I got to a spot where the grass beside the road was
smothered
in primroses.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
He’s rather a striking
looking chap, very tall, with curly grey hair and a thin, dreamy kind of face that’s a bit
discoloured but might almost belong to a boy, though he must be nearly sixty. It’s funny
how some of these public-school and university chaps manage to look like boys till their
dying day. It’s something in their movements. Old Porteous has got a way of strolling up
and down, with that handsome head of his, with the grey curls, held a little back that
makes you feel that all the while he’s dreaming about some poem or other and isn’t
conscious of what’s going on round him. You can’t look at him without seeing the way
he’s lived written all over him. Public School, Oxford, and then back to his old school as
a master. Whole life lived in an atmosphere of Latin, Greek, and cricket. He’s got all the
mannerisms. Always wears an old Harris tweed jacket and old grey flannel bags which he
likes you to call ‘disgraceful’, smokes a pipe and looks down on cigarettes, and though he
sits up half the night I bet he has a cold bath every morning. I suppose from his point of
view I’m a bit of a bounder. I haven’t been to a public school, I don’t know any Latin and
don’t even want to. He tells me sometimes that it’s a pity I’m ‘insensible to beauty’,
which I suppose is a polite way of saying that I’ve got no education. All the same I like
him. He’s very hospitable in the right kind of way, always ready to have you in and talk
at all hours, and always got drinks handy. When you live in a house like ours, more or
less infested by women and kids, it does you good to get out of it sometimes into a
bachelor atmosphere, a kind of book- pipe-fire atmosphere. And the classy Oxford
feeling of nothing mattering except books and poetry and Greek statues, and nothing
worth mentioning having happened since the Goths sacked Rome — sometimes that’s a
comfort too.
He shoved me into the old leather armchair by the fire and dished out whisky and soda.
I’ve never seen his sitting-room when it wasn’t dim with pipe-smoke. The ceiling is
almost black. It’s a smallish room and, except for the door and the window and the space
over the fireplace, the walls are covered with books from the floor right up to the ceiling.
On the mantelpiece there are all the things you’d expect. A row of old briar pipes, all
filthy, a few Greek silver coins, a tobacco jar with the arms of old Porteous’s college on
it, and a little earthenware lamp which he told me he dug up on some mountain in Sicily.
Over the mantelpiece there are photos of Greek statues. There’s a big one in the middle,
of a woman with wings and no head who looks as if she was stepping out to catch a bus. I
remember how shocked old Porteous was when the first time I saw it, not knowing any
better, I asked him why they didn’t stick a head on it.
Porteous started refilling his pipe from the jar on the mantelpiece.
‘That intolerable woman upstairs has purchased a wireless set,’ he said. ‘I had been
hoping to live the rest of my life out of the sound of those things. I suppose there is
nothing one can do? Do you happen to know the legal position? ’
I told him there was nothing one could do. I rather like the Oxfordy way he says
‘intolerable’, and it tickles me, in 1938, to find someone objecting to having a radio in the
house. Porteous was strolling up and down in his usual dreamy way, with his hands in his
coat pockets and his pipe between his teeth, and almost instantly he’d begun talking
about some law against musical instruments that was passed in Athens in the time of
Pericles. It’s always that way with old Porteous. All his talk is about things that happened
centuries ago. Whatever you start off with it always comes back to statues and poetry and
the Greeks and Romans. If you mention the Queen Mary he’d start telling you about
Phoenician triremes. He never reads a modern book, refuses to know their names, never
looks at any newspaper except The Times, and takes a pride in telling you that he’s never
been to the pictures. Except for a few poets like Keats and Wordsworth he thinks the
modem world — and from his point of view the modern world is the last two thousand
years — just oughtn’t to have happened.
I’m part of the modern world myself, but I like to hear him talk. He’ll stroll round the
shelves and haul out first one book and then another, and now and again he’ll read you a
piece between little puffs of smoke, generally having to translate it from the Latin or
something as he goes. It’s all kind of peaceful, kind of mellow. All a little like a school-
master, and yet it soothes you, somehow. While you listen you aren’t in the same world
as trains and gas bills and insurance companies. It’s all temples and olive trees, and
peacocks and elephants, and chaps in the arena with their nets and tridents, and winged
lions and eunuchs and galleys and catapults, and generals in brass armour galloping their
horses over the soldiers’ shields. It’s funny that he ever cottoned on to a chap like me.
But it’s one of the advantages of being fat that you can fit into almost any society.
Besides we meet on common ground when it comes to dirty stories. They’re the one
modem thing he cares about, though, as he’s always reminding me, they aren’t modern.
He’s rather old-maidish about it, always tells a story in a veiled kind of way. Sometimes
he’ll pick out some Latin poet and translate a smutty rhyme, leaving a lot to your
imagination, or he’ll drop hints about the private lives of the Roman emperors and the
things that went on in the temples of Ashtaroth. They seem to have been a bad lot, those
Greeks and Romans. Old Porteous has got photographs of wall-paintings somewhere in
Italy that would make your hair curl.
When I’m fed up with business and home life it’s often done me a lot of good to go and
have a talk with Porteous. But tonight it didn’t seem to. My mind was still running on the
same lines as it had been all day. Just as I’d done with the Left Book Club lecturer, I
didn’t exactly listen to what Porreous was saying, only to the sound of his voice. But
whereas the lecturer’s voice had got under my skin, old Porteous’s didn’t. It was too
peaceful, too Oxfordy. Finally, when he was in the middle of saying something, I chipped
in and said:
‘Tell me, Porteous, what do you think of Hitler? ’
Old Porteous was leaning in his lanky, graceful kind of way with his elbows on the
mantelpiece and a foot on the fender. He was so surprised that he almost took his pipe out
of his mouth.
‘Hitler? This Gennan person? My dear fellow! I DON’T think of him. ’
‘But the trouble is he’s going to bloody well make us think about him before he’s
finished. ’
Old Porteous shies a bit at the world ‘bloody’, which he doesn’t like, though of course
it’s part of his pose never to be shocked. He begins walking up and down again, puffing
out smoke.
