I thought of the
lad that sometimes serves me at the chain-store grocery we deal at.
lad that sometimes serves me at the chain-store grocery we deal at.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
I’d just turned on some more hot water and was thinking about women
and cigars when there was a noise like a herd of buffaloes coming down the two steps
that lead to the bathroom. It was the kids, of course. Two kids in a house the size of ours
is like a quart of beer in a pint mug. There was a frantic stamping outside and then a yell
of agony.
‘Dadda! I wanna come in! ’
‘Well, you can’t. Clear out! ’
‘But dadda! I wanna go somewhere! ’
‘Go somewhere else, then. Hop it. I’m having my bath. ’
‘Dad-DA! I wanna GO SOME— WHERE! ’
No use! I knew the danger signal. The W. C. is in the bathroom — it would be, of course,
in a house like ours. I hooked the plug out of the bath and got partially dry as quickly as I
could. As I opened the door, little Billy — my youngest, aged seven — shot past me,
dodging the smack which I aimed at his head. It was only when I was nearly dressed and
looking for a tie that I discovered that my neck was still soapy.
It’s a rotten thing to have a soapy neck. It gives you a disgusting sticky feeling, and the
queer thing is that, however carefully you sponge it away, when you’ve once discovered
that your neck is soapy you feel sticky for the rest of the day. I went downstairs in a bad
temper and ready to make myself disagreeable.
Our dining-room, like the other dining-rooms in Ellesmere Road, is a poky little place,
fourteen feet by twelve, or maybe it’s twelve by ten, and the Japanese oak sideboard, with
the two empty decanters and the silver egg-stand that Hilda’s mother gave us for a
wedding present, doesn’t leave much room. Old Hilda was glooming behind the teapot, in
her usual state of alarm and dismay because the News Chronicle had announced that the
price of butter was going up, or something. She hadn’t lighted the gas-fire, and though
the windows were shut it was beastly cold. I bent down and put a match to the fire,
breathing rather loudly through my nose (bending always makes me puff and blow) as a
kind of hint to Hilda. She gave me the little sidelong glance that she always gives me
when she thinks I’m doing something extravagant.
Hilda is thirty-nine, and when I first knew her she looked just like a hare. So she does
still, but she’s got very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look
in her eyes, and when she’s more upset than usual she’s got a trick of humping her
shoulders and folding her anns across her breast, like an old gypsy woman over her fire.
She’s one of those people who get their main kick in life out of foreseeing disasters. Only
petty disasters, of course. As for wars, earthquakes, plagues, famines, and revolutions,
she pays no attention to them. Butter is going up, and the gas-bill is enormous, and the
kids’ boots are wearing out, and there’s another instalment due on the radio — that’s
Hilda’s litany. She gets what I’ve finally decided is a definite pleasure out of rocking
herself to and fro with her anns across her breast, and glooming at me, ‘But, George, it’s
very SERIOUS! I don’t know what we’re going to DO! I don’t kn ow where the money’s
coming from! You don’t seem to realize how serious it IS! ’ and so on and so forth. It’s
fixed firmly in her head that we shall end up in the workhouse. The funny thing is that if
we ever do get to the workhouse Hilda won’t mind it a quarter as much as I shall, in fact
she’ll probably rather enjoy the feeling of security.
The kids were downstairs already, having washed and dressed at lightning speed, as they
always do when there’s no chance to keep anyone else out of the bathroom. When I got to
the breakfast table they were having an argument which went to the tune of ‘Yes, you
did! ’ ‘No, I didn’t! ’ ‘Yes, you did! ’ ‘No, I didn’t! ’ and looked like going on for the rest
of the morning, until I told them to cheese it. There are only the two of them, Billy, aged
seven, and Lorna, aged eleven. It’s a peculiar feeling that I have towards the kids. A great
deal of the time I can hardly stick the sight of them. As for their conversation, it’s just
unbearable. They’re at that dreary bread-and-butter age when a kid’s mind revolves
round things like rulers, pencil-boxes, and who got top marks in French. At other times,
especially when they’re asleep, I have quite a different feeling. Sometimes I’ve stood
over their cots, on summer evenings when it’s light, and watched them sleeping, with
their round faces and their tow-coloured hair, several shades lighter than mine, and it’s
given me that feeling you read about in the Bible when it says your bowels yearn. At such
times I feel that I’m just a kind of dried-up seed-pod that doesn’t matter twopence and
that my sole importance has been to bring these creatures into the world and feed them
while they’re growing. But that’s only at moments. Most of the time my separate
existence looks pretty important to me, I feel that there’s life in the old dog yet and plenty
of good times ahead, and the notion of myself as a kind of tame dairy-cow for a lot of
women and kids to chase up and down doesn’t appeal to me.
We didn’t talk much at breakfast. Hilda was in her ‘I don’t know what we’re going to
DO! ’ mood, partly owing to the price of butter and partly because the Christmas holidays
were nearly over and there was still five pounds owing on the school fees for last term. I
ate my boiled egg and spread a piece of bread with Golden Crown marmalade. Hilda will
persist in buying the stuff. It’s fivepence-halfpenny a pound, and the label tells you, in the
smallest print the law allows, that it contains ‘a certain proportion of neutral fruit-juice’.
This started me off, in the rather irritating way I have sometimes, talking about neutral
fruit-trees, wondering what they looked like and what countries they grew in, until finally
Hilda got angry. It’s not that she minds me chipping her, it’s only that in some obscure
way she thinks it’s wicked to make jokes about anything you save money on.
I had a look at the paper, but there wasn’t much news. Down in Spain and over in China
they were murdering one another as usual, a woman’s legs had been found in a railway
waiting-room, and King Zog’s wedding was wavering in the balance. Finally, at about ten
o’clock, rather earlier than I’d intended, I started out for town. The kids had gone off to
play in the public gardens. It was a beastly raw morning. As I stepped out of the front
door a nasty little gust of wind caught the soapy patch on my neck and made me suddenly
feel that my clothes didn’t fit and that I was sticky all over.
2
Do you know the road I live in — Ellesmere Road, West Bletchley? Even if you don’t,
you know fifty others exactly like it.
You know how these streets fester all over the inner-outer suburbs. Always the same.
Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses — the numbers in Ellesmere Road run to
212 and ours is 191 — as much alike as council houses and generally uglier. The stucco
front, the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door. The Laurels, the Myrtles,
the Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue. At perhaps one house in fifty some
anti-social type who’ll probably end in the workhouse has painted his front door blue
instead of green.
That sticky feeling round my neck had put me into a demoralized kind of mood. It’s
curious how it gets you down to have a sticky neck. It seems to take all the bounce out of
you, like when you suddenly discover in a public place that the sole of one of your shoes
is coming off. I had no illusions about myself that morning. It was almost as if I could
stand at a distance and watch myself coming down the road, with my fat, red face and my
false teeth and my vulgar clothes. A chap like me is incapable of looking like a
gentleman. Even if you saw me at two hundred yards’ distance you’d know
immediately — not, perhaps, that I was in the insurance business, but that I was some kind
of tout or salesman. The clothes I was wearing were practically the uniform of the tribe.
