It was a bit like one of these Eastern sages
retiring
into a desert.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
I’d got to do an assessment of
an ironmonger’s shop, and then, if I could get hold of him, to interview a life-insurance
case who was wavering in the balance. His name had been sent in by our local agent, but
at the last moment he’d taken fright and begun to doubt whether he could afford it. I’m
pretty good at talking people round. It’s being fat that does it. It puts people in a cheery
kind of mood, makes ‘em feel that signing a cheque is almost a pleasure. Of course there
are different ways of tackling different people. With some it’s better to lay all the stress
on the bonuses, others you can scare in a subtle way with hints about what’ll happen to
their wives if they die uninsured.
The old car switchbacked up and down the curly little hills. And by God, what a day!
You kn ow the kind of day that generally comes some time in March when winter
suddenly seems to give up fighting. For days past we’d been having the kind of beastly
weather that people call ‘bright’ weather, when the sky’s a cold hard blue and the wind
scrapes you like a blunt razor-blade. Then suddenly the wind had dropped and the sun got
a chance. You know the kind of day. Pale yellow sunshine, not a leaf stirring, a touch of
mist in the far distance where you could see the sheep scattered over the hillsides like
lumps of chalk. And down in the valleys fires were burning, and the smoke twisted
slowly upwards and melted into the mist. I’d got the road to myself. It was so wann you
could almost have taken your clothes off.
I got to a spot where the grass beside the road was smothered in primroses. A patch of
clayey soil, perhaps. Twenty yards farther on I slowed down and stopped. The weather
was too good to miss. I felt I’d got to get out and have a smell at the spring air, and
perhaps even pick a few primroses if there was nobody coming. I even had some vague
notion of picking a bunch of them to take home to Hilda.
I switched the engine off and got out. I never like leaving the old car running in neutral,
I’m always half afraid she’ll shake her mudguards off or something. She’s a 1927 model,
and she’s done a biggish mileage. When you lift the bonnet and look at the engine it
reminds you of the old Austrian Empire, all tied together with bits of string but somehow
keeps plugging along. You wouldn’t believe any machine could vibrate in so many
directions at once. It’s like the motion of the earth, which has twenty-two different kinds
of wobble, or so I remember reading. If you look at her from behind when she’s running
in neutral it’s for all the world like watching one of those Hawaiian girls dancing the
hula-hula.
There was a five-barred gate beside the road. I strolled over and leaned across it. Not a
soul in sight. I hitched my hat back a bit to get the kind of balmy feeling of the air against
my forehead. The grass under the hedge was full of primroses. Just inside the gate a
tramp or somebody had left the remains of a fire. A little pile of white embers and a wisp
of smoke still oozing out of them. Farther along there was a little bit of a pool, covered
over with duck-weed. The field was winter wheat. It sloped up sharply, and then there
was a fall of chalk and a little beech spinney. A kind of mist of young leaves on the trees.
And utter stillness everywhere. Not even enough wind to stir the ashes of the fire. A lark
singing somewhere, otherwise not a sound, not even an aeroplane.
I stayed there for a bit, leaning over the gate. I was alone, quite alone. I was looking at
the field, and the field was looking at me. I felt — I wonder whether you’ll understand.
What I felt was something that’s so unusual nowadays that to say it sounds like
foolishness. I felt HAPPY. I felt that though I shan’t live for ever, I’d be quite ready to. If
you like you can say that that was merely because it was the first day of spring. Seasonal
effect on the sex-glands, or something. But there was more to it than that. Curiously
enough, the thing that had suddenly convinced me that life was worth living, more than
the primroses or the young buds on the hedge, was that bit of fire near the gate. You
know the look of a wood fire on a still day. The sticks that have gone all to white ash and
still keep the shape of sticks, and under the ash the kind of vivid red that you can see into.
It’s curious that a red ember looks more alive, gives you more of a feeling of life than any
living thing. There’s something about it, a kind of intensity, a vibration — I can’t think of
the exact words. But it lets you know that you’re alive yourself. It’s the spot on the
picture that makes you notice everything else.
I bent down to pick a primrose. Couldn’t reach it — too much belly. I squatted down on
my haunches and picked a little bunch of them. Lucky there was no one to see me. The
leaves were kind of crinkly and shaped like rabbits’ ears. I stood up and put my bunch of
primroses on the gatepost. Then on an impulse I slid my false teeth out of my mouth and
had a look at them.
If I’d had a mirror I’d have looked at the whole of myself, though, as a matter of fact, I
knew what I looked like already. A fat man of forty-five, in a grey herring-bone suit a bit
the worse for wear and a bowler hat. Wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs written
all over me. Red face and boiled blue eyes. I know, you don’t have to tell me. But the
thing that struck me, as I gave my dental plate the once-over before slipping it back into
my mouth, was that IT DOESN’T MATTER. Even false teeth don’t matter. I’m fat — yes.
I look like a bookie’s unsuccessful brother — yes. No woman will ever go to bed with me
again unless she’s paid to. I know all that. But I tell you I don’t care. I don’t want the
women, I don’t even want to be young again. I only want to be alive. And I was alive that
moment when I stood looking at the primroses and the red embers under the hedge. It’s a
feeling inside you, a kind of peaceful feeling, and yet it’s like a flame.
Farther down the hedge the pool was covered with duck-weed, so like a carpet that if you
didn’t know what duck-weed was you might think it was solid and step on it. I wondered
why it is that we’re all such bloody fools. Why don’t people, instead of the idiocies they
do spend their time on, just walk round LOOKING at things? That pool, for instance — all
the stuff that’s in it. Newts, water- snails, water-beetles, caddis-flies, leeches, and God
knows how many other things that you can only see with a microscope. The mystery of
their lives, down there under water. You could spend a lifetime watching them, ten
lifetimes, and still you wouldn’t have got to the end even of that one pool. And all the
while the sort of feeling of wonder, the peculiar flame inside you. It’s the only thing
worth having, and we don’t want it.