‘I see no reason for paying any attention to him. A mere adventurer. These people come
and go. Ephemeral, purely ephemeral. ’
I’m not certain what the word ‘ephemeral’ means, but I stick to my point:
‘I think you’ve got it wrong. Old Hitler’s something different. So’s Joe Stalin. They
aren’t like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off
and so forth, just for the fun of it. They’re after something quite new — something that’s
never been heard of before. ’
‘My dear fellow! There is nothing new under the sun. ’
Of course that’s a favourite saying of old Porteous’s. He won’t hear of the existence of
anything new. As soon as you tell him about anything that’s happening nowadays he says
that exactly the same thing happened in the reign of King So-and-so. Even if you bring
up things like aeroplanes he tells you that they probably had them in Crete, or Mycenae,
or wherever it was. I tried to explain to him what I’d felt while the little bloke was
lecturing and the kind of vision I’d had of the bad time that’s coming, but he wouldn’t
listen. Merely repeated that there’s nothing new under the sun. Finally he hauls a book
out of the shelves and reads me a passage about some Greek tyrant back in the B. C. s who
certainly might have been Hitler’s twin brother.
The argument went on for a bit. All day I’d been wanting to talk to somebody about this
business. It’s funny. I’m not a fool, but I’m not a highbrow either, and God knows at
nonnal times I don’t have many interests that you wouldn’t expect a middle-aged seven-
pound-a-weeker with two kids to have. And yet I’ve enough sense to see that the old life
we’re used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. I can see the war
that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the
loudspeakers telling you what to think. And I’m not even exceptional in this. There are
millions of others like me. Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run across in
pubs, bus drivers, and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the
world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet. And
yet here’s this learned chap, who’s lived all his life with books and soaked himself in
history till it’s running out of his pores, and he can’t even see that things are changing.
Doesn’t think Hitler matters. Refuses to believe there’s another war coming. In any case,
as he didn’t fight in the last war, it doesn’t enter much into his thoughts — he thinks it was
a poor show compared with the siege of Troy. Doesn’t see why one should bother about
the slogans and the loudspeakers and the coloured shirts. What intelligent person would
pay any attention to such things? he always says. Hitler and Stalin will pass away, but
something which old Porteous calls ‘the eternal verities’ won’t pass away. This, of
course, is simply another way of saying that things will always go on exactly as he’s
known them. For ever and ever, cultivated Oxford blokes will stroll up and down studies
full of books, quoting Latin tags and smoking good tobacco out of jars with coats of arms
on them. Really it was no use talking to him. I’d have got more change out of the lad with
tow- coloured hair. By degrees the conversation twisted off, as it always does, to things
that happened B. C. Then it worked round to poetry. Finally old Porteous drags another
book out of the shelves and begins reading Keat’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (or maybe it
was a skylark — I forget).
So far as I’m concerned a little poetry goes a long way. But it’s a curious fact that I rather
like hearing old Porteous reading it aloud. There’s no question that he reads well. He’s
got the habit, of course — used to reading to classes of boys. He’ll lean up against
something in his lounging way, with his pipe between his teeth and little jets of smoke
coming out, and his voice goes kind of solemn and rises and falls with the line. You can
see that it moves him in some way. I don’t know what poetry is or what it’s supposed to
do. I imagine it has a kind of nervous effect on some people like music has on others.
When he’s reading I don’t actually listen, that’s to say I don’t take in the words, but
sometimes the sound of it brings a kind of peaceful feeling into my mind. On the whole I
like it. But somehow tonight it didn’t work. It was as if a cold draught had blown into the
room. I just felt that this was all hu nk . Poetry! What is it? Just a voice, a bit of an eddy in
the air. And Gosh! what use would that be against machine-guns?
I watched him leaning up against the bookshelf. Funny, these public-school chaps.
Schoolboys all their days. Whole life revolving round the old school and their bits of
Latin and Greek and poetry. And suddenly I remembered that almost the first time I was
here with Porteous he’d read me the very same poem. Read it in just the same way, and
his voice quivered when he got to the same bit — the bit about magic casements, or
something. And a curious thought struck me. HE’S DEAD. He’s a ghost. All people like
that are dead.
It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that
a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts
of your body don’t stop working — hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a
man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old
Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste — but he’s not capable
of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again.
There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving
backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.
Old Porteous’s mind, I thought, probably stopped working at about the time of the Russo-
Japanese War. And it’s a ghastly thing that nearly all the decent people, the people who
DON’T want to go round smashing faces in with spanners, are like that. They’re decent,
but their minds have stopped. They can’t defend themselves against what’s coming to
them, because they can’t see it, even when it’s under their noses. They think that England
will never change and that England’s the whole world. Can’t grasp that it’s just a left-
over, a tiny corner that the bombs happen to have missed. But what about the new kind of
men from eastern Europe, the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets?
They’re on our track. Not long before they catch up with us. No Marquess of Queensbury
rules for those boys. And all the decent people are paralysed. Dead men and live gorillas.
Doesn’t seem to be anything between.
I cleared out about half an hour later, having completely failed to convince old Porteous
that Hitler matters. I was still thinking the same thoughts as I walked home through the
shivery streets. The trains had stopped running. The house was all dark and Hilda was
asleep. I dropped my false teeth into the glass of water in the bathroom, got into my
pyjamas, and prised Hilda over to the other side of the bed. She rolled over without
waking, and the kind of hump between her shoulders was towards me. It’s funny, the
tremendous gloom that sometimes gets hold of you late at night. At that moment the
destiny of Europe seemed to me more important than the rent and the kids’ school-bills
and the work I’d have to do tomorrow. For anyone who has to earn his living such
thoughts are just plain foolishness. But they didn’t move out of my mind. Still the vision
of the coloured shirts and the machine-guns rattling. The last thing I remember
wondering before I fell asleep was why the hell a chap like me should care.
2
The primroses had started. I suppose it was some time in March.