Grey herring-bone suit, a bit the worse for wear, blue overcoat costing fifty shillings,
bowler hat, and no gloves. And I’ve got the look that’s peculiar to people who sell things
on commission, a kind of coarse, brazen look. At my best moments, when I’ve got a new
suit or when I’m smoking a cigar, I might pass for a bookie or a publican, and when
things are very bad I might be touting vacuum cleaners, but at ordinary times you’d place
me correctly. ‘Five to ten quid a week’, you’d say as soon as you saw me. Economically
and socially I’m about at the average level of Ellesmere Road.
I had the street pretty much to myself. The men had bunked to catch the 8. 21 and the
women were fiddling with the gas-stoves. When you’ve time to look about you, and
when you happen to be in the right mood, it’s a thing that makes you laugh inside to walk
down these streets in the inner-outer suburbs and to think of the lives that go on there.
Because, after all, what IS a road like Ellesmere Road? Just a prison with the cells all in a
row. A line of semidetached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten- pound-a-
weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and his wife
riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches. There’s a lot of
rot talked about the sufferings of the working class. I’m not so sorry for the proles
myself. Did you ever know a navvy who lay awake thinking about the sack? The prole
suffers physically, but he’s a free man when he isn’t working. But in every one of those
little stucco boxes there’s some poor bastard who’s NEVER free except when he’s fast
asleep and dreaming that he’s got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging
lumps of coal at him.
Of course, the basic trouble with people like us, I said to myself, is that we all imagine
we’ve got something to lose. To begin with, nine-tenths of the people in Ellesmere Road
are under the impression that they own their houses. Ellesmere Road, and the whole
quarter surrounding it, until you get to the High Street, is part of a huge racket called the
Hesperides Estate, the property of the Cheerful Credit Building Society. Building
societies are probably the cleverest racket of modem times. My own line, insurance, is a
swindle, I admit, but it’s an open swindle with the cards on the table. But the beauty of
the building society swindles is that your victims think you’re doing them a kindness.
You wallop them, and they lick your hand. I sometimes think I’d like to have the
Hesperides Estate surmounted by an enormous statue to the god of building societies. It
would be a queer sort of god. Among other things it would be bisexual. The top half
would be a managing director and the bottom half would be a wife in the family way. In
one hand it would carry an enormous key — the key of the workhouse, of course — and in
the other — what do they call those things like French horns with presents coming out of
them? — a cornucopia, out of which would be pouring portable radios, life- insurance
policies, false teeth, aspirins, French letters, and concrete garden rollers.
As a matter of fact, in Ellesmere Road we don’t own our houses, even when we’ve
finished paying for them. They’re not freehold, only leasehold. They’re priced at five-
fifty, payable over a period of sixteen years, and they’re a class of house, which, if you
bought them for cash down, would cost round about three-eighty. That represents a profit
of a hundred and seventy for the Cheerful Credit, but needless to say that Cheerful Credit
makes a lot more out of it than that. Three-eighty includes the builder’s profit, but the
Cheerful Credit, under the name of Wilson & Bloom, builds the houses itself and scoops
the builder’s profit. All it has to pay for is the materials. But it also scoops the profit on
the materials, because under the name of Brookes & Scatterby it sells itself the bricks,
tiles, doors, window-frames, sand, cement, and, I think, glass. And it wouldn’t altogether
surprise me to learn that under yet another alias it sells itself the timber to make the doors
and window-frames. Also — and this was something which we really might have foreseen,
though it gave us all a knock when we discovered it — the Cheerful Credit doesn’t always
keep to its end of the bargain. When Ellesmere Road was built it gave on some open
fields — nothing very wonderful, but good for the kids to play in — known as Platt’s
Meadows. There was nothing in black and white, but it had always been understood that
Platt’s Meadows weren’t to be built on. However, West Bletchley was a growing suburb,
Rothwell’s jam factory had opened in ‘28 and the Anglo-American All-Steel Bicycle
factory started in ‘33, and the population was increasing and rents were going up. I’ve
never seen Sir Herbert Crum or any other of the big noises of the Cheerful Credit in the
flesh, but in my mind’s eye I could see their mouths watering. Suddenly the builders
arrived and houses began to go up on Platt’s Meadows. There was a howl of agony from
the Hesperides, and a tenants’ defence association was set up. No use! Crum’s lawyers
had knocked the stuffing out of us in five minutes, and Platt’s Meadows were built over.
But the really subtle swindle, the one that makes me feel old Crum deserved his
baronetcy, is the mental one. Merely because of the illusion that we own our houses and
have what’s called ‘a stake in the country’, we poor saps in the Hesperides, and in all
such places, are turned into Crum’s devoted slaves for ever. We’re all respectable
householders — that’s to say Tories, yes-men, and bumsuckers. Daren’t kill the goose that
lays the gilded eggs! And the fact that actually we aren’t householders, that we’re all in
the middle of paying for our houses and eaten up with the ghastly fear that something
might happen before we’ve made the last payment, merely increases the effect. We’re all
bought, and what’s more we’re bought with our own money. Every one of those poor
downtrodden bastards, sweating his guts out to pay twice the proper price for a brick
doll’s house that’s called Belle Vue because there’s no view and the bell doesn’t ring —
every one of those poor suckers would die on the field of battle to save his country from
Bolshevism.
1 turned down Walpole Road and got into the High Street. There’s a train to London at
10. 14. 1 was just passing the Sixpenny Bazaar when 1 remembered the mental note I’d
made that morning to buy a packet of razor-blades. When I got to the soap counter the
floor- manager, or whatever his proper title is, was cursing the girl in charge there.
Generally there aren’t many people in the Sixpenny at that hour of the morning.
Sometimes if you go in just after opening-time you see all the girls lined up in a row and
given their morning curse, just to get them into trim for the day. They say these big
chain-stores have chaps with special powers of sarcasm and abuse who are sent from
branch to branch to ginger the girls up. The floor-manager was an ugly little devil, under-
sized, with very square shoulders and a spiky grey moustache. He’d just pounced on her
about something, some mistake in the change evidently, and was going for her with a
voice like a circular saw.
‘Ho, no! Course you couldn’t count it! COURSE you couldn’t. Too much trouble, that’d
be. Ho, no! ’
Before I could stop myself I’d caught the girl’s eye. It wasn’t so nice for her to have a fat
middle-aged bloke with a red face looking on while she took her cursing. I turned away
as quickly as I could and pretended to be interested in some stuff at the next counter,
curtain rings or something. He was on to her again. He was one of those people who turn
away and then suddenly dart back at you, like a dragon-fly.
