Has it
anything
to do with the war?
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
The
whole thing had existed for about three days, like a sort of bubble, and then had been
forgotten, and I’d been forgotten with it. My eleven tins of bully beef had been left
behind by some officers who had been there earlier on some other mysterious mission.
They’d also left behind a very deaf old man called Private Lidgebird. What Lidgebird
was supposed to be doing there I never discovered. I wonder whether you’ll believe that I
remained guarding those eleven tins of bully beef from half-way through 1917 to the
beginning of 1919? Probably you won’t, but it’s the truth. And at the time even that
didn’t seem particularly strange. By 1918 one had simply got out of the habit of
expecting things to happen in a reasonable manner.
Once a month they sent me an enormous official form calling upon me to state the
number and condition of pick-axes, entrenching tools, coils of barbed wire, blankets,
waterproof groundsheets, first-aid outfits, sheets of corrugated iron, and tins of plum and
apple jam under my care. I just entered ‘nil’ against everything and sent the form back.
Nothing ever happened. Up in London someone was quietly filing the forms, and sending
out more forms, and filing those, and so on. It was the way things were happening. The
mysterious higher-ups who were running the war had forgotten my existence. I didn’t jog
their memory. I was up a backwater that didn’t lead anywhere, and after two years in
France I wasn’t so burning with patriotism that I wanted to get out of it.
It was a lonely part of the coast where you never saw a soul except a few yokels who’d
barely heard there was a war on. A quarter of a mile away, down a little hill, the sea
boomed and surged over enormous flats of sand. Nine months of the year it rained, and
the other three a raging wind blew off the Atlantic. There was nothing there except
Private Lidgebird, myself, two Army huts — one of them a decentish two-roomed hut
which I inhabited — and the eleven tins of bully beef. Lidgebird was a surly old devil and
I could never get much out of him except the fact that he’d been a market gardener before
he joined the Army. It was interesting to see how rapidly he was reverting to type. Even
before I got to Twelve Mile Dump he’d dug a patch round one of the huts and started
planting spuds, in the autumn he dug another patch till he’d got about half an acre under
cultivation, at the beginning of 1918 he started keeping hens which had got to quite a
number by the end of the summer, and towards the end of the year he suddenly produced
a pig from God knows where. I don’t think it crossed his mind to wonder what the devil
we were doing there, or what the West Coast Defence Force was and whether it actually
existed. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that he’s there still, raising pigs and potatoes on
the spot where Twelve Mile Dump used to be. I hope he is. Good luck to him.
Meanwhile I was doing something I’d never before had the chance to do as a full-time
job — reading.
The officers who’d been there before had left a few books behind, mostly sevenpenny
editions and nearly all of them the kind of tripe that people were reading in those days.
Ian Hay and Sapper and the Craig Kennedy stories and so forth. But at some time or other
somebody had been there who knew what books are worth reading and what are not. I
myself, at the time, didn’t know anything of the kind. The only books I’d ever voluntarily
read were detective stories and once in a way a smutty sex book. God knows I don’t set
up to be a highbrow even now, but if you’d asked me THEN for the name of a ‘good’
book I’d have answered The Woman Thou Gavest Me, or (in memory of the vicar)
Sesame and Lilies. In any case a ‘good’ book was a book one didn’t have any intention of
reading. But there I was, in a job where there was less than nothing to do, with the sea
booming on the beach and the rain streaming down the window-panes — and a whole row
of books staring me in the face on the temporary shelf someone had rigged up against the
wall of the hut. Naturally I started to read them from end to end, with, at the beginning,
about as much attempt to discriminate as a pig working its way through a pail of garbage.
But in among them there were three or four books that were different from the others. No,
you’ve got it wrong! Don’t run away with the idea that I suddenly discovered Marcel
Proust or Henry James or somebody. I wouldn’t have read them even if I had. These
books I’m speaking of weren’t in the least highbrow. But now and again it so happens
that you strike a book which is exactly at the mental level you’ve reached at the moment,
so much so that it seems to have been written especially for you. One of them was H. G.
Wells’s The History of Mr Polly, in a cheap shilling edition which was falling to pieces. I
wonder if you can imagine the effect it had upon me, to be brought up as I’d been
brought up, the son of a shopkeeper in a country town, and then to come across a book
like that? Another was Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street. It had been the scandal of
the season a few years back, and I’d even heard vague rumours of it in Lower Binfield.
Another was Conrad’s Victory, parts of which bored me. But books like that started you
thinking. And there was a back number of some magazine with a blue cover which had a
short story of D. H. Lawrence’s in it. I don’t remember the name of it. It was a story
about a German conscript who shoves his sergeant-major over the edge of a fortification
and then does a bunk and gets caught in his girl’s bedroom. It puzzled me a lot. I couldn’t
make out what it was all about, and yet it left me with a vague feeling that I’d like to read
some others like it.
Well, for several months I had an appetite for books that was almost like physical thirst.
It was the first real go-in at reading that I’d had since my Dick Donovan days. At the
beginning I had no idea how to set about getting hold of books. I thought the only way
was to buy them. That’s interesting, I think. It shows you the difference upbringing
makes. I suppose the children of the middle classes, the 500 pounds a year middle
classes, know all about Mudie’s and the Times Book Club when they’re in their cradles.
A bit later I learned of the existence of lending libraries and took out a subscription at
Mudie’s and another at a library in Bristol. And what I read during the next year or so!
Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W. W. Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver
Onions, Compton Mackenzie, H. Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna,
May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, Elinor Glyn, O. Henry, Stephen Leacock,
and even Silas Hocking and Jean Stratton Porter. How many of the names in that list are
kn own to you, I wonder? Half the books that people took seriously in those days are
forgotten now. But at the beginning I swallowed them all down like a whale that’s got in
among a shoal of shrimps. I just revelled in them. After a bit, of course, I grew more
highbrow and began to distinguish between tripe and not-tripe. I got hold of Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers and sort of half-enjoyed it, and I got a lot of kick out of Oscar Wilde’s
Dorian Gray and Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights. Wells was the author who made the
biggest impression on me. I read George Moore’s Esther Waters and liked it, and I tried
several of Hardy’s novels and always got stuck about half-way through. I even had a go
at Ibsen, who left me with a vague impression that in Norway it’s always raining.
It was queer, really. Even at the time it struck me as queer. I was a second-loot with
hardly any Cockney accent left, I could already distinguish between Arnold Bennett and
Elinor Glyn, and yet it was only four years since I’d been slicing cheese behind the
counter in my white apron and looking forward to the days when I’d be a master-grocer.
If I tot up the account, I suppose I must admit that the war did me good as well as harm.
At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book-
learning, that I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a
kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life
in a nonnal sensible way. But — I wonder if you can understand this — the thing that really
changed me, really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the
rotten meaninglessness of the life I was leading.
It really was unspeakably meaningless, that time in 1918. Here I was, sitting beside the
stove in an Army hut, reading novels, and a few hundred miles away in France the guns
were roaring and droves of wretched children, wetting their bags with fright, were being
driven into the machine-gun barrage like you’d shoot small coke into a furnace. I was one
of the lucky ones. The higher-ups had taken their eye off me, and here I was in a snug
little bolt-hole, drawing pay for a job that didn’t exist. At times I got into a panic and
made sure they’d remember about me and dig me out, but it never happened. The official
forms, on gritty grey paper, came in once a month, and I filled them up and sent them
back, and more forms came in, and I filled them up and sent them back, and so it went
on. The whole thing had about as much sense in it as a lunatic’s dream. The effect of all
this, plus the books I was reading, was to leave me with a feeling of disbelief in
everything.