But I do want it. At least I thought so at that moment. And don’t mistake what I’m
saying. To begin with, unlike most Cockneys, I’m not soppy about ‘the country’. I was
brought up a damn sight too near to it for that. I don’t want to stop people living in towns,
or in suburbs for that matter. Let ‘em live where they like. And I’m not suggesting that
the whole of humanity could spend the whole of their lives wandering round picking
primroses and so forth. I know perfectly well that we’ve got to work. It’s only because
chaps are coughing their lungs out in mines and girls are hammering at typewriters that
anyone ever has time to pick a flower. Besides, if you hadn’t a full belly and a warm
house you wouldn’t want to pick flowers. But that’s not the point. Here’s this feeling that
I get inside me — not often, I admit, but now and again. I know it’s a good feeling to have.
What’s more, so does everybody else, or nearly everybody. It’s just round the corner all
the time, and we all know it’s there. Stop firing that machine-gun! Stop chasing whatever
you’re chasing! Calm down, get your breath back, let a bit of peace seep into your bones.
No use. We don’t do it. Just keep on with the same bloody fooleries.
And the next war coming over the horizon, 1941, they say. Three more circles of the sun,
and then we whizz straight into it. The bombs diving down on you like black cigars, and
the streamlined bullets streaming from the Bren machine-guns. Not that that worries me
particularly. I’m too old to fight. There’ll be air- raids, of course, but they won’t hit
everybody. Besides, even if that kind of danger exists, it doesn’t really enter into one’s
thoughts beforehand. As I’ve said several times already, I’m not frightened of the war,
only the after- war. And even that isn’t likely to affect me personally. Because who’d
bother about a chap like me? I’m too fat to be a political suspect. No one would bump me
off or cosh me with a rubber truncheon. I’m the ordinary middling kind that moves on
when the policeman tells him. As for Hilda and the kids, they’d probably never notice the
difference. And yet it frightens me. The barbed wire! The slogans! The enonnous faces!
The cork-lined cellars where the executioner plugs you from behind! For that matter it
frightens other chaps who are intellectually a good deal dumber than I am. But why!
Because it means good-bye to this thing I’ve been telling you about, this special feeling
inside you. Call it peace, if you like. But when I say peace I don’t mean absence of war, I
mean peace, a feeling in your guts. And it’s gone for ever if the rubber truncheon boys
get hold of us.
I picked up my bunch of primroses and had a smell at them. I was thinking of Lower
Binfield. It was funny how for two months past it had been in and out of my mind all the
time, after twenty years during which I’d practically forgotten it. And just at this moment
there was the zoom of a car coming up the road.
It brought me up with a kind of jolt. I suddenly realized what I was doing — wandering
round picking primroses when I ought to have been going through the inventory at that
ironmonger’s shop in Pudley. What was more, it suddenly struck me what I’d look like if
those people in the car saw me. A fat man in a bowler hat holding a bunch of primroses!
It wouldn’t look right at all. Fat men mustn’t pick primroses, at any rate in public. I just
had time to chuck them over the hedge before the car came in sight. It was a good job I’d
done so. The car was full of young fools of about twenty. How they’d have sniggered if
they’d seen me! They were all looking at me — you kn ow how people look at you when
they’re in a car coming towards you — and the thought struck me that even now they
might somehow guess what I’d been doing. Better let ‘em think it was something else.
Why should a chap get out of his car at the side of a country road? Obvious! As the car
went past I pretended to be doing up a fly-button.
I cranked up the car (the self-starter doesn’t work any longer) and got in. Curiously
enough, in the very moment when I was doing up the fly-button, when my mind was
about three-quarters full of those young fools in the other car, a wonderful idea had
occurred to me.
I’d go back to Lower Binfield!
Why not? I thought as I jammed her into top gear. Why shouldn’t I? What was to stop
me? And why the hell hadn’t I thought of it before? A quiet holiday in Lower Binfield —
just the thing I wanted.
Don’t imagine that I had any ideas of going back to LIVE in Lower Binfield. I wasn’t
planning to desert Hilda and the kids and start life under a different name. That kind of
thing only happens in books. But what was to stop me slipping down to Lower Binfield
and having a week there all by myself, on the Q. T. ?
I seemed to have it all planned out in my mind already. It was all right as far as the
money went. There was still twelve quid left in that secret pile of mine, and you can have
a very comfortable week on twelve quid. I get a fortnight’s holiday a year, generally in
August or September. But if I made up some suitable story — relative dying of incurable
disease, or something — I could probably get the firm to give me my holiday in two
separate halves. Then I could have a week all to myself before Hilda knew what was
happening. A week in Lower Binfield, with no Hilda, no kids, no Flying Salamander, no
Ellesmere Road, no rumpus about the hire- purchase payments, no noise of traffic driving
you silly — just a week of loafing round and listening to the quietness?
But why did I want to go back to Lower Binfield? you say. Why Lower Binfield in
particular? What did I mean to do when I got there?
I didn’t mean to do anything. That was part of the point. I wanted peace and quiet. Peace!
We had it once, in Lower Binfield. I’ve told you something about our old life there,
before the war. I’m not pretending it was perfect. I dare say it was a dull, sluggish,
vegetable kind of life. You can say we were like turnips, if you like. But turnips don’t
live in terror of the boss, they don’t lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and
the next war. We had peace inside us. Of course I knew that even in Lower Binfield life
would have changed. But the place itself wouldn’t have. There’d still be the beech woods
round Binfield House, and the towpath down by Burford Weir, and the horse-trough in
the market-place. I wanted to get back there, just for a week, and let the feeling of it soak
into me.
It was a bit like one of these Eastern sages retiring into a desert. And I should
think, the way things are going, there’ll be a good many people retiring into the desert
during the next few years. It’ll be like the time in ancient Rome that old Porteous was
telling me about, when there were so many hermits that there was a waiting list for every
cave.
But it wasn’t that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get my nerve back before
the bad times begin. Because does anyone who isn’t dead from the neck up doubt that
there’s a bad time coming? We don’t even know what it’ll be, and yet we know it’s
coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump — no knowing, except that it’ll be something bad.
Wherever we’re going, we’re going downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool — no
knowing. And you can’t face that kind of thing unless you’ve got the right feeling inside
you. There’s something that’s gone out of us in these twenty years since the war. It’s a
kind of vital juice that we’ve squirted away until there’s nothing left. All this rushing to
and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses, bombs, radios,
telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the marrow
ought to be.