‘COURSE you couldn’t count it! Doesn’t matter to YOU if we’re two bob out. Doesn’t
matter at all. What’s two bob to YOU? Couldn’t ask YOU to go to the trouble of
counting it properly. Ho, no! Nothing matters ‘ere ‘cept YOUR convenience. You don’t
think about others, do you? ’
This went on for about five minutes in a voice you could hear half across the shop. He
kept turning away to make her think he’d finished with her and then darting back to have
another go. As I edged a bit farther off I had a glance at them. The girl was a kid about
eighteen, rather fat, with a sort of moony face, the kind that would never get the change
right anyway. She’d turned pale pink and she was wriggling, actually wriggling with
pain. It was just the same as if he’d been cutting into her with a whip. The girls at the
other counters were pretending not to hear. He was an ugly, stiff-built little devil, the sort
of cock-sparrow type of man that sticks his chest out and puts his hands under his
coattails — the type that’d be a sergeant-major only they aren’t tall enough. Do you notice
how often they have under-sized men for these bullying jobs? He was sticking his face,
moustaches and all, almost into hers so as to scream at her better. And the girl all pink
and wriggling.
Finally he decided that he’d said enough and strutted off like an admiral on the quarter-
deck, and I came up to the counter for my razor-blades. He knew I’d heard every word,
and so did she, and both of them knew I knew they knew. But the worst of it was that for
my benefit she’d got to pretend that nothing had happened and put on the standoffish
keep-your-distance attitude that a shopgirl’s supposed to keep up with male customers.
Had to act the grown-up young lady half a minute after I’d seen her cursed like a skivvy!
Her face was still pink and her hands were trembling. I asked her for penny blades and
she started fumbling in the threepenny tray. Then the little devil of a floor-manager
turned our way and for a moment both of us thought he was coming back to begin again.
The girl flinched like a dog that sees the whip. But she was looking at me out of the
comer of her eye. I could see that because I’d seen her cursed she hated me like the devil.
Queer!
I cleared out with my razor-blades. Why do they stand it? I was thinking. Pure funk, of
course. One back-answer and you get the sack. It’s the same everywhere.
I thought of the
lad that sometimes serves me at the chain-store grocery we deal at. A great hefty lump of
twenty, with cheeks like roses and enormous fore- arms, ought to be working in a
blacksmith’s shop. And there he is in his white jacket, bent double across the counter,
rubbing his hands together with his ‘Yes, sir! Very true, sir! Pleasant weather for the time
of the year, sir! What can I have the pleasure of getting you today, sir? ’ practically asking
you to kick his bum. Orders, of course. The customer is always right. The thing you can
see in his face is mortal dread that you might report him for impertinence and get him
sacked. Besides, how’s he to know you aren’t one of the narks the company sends round?
Fear! We swim in it. It’s our element. Everyone that isn’t scared stiff of losing his job is
scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something. Jews sweating when they
think of Hitler. It crossed my mind that that little bastard with the spiky moustache was
probably a damn sight more scared for his job than the girl was. Probably got a family to
support. And perhaps, who knows, at home he’s meek and mild, grows cucumbers in the
back garden, lets his wife sit on him and the kids pull his moustache. And by the same
token you never read about a Spanish Inquisitor or one of these higher-ups in the Russian
Ogpu without being told that in private life he was such a good kind man, best of
husbands and fathers, devoted to his tame canary, and so forth.
The girl at the soap counter was looking after me as I went out of the door. She’d have
murdered me if she could. How she hated me because of what I’d seen! Much more than
she hated the floor- manager.
3
There was a bombing plane flying low overhead. For a minute or two it seemed to be
keeping pace with the train. Two vulgar kind of blokes in shabby overcoats, obviously
commercials of the lowest type, newspaper canvassers probably, were sitting opposite
me. One of them was reading the Mail and the other was reading the Express. I could see
by their manner that they’d spotted me for one of their kind. Up at the other end of the
carriage two lawyers’ clerks with black bags were keeping up a conversation full of legal
baloney that was meant to impress the rest of us and show that they didn’t belong to the
common herd.
I was watching the backs of the houses sliding past. The line from West Bletchley runs
most of the way through slums, but it’s kind of peaceful, the glimpses you get of little
backyards with bits of flowers stuck in boxes and the flat roofs where the women peg out
the washing and the bird-cage on the wall. The great black bombing plane swayed a little
in the air and zoomed ahead so that I couldn’t see it. I was sitting with my back to the
engine. One of the commercials cocked his eye at it for just a second. I knew what he was
thinking. For that matter it’s what everybody else is thinking. You don’t have to be a
highbrow to think such thoughts nowadays. In two years’ time, one year’s time, what
shall we be doing when we see one of those things? Making a dive for the cellar, wetting
our bags with fright.
The commercial bloke put down his Daily Mail.
‘Templegate’s winner come in,’ he said.
The lawyers’ clerks were sprouting some learned rot about fee- simple and peppercorns.
The other commercial felt in his waistcoat pocket and took out a bent Woodbine. He felt
in the other pocket and then leaned across to me.
‘Got a match, Tubby? ’
I felt for my matches. ‘Tubby’, you notice. That’s interesting, really. For about a couple
of minutes I stopped thinking about bombs and began thinking about my figure as I’d
studied it in my bath that morning.
It’s quite true I’m tubby, in fact my upper half is almost exactly the shape of a tub. But
what’s interesting, I think, is that merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost
anyone, even a total, stranger, will take it for granted to give you a nickname that’s an
insulting comment on your personal appearance. Suppose a chap was a hunchback or had
a squint or a hare-lip — would you give him a nickname to remind him of it? But every fat
man’s labelled as a matter of course. I’m the type that people automatically slap on the
back and punch in the ribs, and nearly all of them think I like it. I never go into the saloon
bar of the Crown at Pudley (I pass that way once a week on business) without that ass
Waters, who travels for the Seafoam Soap people but who’s more or less a permanency in
the saloon bar of the Crown, prodding me in the ribs and singing out ‘Here a sheer hulk
lies poor Tom Bowling! ’ which is a joke the bloody fools in the bar never get tired of.
Waters has got a linger like a bar of iron. They all think a fat man doesn’t have any
feelings.
The commercial took another of my matches, to pick his teeth with, and chucked the box
back. The train whizzed on to an iron bridge. Down below I got a glimpse of a baker’s
van and a long string of lorries loaded with cement. The queer thing, I was thinking, is
that in a way they’re right about fat men. It’s a fact that a fat man, particularly a man
who’s been fat from birth — from childhood, that’s to say — isn’t quite like other men. He
goes through his life on a different plane, a sort of light-comedy plane, though in the case
of blokes in side-shows at fairs, or in fact anyone over twenty stone, it isn’t so much light
comedy as low farce. I’ve been both fat and thin in my life, and I know the difference
fatness makes to your outlook. It kind of prevents you from taking things too hard. I
doubt whether a man who’s never been anything but fat, a man who’s been called Fatty
ever since he could walk, even knows of the existence of any really deep emotions. How
could he? He’s got no experience of such things. He can’t ever be present at a tragic
scene, because a scene where there’s a fat man present isn’t tragic, it’s comic. Just
imagine a fat Hamlet, for instance! Or Oliver Hardy acting Romeo. Funnily enough I’d
been thinking something of the kind only a few days earlier when I was reading a novel
I’d got out of Boots. Wasted Passion, it was called. The chap in the story finds out that
his girl has gone off with another chap. He’s one of these chaps you read about in novels,
that have pale sensitive faces and dark hair and a private income. I remember more or
less how the passage went:
David paced up and down the room, his hands pressed to his forehead. The news seemed
to have stunned him. For a long time he could not believe it. Sheila untrue to him! It
could not be! Suddenly realization rushed over him, and he saw the fact in all its stark
horror. It was too much. He flung himself down in a paroxysm of weeping.
