Houses going up into the air,
bloomers
soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
We’re all respectable
householders — that’s to say Tories, yes-men, and bumsuckers. Daren’t kill the goose that
lays the gilded eggs! And the fact that actually we aren’t householders, that we’re all in
the middle of paying for our houses and eaten up with the ghastly fear that something
might happen before we’ve made the last payment, merely increases the effect. We’re all
bought, and what’s more we’re bought with our own money. Every one of those poor
downtrodden bastards, sweating his guts out to pay twice the proper price for a brick
doll’s house that’s called Belle Vue because there’s no view and the bell doesn’t ring —
every one of those poor suckers would die on the field of battle to save his country from
Bolshevism.
1 turned down Walpole Road and got into the High Street. There’s a train to London at
10. 14. 1 was just passing the Sixpenny Bazaar when 1 remembered the mental note I’d
made that morning to buy a packet of razor-blades. When I got to the soap counter the
floor- manager, or whatever his proper title is, was cursing the girl in charge there.
Generally there aren’t many people in the Sixpenny at that hour of the morning.
Sometimes if you go in just after opening-time you see all the girls lined up in a row and
given their morning curse, just to get them into trim for the day. They say these big
chain-stores have chaps with special powers of sarcasm and abuse who are sent from
branch to branch to ginger the girls up. The floor-manager was an ugly little devil, under-
sized, with very square shoulders and a spiky grey moustache. He’d just pounced on her
about something, some mistake in the change evidently, and was going for her with a
voice like a circular saw.
‘Ho, no! Course you couldn’t count it! COURSE you couldn’t. Too much trouble, that’d
be. Ho, no! ’
Before I could stop myself I’d caught the girl’s eye. It wasn’t so nice for her to have a fat
middle-aged bloke with a red face looking on while she took her cursing. I turned away
as quickly as I could and pretended to be interested in some stuff at the next counter,
curtain rings or something. He was on to her again. He was one of those people who turn
away and then suddenly dart back at you, like a dragon-fly.
‘COURSE you couldn’t count it! Doesn’t matter to YOU if we’re two bob out. Doesn’t
matter at all. What’s two bob to YOU? Couldn’t ask YOU to go to the trouble of
counting it properly. Ho, no! Nothing matters ‘ere ‘cept YOUR convenience. You don’t
think about others, do you? ’
This went on for about five minutes in a voice you could hear half across the shop. He
kept turning away to make her think he’d finished with her and then darting back to have
another go. As I edged a bit farther off I had a glance at them. The girl was a kid about
eighteen, rather fat, with a sort of moony face, the kind that would never get the change
right anyway. She’d turned pale pink and she was wriggling, actually wriggling with
pain. It was just the same as if he’d been cutting into her with a whip. The girls at the
other counters were pretending not to hear. He was an ugly, stiff-built little devil, the sort
of cock-sparrow type of man that sticks his chest out and puts his hands under his
coattails — the type that’d be a sergeant-major only they aren’t tall enough. Do you notice
how often they have under-sized men for these bullying jobs? He was sticking his face,
moustaches and all, almost into hers so as to scream at her better. And the girl all pink
and wriggling.
Finally he decided that he’d said enough and strutted off like an admiral on the quarter-
deck, and I came up to the counter for my razor-blades. He knew I’d heard every word,
and so did she, and both of them knew I knew they knew. But the worst of it was that for
my benefit she’d got to pretend that nothing had happened and put on the standoffish
keep-your-distance attitude that a shopgirl’s supposed to keep up with male customers.
Had to act the grown-up young lady half a minute after I’d seen her cursed like a skivvy!
Her face was still pink and her hands were trembling. I asked her for penny blades and
she started fumbling in the threepenny tray. Then the little devil of a floor-manager
turned our way and for a moment both of us thought he was coming back to begin again.
The girl flinched like a dog that sees the whip. But she was looking at me out of the
comer of her eye. I could see that because I’d seen her cursed she hated me like the devil.
Queer!