I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. The very thought of going back to Lower
Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air! Like
the big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses out and
fill their lungs with a great gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and the
octopuses. We’re all stifling at the bottom of a dustbin, but I’d found the way to the top.
Back to Lower Binlield! I kept my foot on the accelerator until the old car worked up to
her maximum speed of nearly forty miles an hour. She was rattling like a tin tray full of
crockery, and under cover of the noise I nearly started singing.
Of course the fly in the milk-jug was Hilda. That thought pulled me up a bit. I slowed
down to about twenty to think it over.
There wasn’t much doubt Hilda would find out sooner or later. As to getting only a
week’s holiday in August, I might be able to pass that off all right. I could tell her the
firm were only giving me a week this year. Probably she wouldn’t ask too many
questions about that, because she’d jump at the chance of cutting down the holiday
expenses. The kids, in any case, always stay at the seaside for a month. Where the
difficulty came in was finding an alibi for that week in May. I couldn’t just clear off
without notice. Best thing, I thought, would be to tell her a good while ahead that I was
being sent on some special job to Nottingham, or Derby, or Bristol, or some other place a
good long way away. If I told her about it two months ahead it would look as if I hadn’t
anything to hide.
But of course she’d find out sooner or later. Trust Hilda! She’d start off by pretending to
believe it, and then, in that quiet, obstinate way she has, she’d nose out the fact that I’d
never been to Nottingham or Derby or Bristol or wherever it might be. It’s astonishing
how she does it. Such perseverance! She lies low till she’s found out all the weak points
in your alibi, and then suddenly, when you’ve put your foot in it by some careless
remark, she starts on you. Suddenly comes out with the whole dossier of the case. ‘Where
did you spend Saturday night? That’s a lie! You’ve been off with a woman. Look at these
hairs I found when I was brushing your waistcoat. Look at them! Is my hair that colour? ’
And then the fun begins. Lord knows how many times it’s happened. Sometimes she’s
been right about the woman and sometimes she’s been wrong, but the after-effects are
always the same. Nagging for weeks on end! Never a meal without a row — and the kids
can’t make out what it’s all about. The one completely hopeless thing would be to tell her
just where I’d spent that week, and why. If I explained till the Day of Judgment she’d
never believe that.
But, hell! I thought, why bother? It was a long way off. You know how different these
things seem before and after. I shoved my foot down on the accelerator again. I’d had
another idea, almost bigger than the first. I wouldn’t go in May. I’d go in the second half
of June, when the coarse-fishing season had started, and I’d go fishing!
Why not, after all? I wanted peace, and fishing is peace. And then the biggest idea of all
came into my head and very nearly made me swing the car off the road.
I’d go and catch those big carp in the pool at Binfield House!
And once again, why not? Isn’t it queer how we go through life, always thinking that the
things we want to do are the things that can’t be done? Why shouldn’t I catch those carp?
And yet, as soon as the idea’s mentioned, doesn’t it sound to you like something
impossible, something that just couldn’t happen? It seemed so to me, even at that
moment. It seemed to me a kind of dope-dream, like the ones you have of sleeping with
film stars or winning the heavyweight championship. And yet it wasn’t in the least
impossible, it wasn’t even improbable. Fishing can be rented. Whoever owned Binfield
House now would probably let the pool if they got enough for it. And Gosh! I’d be glad
to pay five pounds for a day’s fishing in that pool. For that matter it was quite likely that
the house was still empty and nobody even knew that the pool existed.
I thought of it in the dark place among the trees, waiting for me all those years. And the
huge black fish still gliding round it. Jesus! If they were that size thirty years ago, what
would they be like now?
3
It was June the seventeenth, Friday, the second day of the coarse- fishing season.
I hadn’t had any difficulty in fixing things with the firm. As for Hilda, I’d fitted her up
with a story that was all shipshape and watertight. I’d fixed on Birmingham for my alibi,
and at the last moment I’d even told her the name of the hotel I was going to stay at,
Rowbottom’s Family and Commercial. I happened to know the address because I’d
stayed there some years earlier. At the same time I didn’t want her writing to me at
Birmingham, which she might do if I was away as long as a week. After thinking it over I
took young Saunders, who travels for Glisso Floor Polish, partly into my confidence.
He’d happened to mention that he’d be passing through Birmingham on the eighteenth of
June, and I got him to promise that he’d stop on his way and post a letter from me to
Hilda, addressed from Rowbottom’s. This was to tell her that I might be called away and
she’d better not write. Saunders understood, or thought he did. He gave me a wink and
said I was wonderful for my age. So that settled Hilda. She hadn’t asked any questions,
and even if she turned suspicious later, an alibi like that would take some breaking.
I drove through Westerham. It was a wonderful June morning. A faint breeze blowing,
and the elm tops swaying in the sun, little white clouds streaming across the sky like a
flock of sheep, and the shadows chasing each other across the fields. Outside Westerham
a Walls’ Ice Cream lad, with cheeks like apples, came tearing towards me on his bike,
whistling so that it went through your head. It suddenly reminded me of the time when
I’d been an errand boy myself (though in those days we didn’t have free-wheel bikes) and
I very nearly stopped him and took one. They’d cut the hay in places, but they hadn’t got
it in yet. It lay drying in long shiny rows, and the smell of it drifted across the road and
got mixed up with the petrol.
I drove along at a gentle fifteen. The morning had a kind of peaceful, dreamy feeling. The
ducks floated about on the ponds as if they felt too satisfied to eat. In Nettlefield, the
village beyond Westerham, a little man in a white apron, with grey hair and a huge grey
moustache, darted across the green, planted himself in the middle of the road and began
doing physical jerks to attract my attention. My car’s kn own all along this road, of
course. I pulled up. It’s only Mr Weaver, who keeps the village general shop. No, he
doesn’t want to insure his life, nor his shop either. He’s merely run out of change and
wants to know whether I’ve got a quid’s worth of Targe silver’. They never have any
change in Nettlefield, not even at the pub.