I wasn’t the only one. The war was full of loose ends and forgotten comers. By this time
literally millions of people were stuck up backwaters of one kind and another. Whole
armies were rotting away on fronts that people had forgotten the names of. There were
huge Ministries with hordes of clerks and typists all drawing two pounds a week and
upwards for piling up mounds of paper. Moreover they knew perfectly well that all they
were doing was to pile up mounds of paper. Nobody believed the atrocity stories and the
gallant little Belgium stuff any longer. The soldiers thought the Germans were good
fellows and hated the French like poison. Every junior officer looked on the General Staff
as mental defectives. A sort of wave of disbelief was moving across England, and it even
got as far as Twelve Mile Dump. It would be an exaggeration to say that the war turned
people into highbrows, but it did turn them into nihilists for the time being. People who in
a nonnal way would have gone through life with about as much tendency to think for
themselves as a suet pudding were turned into Bolshies just by the war. What should I be
now if it hadn’t been for the war? I don’t know, but something different from what I am.
If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that
unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and
unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.
9
The war had jerked me out of the old life I’d known, but in the queer period that came
afterwards I forgot it almost completely.
I know that in a sense one never forgets anything. You remember that piece of orange-
peel you saw in the gutter thirteen years ago, and that coloured poster of Torquay that
you once got a glimpse of in a railway waiting-room. But I’m speaking of a different kind
of memory. In a sense I remembered the old life in Lower Binfield. I remembered my
fishing-rod and the smell of sainfoin and Mother behind the brown teapot and Jackie the
bullfinch and the horse- trough in the market-place. But none of it was alive in my mind
any longer. It was something far away, something that I’d finished with. It would never
have occurred to me that some day I might want to go back to it.
It was a queer time, those years just after the war, almost queerer than the war itself,
though people don’t remember it so vividly. In a rather different form the sense of
disbelieving in everything was stronger than ever. Millions of men had suddenly been
kicked out of the Army to find that the country they’d fought for didn’t want them, and
Lloyd George and his pals were giving the works to any illusions that still existed. Bands
of ex-service men marched up and down rattling collection boxes, masked women were
singing in the streets, and chaps in officers’ tunics were grinding barrel- organs.
Everybody in England seemed to be scrambling for jobs, myself included. But I came off
luckier than most. I got a small wound-gratuity, and what with that and the bit of money
I’d put aside during the last year of war (not having had much opportunity to spend it), I
came out of the Anny with no less than three hundred and fifty quid. It’s rather
interesting, I think, to notice my reaction. Here I was, with quite enough money to do the
thing I’d been brought up to do and the thing I’d dreamed of for years — that is, start a
shop. I had plenty of capital. If you bide your time and keep your eyes open you can run
across quite nice little businesses for three hundred and fifty quid. And yet, if you’ll
believe me, the idea never occurred to me. I not only didn’t make any move towards
starting a shop, but it wasn’t till years later, about 1925 in fact, that it even crossed my
mind that I might have done so. The fact was that I’d passed right out of the shopkeeping
orbit. That was what the Army did to you. It turned you into an imitation gentleman and
gave you a fixed idea that there’d always be a bit of money coming from somewhere. If
you’d suggested to me then, in 1919, that I ought to start a shop — a tobacco and sweet
shop, say, or a general store in some god- forsaken village — I’d just have laughed. I’d
worn pips on my shoulder, and my social standards had risen. At the same time I didn’t
share the delusion, which was pretty common among ex- officers, that I could spend the
rest of my life drinking pink gin. I knew I’d got to have a job. And the job, of course,
would be ‘in business’ — just what kind of job I didn’t know, but something high- up and
important, something with a car and a telephone and if possible a secretary with a
pennanent wave. During the last year or so of war a lot of us had had visions like that.
The chap who’d been a shop walker saw himself as a travelling salesman, and the chap
who’d been a travelling salesman saw himself as a managing director. It was the effect of
Army life, the effect of wearing pips and having a cheque-book and calling the evening
meal dinner. All the while there’d been an idea floating round — and this applied to the
men in the ranks as well as the officers — that when we came out of the Army there’d be
jobs waiting for us that would bring in at least as much as our Anny pay. Of course, if
ideas like that didn’t circulate, no war would ever be fought.
Well, I didn’t get that job. It seemed that nobody was anxious to pay me 2,000 pounds a
year for sitting among streamlined office furniture and dictating letters to a platinum
blonde. I was discovering what three-quarters of the blokes who’d been officers were
discovering — that from a financial point of view we’d been better off in the Army than
we were ever likely to be again. We’d suddenly changed from gentlemen holding His
Majesty’s commission into miserable out-of-works whom nobody wanted. My ideas soon
sank from two thousand a year to three or four pounds a week. But even jobs of the three
or four pounds a week kind didn’t seem to exist. Every mortal job was filled already,
either by men who’d been a few years too old to fight, or by boys who’d been a few
months too young. The poor bastards who’d happened to be born between 1890 and 1900
were left out in the cold. And still it never occurred to me to go back to the grocering
business. Probably I could have got a job as a grocer’s assistant; old Grimmett, if he was
still alive and in business (I wasn’t in touch with Lower Binfield and didn’t know), would
have given me good refs. But I’d passed into a different orbit. Even if my social ideas
hadn’t risen, I could hardly have imagined, after what I’d seen and learned, going back to
the old safe existence behind the counter. I wanted to be travelling about and pulling
down the big dough. Chiefly I wanted to be a travelling salesman, which I knew would
suit me.
But there were no jobs for travelling salesmen — that’s to say, jobs with a salary attached.
What there were, however, were on- commission jobs. That racket was just beginning on
a big, scale. It’s a beautifully simple method of increasing your sales and advertising your
stuff without taking any risks, and it always flourishes when times are bad. They keep
you on a string by hinting that perhaps there’ll be a salaried job going in three months’
time, and when you get fed up there’s always some other poor devil ready to take over.
Naturally it wasn’t long before I had an on-commission job, in fact I had quite a number
in rapid succession. Thank God, I never came down to peddling vacuum- cleaners, or
dictionaries. But I travelled in cutlery, in soap- powder, in a line of patent corkscrews,
tin-openers, and similar gadgets, and finally in a line of office accessories — paper-clips,
carbon paper, typewriter ribbons, and so forth. I didn’t do so badly either. I’m the type
that CAN sell things on commission. I’ve got the temperament and I’ve got the manner.
But I never came anywhere near making a decent living. You can’t, in jobs like that-
and, of course, you aren’t meant to.
I had about a year of it altogether. It was a queer time. The cross-country journeys, the
godless places you fetched up in, suburbs of Midland towns that you’d never hear of in a
hundred normal lifetimes. The ghastly bed-and -breakfast houses where the sheets always
smell faintly of slops and the fried egg at breakfast has a yolk paler than a lemon. And the
other poor devils of salesmen that you’re always meeting, middle-aged fathers of families
in moth-eaten overcoats and bowler hats, who honestly believe that sooner or later trade
will turn the comer and they’ll jack their earnings up to five quid a week. And the
traipsing from shop to shop, and the arguments with shopkeepers who don’t want to
listen, and the standing back and making yourself small when a customer comes in. Don’t
think that it worried me particularly. To some chaps that kind of life is torture. There are
chaps who can’t even walk into a shop and open their bag of samples without screwing
themselves up as though they were going over the top. But I’m not like that. I’m tough, I
can talk people into buying things they don’t want, and even if they slam the door in my
face it doesn’t bother me. Selling things on commission is actually what I like doing,
provided I can see my way to making a bit of dough out of it. I don’t kn ow whether I
learned much in that year, but I unlearned a good deal. It knocked the Army nonsense out
of me, and it drove into the back of my head the notions that I’d picked up during the idle
year when I was reading novels. I don’t think I read a single book, barring detective
stories, all the time I was on the road. I wasn’t a highbrow any longer. I was down among
the realities of modern life. And what are the realities of modern life? Well, the chief one
is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. With most people it takes the fonn of
selling themselves — that’s to say, getting a job and keeping it. I suppose there hasn’t been
a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more
men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship
when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly
modem in that, you say?
Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had.
That feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get
anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your
job, the next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the
bird — THAT, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.
But meanwhile I wasn’t badly off. I was earning a bit and I’d still got plenty of money in
the bank, nearly two hundred quid, and I wasn’t frightened for the future. I knew that
sooner or later I’d get a regular job. And sure enough, after about a year, by a stroke of
luck it happened. I say by a stroke of luck, but the fact is that I was bound to fall on my
feet. I’m not the type that starves. I’m about as likely to end up in the workhouse as to
end up in the House of Lords. I’m the middling type, the type that gravitates by a kind of
natural law towards the five-pound-a-week level. So long as there are any jobs at all I’ll
back myself to get one.
It happened when I was peddling paper-clips and typewriter ribbons. I’d just dodged into
a huge block of offices in Fleet Street, a building which canvassers weren’t allowed into,
as a matter of fact, but I’d managed to give the lift attendant the impression that my bag
of samples was merely an attache case. I was walking along one of the corridors looking
for the offices of a small toothpaste firm that I’d been recommended to try, when I saw
that some very big bug was coming down the corridor in the other direction. I knew
immediately that it was a big bug. You know how it is with these big business men, they
seem to take up more room and walk more loudly than any ordinary person, and they
give off a kind of wave of money that you can feel fifty yards away. When he got nearly
up to me I saw that it was Sir Joseph Cheam. He was in civvies, of course, but I had no
difficulty in recognizing him. I suppose he’d been there for some business conference or
other. A couple of clerks, or secretaries, or something, were following after him, not
actually holding up his train, because he wasn’t wearing one, but you somehow felt that
that was what they were doing. Of course I dodged aside instantly. But curiously enough
he recognized me, though he hadn’t seen me for years. To my surprise he stopped and
spoke to me.
‘Hullo, you! I’ve seen you somewhere before. What’s your name? It’s on the tip of my
tongue. ’
‘Bowling, sir. Used to be in the A. S. C. ’
‘Of course. The boy that said he wasn’t a gentleman. What are you doing here? ’
I might have told him I was selling typewriter ribbons, and there perhaps the whole thing
would have ended. But I had one of those sudden inspirations that you get occasionally —
a feeling that I might make something out of this if I handled it properly. I said instead:
‘Well, sir, as a matter of fact I’m looking for a job. ’
‘A job, eh? Hm. Not so easy, nowadays. ’
He looked me up and down for a second. The two train-bearers had kind of wafted
themselves a little distance away. I saw his rather good-looking old face, with the heavy
grey eyebrows and the intelligent nose, looking me over and realized that he’d decided to
help me. It’s queer, the power of these rich men. He’d been marching past me in his
power and glory, with his underlings after him, and then on some whim or other he’d
turned aside like an emperor suddenly chucking a coin to a beggar.
‘So you want a job? What can you do? ’
Again the inspiration. No use, with a bloke like this, cracking up your own merits. Stick
to the truth. I said: ‘Nothing, sir. But I want a job as a travelling salesman. ’
‘Salesman? Hm. Not sure that I’ve got anything for you at present. Let’s see. ’
He pursed his lips up. For a moment, half a minute perhaps, he was thinking quite deeply.
It was curious. Even at the time I realized that it was curious. This important old bloke,
who was probably worth at least half a million, was actually taking thought on my behalf.
I’d deflected him from his path and wasted at least three minutes of his time, all because
of a chance remark I’d happened to make years earlier. I’d stuck in his memory and
therefore he was willing to take the tiny bit of trouble that was needed to find me a job. I
dare say the same day he gave twenty clerks the sack. Finally he said:
‘How’d you like to go into an insurance firm? Always fairly safe, you know. People have
got to have insurance, same as they’ve got to eat. ’
Of course I jumped at the idea of going into an insurance firm. Sir Joseph was
‘interested’ in the Flying Salamander. God knows how many companies he was
‘interested’ in. One of the underlings wafted himself forward with a scribbling-pad, and
there and then, with the gold stylo out of his waistcoat pocket, Sir Joseph scribbled me a
note to some higher-up in the Flying Salamander. Then I thanked him, and he marched
on, and I sneaked off in the other direction, and we never saw one another again.
Well, I got the job, and, as I said earlier, the job got me. I’ve been with the Flying
Salamander close on eighteen years. I started off in the office, but now I’m what’s known
as an Inspector, or, when there’s reason to sound particularly impressive, a
Representative. A couple of days a week I’m working in the district office, and the rest of
the time I’m travelling around, interviewing clients whose names have been sent in by the
local agents, making assessments of shops and other property, and now and again
snapping up a few orders on my own account. I earn round about seven quid a week. And
properly speaking that’s the end of my story.
When I look back I realize that my active life, if I ever had one, ended when I was
sixteen. Everything that really matters to me had happened before that date. But in a
manner of speaking things were still happening — the war, for instance — up to the time
when I got the job with the Flying Salamander. After that — well, they say that happy
people have no histories, and neither do the blokes who work in insurance offices. From
that day forward there was nothing in my life that you could properly describe as an
event, except that about two and a half years later, at the beginning of ‘23, 1 got married.
10
I was living in a boarding-house in Ealing. The years were rolling on, or crawling on.
Lower Binfield had passed almost out of my memory. I was the usual young city worker
who scoots for the 8. 15 and intrigues for the other fellow’s job. I was fairly well thought
of in the firm and pretty satisfied with life. The post- war success dope had caught me,
more or less. You remember the line of talk. Pep, punch, grit, sand. Get on or get out.
There’s plenty of room at the top. You can’t keep a good man down. And the ads in the
magazines about the chap that the boss clapped on the shoulder, and the keen-jawed
executive who’s pulling down the big dough and attributes his success to so and so’s
correspondence course. It’s funny how we all swallowed it, even blokes like me to whom
it hadn’t the smallest application. Because I’m neither a go- getter nor a down-and-out,
and I’m by nature incapable of being either. But it was the spirit of the time. Get on!
Make good! If you see a man down, jump on his guts before he gets up again. Of course
this was in the early twenties, when some of the effects of the war had worn off and the
slump hadn’t yet arrived to knock the stuffing out of us.
I had an ‘A’ subscription at Boots and went to half-crown dances and belonged to a local
tennis club. You know those tennis clubs in the genteel suburbs — little wooden pavilions
and high wire- netting enclosures where young chaps in rather badly cut white flannels
prance up and down, shouting ‘Fifteen forty! ’ and ‘Vantage all! ’ in voices which are a
tolerable imitation of the Upper Crust. I’d learned to play tennis, didn’t dance too badly,
and got on well with the girls. At nearly thirty I wasn’t a bad-looking chap, with my red
face and butter-coloured hair, and in those days it was still a point in your favour to have
fought in the war. I never, then or at any other time, succeeded in looking like a
gentleman, but on the other hand you probably wouldn’t have taken me for the son of a
small shopkeeper in a country town. I could keep my end up in the rather mixed society
of a place like Ealing, where the office-employee class overlaps with the middling-
professional class. It was at the tennis club that I first met Hilda.
