It’s like being
woken up by somebody shying a bucket of water over you.
woken up by somebody shying a bucket of water over you.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
‘The primeval forest
brooding round us. Our young people grow up amid surroundings of natural beauty. We
are nearly all of us enlightened people, of course. Would you credit that three-quarters of
us up here are vegetarians? The local butchers don’t like us at all — te-hee! And some
quite eminent people live here. Miss Helena Thurloe, the novelist — you’ve heard of her,
of course. And Professor Woad, the psychic research worker. Such a poetic character! He
goes wandering out into the woods and the family can’t find him at mealtimes. He says
he’s walking among the fairies. Do you believe in fairies? I admit — te-hee! — I am just a
wee bit sceptical. But his photographs are most convincing. ’
I began to wonder whether he was someone who’d escaped from Binfield House. But no,
he was sane enough, after a fashion. I knew the type. Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry,
nature -worship, roll in the dew before breakfast. I’d met a few of them years ago in
Ealing. He began to show me round the estate. There was nothing left of the woods. It
was all houses, houses — and what houses! Do you know these faked-up Tudor houses
with the curly roofs and the buttresses that don’t buttress anything, and the rock-gardens
with concrete bird-baths and those red plaster elves you can buy at the florists’? You
could see in your mind’s eye the awful gang of food-cranks and spook-hunters and
simple-lifers with 1,000 pounds a year that lived there. Even the pavements were crazy. I
didn’t let him take me far. Some of the houses made me wish I’d got a hand-grenade in
my pocket. I tried to damp him down by asking whether people didn’t object to living so
near the lunatic asylum, but it didn’t have much effect. Finally I stopped and said:
‘There used to be another pool, besides the big one. It can’t be far from here. ’
‘Another pool? Oh, surely not. I don’t think there was ever another pool. ’
‘They may have drained it off,’ I said. ‘It was a pretty deep pool. It would leave a big pit
behind. ’
For the first time he looked a bit uneasy. He rubbed his nose.
‘Oh-ah. Of course, you must understand our life up here is in some ways primitive. The
simple life, you know. We prefer it so. But being so far from the town has its
inconveniences, of course. Some of our sanitary arrangements are not altogether
satisfactory. The dust-cart only calls once a month, I believe. ’
‘You mean they’ve turned the pool into a rubbish-dump? ’
‘Well, there IS something in the nature of a — ’ he shied at the word rubbish-dump. ‘We
have to dispose of tins and so forth, of course. Over there, behind that clump of trees. ’
We went across there. They’d left a few trees to hid it. But yes, there it was. It was my
pool, all right. They’d drained the water off. It made a great round hole, like an enonnous
well, twenty or thirty feet deep. Already it was half full of tin cans.
I stood looking at the tin cans.
‘It’s a pity they drained it,’ I said. ‘There used to be some big fish in that pool. ’
‘Fish? Oh, I never heard anything about that. Of course we could hardly have a pool of
water here among the houses. The mosquitoes, you know. But it was before my time. ’
‘I suppose these houses have been built a good long time? ’ I said.
‘Oh — ten or fifteen years, I think. ’
‘I used to know this place before the war,’ I said. ‘It was all woods then. There weren’t
any houses except Binfield House. But that little bit of copse over there hasn’t changed. I
walked through it on my way here. ’
‘Ah, that! That is sacrosanct. We have decided never to build in it. It is sacred to the
young people. Nature, you know. ’ He twinkled at me, a kind of roguish look, as if he was
letting me into a little secret: ‘We call it the Pixy Glen. ’
The Pixy Glen. I got rid of him, went back to the car and drove down to Lower Binfield.
The Pixy Glen. And they’d filled my pool up with tin cans. God rot them and bust them!
Say what you like — call it silly, childish, anything — but doesn’t it make you puke
sometimes to see what they’re doing to England, with their bird- baths and their plaster
gnomes, and their pixies and tin cans, where the beech woods used to be?
Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what
trees and what men. Not that there’s anything one can do about it, except to wish them
the pox in their guts.
One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill. I’m finished with this notion of getting
back into the past. What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They
don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches
up to the stratosphere. All the same, I didn’t particularly care. After all, I thought, I’ve
still got three days left. I’d have a bit of peace and quiet, and stop bothering about what
they’d done to Lower Binfield. As for my idea of going fishing — that was off, of course.
Fishing, indeed! At my age! Really, Hilda was right.
I dumped the car in the garage of the George and walked into the lounge. It was six
o’clock. Somebody had switched on the wireless and the news-broadcast was beginning.
I came through the door just in time to hear the last few words of an S. O. S. And it gave
me a bit of a jolt, I admit. For the words I heard were:
‘ — where his wife, Hilda Bowling, is seriously ill. ’
The next instant the plummy voice went on: ‘Here is another S. O. S. Will Percival Chute,
who was last heard of — ’, but I didn’t wait to hear any more. I just walked straight on.
What made me feel rather proud, when I thought it over afterwards, was that when I
heard those words come out of the loudspeaker I never turned an eyelash. Not even a
pause in my step to let anyone know that I was George Bowling, whose wife Hilda
Bowling was seriously ill. The landlord’s wife was in the lounge, and she knew my name
was Bowling, at any rate she’d seen it in the register. Otherwise there was nobody there
except a couple of chaps who were staying at the George and who didn’t know me from
Adam. But I kept my head. Not a sign to anyone. I merely walked on into the private bar,
which had just opened, and ordered my pint as usual.