Anyway, it went something like that. And even at the time it started me thinking. There
you have it, you see. That’s how people — some people — are expected to behave. But how
about a chap like me? Suppose Hilda went off for a week-end with somebody else- -not
that I’d care a damn, in fact it would rather please me to find that she’d still got that much
kick left in her — but suppose I did care, would I fling myself down in a paroxysm of
weeping? Would anyone expect me to? You couldn’t, with a figure like mine. It would be
downright obscene.
The train was running along an embankment. A little below us you could see the roofs of
the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a
bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them. Funny how
we keep on thinking about bombs. Of course there’s no question that it’s coming soon.
You can tell how close it is by the cheer- up stuff they’re talking about it in the
newspaper. I was reading a piece in the News Chronicle the other day where it said that
bombing planes can’t do any damage nowadays. The anti-aircraft guns have got so good
that the bomber has to stay at twenty thousand feet. The chap thinks, you notice, that if an
aeroplane’s high enough the bombs don’t reach the ground. Or more likely what he really
meant was that they’ll miss Woolwich Arsenal and only hit places like Ellesmere Road.
But taking it by and large, I thought, it’s not so bad to be fat. One thing about a fat man is
that he’s always popular. There’s really no kind of company, from bookies to bishops,
where a fat man doesn’t fit in and feel at home. As for women, fat men have more luck
with them than people seem to think. It’s all bu nk to imagine, as some people do, that a
woman looks on a fat man as just a joke. The truth is that a woman doesn’t look on ANY
man as a joke if he can kid her that he’s in love with her.
Mind you, I haven’t always been fat. I’ve been fat for eight or nine years, and I suppose
I’ve developed most of the characteristics. But it’s also a fact that internally, mentally,
I’m not altogether fat. No! Don’t mistake me. I’m not trying to put myself over as a kind
of tender flower, the aching heart behind the smiling face and so forth. You couldn’t get
on in the insurance business if you were anything like that. I’m vulgar, I’m insensitive,
and I fit in with my environment. So long as anywhere in the world things are being sold
on commission and livings are picked up by sheer brass and lack of finer feelings, chaps
like me will be doing it. In almost all circumstances I’d manage to make a living — always
a living and never a fortune — and even in war, revolution, plague, and famine I’d back
myself to stay alive longer than most people. I’m that type. But also I’ve got something
else inside me, chiefly a hangover from the past. I’ll tell you about that later. I’m fat, but
I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as
they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?
The chap who’d borrowed my matches was having a good pick at his teeth over the
Express.
‘Legs case don’t seem to get much forrader,’ he said.
‘They’ll never get ‘im,’ said the other. “Ow could you identify a pair of legs? They’re all
the bleeding same, aren’t they? ’
‘Might trace ‘im through the piece of paper ‘e wrapped ‘em up in,’ said the first.
Down below you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, twisting this way
and that with the streets, but stretching on and on, like an enormous plain that you could
have ridden over. Whichever way you cross London it’s twenty miles of houses almost
without a break. Christ! how can the bombers miss us when they come? We’re just one
great big bull’s-eye. And no warning, probably. Because who’s going to be such a bloody
fool as to declare war nowadays? If I was Hitler I’d send my bombers across in the
middle of a disarmament conference. Some quiet morning, when the clerks are streaming
across London Bridge, and the canary’s singing, and the old woman’s pegging the
bloomers on the line — zoom, whizz, plonk! Houses going up into the air, bloomers
soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses.
Seems a pity somehow, I thought. I looked at the great sea of roofs stretching on and on.
Miles and miles of streets, fried-fish shops, tin chapels, picture houses, little printing-
shops up back alleys, factories, blocks of flats, whelk stalls, dairies, power stations — on
and on and on. Enormous! And the peacefulness of it! Like a great wilderness with no
wild beasts. No guns firing, nobody chucking pineapples, nobody beating anybody else
up with a rubber truncheon. If you come to think of it, in the whole of England at this
moment there probably isn’t a single bedroom window from which anyone’s firing a
machine-gun.
But how about five years from now? Or two years? Or one year?
4
I’d dropped my papers at the office. Warner is one of these cheap American dentists, and
he has his consulting-room, or ‘parlour’ as he likes to call it, halfway up a big block of
offices, between a photographer and a rubber-goods wholesaler. I was early for my
appointment, but it was time for a bit of grub. I don’t know what put it into my head to go
into a milk-bar. They’re places I generally avoid. We five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers aren’t
well served in the way of eating-places in London. If your idea of the amount to spend on
a meal is one and threepence, it’s either Lyons, the Express Dairy, or the A. B. C. , or else
it’s the kind of funeral snack they serve you in the saloon bar, a pint of bitter and a slab of
cold pie, so cold that it’s colder than the beer. Outside the milk-bar the boys were yelling
the first editions of the evening papers.
Behind the bright red counter a girl in a tall white cap was fiddling with an ice-box, and
somewhere at the back a radio was playing, plonk-tiddle-tiddle-plonk, a kind of tinny
sound. Why the hell am I coming here? I thought to myself as I went in. There’s a kind of
atmosphere about these places that gets me down. Everything slick and shiny and
streamlined; mirrors, enamel, and chromium plate whichever direction you look in.
Everything spent on the decorations and nothing on the food. No real food at all. Just lists
of stuff with American names, sort of phantom stuff that you can’t taste and can hardly
believe in the existence of. Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it’s hauled out of
a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube. No comfort, no privacy.
Tall stools to sit on, a kind of narrow ledge to eat off, mirrors all round you. A sort of
propaganda floating round, mixed up with the noise of the radio, to the effect that food
doesn’t matter, comfort doesn’t matter, nothing matters except slickness and shininess
and streamlining. Everything’s streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler’s keeping
for you. I ordered a large coffee and a couple of frankfurters. The girl in the white cap
jerked them at me with about as much interest as you’d throw ants’ eggs to a goldfish.
Outside the door a newsboy yelled ‘StarnoosstanNERD! ’ I saw the poster flapping
against his knees: LEGS. FRESH DISCOVERIES. Just Tegs’, you notice. It had got
down to that. Two days earlier they’d found a woman’s legs in a railway waiting-room,
done up in a brown-paper parcel, and what with successive editions of the papers, the
whole nation was supposed to be so passionately interested in these blasted legs that they
didn’t need any further introduction. They were the only legs that were news at the
moment. It’s queer, I thought, as I ate a bit of roll, how dull the murders are getting
nowadays. All this cutting people up and leaving bits of them about the countryside. Not
a patch on the old domestic poisoning dramas, Crippen, Seddon, Mrs Maybrick; the truth
being, I suppose, that you can’t do a good murder unless you believe you’re going to
roast in hell for it.
At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and — Christ!
I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to
taste of nothing, like the roll. But this — well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and
describe it to you.
