had left and the beanos we’d have with it. Also I was thanking God that I hadn’t
happened to run into Elsie.
The war did extraordinary things to people. And what was more extraordinary than the
way it killed people was the way it sometimes didn’t kill them. It was like a great flood
rushing you along to death, and suddenly it would shoot you up some backwater where
you’d find yourself doing incredible and pointless things and drawing extra pay for them.
There were labour battalions making roads across the desert that didn’t lead anywhere,
there were chaps marooned on oceanic islands to look out for German cruisers which had
been sunk years earlier, there were Ministries of this and that with armies of clerks and
typists which went on existing years after their function had ended, by a kind of inertia.
People were shoved into meaningless jobs and then forgotten by the authorities for years
on end. This was what happened to myself, or very likely I wouldn’t be here. The whole
sequence of events is rather interesting.
A little while after I was gazetted there was a call for officers of the A. S. C. As soon as
the O. C. of the training camp heard that I knew something about the grocery trade (I
didn’t let on that I’d actually been behind the counter) he told me to send my name in.
That went through all right, and I was just about to leave for another training-school for
A. S. C. officers somewhere in the Midlands when there was a demand for a young officer,
with knowledge of the grocery trade, to act as some kind of secretary to Sir Joseph
Cheam, who was a big noise in the A. S. C. God knows why they picked me out, but at
any rate they did so. I’ve since thought that they probably mixed my name up with
somebody else’s. Three days later I was saluting in Sir Joseph’s office.
on the roads and cross-country motor-buses began to run. An aeroplane — a flimsy,
rickety-looking thing with a chap sitting in the middle on a kind of chair — flew over
Lower Binfield and the whole town rushed out of their houses to yell at it. People began
to say rather vaguely that this here German Emperor was getting too big for his boots and
‘it’ (meaning war with Germany) was ‘coming some time’. My wages went gradually up,
until finally, just before the war, they were twenty-eight shillings a week. I paid Mother
ten shillings a week for my board, and later, when times got worse, fifteen shillings, and
even that left me feeling richer than I’ve felt since. I grew another inch, my moustache
began to sprout, I wore button boots and collars three inches high. In church on Sundays,
in my natty dark grey suit, with my bowler hat and black dogskin gloves on the pew
beside me, I looked the perfect gent, so that Mother could hardly contain her pride in me.
In between work and ‘walking out’ on Thursdays, and thinking about clothes and girls, I
had fits of ambition and saw myself developing into a Big Business Man like Lever or
William Whiteley. Between sixteen and eighteen I made serious efforts to ‘improve my
mind’ and train myself for a business career. I cured myself of dropping aitches and got
rid of most of my Cockney accent. (In the Thames Valley the country accents were going
out. Except for the fann lads, nearly everyone who was born later than 1890 talked
Cockney. ) I did a correspondence course with Littleburns’ Commercial Academy, learnt
bookkeeping and business English, read solemnly through a book of frightful blah called
The Art of Salesmanship, and improved my arithmetic and even my handwriting. When I
was as old as seventeen I’ve sat up late at night with my tongue hanging out of my
mouth, practising copperplate by the little oil-lamp on the bedroom table. At times I read
enonnously, generally crime and adventure stories, and sometimes paper-covered books
which were furtively passed round by the chaps at the shop and described as ‘hot’. (They
were translations of Maupassant and Paul de Kock. ) But when I was eighteen I suddenly
turned highbrow, got a ticket for the County Library, and began to stodge through books
by Marie Corelli and Hall Caine and Anthony Hope. It was at about that time that I joined
the Lower Binfield Reading Circle, which was run by the vicar and met one evening a
week all through the winter for what was called ‘literary discussion’. Under pressure
from the vicar I read bits of Sesame and Lilies and even had a go at Browning.
And time was slipping away. 1910, 1911, 1912. And Father’s business was going
down — not slumping suddenly into the gutter, but it was going down. Neither Father nor
Mother was ever quite the same after Joe ran away from home. This happened not long
after I went to work at Grimmett’s.