I had to think it over. By the time I’d drunk about half the pint I began to get the bearings
of the situation. In the first place, Hilda WASN’T ill, seriously or otherwise. I knew that.
She’d been perfectly well when I came away, and it wasn’t the time of the year for ‘flu or
anything of that kind. She was shamming. Why?
Obviously it was just another of her dodges. I saw how it was. She’d got wind
somehow — trust Hilda! — that I wasn’t really at Birmingham, and this was just her way of
getting me home. Couldn’t bear to think of me any longer with that other woman.
Because of course she’d take it for granted that I was with a woman. Can’t imagine any
other motive. And naturally she assumed that I’d come rushing home as soon as I heard
she was ill.
But that’s just where you’ve got it wrong, I thought to myself as I finished off the pint.
I’m too cute to be caught that way. I remembered the dodges she’d pulled before, and the
extraordinary trouble she’ll take to catch me out. I’ve even known her, when I’d been on
some journey she was suspicious about, check it all up with a Bradshaw and a road-map,
just to see whether I was telling the truth about my movements. And then there was that
time when she followed me all the way to Colchester and suddenly burst in on me at the
Temperance Hotel. And that time, unfortunately, she happened to be right — at least, she
wasn’t, but there were circumstances which made it look as if she was. I hadn’t the
slightest belief that she was ill. In fact, I knew she wasn’t, although I couldn’t say exactly
how.
I had another pint and things looked better. Of course there was a row coming when I got
home, but there’d have been a row anyway. I’ve got three good days ahead of me, I
thought. Curiously enough, now that the things I’d come to look for had turned out not to
exist, the idea of having a bit of holiday appealed to me all the more. Being away from
home — that was the great thing. Peace perfect peace with loved ones far away, as the
hymn puts it. And suddenly I decided that I WOULD have a woman if I felt like it. It
would serve Hilda right for being so dirty-minded, and besides, where’s the sense of
being suspected if it isn’t true?
But as the second pint worked inside me, the thing began to amuse me. I hadn’t fallen for
it, but it was damned ingenious all the same. I wondered how she’d managed about the
S. O. S. I’ve no idea what the procedure is. Do you have to have a doctor’s certificate, or
do you just send your name in? I felt pretty sure it was the Wheeler woman who’d put her
up to it. It seemed to me to have the Wheeler touch.
But all the same, the cheek of it! The lengths that women will go! Sometimes you can’t
help kind of admiring them.
6
After breakfast I strolled out into the market-place. It was a lovely morning, kind of cool
and still, with a pale yellow light like white wine playing over everything. The fresh
smell of the morning was mixed up with the smell of my cigar. But there was a zooming
noise from behind the houses, and suddenly a fleet of great black bombers came whizzing
over. I looked up at them. They seemed to be bang overhead.
The next moment I heard something. And at the same moment, if you’d happened to be
there, you’d have seen an interesting instance of what I believe is called conditioned
reflex. Because what I’d heard — there wasn’t any question of mistake — was the whistle
of a bomb. I hadn’t heard such a thing for twenty years, but I didn’t need to be told what
it was. And without taking any kind of thought I did the right thing. I flung myself on my
face.
After all I’m glad you didn’t see me. I don’t suppose I looked dignified. I was flattened
out on the pavement like a rat when it squeezes under a door. Nobody else had been half
as prompt. I’d acted so quickly that in the split second while the bomb was whistling
down I even had time to be afraid that it was all a mistake and I’d made a fool of myself
for nothing.
But the next moment — ah!
BOOM-BRRRRR!
A noise like the Day of Judgment, and then a noise like a ton of coal falling on to a sheet
of tin. That was falling bricks. I seemed to kind of melt into the pavement. ‘It’s started,’ I
thought. ‘I knew it! Old Hitler didn’t wait. Just sent his bombers across without warning. ’
And yet here’s a peculiar thing. Even in the echo of that awful, deafening crash, which
seemed to freeze me up from top to toe, I had time to think that there’s something grand
about the bursting of a big projectile. What does it sound like? It’s hard to say, because
what you hear is mixed up with what you’re frightened of. Mainly it gives you a vision of
bursting metal. You seem to see great sheets of iron bursting open. But the peculiar thing
is the feeling it gives you of being suddenly shoved up against reality.
It’s like being
woken up by somebody shying a bucket of water over you. You’re suddenly dragged out
of your dreams by a clang of bursting metal, and it’s terrible, and it’s real.
There was a sound of screams and yells, and also of car brakes being suddenly jammed
on. The second bomb which I was waiting for didn’t fall. I raised my head a little. On
every side people seemed to be rushing round and screaming. A car was skidding
diagonally across the road, I could hear a woman’s voice shrieking, ‘The Germans! The
Germans! ’ To the right I had a vague impression of a man’s round white face, rather like
a wrinkled paper bag, looking down at me. He was kind of dithering:
‘What is it? What’s happened? What are they doing? ’
‘It’s started,’ I said. ‘That was a bomb. Lie down. ’
But still the second bomb didn’t fall. Another quarter of a minute or so, and I raised my
head again. Some of the people were still rushing about, others were standing as if they’d
been glued to the ground. From somewhere behind the houses a huge haze of dust had
risen up, and through it a black jet of smoke was streaming upwards. And then I saw an
extraordinary sight. At the other end of the market-place the High Street rises a little. And
down this little hill a herd of pigs was galloping, a sort of huge flood of pig-faces. The
next moment, of course, I saw what it was. It wasn’t pigs at all, it was only the
schoolchildren in their gas- masks. I suppose they were bolting for some cellar where
they’d been told to take cover in case of air-raids. At the back of them I could even make
out a taller pig who was probably Miss Todgers. But I tell you for a moment they looked
exactly like a herd of pigs.