I cleared out with my razor-blades. Why do they stand it? I was thinking. Pure funk, of
course. One back-answer and you get the sack. It’s the same everywhere. I thought of the
lad that sometimes serves me at the chain-store grocery we deal at. A great hefty lump of
twenty, with cheeks like roses and enormous fore- arms, ought to be working in a
blacksmith’s shop. And there he is in his white jacket, bent double across the counter,
rubbing his hands together with his ‘Yes, sir! Very true, sir! Pleasant weather for the time
of the year, sir! What can I have the pleasure of getting you today, sir? ’ practically asking
you to kick his bum. Orders, of course. The customer is always right. The thing you can
see in his face is mortal dread that you might report him for impertinence and get him
sacked. Besides, how’s he to know you aren’t one of the narks the company sends round?
Fear! We swim in it. It’s our element. Everyone that isn’t scared stiff of losing his job is
scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something. Jews sweating when they
think of Hitler. It crossed my mind that that little bastard with the spiky moustache was
probably a damn sight more scared for his job than the girl was. Probably got a family to
support. And perhaps, who knows, at home he’s meek and mild, grows cucumbers in the
back garden, lets his wife sit on him and the kids pull his moustache. And by the same
token you never read about a Spanish Inquisitor or one of these higher-ups in the Russian
Ogpu without being told that in private life he was such a good kind man, best of
husbands and fathers, devoted to his tame canary, and so forth.
The girl at the soap counter was looking after me as I went out of the door. She’d have
murdered me if she could. How she hated me because of what I’d seen! Much more than
she hated the floor- manager.
3
There was a bombing plane flying low overhead. For a minute or two it seemed to be
keeping pace with the train. Two vulgar kind of blokes in shabby overcoats, obviously
commercials of the lowest type, newspaper canvassers probably, were sitting opposite
me. One of them was reading the Mail and the other was reading the Express. I could see
by their manner that they’d spotted me for one of their kind. Up at the other end of the
carriage two lawyers’ clerks with black bags were keeping up a conversation full of legal
baloney that was meant to impress the rest of us and show that they didn’t belong to the
common herd.
I was watching the backs of the houses sliding past. The line from West Bletchley runs
most of the way through slums, but it’s kind of peaceful, the glimpses you get of little
backyards with bits of flowers stuck in boxes and the flat roofs where the women peg out
the washing and the bird-cage on the wall. The great black bombing plane swayed a little
in the air and zoomed ahead so that I couldn’t see it. I was sitting with my back to the
engine. One of the commercials cocked his eye at it for just a second. I knew what he was
thinking. For that matter it’s what everybody else is thinking. You don’t have to be a
highbrow to think such thoughts nowadays. In two years’ time, one year’s time, what
shall we be doing when we see one of those things? Making a dive for the cellar, wetting
our bags with fright.
The commercial bloke put down his Daily Mail.
‘Templegate’s winner come in,’ he said.
The lawyers’ clerks were sprouting some learned rot about fee- simple and peppercorns.
The other commercial felt in his waistcoat pocket and took out a bent Woodbine. He felt
in the other pocket and then leaned across to me.
‘Got a match, Tubby? ’
I felt for my matches. ‘Tubby’, you notice. That’s interesting, really. For about a couple
of minutes I stopped thinking about bombs and began thinking about my figure as I’d
studied it in my bath that morning.
It’s quite true I’m tubby, in fact my upper half is almost exactly the shape of a tub. But
what’s interesting, I think, is that merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost
anyone, even a total, stranger, will take it for granted to give you a nickname that’s an
insulting comment on your personal appearance. Suppose a chap was a hunchback or had
a squint or a hare-lip — would you give him a nickname to remind him of it? But every fat
man’s labelled as a matter of course. I’m the type that people automatically slap on the
back and punch in the ribs, and nearly all of them think I like it. I never go into the saloon
bar of the Crown at Pudley (I pass that way once a week on business) without that ass
Waters, who travels for the Seafoam Soap people but who’s more or less a permanency in
the saloon bar of the Crown, prodding me in the ribs and singing out ‘Here a sheer hulk
lies poor Tom Bowling! ’ which is a joke the bloody fools in the bar never get tired of.
Waters has got a linger like a bar of iron. They all think a fat man doesn’t have any
feelings.