Joe, at eighteen, had grown into an ugly ruffian. He was a hefty chap, much bigger than
the rest of the family, with tremendous shoulders, a big head, and a sulky, lowering kind
of face on which he already had a respectable moustache. When he wasn’t in the tap-
room of the George he was loafing in the shop doorway, with his hands dug deep into his
pockets, scowling at the people who passed, except when they happened to be girls, as
though he’d like to knock them down. If anyone came into the shop he’d move aside just
enough to let them pass, and, without taking his hands out of his pockets, yell over his
shoulders ‘Da-ad! Shop! ’ This was as near as he ever got to helping. Father and Mother
said despairingly that they ‘didn’t know what to do with him’, and he was costing the
devil of a lot with his drinking and endless smoking. Fate one night he walked out of the
house and was never heard of again. He’d prised open the till and taken all the money
that was in it, luckily not much, about eight pounds. That was enough to get him a
steerage passage to America. He’d always wanted to go to America, and I think he
probably did so, though we never knew for certain. It made a bit of a scandal in the town.
The official theory was that Joe had bolted because he’d put a girl in the family way.
There was a girl named Sally Chivers who lived in the same street as the Simmonses and
was going to have a baby, and Joe had certainly been with her, but so had about a dozen
others, and nobody knew whose baby it was. Mother and Father accepted the baby theory
and even, in private, used it to excuse their ‘poor boy’ for stealing the eight pounds and
running away. They weren’t capable of grasping that Joe had cleared out because he
couldn’t stand a decent respectable life in a little country town and wanted a life of
loafing, fights, and women. We never heard of him again. Perhaps he went utterly to the
bad, perhaps he was killed in the war, perhaps he merely didn’t bother to write. Luckily
the baby was born dead, so there were no complications. As for the fact that Joe had
stolen the eight pounds. Mother and Father managed to keep it a secret till they died. In
their eyes it was a much worse disgrace than Sally Chivers’s baby.
The trouble over Joe aged Father a great deal. To lose Joe was merely to cut a loss, but it
hurt him and made him ashamed. From that time forward his moustache was much greyer
and he seemed to have grown a lot smaller. Perhaps my memory of him as a little grey
man, with a round, lined, anxious face and dusty spectacles, really dates from that time.
By slow degrees he was getting more and more involved in money worries and less and
less interested in other things. He talked less about politics and the Sunday papers, and
more about the badness of trade. Mother seemed to have shrunk a little, too. In my
childhood I’d kn own her as something vast and overflowing, with her yellow hair and her
beaming face and her enormous bosom, a sort of great opulent creature like the figure-
head of a battleship. Now she’d got smaller and more anxious and older than her years.
She was less lordly in the kitchen, went in more for neck of mutton, worried over the
price of coal, and began to use margarine, a thing which in the old days she’d never have
allowed into the house. After Joe had gone Father had to hire an errand boy again, but
from then on he employed very young boys whom he only kept for a year or two and who
couldn’t lift heavy weights. I sometimes lent him a hand when I was at home. I was too
selfish to do it regularly. I can still see him working his way slowly across the yard, bent
double and almost hidden under an enonnous sack, like a snail under its shell. The huge,
monstrous sack, weighing a hundred and fifty pounds, I suppose, pressing his neck and
shoulders almost to the ground, and the anxious, spectacled face looking up from
underneath it. In 1911 he ruptured himself and had to spend weeks in hospital and hire a
temporary manager for the shop, which ate another hole in his capital. A small
shopkeeper going down the hill is a dreadful thing to watch, but it isn’t sudden and
obvious like the fate of a working man who gets the sack and promptly finds himself on
the dole. It’s just a gradual chipping away of trade, with little ups and downs, a few
shillings to the bad here, a few sixpences to the good there. Somebody who’s dealt with
you for years suddenly deserts and goes to Sarazins’. Somebody else buys a dozen hens
and gives you a weekly order for com. You can still keep going. You’re still ‘your own
master’, always a little more worried and a little shabbier, with your capital shrinking all
the time. You can go on like that for years, for a lifetime if you’re lucky. Uncle Ezekiel
died in 1911, leaving 120 pounds which must have made a lot of difference to Father. It
wasn’t till 1913 that he had to mortgage his life-insurance policy. That I didn’t hear about
at the time, or I’d have understood what it meant. As it was I don’t think I ever got
further than realizing that Father ‘wasn’t doing well’, trade was ‘slack’, there’d be a bit
longer to wait before I had the money to ‘set up’. Fike Father himself, I looked on the
shop as something permanent, and I was a bit inclined to be angry with him for not
managing things better. I wasn’t capable of seeing, and neither was he nor anyone else,
that he was being slowly ruined, that his business would never pick up again and if he
lived to be seventy he’d certainly end in the workhouse. Many a time I’ve passed
Sarazins’ shop in the market-place and merely thought how much I preferred their slick
window-front to Father’s dusty old shop, with the ‘S. Bowling’ which you could hardly
read, the chipped white lettering, and the faded packets of bird-seed. It didn’t occur to me
that Sarazins’ were tapeworms who were eating him alive. Sometimes I used to repeat to
him some of the stuff I’d been reading in my correspondence-course textbooks, about
salesmanship and modern methods. He never paid much attention. He’d inherited an old-
established business, he’d always worked hard, done a fair trade, and supplied sound
goods, and things would look up presently. It’s a fact that very few shopkeepers in those
days actually ended in the workhouse. With any luck you died with a few pounds still
your own. It was a race between death and bankruptcy, and, thank God, death got Father
first, and Mother too.