I picked myself up and walked across the market-place. People were calming down
already, and quite a little crowd had begun to flock towards the place where the bomb
had dropped.
Oh, yes, you’re right, of course. It wasn’t a German aeroplane after all. The war hadn’t
broken out. It was only an accident. The planes were flying over to do a bit of bombing
practice — at any rate they were carrying bombs — and somebody had put his hands on the
lever by mistake. I expect he got a good ticking off for it. By the time that the postmaster
had rung up London to ask whether there was a war on, and been told that there wasn’t,
everyone had grasped that it was an accident. But there’d been a space of time, something
between a minute and five minutes, when several thousand people believed we were at
war. A good job it didn’t last any longer. Another quarter of an hour and we’d have been
lynching our first spy.
I followed the crowd. The bomb had dropped in a little side-street off the High Street, the
one where Uncle Ezekiel used to have his shop. It wasn’t fifty yards from where the shop
used to be. As I came round the comer I could hear voices murmuring ‘Oo-oo! ’ — a kind
of awed noise, as if they were frightened and getting a big kick out of it. Luckily I got
there a few minutes before the ambulance and the fire-engine, and in spite of the fifty
people or so that had already collected I saw everything.
At first sight it looked as if the sky had been raining bricks and vegetables. There were
cabbage leaves everywhere. The bomb had blown a greengrocer’s shop out of existence.
The house to the right of it had part of its roof blown off, and the roof beams were on fire,
and all the houses round had been more or less damaged and had their windows smashed.
But what everyone was looking at was the house on the left. Its wall, the one that joined
the greengrocer’s shop, was ripped off as neatly as if someone had done it with a knife.
And what was extraordinary was that in the upstairs rooms nothing had been touched. It
was just like looking into a doll’s house. Chests-of-drawers, bedroom chairs, faded
wallpaper, a bed not yet made, and a jerry under the bed — all exactly as it had been lived
in, except that one wall was gone. But the lower rooms had caught the force of the
explosion. There was a frightful smashed-up mess of bricks, plaster, chair-legs, bits of a
varnished dresser, rags of tablecloth, piles of broken plates, and chu nks of a scullery sink.
A jar of marmalade had rolled across the floor, leaving a long streak of marmalade
behind, and running side by side with it there was a ribbon of blood. But in among the
broken crockery there was lying a leg. Just a leg, with the trouser still on it and a black
boot with a Wood-Milne rubber heel. This was what people were oo-ing and ah-ing at.
I had a good look at it and took it in. The blood was beginning to get mixed up with the
marmalade. When the fire-engine arrived I cleared off to the George to pack my bag.
This finishes me with Lower Binfield, I thought. I’m going home. But as a matter of fact
I didn’t shake the dust off my shoes and leave immediately. One never does. When
anything like that happens, people always stand about and discuss it for hours. There
wasn’t much work done in the old part of Lower Binfield that day, everyone was too
busy talking about the bomb, what it sounded like and what they thought when they heard
it. The bannaid at the George said it fair gave her the shudders. She said she’d never
sleep sound in her bed again, and what did you expect, it just showed that with these here
bombs you never knew. A woman had bitten off part of her tongue owing to the jump the
explosion gave her. It turned out that whereas at our end of the town everyone had
imagined it was a Gennan air-raid, everyone at the other end had taken it for granted that
it was an explosion at the stocking factory. Afterwards (I got this out of the newspaper)
the Air Ministry sent a chap to inspect the damage, and issued a report saying that the
effects of the bomb were ‘disappointing’. As a matter of fact it only killed three people,
the greengrocer, Perrott his name was, and an old couple who lived next door. The
woman wasn’t much smashed about, and they identified the old man by his boots, but
they never found a trace of Perrott. Not even a trouser-button to read the burial service
over.
In the afternoon I paid my bill and hooked it. I didn’t have much more than three quid left
after I’d paid the bill. They know how to cut it out of you these dolled-up country hotels,
and what with drinks and other odds and ends I’d been shying money about pretty freely.
I left my new rod and the rest of the fishing tackle in my bedroom. Let ‘em keep it. No
use to me. It was merely a quid that I’d chucked down the drain to teach myself a lesson.
And I’d leamt the lesson all right. Fat men of forty-five can’t go fishing. That kind of
thing doesn’t happen any longer, it’s just a dream, there’ll be no more fishing this side of
the grave.
It’s funny how things sink into you by degrees. What had I really felt when the bomb
exploded? At the actual moment, of course, it scared the wits out of me, and when I saw
the smashed-up house and the old man’s leg I’d had the kind of mild kick that you get
from seeing a street-accident. Disgusting, of course. Quite enough to make me fed-up
with this so-called holiday. But it hadn’t really made much impression.
But as I got clear of the outskirts of Lower Binfield and turned the car eastward, it all
came back to me. You know how it is when you’re in a car alone. There’s something
either in the hedges flying past you, or in the throb of the engine, that gets your thoughts
running in a certain rhythm. You have the same feeling sometimes when you’re in the
train. It’s a feeling of being able to see things in better perspective than usual. All kinds
of things that I’d been doubtful about I felt certain about now. To begin with, I’d come to
Lower Binfield with a question in my mind. What’s ahead of us? Is the game really up?