I’d driven through Westerham and was making for Pudley. I’d got to do an assessment of
an ironmonger’s shop, and then, if I could get hold of him, to interview a life-insurance
case who was wavering in the balance. His name had been sent in by our local agent, but
at the last moment he’d taken fright and begun to doubt whether he could afford it. I’m
pretty good at talking people round. It’s being fat that does it. It puts people in a cheery
kind of mood, makes ‘em feel that signing a cheque is almost a pleasure. Of course there
are different ways of tackling different people. With some it’s better to lay all the stress
on the bonuses, others you can scare in a subtle way with hints about what’ll happen to
their wives if they die uninsured.
The old car switchbacked up and down the curly little hills. And by God, what a day!
You kn ow the kind of day that generally comes some time in March when winter
suddenly seems to give up fighting. For days past we’d been having the kind of beastly
weather that people call ‘bright’ weather, when the sky’s a cold hard blue and the wind
scrapes you like a blunt razor-blade. Then suddenly the wind had dropped and the sun got
a chance. You know the kind of day. Pale yellow sunshine, not a leaf stirring, a touch of
mist in the far distance where you could see the sheep scattered over the hillsides like
lumps of chalk. And down in the valleys fires were burning, and the smoke twisted
slowly upwards and melted into the mist. I’d got the road to myself. It was so wann you
could almost have taken your clothes off.
I got to a spot where the grass beside the road was smothered in primroses. A patch of
clayey soil, perhaps. Twenty yards farther on I slowed down and stopped. The weather
was too good to miss. I felt I’d got to get out and have a smell at the spring air, and
perhaps even pick a few primroses if there was nobody coming. I even had some vague
notion of picking a bunch of them to take home to Hilda.
I switched the engine off and got out. I never like leaving the old car running in neutral,
I’m always half afraid she’ll shake her mudguards off or something. She’s a 1927 model,
and she’s done a biggish mileage. When you lift the bonnet and look at the engine it
reminds you of the old Austrian Empire, all tied together with bits of string but somehow
keeps plugging along. You wouldn’t believe any machine could vibrate in so many
directions at once. It’s like the motion of the earth, which has twenty-two different kinds
of wobble, or so I remember reading. If you look at her from behind when she’s running
in neutral it’s for all the world like watching one of those Hawaiian girls dancing the
hula-hula.
There was a five-barred gate beside the road. I strolled over and leaned across it. Not a
soul in sight. I hitched my hat back a bit to get the kind of balmy feeling of the air against
my forehead. The grass under the hedge was full of primroses. Just inside the gate a
tramp or somebody had left the remains of a fire. A little pile of white embers and a wisp
of smoke still oozing out of them. Farther along there was a little bit of a pool, covered
over with duck-weed. The field was winter wheat. It sloped up sharply, and then there
was a fall of chalk and a little beech spinney. A kind of mist of young leaves on the trees.
And utter stillness everywhere. Not even enough wind to stir the ashes of the fire. A lark
singing somewhere, otherwise not a sound, not even an aeroplane.
I stayed there for a bit, leaning over the gate. I was alone, quite alone. I was looking at
the field, and the field was looking at me. I felt — I wonder whether you’ll understand.
What I felt was something that’s so unusual nowadays that to say it sounds like
foolishness. I felt HAPPY. I felt that though I shan’t live for ever, I’d be quite ready to. If
you like you can say that that was merely because it was the first day of spring. Seasonal
effect on the sex-glands, or something. But there was more to it than that. Curiously
enough, the thing that had suddenly convinced me that life was worth living, more than
the primroses or the young buds on the hedge, was that bit of fire near the gate. You
know the look of a wood fire on a still day. The sticks that have gone all to white ash and
still keep the shape of sticks, and under the ash the kind of vivid red that you can see into.
It’s curious that a red ember looks more alive, gives you more of a feeling of life than any
living thing. There’s something about it, a kind of intensity, a vibration — I can’t think of
the exact words. But it lets you know that you’re alive yourself. It’s the spot on the
picture that makes you notice everything else.
I bent down to pick a primrose. Couldn’t reach it — too much belly. I squatted down on
my haunches and picked a little bunch of them. Lucky there was no one to see me. The
leaves were kind of crinkly and shaped like rabbits’ ears. I stood up and put my bunch of
primroses on the gatepost. Then on an impulse I slid my false teeth out of my mouth and
had a look at them.
If I’d had a mirror I’d have looked at the whole of myself, though, as a matter of fact, I
knew what I looked like already. A fat man of forty-five, in a grey herring-bone suit a bit
the worse for wear and a bowler hat. Wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs written
all over me. Red face and boiled blue eyes. I know, you don’t have to tell me. But the
thing that struck me, as I gave my dental plate the once-over before slipping it back into
my mouth, was that IT DOESN’T MATTER. Even false teeth don’t matter. I’m fat — yes.
I look like a bookie’s unsuccessful brother — yes. No woman will ever go to bed with me
again unless she’s paid to. I know all that. But I tell you I don’t care. I don’t want the
women, I don’t even want to be young again. I only want to be alive. And I was alive that
moment when I stood looking at the primroses and the red embers under the hedge. It’s a
feeling inside you, a kind of peaceful feeling, and yet it’s like a flame.
Farther down the hedge the pool was covered with duck-weed, so like a carpet that if you
didn’t know what duck-weed was you might think it was solid and step on it. I wondered
why it is that we’re all such bloody fools. Why don’t people, instead of the idiocies they
do spend their time on, just walk round LOOKING at things? That pool, for instance — all
the stuff that’s in it. Newts, water- snails, water-beetles, caddis-flies, leeches, and God
knows how many other things that you can only see with a microscope. The mystery of
their lives, down there under water. You could spend a lifetime watching them, ten
lifetimes, and still you wouldn’t have got to the end even of that one pool. And all the
while the sort of feeling of wonder, the peculiar flame inside you. It’s the only thing
worth having, and we don’t want it.