1911, 1912, 1913. I tell you it was a good time to be alive. It was late in 1912, through
the vicar’s Reading Circle, that I first met Elsie Waters. Till then, although, like all the
rest of the boys in the town. I’d gone out looking for girls and occasionally managed to
connect up with this girl or that and ‘walk out’ a few Sunday afternoons, I’d never really
had a girl of my own. It’s a queer business, that chasing of girls when you’re about
sixteen. At some recognized part of the town the boys stroll up and down in pairs,
watching the girls, and the girls stroll up and down in pairs, pretending not to notice the
boys, and presently some kind of contact is established and instead of twos they’re
trailing along in fours, all four utterly speechless. The chief feature of those walks — and
it was worse the second time, when you went out with the girl alone — was the ghastly
failure to make any kind of conversation. But Elsie Waters seemed different. The truth
was that I was growing up.
I don’t want to tell the story of myself and Elsie Waters, even if there was any story to
tell. It’s merely that she’s part of the picture, part of ‘before the war’. Before the war it
was always summer — a delusion, as I’ve remarked before, but that’s how I remember it.
the white dusty road stretching out between the chestnut trees, the smell of night-stocks,
the green pools under the willows, the splash of Burford Weir — that’s what I see when I
shut my eyes and think of ‘before the war’, and towards the end Elsie Waters is part of it.
I don’t know whether Elsie would be considered pretty now. She was then. She was tall
for a girl, about as tall as I am, with pale gold, heavy kind of hair which she wore
somehow plaited and coiled round her head, and a delicate, curiously gentle face. She
was one of those girls that always look their best in black, especially the very plain black
dresses they made them wear in the drapery — she worked at Lilywhite’s, the drapers,
though she came originally from London. I suppose she would have been two years older
than I was.
I’m grateful to Elsie, because she was the first person who taught me to care about a
woman. I don’t mean women in general, I mean an individual woman. I’d met her at the
Reading Circle and hardly noticed her, and then one day I went into Lilywhite’s during
working hours, a thing I wouldn’t normally have been able to do, but as it happened we’d
run out of butter muslin and old Grimmett sent me to buy some. You know the
atmosphere of a draper’s shop. It’s something peculiarly feminine. There’s a hushed
feeling, a subdued light, a cool smell of cloth, and a faint whirring from the wooden balls
of change rolling to and fro. Elsie was leaning against the counter, cutting off a length of
cloth with the big scissors. There was something about her black dress and the curve of
her breast against the counter — I can’t describe it, something curiously soft, curiously
feminine. As soon as you saw her you knew that you could take her in your arms and do
what you wanted with her. She was really deeply feminine, very gentle, very submissive,
the kind that would always do what a man told her, though she wasn’t either small or
weak. She wasn’t even stupid, only rather silent and, at times, dreadfully refined. But in
those days I was rather refined myself.
We were living together for about a year. Of course in a town like Lower Binfield you
could only live together in a figurative sense. Officially we were ‘walking out’, which
was a recognized custom and not quite the same as being engaged. There was a road that
branched off from the road to Upper Binfield and ran along under the edge of the hills.