The fra nk furter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a
fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin.
And then suddenly — pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of
horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just
couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was
FISH!
and cigars when there was a noise like a herd of buffaloes coming down the two steps
that lead to the bathroom. It was the kids, of course. Two kids in a house the size of ours
is like a quart of beer in a pint mug. There was a frantic stamping outside and then a yell
of agony.
‘Dadda! I wanna come in! ’
‘Well, you can’t. Clear out! ’
‘But dadda! I wanna go somewhere! ’
‘Go somewhere else, then. Hop it. I’m having my bath. ’
‘Dad-DA! I wanna GO SOME— WHERE! ’
No use! I knew the danger signal. The W. C. is in the bathroom — it would be, of course,
in a house like ours. I hooked the plug out of the bath and got partially dry as quickly as I
could. As I opened the door, little Billy — my youngest, aged seven — shot past me,
dodging the smack which I aimed at his head. It was only when I was nearly dressed and
looking for a tie that I discovered that my neck was still soapy.
It’s a rotten thing to have a soapy neck. It gives you a disgusting sticky feeling, and the
queer thing is that, however carefully you sponge it away, when you’ve once discovered
that your neck is soapy you feel sticky for the rest of the day. I went downstairs in a bad
temper and ready to make myself disagreeable.
Our dining-room, like the other dining-rooms in Ellesmere Road, is a poky little place,
fourteen feet by twelve, or maybe it’s twelve by ten, and the Japanese oak sideboard, with
the two empty decanters and the silver egg-stand that Hilda’s mother gave us for a
wedding present, doesn’t leave much room. Old Hilda was glooming behind the teapot, in
her usual state of alarm and dismay because the News Chronicle had announced that the
price of butter was going up, or something. She hadn’t lighted the gas-fire, and though
the windows were shut it was beastly cold. I bent down and put a match to the fire,
breathing rather loudly through my nose (bending always makes me puff and blow) as a
kind of hint to Hilda. She gave me the little sidelong glance that she always gives me
when she thinks I’m doing something extravagant.
Hilda is thirty-nine, and when I first knew her she looked just like a hare. So she does
still, but she’s got very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look
in her eyes, and when she’s more upset than usual she’s got a trick of humping her
shoulders and folding her anns across her breast, like an old gypsy woman over her fire.
She’s one of those people who get their main kick in life out of foreseeing disasters. Only
petty disasters, of course. As for wars, earthquakes, plagues, famines, and revolutions,
she pays no attention to them. Butter is going up, and the gas-bill is enormous, and the
kids’ boots are wearing out, and there’s another instalment due on the radio — that’s
Hilda’s litany. She gets what I’ve finally decided is a definite pleasure out of rocking
herself to and fro with her anns across her breast, and glooming at me, ‘But, George, it’s
very SERIOUS! I don’t know what we’re going to DO! I don’t kn ow where the money’s
coming from! You don’t seem to realize how serious it IS! ’ and so on and so forth. It’s
fixed firmly in her head that we shall end up in the workhouse. The funny thing is that if
we ever do get to the workhouse Hilda won’t mind it a quarter as much as I shall, in fact
she’ll probably rather enjoy the feeling of security.
The kids were downstairs already, having washed and dressed at lightning speed, as they
always do when there’s no chance to keep anyone else out of the bathroom. When I got to
the breakfast table they were having an argument which went to the tune of ‘Yes, you
did! ’ ‘No, I didn’t! ’ ‘Yes, you did! ’ ‘No, I didn’t! ’ and looked like going on for the rest
of the morning, until I told them to cheese it. There are only the two of them, Billy, aged
seven, and Lorna, aged eleven. It’s a peculiar feeling that I have towards the kids. A great
deal of the time I can hardly stick the sight of them. As for their conversation, it’s just
unbearable. They’re at that dreary bread-and-butter age when a kid’s mind revolves
round things like rulers, pencil-boxes, and who got top marks in French. At other times,
especially when they’re asleep, I have quite a different feeling. Sometimes I’ve stood
over their cots, on summer evenings when it’s light, and watched them sleeping, with
their round faces and their tow-coloured hair, several shades lighter than mine, and it’s
given me that feeling you read about in the Bible when it says your bowels yearn. At such
times I feel that I’m just a kind of dried-up seed-pod that doesn’t matter twopence and
that my sole importance has been to bring these creatures into the world and feed them
while they’re growing. But that’s only at moments. Most of the time my separate
existence looks pretty important to me, I feel that there’s life in the old dog yet and plenty
of good times ahead, and the notion of myself as a kind of tame dairy-cow for a lot of
women and kids to chase up and down doesn’t appeal to me.
We didn’t talk much at breakfast. Hilda was in her ‘I don’t know what we’re going to
DO! ’ mood, partly owing to the price of butter and partly because the Christmas holidays
were nearly over and there was still five pounds owing on the school fees for last term. I
ate my boiled egg and spread a piece of bread with Golden Crown marmalade. Hilda will
persist in buying the stuff. It’s fivepence-halfpenny a pound, and the label tells you, in the
smallest print the law allows, that it contains ‘a certain proportion of neutral fruit-juice’.
This started me off, in the rather irritating way I have sometimes, talking about neutral
fruit-trees, wondering what they looked like and what countries they grew in, until finally
Hilda got angry. It’s not that she minds me chipping her, it’s only that in some obscure
way she thinks it’s wicked to make jokes about anything you save money on.
I had a look at the paper, but there wasn’t much news. Down in Spain and over in China
they were murdering one another as usual, a woman’s legs had been found in a railway
waiting-room, and King Zog’s wedding was wavering in the balance. Finally, at about ten
o’clock, rather earlier than I’d intended, I started out for town. The kids had gone off to
play in the public gardens. It was a beastly raw morning. As I stepped out of the front
door a nasty little gust of wind caught the soapy patch on my neck and made me suddenly
feel that my clothes didn’t fit and that I was sticky all over.
2
Do you know the road I live in — Ellesmere Road, West Bletchley? Even if you don’t,
you know fifty others exactly like it.
You know how these streets fester all over the inner-outer suburbs. Always the same.
Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses — the numbers in Ellesmere Road run to
212 and ours is 191 — as much alike as council houses and generally uglier. The stucco
front, the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door. The Laurels, the Myrtles,
the Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue. At perhaps one house in fifty some
anti-social type who’ll probably end in the workhouse has painted his front door blue
instead of green.
That sticky feeling round my neck had put me into a demoralized kind of mood. It’s
curious how it gets you down to have a sticky neck. It seems to take all the bounce out of
you, like when you suddenly discover in a public place that the sole of one of your shoes
is coming off. I had no illusions about myself that morning. It was almost as if I could
stand at a distance and watch myself coming down the road, with my fat, red face and my
false teeth and my vulgar clothes. A chap like me is incapable of looking like a
gentleman. Even if you saw me at two hundred yards’ distance you’d know
immediately — not, perhaps, that I was in the insurance business, but that I was some kind
of tout or salesman. The clothes I was wearing were practically the uniform of the tribe.