I drove on. The wheat would have been as tall as your waist. It went undulating up and
down the hills like a great green carpet, with the wind rippling it a little, kind of thick and
silky- looking. It’s like a woman, I thought. It makes you want to lie on it. And a bit
ahead of me I saw the sign-post where the road forks right for Pudley and left for Oxford.
I was still on my usual beat, inside the boundary of my own ‘district’, as the firm calls it.
The natural thing, as I was going westward, would have been to leave London along the
Uxbridge Road. But by a kind of instinct I’d followed my usual route. The fact was I was
feeling guilty about the whole business. I wanted to get well away before I headed for
Oxfordshire. And in spite of the fact that I’d fixed things so neatly with Hilda and the
firm, in spite of the twelve quid in my pocket-book and the suitcase in the back of the car,
as I got nearer the crossroads I actually felt a temptation — I knew I wasn’t going to
succumb to it, and yet it was a temptation — to chuck the whole thing up. I had a sort of
feeling that so long as I was driving along my nonnal beat I was still inside the law. It’s
not too late, I thought. There’s still time to do the respectable thing. I could run into
Pudley, for instance, see the manager of Barclay’s Bank (he’s our agent at Pudley) and
find out if any new business had come in. For that matter I could even turn round, go
back to Hilda, and make a clean breast of the plot.
I slowed down as I got to the comer. Should I or shouldn’t I? For about a second I was
really tempted. But no! I tooted the klaxon and swung the car westward, on to the Oxford
road.
Well, I’d done it. I was on the forbidden ground. It was true that five miles farther on, if I
wanted to, I could turn to the left again and get back to Westerham. But for the moment I
was headed westward. Strictly speaking I was in flight. And what was curious, I was no
sooner on the Oxford road than I felt perfectly certain that THEY knew all about it. When
I say THEY I mean all the people who wouldn’t approve of a trip of this kind and who’d
have stopped me if they could — which, I suppose, would include pretty well everybody.
What was more, I actually had a feeling that they were after me already. The whole lot of
them! All the people who couldn’t understand why a middle-aged man with false teeth
should sneak away for a quiet week in the place where he spent his boyhood. And all the
mean-minded bastards who COULD understand only too well, and who’d raise heaven
and earth to prevent it. They were all on my track. It was as if a huge army were
streaming up the road behind me. I seemed to see them in my mind’s eye. Hilda was in
front, of course, with the kids tagging after her, and Mrs Wheeler driving her forward
with a grim, vindictive expression, and Miss Minns rushing along in the rear, with her
pince-nez slipping down and a look of distress on her face, like the hen that gets left
behind when the others have got hold of the bacon rind. And Sir Herbert Crum and the
higher-ups of the Flying Salamander in their Rolls- Royces and Hispano-Suizas. And all
the chaps at the office, and all the poor down-trodden pen-pushers from Ellesmere Road
and from all such other roads, some of them wheeling prams and mowing- machines and
concrete garden-rollers, some of them chugging along in little Austin Sevens. And all the
soul-savers and Nosey Parkers, the people whom you’ve never seen but who rule your
destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Temperance League, the
Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of
Bishops, Mussolini, the Pope — they were all of them after me. I could almost hear them
shouting:
‘There’s a chap who thinks he’s going to escape! There’s a chap who says he won’t be
streamlined! He’s going back to Lower Binfield! After him! Stop him! ’
It’s queer. The impression was so strong that I actually took a peep through the little
window at the back of the car to make sure I wasn’t being followed. Guilty conscience, I
suppose. But there was nobody. Only the dusty white road and the long line of the elms
dwindling out behind me.
I trod on the gas and the old car rattled into the thirties. A few minutes later I was past the
Westerham turning. So that was that. I’d burnt my boats. This was the idea which, in a
dim sort of way, had begun to fonn itself in my mind the day I got my new false teeth.
PART IV
1
I came towards Lower Binficld over Chamford Hill. There are four roads into Lower
Binfield, and it would have been more direct to go through Walton. But I’d wanted to
come over Chamford Hill, the way we used to go when we hiked home from fishing in
the Thames. When you get just past the crown of the hill the trees open out and you can
see Lower Binfield lying in the valley below you.
It’s a queer experience to go over a bit of country you haven’t seen in twenty years. You
remember it in great detail, and you remember it all wrong. All the distances are
different, and the landmarks seem to have moved about. Y ou keep feeling, surely this hill
used to be a lot steeper — surely that turning was on the other side of the road? And on the
other hand you’ll have memories which are perfectly accurate, but which only belong to
one particular occasion. You’ll remember, for instance, a corner of a field, on a wet day
in winter, with the grass so green that it’s almost blue, and a rotten gatepost covered with
lichen and a cow standing in the grass and looking at you. And you’ll go back after
twenty years and be surprised because the cow isn’t standing in the same place and
looking at you with the same expression.
As I drove up Chamford Hill I realized that the picture I’d had of it in my mind was
almost entirely imaginary. But it was a fact that certain things had changed. The road was
tannac, whereas in the old days it used to be macadam (I remember the bumpy feeling of
it under the bike), and it seemed to have got a lot wider. And there were far less trees. In
the old days there used to be huge beeches growing in the hedgerows, and in places their
boughs met across the road and made a kind of arch. Now they were all gone. I’d nearly
got to the top of the hill when I came on something which was certainly new. To the right
of the road there was a whole lot of fake -picturesque houses, with overhanging eaves and
rose pergolas and what-not. You know the kind of houses that are just a little too high-
class to stand in a row, and so they’re dotted about in a kind of colony, with private roads
leading up to them. And at the entrance to one of the private roads there was a huge white
board which said:
THE KENNELS
PEDIGREE SEALYHAM PUPS
DOGS BOARDED
Surely THAT usen’t to be there?
I thought for a moment. Yes, I remembered! Where those houses stood there used to be a
little oak plantation, and the trees grew too close together, so that they were very tall and
thin, and in spring the ground underneath them used to be smothered in anemones.
Certainly there were never any houses as far out of the town as this.