Can we get back to the life we used to live, or is it gone for ever? Well, I’d had my
answer. The old life’s finished, and to go back to Lower Binfield, you can’t put Jonah
back into the whale. I KNEW, though I don’t expect you to follow my train of thought.
And it was a queer thing I’d done coming here. All those years Lower Binfield had been
tucked away somewhere or other in my mind, a sort of quiet comer that I could step back
into when I felt like it, and finally I’d stepped back into it and found that it didn’t exist.
I’d chucked a pineapple into my dreams, and lest there should be any mistake the Royal
Air Force had followed up with five hundred pounds of T. N. T.
War is coming. 1941, they say. And there’ll be plenty of broken crockery, and little
houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant’s clerk
plastered over the piano that he’s buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of
thing matter, anyway? I’ 11 tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it
was this. IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you’ve got at the back of your
mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare
or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons,
the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enonnous faces, the machine-guns
squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it — at any rate, I
knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and
pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing
along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.
I trod on the gas, and the old car whizzed up and down the little hills, and the cows and
elm trees and fields of wheat rushed past till the engine was pretty nearly red-hot. I felt in
much the same mood as I’d felt that day in January when I was coming down the Strand,
the day I got my new false teeth. It was as though the power of prophecy had been given
me. It seemed to me that I could see the whole of England, and all the people in it, and all
the things that’ll happen to all of them. Sometimes, of course, even then, I had a doubt or
two. The world is very large, that’s a thing you notice when you’re driving about in a car,
and in a way it’s reassuring. Think of the enonnous stretches of land you pass over when
you cross a comer of a single English county. It’s like Siberia. And the fields and beech
spinneys and farmhouses and churches, and the villages with their little grocers’ shops
and the parish hall and the ducks walking across the green. Surely it’s too big to be
changed? Bound to remain more or less the same. And presently I struck into outer
London and followed the Uxbridge Road as far as Southall. Miles and miles of ugly
houses, with people living dull decent lives inside them. And beyond it London stretching
on and on, streets, squares, back-alleys, tenements, blocks of flats, pubs, fried-fish shops,
picture-houses, on and on for twenty miles, and all the eight million people with their
little private lives which they don’t want to have altered. The bombs aren’t made that
could smash it out of existence. And the chaos of it! The privateness of all those lives!
John Smith cutting out the football coupons, Bill Williams swapping stories in the
barber’s. Mrs Jones coming home with the supper beer. Eight million of them! Surely
they’ll manage somehow, bombs or no bombs, to keep on with the life that they’ve been
used to?
Illusion! Baloney! It doesn’t matter how many of them there are, they’re all for it. The
bad times are coming, and the streamlined men are coming too. What’s coming
afterwards I don’t know, it hardly even interests me. I only know that if there’s anything
you care a curse about, better say good-bye to it now, because everything you’ve ever
known is going down, down, into the muck, with the machine-guns rattling all the time.
But when I got back to the suburb my mood suddenly changed.
It suddenly struck me — and it hadn’t even crossed my mind till that moment — that Hilda
might really be ill after all.
That’s the effect of environment, you see. In Lower Binfield I’d taken it absolutely for
granted that she wasn’t ill and was merely shamming in order to get me home. It had
seemed natural at the time, I don’t know why. But as I drove into West Bletchley and the
Hesperides Estate closed round me like a kind of red-brick prison, which is what it is, the
ordinary habits of thought came back. I had this kind of Monday morning feeling when
everything seems bleak and sensible. I saw what bloody rot it was, this business that I’d
wasted the last five days on. Sneaking off to Lower Binfield to try and recover the past,
and then, in the car coming home, thinking a lot of prophetic baloney about the future.
The future! What’s the future got to do with chaps like you and me? Holding down our
jobs — that’s our future. As for Hilda, even when the bombs are dropping she’ll be still
thinking about the price of butter.
And suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to think she’d do a thing like that. Of course the
S. O. S. wasn’t a fake! As though she’d have the imagination! It was just the plain cold
truth. She wasn’t shamming at all, she was really ill. And Gosh! at this moment she might
be lying somewhere in ghastly pain, or even dead, for all I knew. The thought sent a most
horrible pang of fright through me, a sort of dreadful cold feeling in my guts. I whizzed
down Ellesmere Road at nearly forty miles an hour, and instead of taking the car to the
lock-up garage as usual I stopped outside the house and jumped out.
So I’m fond of Hilda after all, you say! I don’t know exactly what you mean by fond. Are
you fond of your own face? Probably not, but you can’t imagine yourself without it. It’s
part of you. Well, that’s how I felt about Hilda. When things are going well I can’t stick
the sight of her, but the thought that she might be dead or even in pain sent the shivers
through me.
I fumbled with the key, got the door open, and the familiar smell of old mackintoshes hit
me.
‘Hilda! ’ I yelled. ‘Hilda! ’
No answer. For a moment I was yelling ‘Hilda! Hilda! ’ into utter silence, and some cold
sweat started out on my backbone. Maybe they carted her away to hospital already —
maybe there was a corpse lying upstairs in the empty house.
I started to dash up the stairs, but at the same moment the two kids, in their pyjamas,
came out of their rooms on either side of the landing. It was eight or nine o’clock, I
suppose — at any rate the light was just beginning to fail. Lorna hung over the banisters.