There was a long stretch of it, nearly a mile, that was quite straight and fringed with
enonnous horse- chestnut trees, and on the grass at the side there was a footpath under
the boughs that was known as Lovers’ Lane. We used to go there on the May evenings,
when the chestnuts were in blossom. Then the short nights came on, and it was light for
hours after we’d left the shop. You know the feeling of a June evening. The kind of blue
twilight that goes on and on, and the air brushing against your face like silk. Sometimes
on Sunday afternoons we went over Chamford Hill and down to the water-meadows
along the Thames. 1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the
weir! It’ll never come again. I don’t mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the
feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling
you’ve either had and don’t need to be told about, or haven’t had and won’t ever have the
chance to leam.
It wasn’t till late summer that we began what’s called living together. I’d been too shy
and clumsy to begin, and too ignorant to realize that there’d been others before me. One
Sunday afternoon we went into the beech woods round Upper Binfield. Up there you
could always be alone. I wanted her very badly, and I knew quite well that she was only
waiting for me to begin. Something, I don’t know what, put it into my head to go into the
grounds of Binfield House. Old Hodges, who was past seventy and getting very crusty,
was capable of turning us out, but he’d probably be asleep on a Sunday afternoon. We
slipped through a gap in the fence and down the footpath between the beeches to the big
pool. It was four years or more since I’d been that way. Nothing had changed. Still the
utter solitude, the hidden feeling with the great trees all round you, the old boat-house
rotting among the bulrushes. We lay down in the little grass hollow beside the wild
peppermint, and we were as much alone as if we’d been in Central Africa. I’d kissed her
God knows how many times, and then I’d got up and was wandering about again. I
wanted her very badly, and wanted to take the plunge, only I was half-frightened. And
curiously enough there was another thought in my mind at the same time. It suddenly
struck me that for years I’d meant to come back here and had never come. Now I was so
near, it seemed a pity not to go down to the other pool and have a look at the big carp. I
felt I’d kick myself afterwards if I missed the chance, in fact I couldn’t think why I hadn’t
been back before. The carp were stored away in my mind, nobody knew about them
except me, I was going to catch them some time. Practically they were MY carp. I
actually started wandering along the bank in that direction, and then when I’d gone about
ten yards I turned back. It meant crashing your way through a kind of jungle of brambles
and rotten brushwood, and I was dressed up in my Sunday best. Dark-grey suit, bowler
hat, button boots, and a collar that almost cut my ears off. That was how people dressed
for Sunday afternoon walks in those days. And I wanted Elsie very badly. I went back
and stood over her for a moment. She was lying on the grass with her arm over her face,
and she didn’t stir when she heard me come. In her black dress she looked — I don’t kn ow
how, kind of soft, kind of yielding, as though her body was a kind of malleable stuff that
you could do what you liked with. She was mine and I could have her, this minute if I
wanted to. Suddenly I stopped being frightened, I chucked my hat on to the grass (it
bounced, I remember), knelt down, and took hold of her. I can smell the wild peppennint
yet. It was my first time, but it wasn’t hers, and we didn’t make such a mess of it as you
might expect. So that was that. The big carp faded out of my mind again, and in fact for
years afterwards I hardly thought about them.
1913. 1914. The spring of 1914. First the blackthorn, then the hawthorn, then the
chestnuts in blossom. Sunday afternoons along the towpath, and the wind rippling the
beds of rushes so that they swayed all together in great thick masses and looked somehow
like a woman’s hair. The endless June evenings, the path under the chestnut trees, an owl
hooting somewhere and Elsie’s body against me. It was a hot July that year. How we
sweated in the shop, and how the cheese and the ground coffee smelt! And then the cool
of the evening outside, the smell of night-stocks and pipe-tobacco in the lane behind the
allotments, the soft dust underfoot, and the nightjars hawking after the cockchafers.
Christ! What’s the use of saying that one oughtn’t to be sentimental about ‘before the
war’? I AM sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It’s quite true that if you
look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That’s
true even of the war. But it’s also true that people then had something that we haven’t got
now.