I got to the top of the hill. Another minute and Lower Binfield would be in sight. Lower
Binfield! Why should I pretend I wasn’t excited? At the very thought of seeing it again an
extraordinary feeling that started in my guts crept upwards and did something to my
heart.
an ironmonger’s shop, and then, if I could get hold of him, to interview a life-insurance
case who was wavering in the balance. His name had been sent in by our local agent, but
at the last moment he’d taken fright and begun to doubt whether he could afford it. I’m
pretty good at talking people round. It’s being fat that does it. It puts people in a cheery
kind of mood, makes ‘em feel that signing a cheque is almost a pleasure. Of course there
are different ways of tackling different people. With some it’s better to lay all the stress
on the bonuses, others you can scare in a subtle way with hints about what’ll happen to
their wives if they die uninsured.
The old car switchbacked up and down the curly little hills. And by God, what a day!
You kn ow the kind of day that generally comes some time in March when winter
suddenly seems to give up fighting. For days past we’d been having the kind of beastly
weather that people call ‘bright’ weather, when the sky’s a cold hard blue and the wind
scrapes you like a blunt razor-blade. Then suddenly the wind had dropped and the sun got
a chance. You know the kind of day. Pale yellow sunshine, not a leaf stirring, a touch of
mist in the far distance where you could see the sheep scattered over the hillsides like
lumps of chalk. And down in the valleys fires were burning, and the smoke twisted
slowly upwards and melted into the mist. I’d got the road to myself. It was so wann you
could almost have taken your clothes off.
I got to a spot where the grass beside the road was smothered in primroses. A patch of
clayey soil, perhaps. Twenty yards farther on I slowed down and stopped. The weather
was too good to miss. I felt I’d got to get out and have a smell at the spring air, and
perhaps even pick a few primroses if there was nobody coming. I even had some vague
notion of picking a bunch of them to take home to Hilda.
I switched the engine off and got out. I never like leaving the old car running in neutral,
I’m always half afraid she’ll shake her mudguards off or something. She’s a 1927 model,
and she’s done a biggish mileage. When you lift the bonnet and look at the engine it
reminds you of the old Austrian Empire, all tied together with bits of string but somehow
keeps plugging along. You wouldn’t believe any machine could vibrate in so many
directions at once. It’s like the motion of the earth, which has twenty-two different kinds
of wobble, or so I remember reading. If you look at her from behind when she’s running
in neutral it’s for all the world like watching one of those Hawaiian girls dancing the
hula-hula.
There was a five-barred gate beside the road. I strolled over and leaned across it. Not a
soul in sight. I hitched my hat back a bit to get the kind of balmy feeling of the air against
my forehead. The grass under the hedge was full of primroses. Just inside the gate a
tramp or somebody had left the remains of a fire. A little pile of white embers and a wisp
of smoke still oozing out of them. Farther along there was a little bit of a pool, covered
over with duck-weed. The field was winter wheat. It sloped up sharply, and then there
was a fall of chalk and a little beech spinney. A kind of mist of young leaves on the trees.
And utter stillness everywhere. Not even enough wind to stir the ashes of the fire. A lark
singing somewhere, otherwise not a sound, not even an aeroplane.
I stayed there for a bit, leaning over the gate. I was alone, quite alone. I was looking at
the field, and the field was looking at me. I felt — I wonder whether you’ll understand.
What I felt was something that’s so unusual nowadays that to say it sounds like
foolishness. I felt HAPPY. I felt that though I shan’t live for ever, I’d be quite ready to. If
you like you can say that that was merely because it was the first day of spring. Seasonal
effect on the sex-glands, or something. But there was more to it than that. Curiously
enough, the thing that had suddenly convinced me that life was worth living, more than
the primroses or the young buds on the hedge, was that bit of fire near the gate. You
know the look of a wood fire on a still day. The sticks that have gone all to white ash and
still keep the shape of sticks, and under the ash the kind of vivid red that you can see into.
It’s curious that a red ember looks more alive, gives you more of a feeling of life than any
living thing. There’s something about it, a kind of intensity, a vibration — I can’t think of
the exact words. But it lets you know that you’re alive yourself. It’s the spot on the
picture that makes you notice everything else.
I bent down to pick a primrose. Couldn’t reach it — too much belly. I squatted down on
my haunches and picked a little bunch of them. Lucky there was no one to see me. The
leaves were kind of crinkly and shaped like rabbits’ ears. I stood up and put my bunch of
primroses on the gatepost. Then on an impulse I slid my false teeth out of my mouth and
had a look at them.
If I’d had a mirror I’d have looked at the whole of myself, though, as a matter of fact, I
knew what I looked like already. A fat man of forty-five, in a grey herring-bone suit a bit
the worse for wear and a bowler hat. Wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs written
all over me. Red face and boiled blue eyes. I know, you don’t have to tell me. But the
thing that struck me, as I gave my dental plate the once-over before slipping it back into
my mouth, was that IT DOESN’T MATTER. Even false teeth don’t matter. I’m fat — yes.
I look like a bookie’s unsuccessful brother — yes. No woman will ever go to bed with me
again unless she’s paid to. I know all that. But I tell you I don’t care. I don’t want the
women, I don’t even want to be young again. I only want to be alive. And I was alive that
moment when I stood looking at the primroses and the red embers under the hedge. It’s a
feeling inside you, a kind of peaceful feeling, and yet it’s like a flame.
Farther down the hedge the pool was covered with duck-weed, so like a carpet that if you
didn’t know what duck-weed was you might think it was solid and step on it. I wondered
why it is that we’re all such bloody fools. Why don’t people, instead of the idiocies they
do spend their time on, just walk round LOOKING at things? That pool, for instance — all
the stuff that’s in it. Newts, water- snails, water-beetles, caddis-flies, leeches, and God
knows how many other things that you can only see with a microscope. The mystery of
their lives, down there under water. You could spend a lifetime watching them, ten
lifetimes, and still you wouldn’t have got to the end even of that one pool. And all the
while the sort of feeling of wonder, the peculiar flame inside you. It’s the only thing
worth having, and we don’t want it.