‘Oo, Daddy! Oo, it’s Daddy! Why have you come back today? Mummy said you weren’t
coming till Friday. ’
‘Where’s your mother?
brooding round us. Our young people grow up amid surroundings of natural beauty. We
are nearly all of us enlightened people, of course. Would you credit that three-quarters of
us up here are vegetarians? The local butchers don’t like us at all — te-hee! And some
quite eminent people live here. Miss Helena Thurloe, the novelist — you’ve heard of her,
of course. And Professor Woad, the psychic research worker. Such a poetic character! He
goes wandering out into the woods and the family can’t find him at mealtimes. He says
he’s walking among the fairies. Do you believe in fairies? I admit — te-hee! — I am just a
wee bit sceptical. But his photographs are most convincing. ’
I began to wonder whether he was someone who’d escaped from Binfield House. But no,
he was sane enough, after a fashion. I knew the type. Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry,
nature -worship, roll in the dew before breakfast. I’d met a few of them years ago in
Ealing. He began to show me round the estate. There was nothing left of the woods. It
was all houses, houses — and what houses! Do you know these faked-up Tudor houses
with the curly roofs and the buttresses that don’t buttress anything, and the rock-gardens
with concrete bird-baths and those red plaster elves you can buy at the florists’? You
could see in your mind’s eye the awful gang of food-cranks and spook-hunters and
simple-lifers with 1,000 pounds a year that lived there. Even the pavements were crazy. I
didn’t let him take me far. Some of the houses made me wish I’d got a hand-grenade in
my pocket. I tried to damp him down by asking whether people didn’t object to living so
near the lunatic asylum, but it didn’t have much effect. Finally I stopped and said:
‘There used to be another pool, besides the big one. It can’t be far from here. ’
‘Another pool? Oh, surely not. I don’t think there was ever another pool. ’
‘They may have drained it off,’ I said. ‘It was a pretty deep pool. It would leave a big pit
behind. ’
For the first time he looked a bit uneasy. He rubbed his nose.
‘Oh-ah. Of course, you must understand our life up here is in some ways primitive. The
simple life, you know. We prefer it so. But being so far from the town has its
inconveniences, of course. Some of our sanitary arrangements are not altogether
satisfactory. The dust-cart only calls once a month, I believe. ’
‘You mean they’ve turned the pool into a rubbish-dump? ’
‘Well, there IS something in the nature of a — ’ he shied at the word rubbish-dump. ‘We
have to dispose of tins and so forth, of course. Over there, behind that clump of trees. ’
We went across there. They’d left a few trees to hid it. But yes, there it was. It was my
pool, all right. They’d drained the water off. It made a great round hole, like an enonnous
well, twenty or thirty feet deep. Already it was half full of tin cans.
I stood looking at the tin cans.
‘It’s a pity they drained it,’ I said. ‘There used to be some big fish in that pool. ’
‘Fish? Oh, I never heard anything about that. Of course we could hardly have a pool of
water here among the houses. The mosquitoes, you know. But it was before my time. ’
‘I suppose these houses have been built a good long time? ’ I said.
‘Oh — ten or fifteen years, I think. ’
‘I used to know this place before the war,’ I said. ‘It was all woods then. There weren’t
any houses except Binfield House. But that little bit of copse over there hasn’t changed. I
walked through it on my way here. ’
‘Ah, that! That is sacrosanct. We have decided never to build in it. It is sacred to the
young people. Nature, you know. ’ He twinkled at me, a kind of roguish look, as if he was
letting me into a little secret: ‘We call it the Pixy Glen. ’
The Pixy Glen. I got rid of him, went back to the car and drove down to Lower Binfield.
The Pixy Glen. And they’d filled my pool up with tin cans. God rot them and bust them!
Say what you like — call it silly, childish, anything — but doesn’t it make you puke
sometimes to see what they’re doing to England, with their bird- baths and their plaster
gnomes, and their pixies and tin cans, where the beech woods used to be?
Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what
trees and what men. Not that there’s anything one can do about it, except to wish them
the pox in their guts.
One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill. I’m finished with this notion of getting
back into the past. What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They
don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches
up to the stratosphere. All the same, I didn’t particularly care. After all, I thought, I’ve
still got three days left. I’d have a bit of peace and quiet, and stop bothering about what
they’d done to Lower Binfield. As for my idea of going fishing — that was off, of course.
Fishing, indeed! At my age! Really, Hilda was right.
I dumped the car in the garage of the George and walked into the lounge. It was six
o’clock. Somebody had switched on the wireless and the news-broadcast was beginning.
I came through the door just in time to hear the last few words of an S. O. S. And it gave
me a bit of a jolt, I admit. For the words I heard were:
‘ — where his wife, Hilda Bowling, is seriously ill. ’
The next instant the plummy voice went on: ‘Here is another S. O. S. Will Percival Chute,
who was last heard of — ’, but I didn’t wait to hear any more. I just walked straight on.
What made me feel rather proud, when I thought it over afterwards, was that when I
heard those words come out of the loudspeaker I never turned an eyelash. Not even a
pause in my step to let anyone know that I was George Bowling, whose wife Hilda
Bowling was seriously ill. The landlord’s wife was in the lounge, and she knew my name
was Bowling, at any rate she’d seen it in the register. Otherwise there was nobody there
except a couple of chaps who were staying at the George and who didn’t know me from
Adam. But I kept my head. Not a sign to anyone. I merely walked on into the private bar,
which had just opened, and ordered my pint as usual.