What? It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of. It
isn’t that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole
worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. The fann hands worked
frightful hours for fourteen shillings a week and ended up as worn-out cripples with a
five-shilling old-age pension and an occasional half-crown from the parish. And what
was called ‘respectable’ poverty was even worse. When little Watson, a small draper at
the other end of the High Street, ‘failed’ after years of struggling, his personal assets were
L2 9s. 6d. , and he died almost immediately of what was called ‘gastric trouble’, but the
doctor let it out that it was starvation. Yet he’d clung to his frock coat to the last. Old
Crimp, the watchmaker’s assistant, a skilled workman who’d been at the job, man and
boy, for fifty years, got cataract and had to go into the workhouse. His grandchildren
were howling in the street when they took him away. His wife went out charing, and by
desperate efforts managed to send him a shilling a week for pocket-money. You saw
ghastly things happening sometimes. Small businesses sliding down the hill, solid
tradesmen turning gradually into broken-down bankrupts, people dying by inches of
cancer and liver disease, drunken husbands signing the pledge every Monday and
breaking it every Saturday, girls ruined for life by an illegitimate baby. The houses had
no bathrooms, you broke the ice in your basin on winter mornings, the back streets stank
like the devil in hot weather, and the churchyard was bang in the middle of the town, so
that you never went a day without remembering how you’d got to end. And yet what was
it that people had in those days?
A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure.
More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I
suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know
was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things
would go on as they’d known them. I don’t believe it made very much difference that
what’s called religious belief was still prevalent in those days. It’s true that nearly
everyone went to church, at any rate in the country — Elsie and I still went to church as a
matter of course, even when we were living in what the vicar would have called sin — and
if you asked people whether they believed in a life after death they generally answered
that they did. But I’ve never met anyone who gave me the impression of really believing
in a future life. I think that, at most, people believe in that kind of thing in the same way
as kids believe in Father Christmas. But it’s precisely in a settled period, a period when
civilization seems to stand on its four legs like an elephant, that such things as a future
life don’t matter. It’s easy enough to die if the things you care about are going to survive.
You’ve had your life, you’re getting tired, it’s time to go underground — that’s how
people used to see it. Individually they were finished, but their way of life would
continue. Their good and evil would remain good and evil. They didn’t feel the ground
they stood on shifting under their feet.
Father was failing, and he didn’t know it. It was merely that times were very bad, trade
seemed to dwindle and dwindle, his bills were harder and harder to meet. Thank God, he
never even knew that he was ruined, never actually went bankrupt, because he died very
suddenly (it was influenza that turned into pneumonia) at the beginning of 1915. To the
end he believed that with thrift, hard work, and fair dealing a man can’t go wrong. There
must have been plenty of small shopkeepers who carried that belief not merely on to
bankrupt deathbeds but even into the workhouse. Even Fovegrove the saddler, with cars
and motor-vans staring him in the face, didn’t realize that he was as out of date as the
rhinoceros. And Mother too — Mother never lived to know that the life she’d been
brought up to, the life of a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s daughter and a decent God-
fearing shopkeeper’s wife in the reign of good Queen Vic, was finished for ever. Times
were difficult and trade was bad, Father was worried and this and that was ‘aggravating’,
but you carried on much the same as usual. The old English order of life couldn’t change.
For ever and ever decent God-fearing women would cook Yorkshire pudding and apple
dumplings on enormous coal ranges, wear woollen underclothes and sleep on feathers,
make plum jam in July and pickles in October, and read Hilda’s Home Companion in the
afternoons, with the flies buzzing round, in a sort of cosy little underworld of stewed tea,
bad legs, and happy endings. I don’t say that either Father or Mother was quite the same
to the end. They were a bit shaken, and sometimes a little dispirited. But at least they
never lived to know that everything they’d believed in was just so much junk. They lived
at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and
they didn’t know it. They thought it was eternity. You couldn’t blame them. That was
what it felt like.
Then came the end of July, and even Lower Binlield grasped that things were happening.
For days there was tremendous vague excitement and endless leading articles in the
papers, which Father actually brought in from the shop to read aloud to Mother. And then
suddenly the posters everywhere:
GERMAN ULTIMATUM. FRANCE MOBILIZING
For several days (four days, wasn’t it? I forget the exact dates) there was a strange stifled
feeling, a kind of waiting hush, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks, as though
the whole of England was silent and listening. It was very hot, I remember. In the shop it
was as though we couldn’t work, though already everyone in the neighbourhood who had
five bob to spare was rushing in to buy quantities of tinned stuff and flour and oatmeal. It
was as if we were too feverish to work, we only sweated and waited. In the evenings
people went down to the railway station and fought like devils over the evening papers
which arrived on the London train. And then one afternoon a boy came rushing down the
High Street with an armful of papers, and people were coming into their doorways to
shout across the street. Everyone was shouting ‘We’ve come in! We’ve come in! ’ The
boy grabbed a poster from his bundle and stuck it on the shop-front opposite:
ENGLAND DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY
We rushed out on to the pavement, all three assistants, and cheered. Everybody was
cheering. Yes, cheering. But old Grimmett, though he’d already done pretty well out of
the war- scare, still held on to a little of his Liberal principles, ‘didn’t hold’ with the war,
and said it would be a bad business.