But I do want it. At least I thought so at that moment. And don’t mistake what I’m
saying. To begin with, unlike most Cockneys, I’m not soppy about ‘the country’. I was
brought up a damn sight too near to it for that. I don’t want to stop people living in towns,
or in suburbs for that matter. Let ‘em live where they like. And I’m not suggesting that
the whole of humanity could spend the whole of their lives wandering round picking
primroses and so forth. I know perfectly well that we’ve got to work. It’s only because
chaps are coughing their lungs out in mines and girls are hammering at typewriters that
anyone ever has time to pick a flower. Besides, if you hadn’t a full belly and a warm
house you wouldn’t want to pick flowers. But that’s not the point. Here’s this feeling that
I get inside me — not often, I admit, but now and again. I know it’s a good feeling to have.
What’s more, so does everybody else, or nearly everybody. It’s just round the corner all
the time, and we all know it’s there. Stop firing that machine-gun! Stop chasing whatever
you’re chasing! Calm down, get your breath back, let a bit of peace seep into your bones.
No use. We don’t do it. Just keep on with the same bloody fooleries.
And the next war coming over the horizon, 1941, they say. Three more circles of the sun,
and then we whizz straight into it. The bombs diving down on you like black cigars, and
the streamlined bullets streaming from the Bren machine-guns. Not that that worries me
particularly. I’m too old to fight. There’ll be air- raids, of course, but they won’t hit
everybody. Besides, even if that kind of danger exists, it doesn’t really enter into one’s
thoughts beforehand. As I’ve said several times already, I’m not frightened of the war,
only the after- war. And even that isn’t likely to affect me personally. Because who’d
bother about a chap like me? I’m too fat to be a political suspect. No one would bump me
off or cosh me with a rubber truncheon. I’m the ordinary middling kind that moves on
when the policeman tells him. As for Hilda and the kids, they’d probably never notice the
difference. And yet it frightens me. The barbed wire! The slogans! The enonnous faces!
The cork-lined cellars where the executioner plugs you from behind! For that matter it
frightens other chaps who are intellectually a good deal dumber than I am. But why!
Because it means good-bye to this thing I’ve been telling you about, this special feeling
inside you. Call it peace, if you like. But when I say peace I don’t mean absence of war, I
mean peace, a feeling in your guts. And it’s gone for ever if the rubber truncheon boys
get hold of us.
I picked up my bunch of primroses and had a smell at them. I was thinking of Lower
Binfield. It was funny how for two months past it had been in and out of my mind all the
time, after twenty years during which I’d practically forgotten it. And just at this moment
there was the zoom of a car coming up the road.
It brought me up with a kind of jolt. I suddenly realized what I was doing — wandering
round picking primroses when I ought to have been going through the inventory at that
ironmonger’s shop in Pudley. What was more, it suddenly struck me what I’d look like if
those people in the car saw me. A fat man in a bowler hat holding a bunch of primroses!
It wouldn’t look right at all. Fat men mustn’t pick primroses, at any rate in public. I just
had time to chuck them over the hedge before the car came in sight. It was a good job I’d
done so. The car was full of young fools of about twenty. How they’d have sniggered if
they’d seen me! They were all looking at me — you kn ow how people look at you when
they’re in a car coming towards you — and the thought struck me that even now they
might somehow guess what I’d been doing. Better let ‘em think it was something else.
Why should a chap get out of his car at the side of a country road? Obvious! As the car
went past I pretended to be doing up a fly-button.
I cranked up the car (the self-starter doesn’t work any longer) and got in. Curiously
enough, in the very moment when I was doing up the fly-button, when my mind was
about three-quarters full of those young fools in the other car, a wonderful idea had
occurred to me.
I’d go back to Lower Binfield!
Why not? I thought as I jammed her into top gear. Why shouldn’t I? What was to stop
me? And why the hell hadn’t I thought of it before? A quiet holiday in Lower Binfield —
just the thing I wanted.
Don’t imagine that I had any ideas of going back to LIVE in Lower Binfield. I wasn’t
planning to desert Hilda and the kids and start life under a different name. That kind of
thing only happens in books. But what was to stop me slipping down to Lower Binfield
and having a week there all by myself, on the Q. T. ?
I seemed to have it all planned out in my mind already. It was all right as far as the
money went. There was still twelve quid left in that secret pile of mine, and you can have
a very comfortable week on twelve quid. I get a fortnight’s holiday a year, generally in
August or September. But if I made up some suitable story — relative dying of incurable
disease, or something — I could probably get the firm to give me my holiday in two
separate halves. Then I could have a week all to myself before Hilda knew what was
happening. A week in Lower Binfield, with no Hilda, no kids, no Flying Salamander, no
Ellesmere Road, no rumpus about the hire- purchase payments, no noise of traffic driving
you silly — just a week of loafing round and listening to the quietness?
But why did I want to go back to Lower Binfield? you say. Why Lower Binfield in
particular? What did I mean to do when I got there?
I didn’t mean to do anything. That was part of the point. I wanted peace and quiet. Peace!
We had it once, in Lower Binfield. I’ve told you something about our old life there,
before the war. I’m not pretending it was perfect. I dare say it was a dull, sluggish,
vegetable kind of life. You can say we were like turnips, if you like. But turnips don’t
live in terror of the boss, they don’t lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and
the next war. We had peace inside us. Of course I knew that even in Lower Binfield life
would have changed. But the place itself wouldn’t have. There’d still be the beech woods
round Binfield House, and the towpath down by Burford Weir, and the horse-trough in
the market-place. I wanted to get back there, just for a week, and let the feeling of it soak
into me. It was a bit like one of these Eastern sages retiring into a desert. And I should
think, the way things are going, there’ll be a good many people retiring into the desert
during the next few years. It’ll be like the time in ancient Rome that old Porteous was
telling me about, when there were so many hermits that there was a waiting list for every
cave.
But it wasn’t that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get my nerve back before
the bad times begin. Because does anyone who isn’t dead from the neck up doubt that
there’s a bad time coming? We don’t even know what it’ll be, and yet we know it’s
coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump — no knowing, except that it’ll be something bad.
Wherever we’re going, we’re going downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool — no
knowing. And you can’t face that kind of thing unless you’ve got the right feeling inside
you. There’s something that’s gone out of us in these twenty years since the war. It’s a
kind of vital juice that we’ve squirted away until there’s nothing left. All this rushing to
and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses, bombs, radios,
telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the marrow
ought to be.