Grey herring-bone suit, a bit the worse for wear, blue overcoat costing fifty shillings,
bowler hat, and no gloves. And I’ve got the look that’s peculiar to people who sell things
on commission, a kind of coarse, brazen look. At my best moments, when I’ve got a new
suit or when I’m smoking a cigar, I might pass for a bookie or a publican, and when
things are very bad I might be touting vacuum cleaners, but at ordinary times you’d place
me correctly. ‘Five to ten quid a week’, you’d say as soon as you saw me. Economically
and socially I’m about at the average level of Ellesmere Road.
I had the street pretty much to myself. The men had bunked to catch the 8. 21 and the
women were fiddling with the gas-stoves. When you’ve time to look about you, and
when you happen to be in the right mood, it’s a thing that makes you laugh inside to walk
down these streets in the inner-outer suburbs and to think of the lives that go on there.
Because, after all, what IS a road like Ellesmere Road? Just a prison with the cells all in a
row. A line of semidetached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten- pound-a-
weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and his wife
riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches. There’s a lot of
rot talked about the sufferings of the working class. I’m not so sorry for the proles
myself. Did you ever know a navvy who lay awake thinking about the sack? The prole
suffers physically, but he’s a free man when he isn’t working. But in every one of those
little stucco boxes there’s some poor bastard who’s NEVER free except when he’s fast
asleep and dreaming that he’s got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging
lumps of coal at him.
Of course, the basic trouble with people like us, I said to myself, is that we all imagine
we’ve got something to lose. To begin with, nine-tenths of the people in Ellesmere Road
are under the impression that they own their houses. Ellesmere Road, and the whole
quarter surrounding it, until you get to the High Street, is part of a huge racket called the
Hesperides Estate, the property of the Cheerful Credit Building Society. Building
societies are probably the cleverest racket of modem times. My own line, insurance, is a
swindle, I admit, but it’s an open swindle with the cards on the table. But the beauty of
the building society swindles is that your victims think you’re doing them a kindness.
You wallop them, and they lick your hand. I sometimes think I’d like to have the
Hesperides Estate surmounted by an enormous statue to the god of building societies. It
would be a queer sort of god. Among other things it would be bisexual. The top half
would be a managing director and the bottom half would be a wife in the family way. In
one hand it would carry an enormous key — the key of the workhouse, of course — and in
the other — what do they call those things like French horns with presents coming out of
them? — a cornucopia, out of which would be pouring portable radios, life- insurance
policies, false teeth, aspirins, French letters, and concrete garden rollers.
As a matter of fact, in Ellesmere Road we don’t own our houses, even when we’ve
finished paying for them. They’re not freehold, only leasehold. They’re priced at five-
fifty, payable over a period of sixteen years, and they’re a class of house, which, if you
bought them for cash down, would cost round about three-eighty. That represents a profit
of a hundred and seventy for the Cheerful Credit, but needless to say that Cheerful Credit
makes a lot more out of it than that. Three-eighty includes the builder’s profit, but the
Cheerful Credit, under the name of Wilson & Bloom, builds the houses itself and scoops
the builder’s profit. All it has to pay for is the materials. But it also scoops the profit on
the materials, because under the name of Brookes & Scatterby it sells itself the bricks,
tiles, doors, window-frames, sand, cement, and, I think, glass. And it wouldn’t altogether
surprise me to learn that under yet another alias it sells itself the timber to make the doors
and window-frames. Also — and this was something which we really might have foreseen,
though it gave us all a knock when we discovered it — the Cheerful Credit doesn’t always
keep to its end of the bargain. When Ellesmere Road was built it gave on some open
fields — nothing very wonderful, but good for the kids to play in — known as Platt’s
Meadows. There was nothing in black and white, but it had always been understood that
Platt’s Meadows weren’t to be built on. However, West Bletchley was a growing suburb,
Rothwell’s jam factory had opened in ‘28 and the Anglo-American All-Steel Bicycle
factory started in ‘33, and the population was increasing and rents were going up. I’ve
never seen Sir Herbert Crum or any other of the big noises of the Cheerful Credit in the
flesh, but in my mind’s eye I could see their mouths watering. Suddenly the builders
arrived and houses began to go up on Platt’s Meadows. There was a howl of agony from
the Hesperides, and a tenants’ defence association was set up. No use! Crum’s lawyers
had knocked the stuffing out of us in five minutes, and Platt’s Meadows were built over.
But the really subtle swindle, the one that makes me feel old Crum deserved his
baronetcy, is the mental one. Merely because of the illusion that we own our houses and
have what’s called ‘a stake in the country’, we poor saps in the Hesperides, and in all
such places, are turned into Crum’s devoted slaves for ever. We’re all respectable
householders — that’s to say Tories, yes-men, and bumsuckers. Daren’t kill the goose that
lays the gilded eggs! And the fact that actually we aren’t householders, that we’re all in
the middle of paying for our houses and eaten up with the ghastly fear that something
might happen before we’ve made the last payment, merely increases the effect. We’re all
bought, and what’s more we’re bought with our own money. Every one of those poor
downtrodden bastards, sweating his guts out to pay twice the proper price for a brick
doll’s house that’s called Belle Vue because there’s no view and the bell doesn’t ring —
every one of those poor suckers would die on the field of battle to save his country from
Bolshevism.
1 turned down Walpole Road and got into the High Street. There’s a train to London at
10. 14. 1 was just passing the Sixpenny Bazaar when 1 remembered the mental note I’d
made that morning to buy a packet of razor-blades. When I got to the soap counter the
floor- manager, or whatever his proper title is, was cursing the girl in charge there.
Generally there aren’t many people in the Sixpenny at that hour of the morning.
Sometimes if you go in just after opening-time you see all the girls lined up in a row and
given their morning curse, just to get them into trim for the day. They say these big
chain-stores have chaps with special powers of sarcasm and abuse who are sent from
branch to branch to ginger the girls up. The floor-manager was an ugly little devil, under-
sized, with very square shoulders and a spiky grey moustache. He’d just pounced on her
about something, some mistake in the change evidently, and was going for her with a
voice like a circular saw.
‘Ho, no! Course you couldn’t count it! COURSE you couldn’t. Too much trouble, that’d
be. Ho, no! ’
Before I could stop myself I’d caught the girl’s eye. It wasn’t so nice for her to have a fat
middle-aged bloke with a red face looking on while she took her cursing. I turned away
as quickly as I could and pretended to be interested in some stuff at the next counter,
curtain rings or something. He was on to her again. He was one of those people who turn
away and then suddenly dart back at you, like a dragon-fly.
‘COURSE you couldn’t count it! Doesn’t matter to YOU if we’re two bob out. Doesn’t
matter at all. What’s two bob to YOU? Couldn’t ask YOU to go to the trouble of
counting it properly. Ho, no! Nothing matters ‘ere ‘cept YOUR convenience. You don’t
think about others, do you? ’
This went on for about five minutes in a voice you could hear half across the shop. He
kept turning away to make her think he’d finished with her and then darting back to have
another go. As I edged a bit farther off I had a glance at them. The girl was a kid about
eighteen, rather fat, with a sort of moony face, the kind that would never get the change
right anyway. She’d turned pale pink and she was wriggling, actually wriggling with
pain. It was just the same as if he’d been cutting into her with a whip. The girls at the
other counters were pretending not to hear. He was an ugly, stiff-built little devil, the sort
of cock-sparrow type of man that sticks his chest out and puts his hands under his
coattails — the type that’d be a sergeant-major only they aren’t tall enough. Do you notice
how often they have under-sized men for these bullying jobs? He was sticking his face,
moustaches and all, almost into hers so as to scream at her better. And the girl all pink
and wriggling.