At that time Hilda was twenty-four. She was a small, slim, rather timid girl, with dark
hair, beautiful movements, and — because of having very large eyes — a distinct
resemblance to a hare. She was one of those people who never say much, but remain on
the edge of any conversation that’s going on, and give the impression that they’re
listening. If she said anything at all, it was usually ‘Oh, yes, I think so too’, agreeing with
whoever had spoken last. At tennis she hopped about very gracefully, and didn’t play
badly, but somehow had a helpless, childish air. Her surname was Vincent.
If you’re married, there’ll have been times when you’ve said to yourself ‘Why the hell
did I do it? ’ and God knows I’ve said it often enough about Hilda. And once again,
looking at it across fifteen years, why DID I marry Hilda?
Partly, of course, because she was young and in a way very pretty. Beyond that I can only
say that because she came of totally different origins from myself it was very difficult for
me to get any grasp of what she was really like. I had to marry her first and find out about
her afterwards, whereas if I’d married say, Elsie Waters, I’d have known what I was
marrying. Hilda belonged to a class I only knew by hearsay, the poverty-stricken officer
class. For generations past her family had been soldiers, sailors, clergymen, Anglo-Indian
officials, and that kind of thing. They’d never had any money, but on the other hand none
of them had ever done anything that I should recognize as work. Say what you will,
there’s a kind of snob-appeal in that, if you belong as I do to the God-fearing shopkeeper
class, the low church, and high-tea class. It wouldn’t make any impression on me now,
but it did then. Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I don’t mean that I married Hilda
BECAUSE she belonged to the class I’d once served across the counter, with some
notion of jockeying myself up in the social scale. It was merely that I couldn’t understand
her and therefore was capable of being goofy about her. And one thing I certainly didn’t
grasp was that the girls in these penniless middle-class families will marry anything in
trousers, just to get away from home.
It wasn’t long before Hilda took me home to see her family. I hadn’t kn own till then that
there was a considerable Anglo-Indian colony in Ealing. Talk about discovering a new
world! It was quite a revelation to me.
Do you know these Anglo-Indian families? It’s almost impossible, when you get inside
these people’s houses, to remember that out in the street it’s England and the twentieth
century. As soon as you set foot inside the front door you’re in India in the eighties. You
know the kind of atmosphere. The carved teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-
skulls on the wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot pickles, the yellow photographs of
chaps in sun-helmets, the Hindustani words that you’re expected to know the meaning of,
the everlasting anecdotes about tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in
‘87. It’s a sort of little world of their own that they’ve created, like a kind of cyst. To me,
of course, it was all quite new and in some ways rather interesting. Old Vincent, Hilda’s
father, had been not only in India but also in some even more outlandish place, Borneo or
Sarawak, I forget which. He was the usual type, completely bald, almost invisible behind
his moustache, and full of stories about cobras and cummerbunds and what the district
collector said in ‘93. Hilda’s mother was so colourless that she was just like one of the
faded photos on the wall. There was also a son, Harold, who had some official job in
Ceylon and was home on leave at the time when I first met Hilda. They had a little dark
house in one of those buried back-streets that exist in Ealing. It smelt perpetually of
Trichinopoly cigars and it was so full of spears, blow-pipes, brass ornaments, and the
heads of wild animals that you could hardly move about in it.
Old Vincent had retired in 1910, and since then he and his wife had shown about as much
activity, mental or physical, as a couple of shellfish. But at the time I was vaguely
impressed by a family which had had majors, colonels, and once even an admiral in it.
My attitude towards the Vincents, and theirs towards me, is an interesting illustration of
what fools people can be when they get outside their own line. Put me among business
people — whether they’re company directors or commercial travellers — and I’m a fairly
good judge of character. But I had no experience whatever of the officer-rentier-
clergyman class, and I was inclined to kow- tow to these decayed throw-outs. I looked on
them as my social and intellectual superiors, while they on the other hand mistook me for
a rising young businessman who before long would be pulling down the big dough. To
people of that kind, ‘business’, whether it’s marine insurance or selling peanuts, is just a
dark mystery. All they know is that it’s something rather vulgar out of which you can
make money. Old Vincent used to talk impressively about my being ‘in business’ — once,
I remember, he had a slip of the tongue and said ‘in trade’ — and obviously didn’t grasp
the difference between being in business as an employee and being there on your own
account. He had some vague notion that as I was ‘in’ the Flying Salamander I should
sooner or later rise to the top of it, by a process of promotion. I think it’s possible that he
also had pictures of himself touching me for fivers at some future date. Harold certainly
had. I could see it in his eye. In fact, even with my income being what it is, I’d probably
be lending money to Harold at this moment if he were alive. Luckily he died a few years
after we were married, of enteric or something, and both the old Vincents are dead too.
Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop. Why did you marry
her? you say. But why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether
you’ll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing
Hilda. Of course in practice one never does these things, they’re only a kind of fantasy
that one enjoys thinking about. Besides, chaps who murder their wives always get
copped. However cleverly you’ve faked the alibi, they know perfectly well that it’s you
who did it, and they’ll pin it on to you somehow. When a woman’s bumped off, her
husband is always the first suspect — which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people
really think about marriage.
One gets used to everything in time. After a year or two I stopped wanting to kill her and
started wondering about her. Just wondering. For hours, sometimes, on Sunday
afternoons or in the evening when I’ve come home from work. I’ve lain on my bed with
all my clothes on except my shoes, wondering about women. Why they’re like that, how
they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose. It seems to be a most frightful
thing, the suddenness with which some women go to pieces after they’re married. It’s as
if they were strung up to do just that one thing, and the instant they’ve done it they wither
off like a flower that’s set its seed. What really gets me down is the dreary attitude
towards life that it implies. If marriage was just an open swindle — if the woman trapped
you into it and then turned round and said, ‘Now, you bastard, I’ve caught you and you’re
going to work for me while I have a good time! ’ — I wouldn’t mind so much. But not a bit
of it. They don’t want to have a good time, they merely want to slump into middle age as
quickly as possible. After the frightful battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman
kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy, and joy of life just vanish overnight. It
was like that with Hilda. Here was this pretty, delicate girl, who’d seemed to me — and in
fact when I first knew her she WAS — a finer type of animal than myself, and within only
about three years she’d settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump. I’m
not denying that I was part of the reason. But whoever she’d married it would have been
much the same.
What Hilda lacks — I discovered this about a week after we were married — is any kind of
joy in life, any kind of interest in things for their own sake. The idea of doing things
because you enjoy them is something she can hardly understand. It was through Hilda
that I first got a notion of what these decayed middle-class families are really like. The
essential fact about them is that all their vitality has been drained away by lack of money.
In families like that, which live on tiny pensions and annuities — that’s to say on incomes
which never get bigger and generally get smaller — there’s more sense of poverty, more
crust-wiping, and looking twice at sixpence, than you’d find in any farm-labourer’s
family, let alone a family like mine. Hilda’s often told me that almost the first thing she
can remember is a ghastly feeling that there was never enough money for anything. Of
course, in that kind of family, the lack of money is always at its worst when the kids are
at the school-age.
whole thing had existed for about three days, like a sort of bubble, and then had been
forgotten, and I’d been forgotten with it. My eleven tins of bully beef had been left
behind by some officers who had been there earlier on some other mysterious mission.