I shoved my foot down on the accelerator.
looking chap, very tall, with curly grey hair and a thin, dreamy kind of face that’s a bit
discoloured but might almost belong to a boy, though he must be nearly sixty. It’s funny
how some of these public-school and university chaps manage to look like boys till their
dying day. It’s something in their movements. Old Porteous has got a way of strolling up
and down, with that handsome head of his, with the grey curls, held a little back that
makes you feel that all the while he’s dreaming about some poem or other and isn’t
conscious of what’s going on round him. You can’t look at him without seeing the way
he’s lived written all over him. Public School, Oxford, and then back to his old school as
a master. Whole life lived in an atmosphere of Latin, Greek, and cricket. He’s got all the
mannerisms. Always wears an old Harris tweed jacket and old grey flannel bags which he
likes you to call ‘disgraceful’, smokes a pipe and looks down on cigarettes, and though he
sits up half the night I bet he has a cold bath every morning. I suppose from his point of
view I’m a bit of a bounder. I haven’t been to a public school, I don’t know any Latin and
don’t even want to. He tells me sometimes that it’s a pity I’m ‘insensible to beauty’,
which I suppose is a polite way of saying that I’ve got no education. All the same I like
him. He’s very hospitable in the right kind of way, always ready to have you in and talk
at all hours, and always got drinks handy. When you live in a house like ours, more or
less infested by women and kids, it does you good to get out of it sometimes into a
bachelor atmosphere, a kind of book- pipe-fire atmosphere. And the classy Oxford
feeling of nothing mattering except books and poetry and Greek statues, and nothing
worth mentioning having happened since the Goths sacked Rome — sometimes that’s a
comfort too.
He shoved me into the old leather armchair by the fire and dished out whisky and soda.
I’ve never seen his sitting-room when it wasn’t dim with pipe-smoke. The ceiling is
almost black. It’s a smallish room and, except for the door and the window and the space
over the fireplace, the walls are covered with books from the floor right up to the ceiling.
On the mantelpiece there are all the things you’d expect. A row of old briar pipes, all
filthy, a few Greek silver coins, a tobacco jar with the arms of old Porteous’s college on
it, and a little earthenware lamp which he told me he dug up on some mountain in Sicily.
Over the mantelpiece there are photos of Greek statues. There’s a big one in the middle,
of a woman with wings and no head who looks as if she was stepping out to catch a bus. I
remember how shocked old Porteous was when the first time I saw it, not knowing any
better, I asked him why they didn’t stick a head on it.
Porteous started refilling his pipe from the jar on the mantelpiece.
‘That intolerable woman upstairs has purchased a wireless set,’ he said. ‘I had been
hoping to live the rest of my life out of the sound of those things. I suppose there is
nothing one can do? Do you happen to know the legal position? ’
I told him there was nothing one could do. I rather like the Oxfordy way he says
‘intolerable’, and it tickles me, in 1938, to find someone objecting to having a radio in the
house. Porteous was strolling up and down in his usual dreamy way, with his hands in his
coat pockets and his pipe between his teeth, and almost instantly he’d begun talking
about some law against musical instruments that was passed in Athens in the time of
Pericles. It’s always that way with old Porteous. All his talk is about things that happened
centuries ago. Whatever you start off with it always comes back to statues and poetry and
the Greeks and Romans. If you mention the Queen Mary he’d start telling you about
Phoenician triremes. He never reads a modern book, refuses to know their names, never
looks at any newspaper except The Times, and takes a pride in telling you that he’s never
been to the pictures. Except for a few poets like Keats and Wordsworth he thinks the
modem world — and from his point of view the modern world is the last two thousand
years — just oughtn’t to have happened.
I’m part of the modern world myself, but I like to hear him talk. He’ll stroll round the
shelves and haul out first one book and then another, and now and again he’ll read you a
piece between little puffs of smoke, generally having to translate it from the Latin or
something as he goes. It’s all kind of peaceful, kind of mellow. All a little like a school-
master, and yet it soothes you, somehow. While you listen you aren’t in the same world
as trains and gas bills and insurance companies. It’s all temples and olive trees, and
peacocks and elephants, and chaps in the arena with their nets and tridents, and winged
lions and eunuchs and galleys and catapults, and generals in brass armour galloping their
horses over the soldiers’ shields. It’s funny that he ever cottoned on to a chap like me.
But it’s one of the advantages of being fat that you can fit into almost any society.
Besides we meet on common ground when it comes to dirty stories. They’re the one
modem thing he cares about, though, as he’s always reminding me, they aren’t modern.
He’s rather old-maidish about it, always tells a story in a veiled kind of way. Sometimes
he’ll pick out some Latin poet and translate a smutty rhyme, leaving a lot to your
imagination, or he’ll drop hints about the private lives of the Roman emperors and the
things that went on in the temples of Ashtaroth. They seem to have been a bad lot, those
Greeks and Romans. Old Porteous has got photographs of wall-paintings somewhere in
Italy that would make your hair curl.
When I’m fed up with business and home life it’s often done me a lot of good to go and
have a talk with Porteous. But tonight it didn’t seem to. My mind was still running on the
same lines as it had been all day. Just as I’d done with the Left Book Club lecturer, I
didn’t exactly listen to what Porreous was saying, only to the sound of his voice. But
whereas the lecturer’s voice had got under my skin, old Porteous’s didn’t. It was too
peaceful, too Oxfordy. Finally, when he was in the middle of saying something, I chipped
in and said:
‘Tell me, Porteous, what do you think of Hitler? ’
Old Porteous was leaning in his lanky, graceful kind of way with his elbows on the
mantelpiece and a foot on the fender. He was so surprised that he almost took his pipe out
of his mouth.
‘Hitler? This Gennan person? My dear fellow! I DON’T think of him. ’
‘But the trouble is he’s going to bloody well make us think about him before he’s
finished. ’
Old Porteous shies a bit at the world ‘bloody’, which he doesn’t like, though of course
it’s part of his pose never to be shocked. He begins walking up and down again, puffing
out smoke.