Finally he decided that he’d said enough and strutted off like an admiral on the quarter-
deck, and I came up to the counter for my razor-blades. He knew I’d heard every word,
and so did she, and both of them knew I knew they knew. But the worst of it was that for
my benefit she’d got to pretend that nothing had happened and put on the standoffish
keep-your-distance attitude that a shopgirl’s supposed to keep up with male customers.
Had to act the grown-up young lady half a minute after I’d seen her cursed like a skivvy!
Her face was still pink and her hands were trembling. I asked her for penny blades and
she started fumbling in the threepenny tray. Then the little devil of a floor-manager
turned our way and for a moment both of us thought he was coming back to begin again.
The girl flinched like a dog that sees the whip. But she was looking at me out of the
comer of her eye. I could see that because I’d seen her cursed she hated me like the devil.
Queer!
I cleared out with my razor-blades. Why do they stand it? I was thinking. Pure funk, of
course. One back-answer and you get the sack. It’s the same everywhere.
I thought of the
lad that sometimes serves me at the chain-store grocery we deal at. A great hefty lump of
twenty, with cheeks like roses and enormous fore- arms, ought to be working in a
blacksmith’s shop. And there he is in his white jacket, bent double across the counter,
rubbing his hands together with his ‘Yes, sir! Very true, sir! Pleasant weather for the time
of the year, sir! What can I have the pleasure of getting you today, sir? ’ practically asking
you to kick his bum. Orders, of course. The customer is always right. The thing you can
see in his face is mortal dread that you might report him for impertinence and get him
sacked. Besides, how’s he to know you aren’t one of the narks the company sends round?
Fear! We swim in it. It’s our element. Everyone that isn’t scared stiff of losing his job is
scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something. Jews sweating when they
think of Hitler. It crossed my mind that that little bastard with the spiky moustache was
probably a damn sight more scared for his job than the girl was. Probably got a family to
support. And perhaps, who knows, at home he’s meek and mild, grows cucumbers in the
back garden, lets his wife sit on him and the kids pull his moustache. And by the same
token you never read about a Spanish Inquisitor or one of these higher-ups in the Russian
Ogpu without being told that in private life he was such a good kind man, best of
husbands and fathers, devoted to his tame canary, and so forth.
The girl at the soap counter was looking after me as I went out of the door. She’d have
murdered me if she could. How she hated me because of what I’d seen! Much more than
she hated the floor- manager.
3
There was a bombing plane flying low overhead. For a minute or two it seemed to be
keeping pace with the train. Two vulgar kind of blokes in shabby overcoats, obviously
commercials of the lowest type, newspaper canvassers probably, were sitting opposite
me. One of them was reading the Mail and the other was reading the Express. I could see
by their manner that they’d spotted me for one of their kind. Up at the other end of the
carriage two lawyers’ clerks with black bags were keeping up a conversation full of legal
baloney that was meant to impress the rest of us and show that they didn’t belong to the
common herd.
I was watching the backs of the houses sliding past. The line from West Bletchley runs
most of the way through slums, but it’s kind of peaceful, the glimpses you get of little
backyards with bits of flowers stuck in boxes and the flat roofs where the women peg out
the washing and the bird-cage on the wall. The great black bombing plane swayed a little
in the air and zoomed ahead so that I couldn’t see it. I was sitting with my back to the
engine. One of the commercials cocked his eye at it for just a second. I knew what he was
thinking. For that matter it’s what everybody else is thinking. You don’t have to be a
highbrow to think such thoughts nowadays. In two years’ time, one year’s time, what
shall we be doing when we see one of those things? Making a dive for the cellar, wetting
our bags with fright.
The commercial bloke put down his Daily Mail.
‘Templegate’s winner come in,’ he said.
The lawyers’ clerks were sprouting some learned rot about fee- simple and peppercorns.
The other commercial felt in his waistcoat pocket and took out a bent Woodbine. He felt
in the other pocket and then leaned across to me.
‘Got a match, Tubby? ’
I felt for my matches. ‘Tubby’, you notice. That’s interesting, really. For about a couple
of minutes I stopped thinking about bombs and began thinking about my figure as I’d
studied it in my bath that morning.
It’s quite true I’m tubby, in fact my upper half is almost exactly the shape of a tub. But
what’s interesting, I think, is that merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost
anyone, even a total, stranger, will take it for granted to give you a nickname that’s an
insulting comment on your personal appearance. Suppose a chap was a hunchback or had
a squint or a hare-lip — would you give him a nickname to remind him of it? But every fat
man’s labelled as a matter of course. I’m the type that people automatically slap on the
back and punch in the ribs, and nearly all of them think I like it. I never go into the saloon
bar of the Crown at Pudley (I pass that way once a week on business) without that ass
Waters, who travels for the Seafoam Soap people but who’s more or less a permanency in
the saloon bar of the Crown, prodding me in the ribs and singing out ‘Here a sheer hulk
lies poor Tom Bowling! ’ which is a joke the bloody fools in the bar never get tired of.
Waters has got a linger like a bar of iron. They all think a fat man doesn’t have any
feelings.
The commercial took another of my matches, to pick his teeth with, and chucked the box
back. The train whizzed on to an iron bridge. Down below I got a glimpse of a baker’s
van and a long string of lorries loaded with cement. The queer thing, I was thinking, is
that in a way they’re right about fat men. It’s a fact that a fat man, particularly a man
who’s been fat from birth — from childhood, that’s to say — isn’t quite like other men. He
goes through his life on a different plane, a sort of light-comedy plane, though in the case
of blokes in side-shows at fairs, or in fact anyone over twenty stone, it isn’t so much light
comedy as low farce. I’ve been both fat and thin in my life, and I know the difference
fatness makes to your outlook. It kind of prevents you from taking things too hard. I
doubt whether a man who’s never been anything but fat, a man who’s been called Fatty
ever since he could walk, even knows of the existence of any really deep emotions. How
could he? He’s got no experience of such things. He can’t ever be present at a tragic
scene, because a scene where there’s a fat man present isn’t tragic, it’s comic. Just
imagine a fat Hamlet, for instance! Or Oliver Hardy acting Romeo. Funnily enough I’d
been thinking something of the kind only a few days earlier when I was reading a novel
I’d got out of Boots. Wasted Passion, it was called. The chap in the story finds out that
his girl has gone off with another chap. He’s one of these chaps you read about in novels,
that have pale sensitive faces and dark hair and a private income. I remember more or
less how the passage went:
David paced up and down the room, his hands pressed to his forehead. The news seemed
to have stunned him. For a long time he could not believe it. Sheila untrue to him! It
could not be! Suddenly realization rushed over him, and he saw the fact in all its stark
horror. It was too much. He flung himself down in a paroxysm of weeping.