But I do want it. At least I thought so at that moment. And don’t mistake what I’m
saying. To begin with, unlike most Cockneys, I’m not soppy about ‘the country’. I was
brought up a damn sight too near to it for that. I don’t want to stop people living in towns,
or in suburbs for that matter. Let ‘em live where they like. And I’m not suggesting that
the whole of humanity could spend the whole of their lives wandering round picking
primroses and so forth. I know perfectly well that we’ve got to work. It’s only because
chaps are coughing their lungs out in mines and girls are hammering at typewriters that
anyone ever has time to pick a flower. Besides, if you hadn’t a full belly and a warm
house you wouldn’t want to pick flowers. But that’s not the point. Here’s this feeling that
I get inside me — not often, I admit, but now and again. I know it’s a good feeling to have.
What’s more, so does everybody else, or nearly everybody. It’s just round the corner all
the time, and we all know it’s there. Stop firing that machine-gun! Stop chasing whatever
you’re chasing! Calm down, get your breath back, let a bit of peace seep into your bones.
No use. We don’t do it. Just keep on with the same bloody fooleries.
And the next war coming over the horizon, 1941, they say. Three more circles of the sun,
and then we whizz straight into it. The bombs diving down on you like black cigars, and
the streamlined bullets streaming from the Bren machine-guns. Not that that worries me
particularly. I’m too old to fight. There’ll be air- raids, of course, but they won’t hit
everybody. Besides, even if that kind of danger exists, it doesn’t really enter into one’s
thoughts beforehand. As I’ve said several times already, I’m not frightened of the war,
only the after- war. And even that isn’t likely to affect me personally. Because who’d
bother about a chap like me? I’m too fat to be a political suspect. No one would bump me
off or cosh me with a rubber truncheon. I’m the ordinary middling kind that moves on
when the policeman tells him. As for Hilda and the kids, they’d probably never notice the
difference. And yet it frightens me. The barbed wire! The slogans! The enonnous faces!
The cork-lined cellars where the executioner plugs you from behind! For that matter it
frightens other chaps who are intellectually a good deal dumber than I am. But why!
Because it means good-bye to this thing I’ve been telling you about, this special feeling
inside you. Call it peace, if you like. But when I say peace I don’t mean absence of war, I
mean peace, a feeling in your guts. And it’s gone for ever if the rubber truncheon boys
get hold of us.
I picked up my bunch of primroses and had a smell at them. I was thinking of Lower
Binfield. It was funny how for two months past it had been in and out of my mind all the
time, after twenty years during which I’d practically forgotten it. And just at this moment
there was the zoom of a car coming up the road.
It brought me up with a kind of jolt. I suddenly realized what I was doing — wandering
round picking primroses when I ought to have been going through the inventory at that
ironmonger’s shop in Pudley. What was more, it suddenly struck me what I’d look like if
those people in the car saw me. A fat man in a bowler hat holding a bunch of primroses!
It wouldn’t look right at all. Fat men mustn’t pick primroses, at any rate in public. I just
had time to chuck them over the hedge before the car came in sight. It was a good job I’d
done so. The car was full of young fools of about twenty. How they’d have sniggered if
they’d seen me! They were all looking at me — you kn ow how people look at you when
they’re in a car coming towards you — and the thought struck me that even now they
might somehow guess what I’d been doing. Better let ‘em think it was something else.
Why should a chap get out of his car at the side of a country road? Obvious! As the car
went past I pretended to be doing up a fly-button.
I cranked up the car (the self-starter doesn’t work any longer) and got in. Curiously
enough, in the very moment when I was doing up the fly-button, when my mind was
about three-quarters full of those young fools in the other car, a wonderful idea had
occurred to me.
I’d go back to Lower Binfield!
Why not? I thought as I jammed her into top gear. Why shouldn’t I? What was to stop
me? And why the hell hadn’t I thought of it before? A quiet holiday in Lower Binfield —
just the thing I wanted.
Don’t imagine that I had any ideas of going back to LIVE in Lower Binfield. I wasn’t
planning to desert Hilda and the kids and start life under a different name. That kind of
thing only happens in books. But what was to stop me slipping down to Lower Binfield
and having a week there all by myself, on the Q. T. ?
I seemed to have it all planned out in my mind already. It was all right as far as the
money went. There was still twelve quid left in that secret pile of mine, and you can have
a very comfortable week on twelve quid. I get a fortnight’s holiday a year, generally in
August or September. But if I made up some suitable story — relative dying of incurable
disease, or something — I could probably get the firm to give me my holiday in two
separate halves. Then I could have a week all to myself before Hilda knew what was
happening. A week in Lower Binfield, with no Hilda, no kids, no Flying Salamander, no
Ellesmere Road, no rumpus about the hire- purchase payments, no noise of traffic driving
you silly — just a week of loafing round and listening to the quietness?
But why did I want to go back to Lower Binfield? you say. Why Lower Binfield in
particular? What did I mean to do when I got there?
I didn’t mean to do anything. That was part of the point. I wanted peace and quiet. Peace!
We had it once, in Lower Binfield. I’ve told you something about our old life there,
before the war. I’m not pretending it was perfect. I dare say it was a dull, sluggish,
vegetable kind of life. You can say we were like turnips, if you like. But turnips don’t
live in terror of the boss, they don’t lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and
the next war. We had peace inside us. Of course I knew that even in Lower Binfield life
would have changed. But the place itself wouldn’t have. There’d still be the beech woods
round Binfield House, and the towpath down by Burford Weir, and the horse-trough in
the market-place. I wanted to get back there, just for a week, and let the feeling of it soak
into me.
It was a bit like one of these Eastern sages retiring into a desert. And I should
think, the way things are going, there’ll be a good many people retiring into the desert
during the next few years. It’ll be like the time in ancient Rome that old Porteous was
telling me about, when there were so many hermits that there was a waiting list for every
cave.
But it wasn’t that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get my nerve back before
the bad times begin. Because does anyone who isn’t dead from the neck up doubt that
there’s a bad time coming? We don’t even know what it’ll be, and yet we know it’s
coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump — no knowing, except that it’ll be something bad.
Wherever we’re going, we’re going downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool — no
knowing. And you can’t face that kind of thing unless you’ve got the right feeling inside
you. There’s something that’s gone out of us in these twenty years since the war. It’s a
kind of vital juice that we’ve squirted away until there’s nothing left. All this rushing to
and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses, bombs, radios,
telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the marrow
ought to be.