‘I see no reason for paying any attention to him. A mere adventurer. These people come
and go. Ephemeral, purely ephemeral. ’
I’m not certain what the word ‘ephemeral’ means, but I stick to my point:
‘I think you’ve got it wrong. Old Hitler’s something different. So’s Joe Stalin. They
aren’t like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off
and so forth, just for the fun of it. They’re after something quite new — something that’s
never been heard of before. ’
‘My dear fellow! There is nothing new under the sun. ’
Of course that’s a favourite saying of old Porteous’s. He won’t hear of the existence of
anything new. As soon as you tell him about anything that’s happening nowadays he says
that exactly the same thing happened in the reign of King So-and-so. Even if you bring
up things like aeroplanes he tells you that they probably had them in Crete, or Mycenae,
or wherever it was. I tried to explain to him what I’d felt while the little bloke was
lecturing and the kind of vision I’d had of the bad time that’s coming, but he wouldn’t
listen. Merely repeated that there’s nothing new under the sun. Finally he hauls a book
out of the shelves and reads me a passage about some Greek tyrant back in the B. C. s who
certainly might have been Hitler’s twin brother.
The argument went on for a bit. All day I’d been wanting to talk to somebody about this
business. It’s funny. I’m not a fool, but I’m not a highbrow either, and God knows at
nonnal times I don’t have many interests that you wouldn’t expect a middle-aged seven-
pound-a-weeker with two kids to have. And yet I’ve enough sense to see that the old life
we’re used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. I can see the war
that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the
loudspeakers telling you what to think. And I’m not even exceptional in this. There are
millions of others like me. Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run across in
pubs, bus drivers, and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the
world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet. And
yet here’s this learned chap, who’s lived all his life with books and soaked himself in
history till it’s running out of his pores, and he can’t even see that things are changing.
Doesn’t think Hitler matters. Refuses to believe there’s another war coming. In any case,
as he didn’t fight in the last war, it doesn’t enter much into his thoughts — he thinks it was
a poor show compared with the siege of Troy. Doesn’t see why one should bother about
the slogans and the loudspeakers and the coloured shirts. What intelligent person would
pay any attention to such things? he always says. Hitler and Stalin will pass away, but
something which old Porteous calls ‘the eternal verities’ won’t pass away. This, of
course, is simply another way of saying that things will always go on exactly as he’s
known them. For ever and ever, cultivated Oxford blokes will stroll up and down studies
full of books, quoting Latin tags and smoking good tobacco out of jars with coats of arms
on them. Really it was no use talking to him. I’d have got more change out of the lad with
tow- coloured hair. By degrees the conversation twisted off, as it always does, to things
that happened B. C. Then it worked round to poetry. Finally old Porteous drags another
book out of the shelves and begins reading Keat’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (or maybe it
was a skylark — I forget).
So far as I’m concerned a little poetry goes a long way. But it’s a curious fact that I rather
like hearing old Porteous reading it aloud. There’s no question that he reads well. He’s
got the habit, of course — used to reading to classes of boys. He’ll lean up against
something in his lounging way, with his pipe between his teeth and little jets of smoke
coming out, and his voice goes kind of solemn and rises and falls with the line. You can
see that it moves him in some way. I don’t know what poetry is or what it’s supposed to
do. I imagine it has a kind of nervous effect on some people like music has on others.
When he’s reading I don’t actually listen, that’s to say I don’t take in the words, but
sometimes the sound of it brings a kind of peaceful feeling into my mind. On the whole I
like it. But somehow tonight it didn’t work. It was as if a cold draught had blown into the
room. I just felt that this was all hu nk . Poetry! What is it? Just a voice, a bit of an eddy in
the air. And Gosh! what use would that be against machine-guns?
I watched him leaning up against the bookshelf. Funny, these public-school chaps.
Schoolboys all their days. Whole life revolving round the old school and their bits of
Latin and Greek and poetry. And suddenly I remembered that almost the first time I was
here with Porteous he’d read me the very same poem. Read it in just the same way, and
his voice quivered when he got to the same bit — the bit about magic casements, or
something. And a curious thought struck me. HE’S DEAD. He’s a ghost. All people like
that are dead.
It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that
a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts
of your body don’t stop working — hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a
man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old
Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste — but he’s not capable
of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again.
There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving
backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.
Old Porteous’s mind, I thought, probably stopped working at about the time of the Russo-
Japanese War. And it’s a ghastly thing that nearly all the decent people, the people who
DON’T want to go round smashing faces in with spanners, are like that. They’re decent,
but their minds have stopped. They can’t defend themselves against what’s coming to
them, because they can’t see it, even when it’s under their noses. They think that England
will never change and that England’s the whole world. Can’t grasp that it’s just a left-
over, a tiny corner that the bombs happen to have missed. But what about the new kind of
men from eastern Europe, the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets?
They’re on our track. Not long before they catch up with us. No Marquess of Queensbury
rules for those boys. And all the decent people are paralysed. Dead men and live gorillas.
Doesn’t seem to be anything between.
I cleared out about half an hour later, having completely failed to convince old Porteous
that Hitler matters. I was still thinking the same thoughts as I walked home through the
shivery streets. The trains had stopped running. The house was all dark and Hilda was
asleep. I dropped my false teeth into the glass of water in the bathroom, got into my
pyjamas, and prised Hilda over to the other side of the bed. She rolled over without
waking, and the kind of hump between her shoulders was towards me. It’s funny, the
tremendous gloom that sometimes gets hold of you late at night. At that moment the
destiny of Europe seemed to me more important than the rent and the kids’ school-bills
and the work I’d have to do tomorrow. For anyone who has to earn his living such
thoughts are just plain foolishness. But they didn’t move out of my mind. Still the vision
of the coloured shirts and the machine-guns rattling. The last thing I remember
wondering before I fell asleep was why the hell a chap like me should care.
2
The primroses had started. I suppose it was some time in March.