They’d also left behind a very deaf old man called Private Lidgebird. What Lidgebird
was supposed to be doing there I never discovered. I wonder whether you’ll believe that I
remained guarding those eleven tins of bully beef from half-way through 1917 to the
beginning of 1919? Probably you won’t, but it’s the truth. And at the time even that
didn’t seem particularly strange. By 1918 one had simply got out of the habit of
expecting things to happen in a reasonable manner.
Once a month they sent me an enormous official form calling upon me to state the
number and condition of pick-axes, entrenching tools, coils of barbed wire, blankets,
waterproof groundsheets, first-aid outfits, sheets of corrugated iron, and tins of plum and
apple jam under my care. I just entered ‘nil’ against everything and sent the form back.
Nothing ever happened. Up in London someone was quietly filing the forms, and sending
out more forms, and filing those, and so on. It was the way things were happening. The
mysterious higher-ups who were running the war had forgotten my existence. I didn’t jog
their memory. I was up a backwater that didn’t lead anywhere, and after two years in
France I wasn’t so burning with patriotism that I wanted to get out of it.
It was a lonely part of the coast where you never saw a soul except a few yokels who’d
barely heard there was a war on. A quarter of a mile away, down a little hill, the sea
boomed and surged over enormous flats of sand. Nine months of the year it rained, and
the other three a raging wind blew off the Atlantic. There was nothing there except
Private Lidgebird, myself, two Army huts — one of them a decentish two-roomed hut
which I inhabited — and the eleven tins of bully beef. Lidgebird was a surly old devil and
I could never get much out of him except the fact that he’d been a market gardener before
he joined the Army. It was interesting to see how rapidly he was reverting to type. Even
before I got to Twelve Mile Dump he’d dug a patch round one of the huts and started
planting spuds, in the autumn he dug another patch till he’d got about half an acre under
cultivation, at the beginning of 1918 he started keeping hens which had got to quite a
number by the end of the summer, and towards the end of the year he suddenly produced
a pig from God knows where. I don’t think it crossed his mind to wonder what the devil
we were doing there, or what the West Coast Defence Force was and whether it actually
existed. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that he’s there still, raising pigs and potatoes on
the spot where Twelve Mile Dump used to be. I hope he is. Good luck to him.
Meanwhile I was doing something I’d never before had the chance to do as a full-time
job — reading.
The officers who’d been there before had left a few books behind, mostly sevenpenny
editions and nearly all of them the kind of tripe that people were reading in those days.
Ian Hay and Sapper and the Craig Kennedy stories and so forth. But at some time or other
somebody had been there who knew what books are worth reading and what are not. I
myself, at the time, didn’t know anything of the kind. The only books I’d ever voluntarily
read were detective stories and once in a way a smutty sex book. God knows I don’t set
up to be a highbrow even now, but if you’d asked me THEN for the name of a ‘good’
book I’d have answered The Woman Thou Gavest Me, or (in memory of the vicar)
Sesame and Lilies. In any case a ‘good’ book was a book one didn’t have any intention of
reading. But there I was, in a job where there was less than nothing to do, with the sea
booming on the beach and the rain streaming down the window-panes — and a whole row
of books staring me in the face on the temporary shelf someone had rigged up against the
wall of the hut. Naturally I started to read them from end to end, with, at the beginning,
about as much attempt to discriminate as a pig working its way through a pail of garbage.
But in among them there were three or four books that were different from the others. No,
you’ve got it wrong! Don’t run away with the idea that I suddenly discovered Marcel
Proust or Henry James or somebody. I wouldn’t have read them even if I had. These
books I’m speaking of weren’t in the least highbrow. But now and again it so happens
that you strike a book which is exactly at the mental level you’ve reached at the moment,
so much so that it seems to have been written especially for you. One of them was H. G.
Wells’s The History of Mr Polly, in a cheap shilling edition which was falling to pieces. I
wonder if you can imagine the effect it had upon me, to be brought up as I’d been
brought up, the son of a shopkeeper in a country town, and then to come across a book
like that? Another was Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street. It had been the scandal of
the season a few years back, and I’d even heard vague rumours of it in Lower Binfield.
Another was Conrad’s Victory, parts of which bored me. But books like that started you
thinking. And there was a back number of some magazine with a blue cover which had a
short story of D. H. Lawrence’s in it. I don’t remember the name of it. It was a story
about a German conscript who shoves his sergeant-major over the edge of a fortification
and then does a bunk and gets caught in his girl’s bedroom. It puzzled me a lot. I couldn’t
make out what it was all about, and yet it left me with a vague feeling that I’d like to read
some others like it.
Well, for several months I had an appetite for books that was almost like physical thirst.
It was the first real go-in at reading that I’d had since my Dick Donovan days. At the
beginning I had no idea how to set about getting hold of books. I thought the only way
was to buy them. That’s interesting, I think. It shows you the difference upbringing
makes. I suppose the children of the middle classes, the 500 pounds a year middle
classes, know all about Mudie’s and the Times Book Club when they’re in their cradles.
A bit later I learned of the existence of lending libraries and took out a subscription at
Mudie’s and another at a library in Bristol. And what I read during the next year or so!
Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W. W. Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver
Onions, Compton Mackenzie, H. Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna,
May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, Elinor Glyn, O. Henry, Stephen Leacock,
and even Silas Hocking and Jean Stratton Porter. How many of the names in that list are
kn own to you, I wonder? Half the books that people took seriously in those days are
forgotten now. But at the beginning I swallowed them all down like a whale that’s got in
among a shoal of shrimps. I just revelled in them. After a bit, of course, I grew more
highbrow and began to distinguish between tripe and not-tripe. I got hold of Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers and sort of half-enjoyed it, and I got a lot of kick out of Oscar Wilde’s
Dorian Gray and Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights. Wells was the author who made the
biggest impression on me. I read George Moore’s Esther Waters and liked it, and I tried
several of Hardy’s novels and always got stuck about half-way through. I even had a go
at Ibsen, who left me with a vague impression that in Norway it’s always raining.
It was queer, really. Even at the time it struck me as queer. I was a second-loot with
hardly any Cockney accent left, I could already distinguish between Arnold Bennett and
Elinor Glyn, and yet it was only four years since I’d been slicing cheese behind the
counter in my white apron and looking forward to the days when I’d be a master-grocer.
If I tot up the account, I suppose I must admit that the war did me good as well as harm.
At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book-
learning, that I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a
kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life
in a nonnal sensible way. But — I wonder if you can understand this — the thing that really
changed me, really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the
rotten meaninglessness of the life I was leading.
It really was unspeakably meaningless, that time in 1918. Here I was, sitting beside the
stove in an Army hut, reading novels, and a few hundred miles away in France the guns
were roaring and droves of wretched children, wetting their bags with fright, were being
driven into the machine-gun barrage like you’d shoot small coke into a furnace. I was one
of the lucky ones. The higher-ups had taken their eye off me, and here I was in a snug
little bolt-hole, drawing pay for a job that didn’t exist. At times I got into a panic and
made sure they’d remember about me and dig me out, but it never happened. The official
forms, on gritty grey paper, came in once a month, and I filled them up and sent them
back, and more forms came in, and I filled them up and sent them back, and so it went
on. The whole thing had about as much sense in it as a lunatic’s dream. The effect of all
this, plus the books I was reading, was to leave me with a feeling of disbelief in
everything.