I had to think it over. By the time I’d drunk about half the pint I began to get the bearings
of the situation. In the first place, Hilda WASN’T ill, seriously or otherwise. I knew that.
She’d been perfectly well when I came away, and it wasn’t the time of the year for ‘flu or
anything of that kind. She was shamming. Why?
Obviously it was just another of her dodges. I saw how it was. She’d got wind
somehow — trust Hilda! — that I wasn’t really at Birmingham, and this was just her way of
getting me home. Couldn’t bear to think of me any longer with that other woman.
Because of course she’d take it for granted that I was with a woman. Can’t imagine any
other motive. And naturally she assumed that I’d come rushing home as soon as I heard
she was ill.
But that’s just where you’ve got it wrong, I thought to myself as I finished off the pint.
I’m too cute to be caught that way. I remembered the dodges she’d pulled before, and the
extraordinary trouble she’ll take to catch me out. I’ve even known her, when I’d been on
some journey she was suspicious about, check it all up with a Bradshaw and a road-map,
just to see whether I was telling the truth about my movements. And then there was that
time when she followed me all the way to Colchester and suddenly burst in on me at the
Temperance Hotel. And that time, unfortunately, she happened to be right — at least, she
wasn’t, but there were circumstances which made it look as if she was. I hadn’t the
slightest belief that she was ill. In fact, I knew she wasn’t, although I couldn’t say exactly
how.
I had another pint and things looked better. Of course there was a row coming when I got
home, but there’d have been a row anyway. I’ve got three good days ahead of me, I
thought. Curiously enough, now that the things I’d come to look for had turned out not to
exist, the idea of having a bit of holiday appealed to me all the more. Being away from
home — that was the great thing. Peace perfect peace with loved ones far away, as the
hymn puts it. And suddenly I decided that I WOULD have a woman if I felt like it. It
would serve Hilda right for being so dirty-minded, and besides, where’s the sense of
being suspected if it isn’t true?
But as the second pint worked inside me, the thing began to amuse me. I hadn’t fallen for
it, but it was damned ingenious all the same. I wondered how she’d managed about the
S. O. S. I’ve no idea what the procedure is. Do you have to have a doctor’s certificate, or
do you just send your name in? I felt pretty sure it was the Wheeler woman who’d put her
up to it. It seemed to me to have the Wheeler touch.
But all the same, the cheek of it! The lengths that women will go! Sometimes you can’t
help kind of admiring them.
6
After breakfast I strolled out into the market-place. It was a lovely morning, kind of cool
and still, with a pale yellow light like white wine playing over everything. The fresh
smell of the morning was mixed up with the smell of my cigar. But there was a zooming
noise from behind the houses, and suddenly a fleet of great black bombers came whizzing
over. I looked up at them. They seemed to be bang overhead.
The next moment I heard something. And at the same moment, if you’d happened to be
there, you’d have seen an interesting instance of what I believe is called conditioned
reflex. Because what I’d heard — there wasn’t any question of mistake — was the whistle
of a bomb. I hadn’t heard such a thing for twenty years, but I didn’t need to be told what
it was. And without taking any kind of thought I did the right thing. I flung myself on my
face.
After all I’m glad you didn’t see me. I don’t suppose I looked dignified. I was flattened
out on the pavement like a rat when it squeezes under a door. Nobody else had been half
as prompt. I’d acted so quickly that in the split second while the bomb was whistling
down I even had time to be afraid that it was all a mistake and I’d made a fool of myself
for nothing.
But the next moment — ah!
BOOM-BRRRRR!
A noise like the Day of Judgment, and then a noise like a ton of coal falling on to a sheet
of tin. That was falling bricks. I seemed to kind of melt into the pavement. ‘It’s started,’ I
thought. ‘I knew it! Old Hitler didn’t wait. Just sent his bombers across without warning. ’
And yet here’s a peculiar thing. Even in the echo of that awful, deafening crash, which
seemed to freeze me up from top to toe, I had time to think that there’s something grand
about the bursting of a big projectile. What does it sound like? It’s hard to say, because
what you hear is mixed up with what you’re frightened of. Mainly it gives you a vision of
bursting metal. You seem to see great sheets of iron bursting open. But the peculiar thing
is the feeling it gives you of being suddenly shoved up against reality.
It’s like being
woken up by somebody shying a bucket of water over you. You’re suddenly dragged out
of your dreams by a clang of bursting metal, and it’s terrible, and it’s real.
There was a sound of screams and yells, and also of car brakes being suddenly jammed
on. The second bomb which I was waiting for didn’t fall. I raised my head a little. On
every side people seemed to be rushing round and screaming. A car was skidding
diagonally across the road, I could hear a woman’s voice shrieking, ‘The Germans! The
Germans! ’ To the right I had a vague impression of a man’s round white face, rather like
a wrinkled paper bag, looking down at me. He was kind of dithering:
‘What is it? What’s happened? What are they doing? ’
‘It’s started,’ I said. ‘That was a bomb. Lie down. ’
But still the second bomb didn’t fall. Another quarter of a minute or so, and I raised my
head again. Some of the people were still rushing about, others were standing as if they’d
been glued to the ground. From somewhere behind the houses a huge haze of dust had
risen up, and through it a black jet of smoke was streaming upwards. And then I saw an
extraordinary sight. At the other end of the market-place the High Street rises a little. And
down this little hill a herd of pigs was galloping, a sort of huge flood of pig-faces. The
next moment, of course, I saw what it was. It wasn’t pigs at all, it was only the
schoolchildren in their gas- masks. I suppose they were bolting for some cellar where
they’d been told to take cover in case of air-raids. At the back of them I could even make
out a taller pig who was probably Miss Todgers. But I tell you for a moment they looked
exactly like a herd of pigs.