I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. The very thought of going back to Lower
Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air! Like
the big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses out and
fill their lungs with a great gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and the
octopuses. We’re all stifling at the bottom of a dustbin, but I’d found the way to the top.
Back to Lower Binlield! I kept my foot on the accelerator until the old car worked up to
her maximum speed of nearly forty miles an hour. She was rattling like a tin tray full of
crockery, and under cover of the noise I nearly started singing.
Of course the fly in the milk-jug was Hilda. That thought pulled me up a bit. I slowed
down to about twenty to think it over.
There wasn’t much doubt Hilda would find out sooner or later. As to getting only a
week’s holiday in August, I might be able to pass that off all right. I could tell her the
firm were only giving me a week this year. Probably she wouldn’t ask too many
questions about that, because she’d jump at the chance of cutting down the holiday
expenses. The kids, in any case, always stay at the seaside for a month. Where the
difficulty came in was finding an alibi for that week in May. I couldn’t just clear off
without notice. Best thing, I thought, would be to tell her a good while ahead that I was
being sent on some special job to Nottingham, or Derby, or Bristol, or some other place a
good long way away. If I told her about it two months ahead it would look as if I hadn’t
anything to hide.
But of course she’d find out sooner or later. Trust Hilda! She’d start off by pretending to
believe it, and then, in that quiet, obstinate way she has, she’d nose out the fact that I’d
never been to Nottingham or Derby or Bristol or wherever it might be. It’s astonishing
how she does it. Such perseverance! She lies low till she’s found out all the weak points
in your alibi, and then suddenly, when you’ve put your foot in it by some careless
remark, she starts on you. Suddenly comes out with the whole dossier of the case. ‘Where
did you spend Saturday night? That’s a lie! You’ve been off with a woman. Look at these
hairs I found when I was brushing your waistcoat. Look at them! Is my hair that colour? ’
And then the fun begins. Lord knows how many times it’s happened. Sometimes she’s
been right about the woman and sometimes she’s been wrong, but the after-effects are
always the same. Nagging for weeks on end! Never a meal without a row — and the kids
can’t make out what it’s all about. The one completely hopeless thing would be to tell her
just where I’d spent that week, and why. If I explained till the Day of Judgment she’d
never believe that.
But, hell! I thought, why bother? It was a long way off. You know how different these
things seem before and after. I shoved my foot down on the accelerator again. I’d had
another idea, almost bigger than the first. I wouldn’t go in May. I’d go in the second half
of June, when the coarse-fishing season had started, and I’d go fishing!
Why not, after all? I wanted peace, and fishing is peace. And then the biggest idea of all
came into my head and very nearly made me swing the car off the road.
I’d go and catch those big carp in the pool at Binfield House!
And once again, why not? Isn’t it queer how we go through life, always thinking that the
things we want to do are the things that can’t be done? Why shouldn’t I catch those carp?
And yet, as soon as the idea’s mentioned, doesn’t it sound to you like something
impossible, something that just couldn’t happen? It seemed so to me, even at that
moment. It seemed to me a kind of dope-dream, like the ones you have of sleeping with
film stars or winning the heavyweight championship. And yet it wasn’t in the least
impossible, it wasn’t even improbable. Fishing can be rented. Whoever owned Binfield
House now would probably let the pool if they got enough for it. And Gosh! I’d be glad
to pay five pounds for a day’s fishing in that pool. For that matter it was quite likely that
the house was still empty and nobody even knew that the pool existed.
I thought of it in the dark place among the trees, waiting for me all those years. And the
huge black fish still gliding round it. Jesus! If they were that size thirty years ago, what
would they be like now?
3
It was June the seventeenth, Friday, the second day of the coarse- fishing season.
I hadn’t had any difficulty in fixing things with the firm. As for Hilda, I’d fitted her up
with a story that was all shipshape and watertight. I’d fixed on Birmingham for my alibi,
and at the last moment I’d even told her the name of the hotel I was going to stay at,
Rowbottom’s Family and Commercial. I happened to know the address because I’d
stayed there some years earlier. At the same time I didn’t want her writing to me at
Birmingham, which she might do if I was away as long as a week. After thinking it over I
took young Saunders, who travels for Glisso Floor Polish, partly into my confidence.
He’d happened to mention that he’d be passing through Birmingham on the eighteenth of
June, and I got him to promise that he’d stop on his way and post a letter from me to
Hilda, addressed from Rowbottom’s. This was to tell her that I might be called away and
she’d better not write. Saunders understood, or thought he did. He gave me a wink and
said I was wonderful for my age. So that settled Hilda. She hadn’t asked any questions,
and even if she turned suspicious later, an alibi like that would take some breaking.
I drove through Westerham. It was a wonderful June morning. A faint breeze blowing,
and the elm tops swaying in the sun, little white clouds streaming across the sky like a
flock of sheep, and the shadows chasing each other across the fields. Outside Westerham
a Walls’ Ice Cream lad, with cheeks like apples, came tearing towards me on his bike,
whistling so that it went through your head. It suddenly reminded me of the time when
I’d been an errand boy myself (though in those days we didn’t have free-wheel bikes) and
I very nearly stopped him and took one. They’d cut the hay in places, but they hadn’t got
it in yet. It lay drying in long shiny rows, and the smell of it drifted across the road and
got mixed up with the petrol.
I drove along at a gentle fifteen. The morning had a kind of peaceful, dreamy feeling. The
ducks floated about on the ponds as if they felt too satisfied to eat. In Nettlefield, the
village beyond Westerham, a little man in a white apron, with grey hair and a huge grey
moustache, darted across the green, planted himself in the middle of the road and began
doing physical jerks to attract my attention. My car’s kn own all along this road, of
course. I pulled up. It’s only Mr Weaver, who keeps the village general shop. No, he
doesn’t want to insure his life, nor his shop either. He’s merely run out of change and
wants to know whether I’ve got a quid’s worth of Targe silver’. They never have any
change in Nettlefield, not even at the pub.