Two months later I was in the Anny. Seven months later I was in France.
8
I wasn’t wounded till late in 1916.
We’d just come out of the trenches and were marching over a bit of road a mile or so
back which was supposed to be safe, but which the Germans must have got the range of
some time earlier. Suddenly they started putting a few shells over — it was heavy H. E.
stuff, and they were only firing about one a minute. There was the usual zwee-e-e-e! and
then BOOM! in a field somewhere over to the right. I think it was the third shell that got
me. I knew as soon as I heard it coming that it had my name written on it. They say you
always know. It didn’t say what an ordinary shell says. It said ‘I’m after you, you b — ,
YOU, you b — , YOU! ’ — all this in the space of about three seconds. And the last you
was the explosion.
I felt as if an enormous hand made of air were sweeping me along. And presently I came
down with a sort of burst, shattered feeling among a lot of old tin cans, splinters of wood,
rusty barbed wire, turds, empty cartridge cases, and other muck in the ditch at the side of
the road. When they’d hauled me out and cleaned some of the dirt off me they found that
I wasn’t very badly hurt. It was only a lot of small shell-splinters that had lodged in one
side of my bottom and down the backs of my legs. But luckily I’d broken a rib in falling,
which made it just bad enough to get me back to England. I spent that winter in a hospital
camp on the downs near Eastbourne.
Do you remember those war-time hospital camps? The long rows of wooden huts like
chicken-houses stuck right on top of those beastly icy downs — the ‘south coast’, people
used to call it, which made me wonder what the north coast could be like — where the
wind seems to blow at you from all directions at once. And the droves of blokes in their
pale-blue flannel suits and red ties, wandering up and down looking for a place out of the
wind and never finding one. Sometimes the kids from the slap-up boys’ schools in
Eastbourne used to be led round in crocodiles to hand out fags and peppermint creams to
the ‘wounded Tommies’, as they called us. A pink-faced kid of about eight would walk
up to a knot of wounded men sitting on the grass, split open a packet of Woodbines and
solemnly hand one fag to each man, just like feeding the monkeys at the zoo. Anyone
who was strong enough used to wander for miles over the downs in hopes of meeting
girls. There were never enough girls to go round. In the valley below the camp there was
a bit of a spinney, and long before dusk you’d see a couple glued against every tree, and
sometimes, if it happened to be a thick tree, one on each side of it. My chief memory of
that time is sitting against a gorse-bush in the freezing wind, with my fingers so cold I
couldn’t bend them and the taste of a peppermint cream in my mouth. That’s a typical
soldier’s memory. But I was getting away from a Tommy’s life, all the same. The C. O.
had sent my name in for a commission a little before I was wounded. By this time they
were desperate for officers and anyone who wasn’t actually illiterate could have a
commission if he wanted one. I went straight from the hospital to an officers’ training
camp near Colchester.
It’s very strange, the things the war did to people. It was less than three years since I’d
been a spry young shop-assistant, bending over the counter in my white apron with ‘Yes,
madam! Certainly, madam! AND the next order, madam? ’ with a grocer’s life ahead of
me and about as much notion of becoming an Army officer as of getting a knighthood.
And here I was already, swaggering about in a gorblimey hat and a yellow collar and
more or less keeping my end up among a crowd of other temporary gents and some who
weren’t even temporary. And — this is really the point — not feeling it in any way strange.
Nothing seemed strange in those days.