I picked myself up and walked across the market-place. People were calming down
already, and quite a little crowd had begun to flock towards the place where the bomb
had dropped.
Oh, yes, you’re right, of course. It wasn’t a German aeroplane after all. The war hadn’t
broken out. It was only an accident. The planes were flying over to do a bit of bombing
practice — at any rate they were carrying bombs — and somebody had put his hands on the
lever by mistake. I expect he got a good ticking off for it. By the time that the postmaster
had rung up London to ask whether there was a war on, and been told that there wasn’t,
everyone had grasped that it was an accident. But there’d been a space of time, something
between a minute and five minutes, when several thousand people believed we were at
war. A good job it didn’t last any longer. Another quarter of an hour and we’d have been
lynching our first spy.
I followed the crowd. The bomb had dropped in a little side-street off the High Street, the
one where Uncle Ezekiel used to have his shop. It wasn’t fifty yards from where the shop
used to be. As I came round the comer I could hear voices murmuring ‘Oo-oo! ’ — a kind
of awed noise, as if they were frightened and getting a big kick out of it. Luckily I got
there a few minutes before the ambulance and the fire-engine, and in spite of the fifty
people or so that had already collected I saw everything.
At first sight it looked as if the sky had been raining bricks and vegetables. There were
cabbage leaves everywhere. The bomb had blown a greengrocer’s shop out of existence.
The house to the right of it had part of its roof blown off, and the roof beams were on fire,
and all the houses round had been more or less damaged and had their windows smashed.
But what everyone was looking at was the house on the left. Its wall, the one that joined
the greengrocer’s shop, was ripped off as neatly as if someone had done it with a knife.
And what was extraordinary was that in the upstairs rooms nothing had been touched. It
was just like looking into a doll’s house. Chests-of-drawers, bedroom chairs, faded
wallpaper, a bed not yet made, and a jerry under the bed — all exactly as it had been lived
in, except that one wall was gone. But the lower rooms had caught the force of the
explosion. There was a frightful smashed-up mess of bricks, plaster, chair-legs, bits of a
varnished dresser, rags of tablecloth, piles of broken plates, and chu nks of a scullery sink.
A jar of marmalade had rolled across the floor, leaving a long streak of marmalade
behind, and running side by side with it there was a ribbon of blood. But in among the
broken crockery there was lying a leg. Just a leg, with the trouser still on it and a black
boot with a Wood-Milne rubber heel. This was what people were oo-ing and ah-ing at.
I had a good look at it and took it in. The blood was beginning to get mixed up with the
marmalade. When the fire-engine arrived I cleared off to the George to pack my bag.
This finishes me with Lower Binfield, I thought. I’m going home. But as a matter of fact
I didn’t shake the dust off my shoes and leave immediately. One never does. When
anything like that happens, people always stand about and discuss it for hours. There
wasn’t much work done in the old part of Lower Binfield that day, everyone was too
busy talking about the bomb, what it sounded like and what they thought when they heard
it. The bannaid at the George said it fair gave her the shudders. She said she’d never
sleep sound in her bed again, and what did you expect, it just showed that with these here
bombs you never knew. A woman had bitten off part of her tongue owing to the jump the
explosion gave her. It turned out that whereas at our end of the town everyone had
imagined it was a Gennan air-raid, everyone at the other end had taken it for granted that
it was an explosion at the stocking factory. Afterwards (I got this out of the newspaper)
the Air Ministry sent a chap to inspect the damage, and issued a report saying that the
effects of the bomb were ‘disappointing’. As a matter of fact it only killed three people,
the greengrocer, Perrott his name was, and an old couple who lived next door. The
woman wasn’t much smashed about, and they identified the old man by his boots, but
they never found a trace of Perrott. Not even a trouser-button to read the burial service
over.
In the afternoon I paid my bill and hooked it. I didn’t have much more than three quid left
after I’d paid the bill. They know how to cut it out of you these dolled-up country hotels,
and what with drinks and other odds and ends I’d been shying money about pretty freely.
I left my new rod and the rest of the fishing tackle in my bedroom. Let ‘em keep it. No
use to me. It was merely a quid that I’d chucked down the drain to teach myself a lesson.
And I’d leamt the lesson all right. Fat men of forty-five can’t go fishing. That kind of
thing doesn’t happen any longer, it’s just a dream, there’ll be no more fishing this side of
the grave.
It’s funny how things sink into you by degrees. What had I really felt when the bomb
exploded? At the actual moment, of course, it scared the wits out of me, and when I saw
the smashed-up house and the old man’s leg I’d had the kind of mild kick that you get
from seeing a street-accident. Disgusting, of course. Quite enough to make me fed-up
with this so-called holiday. But it hadn’t really made much impression.
But as I got clear of the outskirts of Lower Binfield and turned the car eastward, it all
came back to me. You know how it is when you’re in a car alone. There’s something
either in the hedges flying past you, or in the throb of the engine, that gets your thoughts
running in a certain rhythm. You have the same feeling sometimes when you’re in the
train. It’s a feeling of being able to see things in better perspective than usual. All kinds
of things that I’d been doubtful about I felt certain about now. To begin with, I’d come to
Lower Binfield with a question in my mind. What’s ahead of us? Is the game really up?