I drove on. The wheat would have been as tall as your waist. It went undulating up and
down the hills like a great green carpet, with the wind rippling it a little, kind of thick and
silky- looking. It’s like a woman, I thought. It makes you want to lie on it. And a bit
ahead of me I saw the sign-post where the road forks right for Pudley and left for Oxford.
I was still on my usual beat, inside the boundary of my own ‘district’, as the firm calls it.
The natural thing, as I was going westward, would have been to leave London along the
Uxbridge Road. But by a kind of instinct I’d followed my usual route. The fact was I was
feeling guilty about the whole business. I wanted to get well away before I headed for
Oxfordshire. And in spite of the fact that I’d fixed things so neatly with Hilda and the
firm, in spite of the twelve quid in my pocket-book and the suitcase in the back of the car,
as I got nearer the crossroads I actually felt a temptation — I knew I wasn’t going to
succumb to it, and yet it was a temptation — to chuck the whole thing up. I had a sort of
feeling that so long as I was driving along my nonnal beat I was still inside the law. It’s
not too late, I thought. There’s still time to do the respectable thing. I could run into
Pudley, for instance, see the manager of Barclay’s Bank (he’s our agent at Pudley) and
find out if any new business had come in. For that matter I could even turn round, go
back to Hilda, and make a clean breast of the plot.
I slowed down as I got to the comer. Should I or shouldn’t I? For about a second I was
really tempted. But no! I tooted the klaxon and swung the car westward, on to the Oxford
road.
Well, I’d done it. I was on the forbidden ground. It was true that five miles farther on, if I
wanted to, I could turn to the left again and get back to Westerham. But for the moment I
was headed westward. Strictly speaking I was in flight. And what was curious, I was no
sooner on the Oxford road than I felt perfectly certain that THEY knew all about it. When
I say THEY I mean all the people who wouldn’t approve of a trip of this kind and who’d
have stopped me if they could — which, I suppose, would include pretty well everybody.
What was more, I actually had a feeling that they were after me already. The whole lot of
them! All the people who couldn’t understand why a middle-aged man with false teeth
should sneak away for a quiet week in the place where he spent his boyhood. And all the
mean-minded bastards who COULD understand only too well, and who’d raise heaven
and earth to prevent it. They were all on my track. It was as if a huge army were
streaming up the road behind me. I seemed to see them in my mind’s eye. Hilda was in
front, of course, with the kids tagging after her, and Mrs Wheeler driving her forward
with a grim, vindictive expression, and Miss Minns rushing along in the rear, with her
pince-nez slipping down and a look of distress on her face, like the hen that gets left
behind when the others have got hold of the bacon rind. And Sir Herbert Crum and the
higher-ups of the Flying Salamander in their Rolls- Royces and Hispano-Suizas. And all
the chaps at the office, and all the poor down-trodden pen-pushers from Ellesmere Road
and from all such other roads, some of them wheeling prams and mowing- machines and
concrete garden-rollers, some of them chugging along in little Austin Sevens. And all the
soul-savers and Nosey Parkers, the people whom you’ve never seen but who rule your
destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Temperance League, the
Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of
Bishops, Mussolini, the Pope — they were all of them after me. I could almost hear them
shouting:
‘There’s a chap who thinks he’s going to escape! There’s a chap who says he won’t be
streamlined! He’s going back to Lower Binfield! After him! Stop him! ’
It’s queer. The impression was so strong that I actually took a peep through the little
window at the back of the car to make sure I wasn’t being followed. Guilty conscience, I
suppose. But there was nobody. Only the dusty white road and the long line of the elms
dwindling out behind me.
I trod on the gas and the old car rattled into the thirties. A few minutes later I was past the
Westerham turning. So that was that. I’d burnt my boats. This was the idea which, in a
dim sort of way, had begun to fonn itself in my mind the day I got my new false teeth.
PART IV
1
I came towards Lower Binficld over Chamford Hill. There are four roads into Lower
Binfield, and it would have been more direct to go through Walton. But I’d wanted to
come over Chamford Hill, the way we used to go when we hiked home from fishing in
the Thames. When you get just past the crown of the hill the trees open out and you can
see Lower Binfield lying in the valley below you.
It’s a queer experience to go over a bit of country you haven’t seen in twenty years. You
remember it in great detail, and you remember it all wrong. All the distances are
different, and the landmarks seem to have moved about. Y ou keep feeling, surely this hill
used to be a lot steeper — surely that turning was on the other side of the road? And on the
other hand you’ll have memories which are perfectly accurate, but which only belong to
one particular occasion. You’ll remember, for instance, a corner of a field, on a wet day
in winter, with the grass so green that it’s almost blue, and a rotten gatepost covered with
lichen and a cow standing in the grass and looking at you. And you’ll go back after
twenty years and be surprised because the cow isn’t standing in the same place and
looking at you with the same expression.
As I drove up Chamford Hill I realized that the picture I’d had of it in my mind was
almost entirely imaginary. But it was a fact that certain things had changed. The road was
tannac, whereas in the old days it used to be macadam (I remember the bumpy feeling of
it under the bike), and it seemed to have got a lot wider. And there were far less trees. In
the old days there used to be huge beeches growing in the hedgerows, and in places their
boughs met across the road and made a kind of arch. Now they were all gone. I’d nearly
got to the top of the hill when I came on something which was certainly new. To the right
of the road there was a whole lot of fake -picturesque houses, with overhanging eaves and
rose pergolas and what-not. You know the kind of houses that are just a little too high-
class to stand in a row, and so they’re dotted about in a kind of colony, with private roads
leading up to them. And at the entrance to one of the private roads there was a huge white
board which said:
THE KENNELS
PEDIGREE SEALYHAM PUPS
DOGS BOARDED
Surely THAT usen’t to be there?
I thought for a moment. Yes, I remembered! Where those houses stood there used to be a
little oak plantation, and the trees grew too close together, so that they were very tall and
thin, and in spring the ground underneath them used to be smothered in anemones.
Certainly there were never any houses as far out of the town as this.
I got to the top of the hill. Another minute and Lower Binfield would be in sight. Lower
Binfield! Why should I pretend I wasn’t excited? At the very thought of seeing it again an
extraordinary feeling that started in my guts crept upwards and did something to my
heart.