I wasn’t the only one. The war was full of loose ends and forgotten comers. By this time
literally millions of people were stuck up backwaters of one kind and another. Whole
armies were rotting away on fronts that people had forgotten the names of. There were
huge Ministries with hordes of clerks and typists all drawing two pounds a week and
upwards for piling up mounds of paper. Moreover they knew perfectly well that all they
were doing was to pile up mounds of paper. Nobody believed the atrocity stories and the
gallant little Belgium stuff any longer. The soldiers thought the Germans were good
fellows and hated the French like poison. Every junior officer looked on the General Staff
as mental defectives. A sort of wave of disbelief was moving across England, and it even
got as far as Twelve Mile Dump. It would be an exaggeration to say that the war turned
people into highbrows, but it did turn them into nihilists for the time being. People who in
a nonnal way would have gone through life with about as much tendency to think for
themselves as a suet pudding were turned into Bolshies just by the war. What should I be
now if it hadn’t been for the war? I don’t know, but something different from what I am.
If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that
unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and
unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.
9
The war had jerked me out of the old life I’d known, but in the queer period that came
afterwards I forgot it almost completely.
I know that in a sense one never forgets anything. You remember that piece of orange-
peel you saw in the gutter thirteen years ago, and that coloured poster of Torquay that
you once got a glimpse of in a railway waiting-room. But I’m speaking of a different kind
of memory. In a sense I remembered the old life in Lower Binfield. I remembered my
fishing-rod and the smell of sainfoin and Mother behind the brown teapot and Jackie the
bullfinch and the horse- trough in the market-place. But none of it was alive in my mind
any longer. It was something far away, something that I’d finished with. It would never
have occurred to me that some day I might want to go back to it.
It was a queer time, those years just after the war, almost queerer than the war itself,
though people don’t remember it so vividly. In a rather different form the sense of
disbelieving in everything was stronger than ever. Millions of men had suddenly been
kicked out of the Army to find that the country they’d fought for didn’t want them, and
Lloyd George and his pals were giving the works to any illusions that still existed. Bands
of ex-service men marched up and down rattling collection boxes, masked women were
singing in the streets, and chaps in officers’ tunics were grinding barrel- organs.
Everybody in England seemed to be scrambling for jobs, myself included. But I came off
luckier than most. I got a small wound-gratuity, and what with that and the bit of money
I’d put aside during the last year of war (not having had much opportunity to spend it), I
came out of the Anny with no less than three hundred and fifty quid. It’s rather
interesting, I think, to notice my reaction. Here I was, with quite enough money to do the
thing I’d been brought up to do and the thing I’d dreamed of for years — that is, start a
shop. I had plenty of capital. If you bide your time and keep your eyes open you can run
across quite nice little businesses for three hundred and fifty quid. And yet, if you’ll
believe me, the idea never occurred to me. I not only didn’t make any move towards
starting a shop, but it wasn’t till years later, about 1925 in fact, that it even crossed my
mind that I might have done so. The fact was that I’d passed right out of the shopkeeping
orbit. That was what the Army did to you. It turned you into an imitation gentleman and
gave you a fixed idea that there’d always be a bit of money coming from somewhere. If
you’d suggested to me then, in 1919, that I ought to start a shop — a tobacco and sweet
shop, say, or a general store in some god- forsaken village — I’d just have laughed. I’d
worn pips on my shoulder, and my social standards had risen. At the same time I didn’t
share the delusion, which was pretty common among ex- officers, that I could spend the
rest of my life drinking pink gin. I knew I’d got to have a job. And the job, of course,
would be ‘in business’ — just what kind of job I didn’t know, but something high- up and
important, something with a car and a telephone and if possible a secretary with a
pennanent wave. During the last year or so of war a lot of us had had visions like that.
The chap who’d been a shop walker saw himself as a travelling salesman, and the chap
who’d been a travelling salesman saw himself as a managing director. It was the effect of
Army life, the effect of wearing pips and having a cheque-book and calling the evening
meal dinner. All the while there’d been an idea floating round — and this applied to the
men in the ranks as well as the officers — that when we came out of the Army there’d be
jobs waiting for us that would bring in at least as much as our Anny pay. Of course, if
ideas like that didn’t circulate, no war would ever be fought.
Well, I didn’t get that job. It seemed that nobody was anxious to pay me 2,000 pounds a
year for sitting among streamlined office furniture and dictating letters to a platinum
blonde. I was discovering what three-quarters of the blokes who’d been officers were
discovering — that from a financial point of view we’d been better off in the Army than
we were ever likely to be again. We’d suddenly changed from gentlemen holding His
Majesty’s commission into miserable out-of-works whom nobody wanted. My ideas soon
sank from two thousand a year to three or four pounds a week. But even jobs of the three
or four pounds a week kind didn’t seem to exist. Every mortal job was filled already,
either by men who’d been a few years too old to fight, or by boys who’d been a few
months too young. The poor bastards who’d happened to be born between 1890 and 1900
were left out in the cold. And still it never occurred to me to go back to the grocering
business. Probably I could have got a job as a grocer’s assistant; old Grimmett, if he was
still alive and in business (I wasn’t in touch with Lower Binfield and didn’t know), would
have given me good refs. But I’d passed into a different orbit. Even if my social ideas
hadn’t risen, I could hardly have imagined, after what I’d seen and learned, going back to
the old safe existence behind the counter. I wanted to be travelling about and pulling
down the big dough. Chiefly I wanted to be a travelling salesman, which I knew would
suit me.
But there were no jobs for travelling salesmen — that’s to say, jobs with a salary attached.
What there were, however, were on- commission jobs. That racket was just beginning on
a big, scale. It’s a beautifully simple method of increasing your sales and advertising your
stuff without taking any risks, and it always flourishes when times are bad. They keep
you on a string by hinting that perhaps there’ll be a salaried job going in three months’
time, and when you get fed up there’s always some other poor devil ready to take over.
Naturally it wasn’t long before I had an on-commission job, in fact I had quite a number
in rapid succession. Thank God, I never came down to peddling vacuum- cleaners, or
dictionaries. But I travelled in cutlery, in soap- powder, in a line of patent corkscrews,
tin-openers, and similar gadgets, and finally in a line of office accessories — paper-clips,
carbon paper, typewriter ribbons, and so forth. I didn’t do so badly either. I’m the type
that CAN sell things on commission. I’ve got the temperament and I’ve got the manner.
But I never came anywhere near making a decent living. You can’t, in jobs like that-
and, of course, you aren’t meant to.
I had about a year of it altogether. It was a queer time. The cross-country journeys, the
godless places you fetched up in, suburbs of Midland towns that you’d never hear of in a
hundred normal lifetimes. The ghastly bed-and -breakfast houses where the sheets always
smell faintly of slops and the fried egg at breakfast has a yolk paler than a lemon. And the
other poor devils of salesmen that you’re always meeting, middle-aged fathers of families
in moth-eaten overcoats and bowler hats, who honestly believe that sooner or later trade
will turn the comer and they’ll jack their earnings up to five quid a week. And the
traipsing from shop to shop, and the arguments with shopkeepers who don’t want to
listen, and the standing back and making yourself small when a customer comes in. Don’t
think that it worried me particularly. To some chaps that kind of life is torture. There are
chaps who can’t even walk into a shop and open their bag of samples without screwing
themselves up as though they were going over the top. But I’m not like that. I’m tough, I
can talk people into buying things they don’t want, and even if they slam the door in my
face it doesn’t bother me. Selling things on commission is actually what I like doing,
provided I can see my way to making a bit of dough out of it. I don’t kn ow whether I
learned much in that year, but I unlearned a good deal. It knocked the Army nonsense out
of me, and it drove into the back of my head the notions that I’d picked up during the idle
year when I was reading novels. I don’t think I read a single book, barring detective
stories, all the time I was on the road. I wasn’t a highbrow any longer. I was down among
the realities of modern life. And what are the realities of modern life? Well, the chief one
is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. With most people it takes the fonn of
selling themselves — that’s to say, getting a job and keeping it. I suppose there hasn’t been
a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more
men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship
when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly
modem in that, you say?
Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had.
That feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get
anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your
job, the next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the
bird — THAT, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.
But meanwhile I wasn’t badly off. I was earning a bit and I’d still got plenty of money in
the bank, nearly two hundred quid, and I wasn’t frightened for the future. I knew that
sooner or later I’d get a regular job. And sure enough, after about a year, by a stroke of
luck it happened. I say by a stroke of luck, but the fact is that I was bound to fall on my
feet. I’m not the type that starves. I’m about as likely to end up in the workhouse as to
end up in the House of Lords. I’m the middling type, the type that gravitates by a kind of
natural law towards the five-pound-a-week level. So long as there are any jobs at all I’ll
back myself to get one.
It happened when I was peddling paper-clips and typewriter ribbons. I’d just dodged into
a huge block of offices in Fleet Street, a building which canvassers weren’t allowed into,
as a matter of fact, but I’d managed to give the lift attendant the impression that my bag
of samples was merely an attache case. I was walking along one of the corridors looking
for the offices of a small toothpaste firm that I’d been recommended to try, when I saw
that some very big bug was coming down the corridor in the other direction. I knew
immediately that it was a big bug. You know how it is with these big business men, they
seem to take up more room and walk more loudly than any ordinary person, and they
give off a kind of wave of money that you can feel fifty yards away. When he got nearly
up to me I saw that it was Sir Joseph Cheam. He was in civvies, of course, but I had no
difficulty in recognizing him. I suppose he’d been there for some business conference or
other. A couple of clerks, or secretaries, or something, were following after him, not
actually holding up his train, because he wasn’t wearing one, but you somehow felt that
that was what they were doing. Of course I dodged aside instantly. But curiously enough
he recognized me, though he hadn’t seen me for years. To my surprise he stopped and
spoke to me.
‘Hullo, you! I’ve seen you somewhere before. What’s your name? It’s on the tip of my
tongue. ’
‘Bowling, sir. Used to be in the A. S. C. ’
‘Of course. The boy that said he wasn’t a gentleman. What are you doing here? ’
I might have told him I was selling typewriter ribbons, and there perhaps the whole thing
would have ended. But I had one of those sudden inspirations that you get occasionally —
a feeling that I might make something out of this if I handled it properly. I said instead:
‘Well, sir, as a matter of fact I’m looking for a job. ’
‘A job, eh? Hm. Not so easy, nowadays. ’
He looked me up and down for a second. The two train-bearers had kind of wafted
themselves a little distance away. I saw his rather good-looking old face, with the heavy
grey eyebrows and the intelligent nose, looking me over and realized that he’d decided to
help me. It’s queer, the power of these rich men. He’d been marching past me in his
power and glory, with his underlings after him, and then on some whim or other he’d
turned aside like an emperor suddenly chucking a coin to a beggar.
‘So you want a job? What can you do? ’
Again the inspiration. No use, with a bloke like this, cracking up your own merits. Stick
to the truth. I said: ‘Nothing, sir. But I want a job as a travelling salesman. ’
‘Salesman? Hm. Not sure that I’ve got anything for you at present. Let’s see. ’
He pursed his lips up. For a moment, half a minute perhaps, he was thinking quite deeply.
It was curious. Even at the time I realized that it was curious. This important old bloke,
who was probably worth at least half a million, was actually taking thought on my behalf.
I’d deflected him from his path and wasted at least three minutes of his time, all because
of a chance remark I’d happened to make years earlier. I’d stuck in his memory and
therefore he was willing to take the tiny bit of trouble that was needed to find me a job. I
dare say the same day he gave twenty clerks the sack. Finally he said:
‘How’d you like to go into an insurance firm? Always fairly safe, you know. People have
got to have insurance, same as they’ve got to eat. ’
Of course I jumped at the idea of going into an insurance firm. Sir Joseph was
‘interested’ in the Flying Salamander. God knows how many companies he was
‘interested’ in. One of the underlings wafted himself forward with a scribbling-pad, and
there and then, with the gold stylo out of his waistcoat pocket, Sir Joseph scribbled me a
note to some higher-up in the Flying Salamander. Then I thanked him, and he marched
on, and I sneaked off in the other direction, and we never saw one another again.
Well, I got the job, and, as I said earlier, the job got me. I’ve been with the Flying
Salamander close on eighteen years. I started off in the office, but now I’m what’s known
as an Inspector, or, when there’s reason to sound particularly impressive, a
Representative. A couple of days a week I’m working in the district office, and the rest of
the time I’m travelling around, interviewing clients whose names have been sent in by the
local agents, making assessments of shops and other property, and now and again
snapping up a few orders on my own account. I earn round about seven quid a week. And
properly speaking that’s the end of my story.
When I look back I realize that my active life, if I ever had one, ended when I was
sixteen. Everything that really matters to me had happened before that date. But in a
manner of speaking things were still happening — the war, for instance — up to the time
when I got the job with the Flying Salamander. After that — well, they say that happy
people have no histories, and neither do the blokes who work in insurance offices. From
that day forward there was nothing in my life that you could properly describe as an
event, except that about two and a half years later, at the beginning of ‘23, 1 got married.
10
I was living in a boarding-house in Ealing. The years were rolling on, or crawling on.
Lower Binfield had passed almost out of my memory. I was the usual young city worker
who scoots for the 8. 15 and intrigues for the other fellow’s job. I was fairly well thought
of in the firm and pretty satisfied with life. The post- war success dope had caught me,
more or less. You remember the line of talk. Pep, punch, grit, sand. Get on or get out.
There’s plenty of room at the top. You can’t keep a good man down. And the ads in the
magazines about the chap that the boss clapped on the shoulder, and the keen-jawed
executive who’s pulling down the big dough and attributes his success to so and so’s
correspondence course. It’s funny how we all swallowed it, even blokes like me to whom
it hadn’t the smallest application. Because I’m neither a go- getter nor a down-and-out,
and I’m by nature incapable of being either. But it was the spirit of the time. Get on!
Make good! If you see a man down, jump on his guts before he gets up again. Of course
this was in the early twenties, when some of the effects of the war had worn off and the
slump hadn’t yet arrived to knock the stuffing out of us.
I had an ‘A’ subscription at Boots and went to half-crown dances and belonged to a local
tennis club. You know those tennis clubs in the genteel suburbs — little wooden pavilions
and high wire- netting enclosures where young chaps in rather badly cut white flannels
prance up and down, shouting ‘Fifteen forty! ’ and ‘Vantage all! ’ in voices which are a
tolerable imitation of the Upper Crust. I’d learned to play tennis, didn’t dance too badly,
and got on well with the girls. At nearly thirty I wasn’t a bad-looking chap, with my red
face and butter-coloured hair, and in those days it was still a point in your favour to have
fought in the war. I never, then or at any other time, succeeded in looking like a
gentleman, but on the other hand you probably wouldn’t have taken me for the son of a
small shopkeeper in a country town. I could keep my end up in the rather mixed society
of a place like Ealing, where the office-employee class overlaps with the middling-
professional class. It was at the tennis club that I first met Hilda.