Can we get back to the life we used to live, or is it gone for ever? Well, I’d had my
answer. The old life’s finished, and to go back to Lower Binfield, you can’t put Jonah
back into the whale. I KNEW, though I don’t expect you to follow my train of thought.
And it was a queer thing I’d done coming here. All those years Lower Binfield had been
tucked away somewhere or other in my mind, a sort of quiet comer that I could step back
into when I felt like it, and finally I’d stepped back into it and found that it didn’t exist.
I’d chucked a pineapple into my dreams, and lest there should be any mistake the Royal
Air Force had followed up with five hundred pounds of T. N. T.
War is coming. 1941, they say. And there’ll be plenty of broken crockery, and little
houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant’s clerk
plastered over the piano that he’s buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of
thing matter, anyway? I’ 11 tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it
was this. IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you’ve got at the back of your
mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare
or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons,
the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enonnous faces, the machine-guns
squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it — at any rate, I
knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and
pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing
along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.
I trod on the gas, and the old car whizzed up and down the little hills, and the cows and
elm trees and fields of wheat rushed past till the engine was pretty nearly red-hot. I felt in
much the same mood as I’d felt that day in January when I was coming down the Strand,
the day I got my new false teeth. It was as though the power of prophecy had been given
me. It seemed to me that I could see the whole of England, and all the people in it, and all
the things that’ll happen to all of them. Sometimes, of course, even then, I had a doubt or
two. The world is very large, that’s a thing you notice when you’re driving about in a car,
and in a way it’s reassuring. Think of the enonnous stretches of land you pass over when
you cross a comer of a single English county. It’s like Siberia. And the fields and beech
spinneys and farmhouses and churches, and the villages with their little grocers’ shops
and the parish hall and the ducks walking across the green. Surely it’s too big to be
changed? Bound to remain more or less the same. And presently I struck into outer
London and followed the Uxbridge Road as far as Southall. Miles and miles of ugly
houses, with people living dull decent lives inside them. And beyond it London stretching
on and on, streets, squares, back-alleys, tenements, blocks of flats, pubs, fried-fish shops,
picture-houses, on and on for twenty miles, and all the eight million people with their
little private lives which they don’t want to have altered. The bombs aren’t made that
could smash it out of existence. And the chaos of it! The privateness of all those lives!
John Smith cutting out the football coupons, Bill Williams swapping stories in the
barber’s. Mrs Jones coming home with the supper beer. Eight million of them! Surely
they’ll manage somehow, bombs or no bombs, to keep on with the life that they’ve been
used to?
Illusion! Baloney! It doesn’t matter how many of them there are, they’re all for it. The
bad times are coming, and the streamlined men are coming too. What’s coming
afterwards I don’t know, it hardly even interests me. I only know that if there’s anything
you care a curse about, better say good-bye to it now, because everything you’ve ever
known is going down, down, into the muck, with the machine-guns rattling all the time.
But when I got back to the suburb my mood suddenly changed.
It suddenly struck me — and it hadn’t even crossed my mind till that moment — that Hilda
might really be ill after all.
That’s the effect of environment, you see. In Lower Binfield I’d taken it absolutely for
granted that she wasn’t ill and was merely shamming in order to get me home. It had
seemed natural at the time, I don’t know why. But as I drove into West Bletchley and the
Hesperides Estate closed round me like a kind of red-brick prison, which is what it is, the
ordinary habits of thought came back. I had this kind of Monday morning feeling when
everything seems bleak and sensible. I saw what bloody rot it was, this business that I’d
wasted the last five days on. Sneaking off to Lower Binfield to try and recover the past,
and then, in the car coming home, thinking a lot of prophetic baloney about the future.
The future! What’s the future got to do with chaps like you and me? Holding down our
jobs — that’s our future. As for Hilda, even when the bombs are dropping she’ll be still
thinking about the price of butter.
And suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to think she’d do a thing like that. Of course the
S. O. S. wasn’t a fake! As though she’d have the imagination! It was just the plain cold
truth. She wasn’t shamming at all, she was really ill. And Gosh! at this moment she might
be lying somewhere in ghastly pain, or even dead, for all I knew. The thought sent a most
horrible pang of fright through me, a sort of dreadful cold feeling in my guts. I whizzed
down Ellesmere Road at nearly forty miles an hour, and instead of taking the car to the
lock-up garage as usual I stopped outside the house and jumped out.
So I’m fond of Hilda after all, you say! I don’t know exactly what you mean by fond. Are
you fond of your own face? Probably not, but you can’t imagine yourself without it. It’s
part of you. Well, that’s how I felt about Hilda. When things are going well I can’t stick
the sight of her, but the thought that she might be dead or even in pain sent the shivers
through me.
I fumbled with the key, got the door open, and the familiar smell of old mackintoshes hit
me.
‘Hilda! ’ I yelled. ‘Hilda! ’
No answer. For a moment I was yelling ‘Hilda! Hilda! ’ into utter silence, and some cold
sweat started out on my backbone. Maybe they carted her away to hospital already —
maybe there was a corpse lying upstairs in the empty house.
I started to dash up the stairs, but at the same moment the two kids, in their pyjamas,
came out of their rooms on either side of the landing. It was eight or nine o’clock, I
suppose — at any rate the light was just beginning to fail. Lorna hung over the banisters.
‘Oo, Daddy! Oo, it’s Daddy! Why have you come back today? Mummy said you weren’t
coming till Friday. ’
‘Where’s your mother?