I’d driven through Westerham and was making for Pudley. I’d got to do an assessment of
an ironmonger’s shop, and then, if I could get hold of him, to interview a life-insurance
case who was wavering in the balance. His name had been sent in by our local agent, but
at the last moment he’d taken fright and begun to doubt whether he could afford it. I’m
pretty good at talking people round. It’s being fat that does it. It puts people in a cheery
kind of mood, makes ‘em feel that signing a cheque is almost a pleasure. Of course there
are different ways of tackling different people. With some it’s better to lay all the stress
on the bonuses, others you can scare in a subtle way with hints about what’ll happen to
their wives if they die uninsured.
The old car switchbacked up and down the curly little hills. And by God, what a day!
You kn ow the kind of day that generally comes some time in March when winter
suddenly seems to give up fighting. For days past we’d been having the kind of beastly
weather that people call ‘bright’ weather, when the sky’s a cold hard blue and the wind
scrapes you like a blunt razor-blade. Then suddenly the wind had dropped and the sun got
a chance. You know the kind of day. Pale yellow sunshine, not a leaf stirring, a touch of
mist in the far distance where you could see the sheep scattered over the hillsides like
lumps of chalk. And down in the valleys fires were burning, and the smoke twisted
slowly upwards and melted into the mist. I’d got the road to myself. It was so wann you
could almost have taken your clothes off.
I got to a spot where the grass beside the road was smothered in primroses. A patch of
clayey soil, perhaps. Twenty yards farther on I slowed down and stopped. The weather
was too good to miss. I felt I’d got to get out and have a smell at the spring air, and
perhaps even pick a few primroses if there was nobody coming. I even had some vague
notion of picking a bunch of them to take home to Hilda.
I switched the engine off and got out. I never like leaving the old car running in neutral,
I’m always half afraid she’ll shake her mudguards off or something. She’s a 1927 model,
and she’s done a biggish mileage. When you lift the bonnet and look at the engine it
reminds you of the old Austrian Empire, all tied together with bits of string but somehow
keeps plugging along. You wouldn’t believe any machine could vibrate in so many
directions at once. It’s like the motion of the earth, which has twenty-two different kinds
of wobble, or so I remember reading. If you look at her from behind when she’s running
in neutral it’s for all the world like watching one of those Hawaiian girls dancing the
hula-hula.
There was a five-barred gate beside the road. I strolled over and leaned across it. Not a
soul in sight. I hitched my hat back a bit to get the kind of balmy feeling of the air against
my forehead. The grass under the hedge was full of primroses. Just inside the gate a
tramp or somebody had left the remains of a fire. A little pile of white embers and a wisp
of smoke still oozing out of them. Farther along there was a little bit of a pool, covered
over with duck-weed. The field was winter wheat. It sloped up sharply, and then there
was a fall of chalk and a little beech spinney. A kind of mist of young leaves on the trees.
And utter stillness everywhere. Not even enough wind to stir the ashes of the fire. A lark
singing somewhere, otherwise not a sound, not even an aeroplane.
I stayed there for a bit, leaning over the gate. I was alone, quite alone. I was looking at
the field, and the field was looking at me. I felt — I wonder whether you’ll understand.
What I felt was something that’s so unusual nowadays that to say it sounds like
foolishness. I felt HAPPY. I felt that though I shan’t live for ever, I’d be quite ready to. If
you like you can say that that was merely because it was the first day of spring. Seasonal
effect on the sex-glands, or something. But there was more to it than that. Curiously
enough, the thing that had suddenly convinced me that life was worth living, more than
the primroses or the young buds on the hedge, was that bit of fire near the gate. You
know the look of a wood fire on a still day. The sticks that have gone all to white ash and
still keep the shape of sticks, and under the ash the kind of vivid red that you can see into.
It’s curious that a red ember looks more alive, gives you more of a feeling of life than any
living thing. There’s something about it, a kind of intensity, a vibration — I can’t think of
the exact words. But it lets you know that you’re alive yourself. It’s the spot on the
picture that makes you notice everything else.
I bent down to pick a primrose. Couldn’t reach it — too much belly. I squatted down on
my haunches and picked a little bunch of them. Lucky there was no one to see me. The
leaves were kind of crinkly and shaped like rabbits’ ears. I stood up and put my bunch of
primroses on the gatepost. Then on an impulse I slid my false teeth out of my mouth and
had a look at them.
If I’d had a mirror I’d have looked at the whole of myself, though, as a matter of fact, I
knew what I looked like already. A fat man of forty-five, in a grey herring-bone suit a bit
the worse for wear and a bowler hat. Wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs written
all over me. Red face and boiled blue eyes. I know, you don’t have to tell me. But the
thing that struck me, as I gave my dental plate the once-over before slipping it back into
my mouth, was that IT DOESN’T MATTER. Even false teeth don’t matter. I’m fat — yes.
I look like a bookie’s unsuccessful brother — yes. No woman will ever go to bed with me
again unless she’s paid to. I know all that. But I tell you I don’t care. I don’t want the
women, I don’t even want to be young again. I only want to be alive. And I was alive that
moment when I stood looking at the primroses and the red embers under the hedge. It’s a
feeling inside you, a kind of peaceful feeling, and yet it’s like a flame.
Farther down the hedge the pool was covered with duck-weed, so like a carpet that if you
didn’t know what duck-weed was you might think it was solid and step on it. I wondered
why it is that we’re all such bloody fools. Why don’t people, instead of the idiocies they
do spend their time on, just walk round LOOKING at things? That pool, for instance — all
the stuff that’s in it. Newts, water- snails, water-beetles, caddis-flies, leeches, and God
knows how many other things that you can only see with a microscope. The mystery of
their lives, down there under water. You could spend a lifetime watching them, ten
lifetimes, and still you wouldn’t have got to the end even of that one pool. And all the
while the sort of feeling of wonder, the peculiar flame inside you. It’s the only thing
worth having, and we don’t want it.
But I do want it. At least I thought so at that moment. And don’t mistake what I’m
saying. To begin with, unlike most Cockneys, I’m not soppy about ‘the country’. I was
brought up a damn sight too near to it for that. I don’t want to stop people living in towns,
or in suburbs for that matter. Let ‘em live where they like. And I’m not suggesting that
the whole of humanity could spend the whole of their lives wandering round picking
primroses and so forth. I know perfectly well that we’ve got to work. It’s only because
chaps are coughing their lungs out in mines and girls are hammering at typewriters that
anyone ever has time to pick a flower. Besides, if you hadn’t a full belly and a warm
house you wouldn’t want to pick flowers. But that’s not the point. Here’s this feeling that
I get inside me — not often, I admit, but now and again. I know it’s a good feeling to have.