Anyway, it went something like that. And even at the time it started me thinking. There
you have it, you see. That’s how people — some people — are expected to behave. But how
about a chap like me? Suppose Hilda went off for a week-end with somebody else- -not
that I’d care a damn, in fact it would rather please me to find that she’d still got that much
kick left in her — but suppose I did care, would I fling myself down in a paroxysm of
weeping? Would anyone expect me to? You couldn’t, with a figure like mine. It would be
downright obscene.
The train was running along an embankment. A little below us you could see the roofs of
the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a
bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them. Funny how
we keep on thinking about bombs. Of course there’s no question that it’s coming soon.
You can tell how close it is by the cheer- up stuff they’re talking about it in the
newspaper. I was reading a piece in the News Chronicle the other day where it said that
bombing planes can’t do any damage nowadays. The anti-aircraft guns have got so good
that the bomber has to stay at twenty thousand feet. The chap thinks, you notice, that if an
aeroplane’s high enough the bombs don’t reach the ground. Or more likely what he really
meant was that they’ll miss Woolwich Arsenal and only hit places like Ellesmere Road.
But taking it by and large, I thought, it’s not so bad to be fat. One thing about a fat man is
that he’s always popular. There’s really no kind of company, from bookies to bishops,
where a fat man doesn’t fit in and feel at home. As for women, fat men have more luck
with them than people seem to think. It’s all bu nk to imagine, as some people do, that a
woman looks on a fat man as just a joke. The truth is that a woman doesn’t look on ANY
man as a joke if he can kid her that he’s in love with her.
Mind you, I haven’t always been fat. I’ve been fat for eight or nine years, and I suppose
I’ve developed most of the characteristics. But it’s also a fact that internally, mentally,
I’m not altogether fat. No! Don’t mistake me. I’m not trying to put myself over as a kind
of tender flower, the aching heart behind the smiling face and so forth. You couldn’t get
on in the insurance business if you were anything like that. I’m vulgar, I’m insensitive,
and I fit in with my environment. So long as anywhere in the world things are being sold
on commission and livings are picked up by sheer brass and lack of finer feelings, chaps
like me will be doing it. In almost all circumstances I’d manage to make a living — always
a living and never a fortune — and even in war, revolution, plague, and famine I’d back
myself to stay alive longer than most people. I’m that type. But also I’ve got something
else inside me, chiefly a hangover from the past. I’ll tell you about that later. I’m fat, but
I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as
they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?
The chap who’d borrowed my matches was having a good pick at his teeth over the
Express.
‘Legs case don’t seem to get much forrader,’ he said.
‘They’ll never get ‘im,’ said the other. “Ow could you identify a pair of legs? They’re all
the bleeding same, aren’t they? ’
‘Might trace ‘im through the piece of paper ‘e wrapped ‘em up in,’ said the first.
Down below you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, twisting this way
and that with the streets, but stretching on and on, like an enormous plain that you could
have ridden over. Whichever way you cross London it’s twenty miles of houses almost
without a break. Christ! how can the bombers miss us when they come? We’re just one
great big bull’s-eye. And no warning, probably. Because who’s going to be such a bloody
fool as to declare war nowadays? If I was Hitler I’d send my bombers across in the
middle of a disarmament conference. Some quiet morning, when the clerks are streaming
across London Bridge, and the canary’s singing, and the old woman’s pegging the
bloomers on the line — zoom, whizz, plonk! Houses going up into the air, bloomers
soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses.
Seems a pity somehow, I thought. I looked at the great sea of roofs stretching on and on.
Miles and miles of streets, fried-fish shops, tin chapels, picture houses, little printing-
shops up back alleys, factories, blocks of flats, whelk stalls, dairies, power stations — on
and on and on. Enormous! And the peacefulness of it! Like a great wilderness with no
wild beasts. No guns firing, nobody chucking pineapples, nobody beating anybody else
up with a rubber truncheon. If you come to think of it, in the whole of England at this
moment there probably isn’t a single bedroom window from which anyone’s firing a
machine-gun.
But how about five years from now? Or two years? Or one year?
4
I’d dropped my papers at the office. Warner is one of these cheap American dentists, and
he has his consulting-room, or ‘parlour’ as he likes to call it, halfway up a big block of
offices, between a photographer and a rubber-goods wholesaler. I was early for my
appointment, but it was time for a bit of grub. I don’t know what put it into my head to go
into a milk-bar. They’re places I generally avoid. We five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers aren’t
well served in the way of eating-places in London. If your idea of the amount to spend on
a meal is one and threepence, it’s either Lyons, the Express Dairy, or the A. B. C. , or else
it’s the kind of funeral snack they serve you in the saloon bar, a pint of bitter and a slab of
cold pie, so cold that it’s colder than the beer. Outside the milk-bar the boys were yelling
the first editions of the evening papers.
Behind the bright red counter a girl in a tall white cap was fiddling with an ice-box, and
somewhere at the back a radio was playing, plonk-tiddle-tiddle-plonk, a kind of tinny
sound. Why the hell am I coming here? I thought to myself as I went in. There’s a kind of
atmosphere about these places that gets me down. Everything slick and shiny and
streamlined; mirrors, enamel, and chromium plate whichever direction you look in.
Everything spent on the decorations and nothing on the food. No real food at all. Just lists
of stuff with American names, sort of phantom stuff that you can’t taste and can hardly
believe in the existence of. Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it’s hauled out of
a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube. No comfort, no privacy.
Tall stools to sit on, a kind of narrow ledge to eat off, mirrors all round you. A sort of
propaganda floating round, mixed up with the noise of the radio, to the effect that food
doesn’t matter, comfort doesn’t matter, nothing matters except slickness and shininess
and streamlining. Everything’s streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler’s keeping
for you. I ordered a large coffee and a couple of frankfurters. The girl in the white cap
jerked them at me with about as much interest as you’d throw ants’ eggs to a goldfish.
Outside the door a newsboy yelled ‘StarnoosstanNERD! ’ I saw the poster flapping
against his knees: LEGS. FRESH DISCOVERIES. Just Tegs’, you notice. It had got
down to that. Two days earlier they’d found a woman’s legs in a railway waiting-room,
done up in a brown-paper parcel, and what with successive editions of the papers, the
whole nation was supposed to be so passionately interested in these blasted legs that they
didn’t need any further introduction. They were the only legs that were news at the
moment. It’s queer, I thought, as I ate a bit of roll, how dull the murders are getting
nowadays. All this cutting people up and leaving bits of them about the countryside. Not
a patch on the old domestic poisoning dramas, Crippen, Seddon, Mrs Maybrick; the truth
being, I suppose, that you can’t do a good murder unless you believe you’re going to
roast in hell for it.
At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and — Christ!
I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to
taste of nothing, like the roll. But this — well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and
describe it to you.
The fra nk furter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a
fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin.
And then suddenly — pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of
horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just
couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was
FISH!