At that time Hilda was twenty-four. She was a small, slim, rather timid girl, with dark
hair, beautiful movements, and — because of having very large eyes — a distinct
resemblance to a hare. She was one of those people who never say much, but remain on
the edge of any conversation that’s going on, and give the impression that they’re
listening. If she said anything at all, it was usually ‘Oh, yes, I think so too’, agreeing with
whoever had spoken last. At tennis she hopped about very gracefully, and didn’t play
badly, but somehow had a helpless, childish air. Her surname was Vincent.
If you’re married, there’ll have been times when you’ve said to yourself ‘Why the hell
did I do it? ’ and God knows I’ve said it often enough about Hilda. And once again,
looking at it across fifteen years, why DID I marry Hilda?
Partly, of course, because she was young and in a way very pretty. Beyond that I can only
say that because she came of totally different origins from myself it was very difficult for
me to get any grasp of what she was really like. I had to marry her first and find out about
her afterwards, whereas if I’d married say, Elsie Waters, I’d have known what I was
marrying. Hilda belonged to a class I only knew by hearsay, the poverty-stricken officer
class. For generations past her family had been soldiers, sailors, clergymen, Anglo-Indian
officials, and that kind of thing. They’d never had any money, but on the other hand none
of them had ever done anything that I should recognize as work. Say what you will,
there’s a kind of snob-appeal in that, if you belong as I do to the God-fearing shopkeeper
class, the low church, and high-tea class. It wouldn’t make any impression on me now,
but it did then. Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I don’t mean that I married Hilda
BECAUSE she belonged to the class I’d once served across the counter, with some
notion of jockeying myself up in the social scale. It was merely that I couldn’t understand
her and therefore was capable of being goofy about her. And one thing I certainly didn’t
grasp was that the girls in these penniless middle-class families will marry anything in
trousers, just to get away from home.
It wasn’t long before Hilda took me home to see her family. I hadn’t kn own till then that
there was a considerable Anglo-Indian colony in Ealing. Talk about discovering a new
world! It was quite a revelation to me.
Do you know these Anglo-Indian families? It’s almost impossible, when you get inside
these people’s houses, to remember that out in the street it’s England and the twentieth
century. As soon as you set foot inside the front door you’re in India in the eighties. You
know the kind of atmosphere. The carved teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-
skulls on the wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot pickles, the yellow photographs of
chaps in sun-helmets, the Hindustani words that you’re expected to know the meaning of,
the everlasting anecdotes about tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in
‘87. It’s a sort of little world of their own that they’ve created, like a kind of cyst. To me,
of course, it was all quite new and in some ways rather interesting. Old Vincent, Hilda’s
father, had been not only in India but also in some even more outlandish place, Borneo or
Sarawak, I forget which. He was the usual type, completely bald, almost invisible behind
his moustache, and full of stories about cobras and cummerbunds and what the district
collector said in ‘93. Hilda’s mother was so colourless that she was just like one of the
faded photos on the wall. There was also a son, Harold, who had some official job in
Ceylon and was home on leave at the time when I first met Hilda. They had a little dark
house in one of those buried back-streets that exist in Ealing. It smelt perpetually of
Trichinopoly cigars and it was so full of spears, blow-pipes, brass ornaments, and the
heads of wild animals that you could hardly move about in it.
Old Vincent had retired in 1910, and since then he and his wife had shown about as much
activity, mental or physical, as a couple of shellfish. But at the time I was vaguely
impressed by a family which had had majors, colonels, and once even an admiral in it.
My attitude towards the Vincents, and theirs towards me, is an interesting illustration of
what fools people can be when they get outside their own line. Put me among business
people — whether they’re company directors or commercial travellers — and I’m a fairly
good judge of character. But I had no experience whatever of the officer-rentier-
clergyman class, and I was inclined to kow- tow to these decayed throw-outs. I looked on
them as my social and intellectual superiors, while they on the other hand mistook me for
a rising young businessman who before long would be pulling down the big dough. To
people of that kind, ‘business’, whether it’s marine insurance or selling peanuts, is just a
dark mystery. All they know is that it’s something rather vulgar out of which you can
make money. Old Vincent used to talk impressively about my being ‘in business’ — once,
I remember, he had a slip of the tongue and said ‘in trade’ — and obviously didn’t grasp
the difference between being in business as an employee and being there on your own
account. He had some vague notion that as I was ‘in’ the Flying Salamander I should
sooner or later rise to the top of it, by a process of promotion. I think it’s possible that he
also had pictures of himself touching me for fivers at some future date. Harold certainly
had. I could see it in his eye. In fact, even with my income being what it is, I’d probably
be lending money to Harold at this moment if he were alive. Luckily he died a few years
after we were married, of enteric or something, and both the old Vincents are dead too.
Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop. Why did you marry
her? you say. But why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether
you’ll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing
Hilda. Of course in practice one never does these things, they’re only a kind of fantasy
that one enjoys thinking about. Besides, chaps who murder their wives always get
copped. However cleverly you’ve faked the alibi, they know perfectly well that it’s you
who did it, and they’ll pin it on to you somehow. When a woman’s bumped off, her
husband is always the first suspect — which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people
really think about marriage.
One gets used to everything in time. After a year or two I stopped wanting to kill her and
started wondering about her. Just wondering. For hours, sometimes, on Sunday
afternoons or in the evening when I’ve come home from work. I’ve lain on my bed with
all my clothes on except my shoes, wondering about women. Why they’re like that, how
they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose. It seems to be a most frightful
thing, the suddenness with which some women go to pieces after they’re married. It’s as
if they were strung up to do just that one thing, and the instant they’ve done it they wither
off like a flower that’s set its seed. What really gets me down is the dreary attitude
towards life that it implies. If marriage was just an open swindle — if the woman trapped
you into it and then turned round and said, ‘Now, you bastard, I’ve caught you and you’re
going to work for me while I have a good time! ’ — I wouldn’t mind so much. But not a bit
of it. They don’t want to have a good time, they merely want to slump into middle age as
quickly as possible. After the frightful battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman
kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy, and joy of life just vanish overnight. It
was like that with Hilda. Here was this pretty, delicate girl, who’d seemed to me — and in
fact when I first knew her she WAS — a finer type of animal than myself, and within only
about three years she’d settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump. I’m
not denying that I was part of the reason. But whoever she’d married it would have been
much the same.
What Hilda lacks — I discovered this about a week after we were married — is any kind of
joy in life, any kind of interest in things for their own sake. The idea of doing things
because you enjoy them is something she can hardly understand. It was through Hilda
that I first got a notion of what these decayed middle-class families are really like. The
essential fact about them is that all their vitality has been drained away by lack of money.
In families like that, which live on tiny pensions and annuities — that’s to say on incomes
which never get bigger and generally get smaller — there’s more sense of poverty, more
crust-wiping, and looking twice at sixpence, than you’d find in any farm-labourer’s
family, let alone a family like mine. Hilda’s often told me that almost the first thing she
can remember is a ghastly feeling that there was never enough money for anything. Of
course, in that kind of family, the lack of money is always at its worst when the kids are
at the school-age.