It was like an enormous machine that had got hold of you. You’d no sense of acting of
your own free will, and at the same time no notion of trying to resist. If people didn’t
have some such feeling as that, no war could last three months. The annies would just
pack up and go home. Why had I joined the Army? Or the million other idiots who joined
up before conscription came in? Partly for a lark and partly because of England my
England and Britons never never and all that stuff. But how long did that last? Most of
the chaps I knew had forgotten all about it long before they got as far as France. The men
in the trenches weren’t patriotic, didn’t hate the Kaiser, didn’t care a damn about gallant
little Belgium and the Germans raping nuns on tables (it was always ‘on tables’, as
though that made it worse) in the streets of Brussels. On the other hand it didn’t occur to
them to try and escape. The machine had got hold of you and it could do what it liked
with you. It lifted you up and dumped you down among places and things you’d never
dreamed of, and if it had dumped you down on the surface of the moon it wouldn’t have
seemed particularly strange. The day I joined the Army the old life was finished. It was as
though it didn’t concern me any longer. I wonder if you’d believe that from that day
forward I only once went back to Lower Bin Held, and that was to Mother’s funeral? It
sounds incredible now, but it seemed natural enough at the time. Partly, I admit, it was on
account of Elsie, whom, of course, I’d stopped writing to after two or three months. No
doubt she’d picked up with someone else, but I didn’t want to meet her. Otherwise,
perhaps, when I got a bit of leave I’d have gone down and seen Mother, who’d had fits
when I joined the Army but would have been proud of a son in uniform.
Father died in 1915. I was in France at the time. I don’t exaggerate when I say that
Father’s death hurts me more now than it did then. At the time it was just a bit of bad
news which I accepted almost without interest, in the sort of empty-headed apathetic way
in which one accepted everything in the trenches. I remember crawling into the doorway
of the dugout to get enough light to read the letter, and I remember Mother’s tear-stains
on the letter, and the aching feeling in my knees and the smell of mud. Father’s life-
insurance policy had been mortgaged for most of its value, but there was a little money in
the bank and Sarazins’ were going to buy up the stock and even pay some tiny amount
for the good-will. Anyway, Mother had a bit over two hundred pounds, besides the
furniture. She went for the time being to lodge with her cousin, the wife of a small-holder
who was doing pretty well out of the war, near Doxley, a few miles the other side of
Walton. It was only ‘for the time being’. There was a temporary feeling about everything.
In the old days, which as a matter of fact were barely a year old, the whole thing would
have been an appalling disaster. With Father dead, the shop sold and Mother with two
hundred pounds in the world, you’d have seen stretching out in front of you a kind of
fifteen-act tragedy, the last act being a pauper’s funeral. But now the war and the feeling
of not being one’s own master overshadowed everything. People hardly thought in terms
of things like bankruptcy and the workhouse any longer. This was the case even with
Mother, who, God knows, had only very dim notions about the war. Besides, she was
already dying, though neither of us knew it.
She came across to see me in the hospital at Eastbourne. It was over two years since I’d
seen her, and her appearance gave me a bit of a shock. She seemed to have faded and
somehow to have shrunken. Partly it was because by this time I was grown-up, I’d
travelled, and everything looked smaller to me, but there was no question that she’d got
thinner, and also yellower. She talked in the old rambling way about Aunt Martha (that
was the cousin she was staying with), and the changes in Fower Binfield since the war,
and all the boys who’d ‘gone’ (meaning joined the Anny), and her indigestion which was
‘aggravating’, and poor Father’s tombstone and what a lovely corpse he made. It was the
old talk, the talk I’d listened to for years, and yet somehow it was like a ghost talking. It
didn’t concern me any longer. I’d kn own her as a great splendid protecting kind of
creature, a bit like a ship’s figure-head and a bit like a broody hen, and after all she was
only a little old woman in a black dress. Everything was changing and fading. That was
the last time I saw her alive. I got the wire saying she was seriously ill when I was at the
training school at Colchester, and put in for a week’s urgent leave immediately. But it
was too late. She was dead by the time I got to Doxley. What she and everyone else had
imagined to be indigestion was some kind of internal growth, and a sudden chill on the
stomach put the final touch. The doctor tried to cheer me up by telling me that the growth
was ‘benevolent’, which struck me as a queer thing to call it, seeing that it had killed her.
Well, we buried her next to Father, and that was my last glimpse of Lower Binfield. It
had changed a lot, even in three years. Some of the shops were shut, some had different
names over them. Nearly all the men I’d known as boys were gone, and some of them
were dead. Sid Lovegrove was dead, killed on the Somme. Ginger Watson, the fann lad
who’d belonged to the Black Hand years ago, the one who used to catch rabbits alive,
was dead in Egypt. One of the chaps who’d worked with me at Grimmett’s had lost both
legs. Old Lovegrove had shut up his shop and was living in a cottage near Walton on a
tiny annuity. Old Grimmett, on the other hand, was doing well out of the war and had
turned patriotic and was a member of the local board which tried conscientious objectors.