What’s more, so does everybody else, or nearly everybody. It’s just round the corner all
the time, and we all know it’s there. Stop firing that machine-gun! Stop chasing whatever
you’re chasing! Calm down, get your breath back, let a bit of peace seep into your bones.
No use. We don’t do it. Just keep on with the same bloody fooleries.
And the next war coming over the horizon, 1941, they say. Three more circles of the sun,
and then we whizz straight into it. The bombs diving down on you like black cigars, and
the streamlined bullets streaming from the Bren machine-guns. Not that that worries me
particularly. I’m too old to fight. There’ll be air- raids, of course, but they won’t hit
everybody. Besides, even if that kind of danger exists, it doesn’t really enter into one’s
thoughts beforehand. As I’ve said several times already, I’m not frightened of the war,
only the after- war. And even that isn’t likely to affect me personally. Because who’d
bother about a chap like me? I’m too fat to be a political suspect. No one would bump me
off or cosh me with a rubber truncheon. I’m the ordinary middling kind that moves on
when the policeman tells him. As for Hilda and the kids, they’d probably never notice the
difference. And yet it frightens me. The barbed wire! The slogans! The enonnous faces!
The cork-lined cellars where the executioner plugs you from behind! For that matter it
frightens other chaps who are intellectually a good deal dumber than I am. But why!
Because it means good-bye to this thing I’ve been telling you about, this special feeling
inside you. Call it peace, if you like. But when I say peace I don’t mean absence of war, I
mean peace, a feeling in your guts. And it’s gone for ever if the rubber truncheon boys
get hold of us.
I picked up my bunch of primroses and had a smell at them. I was thinking of Lower
Binfield. It was funny how for two months past it had been in and out of my mind all the
time, after twenty years during which I’d practically forgotten it. And just at this moment
there was the zoom of a car coming up the road.
It brought me up with a kind of jolt. I suddenly realized what I was doing — wandering
round picking primroses when I ought to have been going through the inventory at that
ironmonger’s shop in Pudley. What was more, it suddenly struck me what I’d look like if
those people in the car saw me. A fat man in a bowler hat holding a bunch of primroses!
It wouldn’t look right at all. Fat men mustn’t pick primroses, at any rate in public. I just
had time to chuck them over the hedge before the car came in sight. It was a good job I’d
done so. The car was full of young fools of about twenty. How they’d have sniggered if
they’d seen me! They were all looking at me — you kn ow how people look at you when
they’re in a car coming towards you — and the thought struck me that even now they
might somehow guess what I’d been doing. Better let ‘em think it was something else.
Why should a chap get out of his car at the side of a country road? Obvious! As the car
went past I pretended to be doing up a fly-button.
I cranked up the car (the self-starter doesn’t work any longer) and got in. Curiously
enough, in the very moment when I was doing up the fly-button, when my mind was
about three-quarters full of those young fools in the other car, a wonderful idea had
occurred to me.
I’d go back to Lower Binfield!
Why not? I thought as I jammed her into top gear. Why shouldn’t I? What was to stop
me? And why the hell hadn’t I thought of it before? A quiet holiday in Lower Binfield —
just the thing I wanted.
Don’t imagine that I had any ideas of going back to LIVE in Lower Binfield. I wasn’t
planning to desert Hilda and the kids and start life under a different name. That kind of
thing only happens in books. But what was to stop me slipping down to Lower Binfield
and having a week there all by myself, on the Q. T. ?
I seemed to have it all planned out in my mind already. It was all right as far as the
money went. There was still twelve quid left in that secret pile of mine, and you can have
a very comfortable week on twelve quid. I get a fortnight’s holiday a year, generally in
August or September. But if I made up some suitable story — relative dying of incurable
disease, or something — I could probably get the firm to give me my holiday in two
separate halves. Then I could have a week all to myself before Hilda knew what was
happening. A week in Lower Binfield, with no Hilda, no kids, no Flying Salamander, no
Ellesmere Road, no rumpus about the hire- purchase payments, no noise of traffic driving
you silly — just a week of loafing round and listening to the quietness?
But why did I want to go back to Lower Binfield? you say. Why Lower Binfield in
particular? What did I mean to do when I got there?
I didn’t mean to do anything. That was part of the point. I wanted peace and quiet. Peace!
We had it once, in Lower Binfield. I’ve told you something about our old life there,
before the war. I’m not pretending it was perfect. I dare say it was a dull, sluggish,
vegetable kind of life. You can say we were like turnips, if you like. But turnips don’t
live in terror of the boss, they don’t lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and
the next war. We had peace inside us. Of course I knew that even in Lower Binfield life
would have changed. But the place itself wouldn’t have. There’d still be the beech woods
round Binfield House, and the towpath down by Burford Weir, and the horse-trough in
the market-place. I wanted to get back there, just for a week, and let the feeling of it soak
into me. It was a bit like one of these Eastern sages retiring into a desert. And I should
think, the way things are going, there’ll be a good many people retiring into the desert
during the next few years. It’ll be like the time in ancient Rome that old Porteous was
telling me about, when there were so many hermits that there was a waiting list for every
cave.
But it wasn’t that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get my nerve back before
the bad times begin. Because does anyone who isn’t dead from the neck up doubt that
there’s a bad time coming? We don’t even know what it’ll be, and yet we know it’s
coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump — no knowing, except that it’ll be something bad.
Wherever we’re going, we’re going downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool — no
knowing. And you can’t face that kind of thing unless you’ve got the right feeling inside
you. There’s something that’s gone out of us in these twenty years since the war. It’s a
kind of vital juice that we’ve squirted away until there’s nothing left. All this rushing to
and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses, bombs, radios,
telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the marrow
ought to be.
I shoved my foot down on the accelerator.