The thing which more than anything else gave the town an empty, forlorn kind of look
was that there were practically no horses left. Every horse worth taking had been
commandeered long ago. The station fly still existed, but the brute that pulled it wouldn’t
have been able to stand up if it hadn’t been for the shafts. For the hour or so that I was
there before the funeral I wandered round the town, saying how d’you do to people and
showing off my uniform. Luckily I didn’t run into Elsie. I saw all the changes, and yet it
was as though I didn’t see them. My mind was on other things, chiefly the pleasure of
being seen in my second-loot’s unifonn, with my black armlet (a thing which looks rather
smart on khaki) and my new whipcord breeches. I distinctly remember that I was still
thinking about those whipcord breeches when we stood at the graveside. And then they
chucked some earth on to the coffin and I suddenly realized what it means for your
mother to be lying with seven feet of earth on top of her, and something kind of twitched
behind my eyes and nose, but even then the whipcord breeches weren’t altogether out of
my mind.
Don’t think I didn’t feel for Mother’s death. I did. I wasn’t in the trenches any longer, I
could feel sorry for a death. But the thing I didn’t care a damn about, didn’t even grasp to
be happening, was the passing-away of the old life I’d known. After the funeral, Aunt
Martha, who was rather proud of having a ‘real officer’ for a nephew and would have
made a splash of the funeral if I’d let her, went back to Doxley on the bus and I took the
fly down to the station, to get the train to London and then to Colchester. We drove past
the shop. No one had taken it since Father died. It was shut up and the window-pane was
black with dust, and they’d burned the ‘S. Bowling’ off the signboard with a plumber’s
blowflame. Well, there was the house where I’d been a child and a boy and a young man,
where I’d crawled about the kitchen floor and smelt the sainfoin and read ‘Donovan the
Dauntless’, where I’d done my homework for the Grammar School, mixed bread paste,
mended bicycle punctures, and tried on my first high collar. It had been as permanent to
me as the Pyramids, and now it would be just an accident if I ever set foot in it again.
Father, Mother, Joe, the errand boys, old Nailer the terrier, Spot, the one that came after
Nailer, Jackie the bullfinch, the cats, the mice in the loft — all gone, nothing left but dust.
And I didn’t care a damn. I was sorry Mother was dead, I was even sorry Father was
dead, but all the time my mind was on other things. I was a bit proud of being seen riding
in a cab, a thing I hadn’t yet got used to, and I was thinking of the sit of my new
whipcord breeches, and my nice smooth officer’s putties, so different from the gritty stuff
the Tommies had to wear, and of the other chaps at Colchester and the sixty quid Mother
had left and the beanos we’d have with it. Also I was thanking God that I hadn’t
happened to run into Elsie.
The war did extraordinary things to people. And what was more extraordinary than the
way it killed people was the way it sometimes didn’t kill them. It was like a great flood
rushing you along to death, and suddenly it would shoot you up some backwater where
you’d find yourself doing incredible and pointless things and drawing extra pay for them.
There were labour battalions making roads across the desert that didn’t lead anywhere,
there were chaps marooned on oceanic islands to look out for German cruisers which had
been sunk years earlier, there were Ministries of this and that with armies of clerks and
typists which went on existing years after their function had ended, by a kind of inertia.
People were shoved into meaningless jobs and then forgotten by the authorities for years
on end. This was what happened to myself, or very likely I wouldn’t be here. The whole
sequence of events is rather interesting.
A little while after I was gazetted there was a call for officers of the A. S. C. As soon as
the O. C. of the training camp heard that I knew something about the grocery trade (I
didn’t let on that I’d actually been behind the counter) he told me to send my name in.
That went through all right, and I was just about to leave for another training-school for
A. S. C. officers somewhere in the Midlands when there was a demand for a young officer,
with knowledge of the grocery trade, to act as some kind of secretary to Sir Joseph
Cheam, who was a big noise in the A. S. C. God knows why they picked me out, but at
any rate they did so. I’ve since thought that they probably mixed my name up with
somebody else’s. Three days later I was saluting in Sir Joseph’s office.