The commercial took another of my matches, to pick his teeth with, and chucked the box
back. The train whizzed on to an iron bridge. Down below I got a glimpse of a baker’s
van and a long string of lorries loaded with cement. The queer thing, I was thinking, is
that in a way they’re right about fat men. It’s a fact that a fat man, particularly a man
who’s been fat from birth — from childhood, that’s to say — isn’t quite like other men. He
goes through his life on a different plane, a sort of light-comedy plane, though in the case
of blokes in side-shows at fairs, or in fact anyone over twenty stone, it isn’t so much light
comedy as low farce. I’ve been both fat and thin in my life, and I know the difference
fatness makes to your outlook. It kind of prevents you from taking things too hard. I
doubt whether a man who’s never been anything but fat, a man who’s been called Fatty
ever since he could walk, even knows of the existence of any really deep emotions. How
could he? He’s got no experience of such things. He can’t ever be present at a tragic
scene, because a scene where there’s a fat man present isn’t tragic, it’s comic. Just
imagine a fat Hamlet, for instance! Or Oliver Hardy acting Romeo. Funnily enough I’d
been thinking something of the kind only a few days earlier when I was reading a novel
I’d got out of Boots. Wasted Passion, it was called. The chap in the story finds out that
his girl has gone off with another chap. He’s one of these chaps you read about in novels,
that have pale sensitive faces and dark hair and a private income. I remember more or
less how the passage went:
David paced up and down the room, his hands pressed to his forehead. The news seemed
to have stunned him. For a long time he could not believe it. Sheila untrue to him! It
could not be! Suddenly realization rushed over him, and he saw the fact in all its stark
horror. It was too much. He flung himself down in a paroxysm of weeping.
Anyway, it went something like that. And even at the time it started me thinking. There
you have it, you see. That’s how people — some people — are expected to behave. But how
about a chap like me? Suppose Hilda went off for a week-end with somebody else- -not
that I’d care a damn, in fact it would rather please me to find that she’d still got that much
kick left in her — but suppose I did care, would I fling myself down in a paroxysm of
weeping? Would anyone expect me to? You couldn’t, with a figure like mine. It would be
downright obscene.
The train was running along an embankment. A little below us you could see the roofs of
the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a
bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them. Funny how
we keep on thinking about bombs. Of course there’s no question that it’s coming soon.
You can tell how close it is by the cheer- up stuff they’re talking about it in the
newspaper. I was reading a piece in the News Chronicle the other day where it said that
bombing planes can’t do any damage nowadays. The anti-aircraft guns have got so good
that the bomber has to stay at twenty thousand feet. The chap thinks, you notice, that if an
aeroplane’s high enough the bombs don’t reach the ground. Or more likely what he really
meant was that they’ll miss Woolwich Arsenal and only hit places like Ellesmere Road.
But taking it by and large, I thought, it’s not so bad to be fat. One thing about a fat man is
that he’s always popular. There’s really no kind of company, from bookies to bishops,
where a fat man doesn’t fit in and feel at home. As for women, fat men have more luck
with them than people seem to think. It’s all bu nk to imagine, as some people do, that a
woman looks on a fat man as just a joke. The truth is that a woman doesn’t look on ANY
man as a joke if he can kid her that he’s in love with her.
Mind you, I haven’t always been fat. I’ve been fat for eight or nine years, and I suppose
I’ve developed most of the characteristics. But it’s also a fact that internally, mentally,
I’m not altogether fat. No! Don’t mistake me. I’m not trying to put myself over as a kind
of tender flower, the aching heart behind the smiling face and so forth. You couldn’t get
on in the insurance business if you were anything like that. I’m vulgar, I’m insensitive,
and I fit in with my environment. So long as anywhere in the world things are being sold
on commission and livings are picked up by sheer brass and lack of finer feelings, chaps
like me will be doing it. In almost all circumstances I’d manage to make a living — always
a living and never a fortune — and even in war, revolution, plague, and famine I’d back
myself to stay alive longer than most people. I’m that type. But also I’ve got something
else inside me, chiefly a hangover from the past. I’ll tell you about that later. I’m fat, but
I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as
they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?
The chap who’d borrowed my matches was having a good pick at his teeth over the
Express.
‘Legs case don’t seem to get much forrader,’ he said.
‘They’ll never get ‘im,’ said the other. “Ow could you identify a pair of legs? They’re all
the bleeding same, aren’t they? ’
‘Might trace ‘im through the piece of paper ‘e wrapped ‘em up in,’ said the first.
Down below you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, twisting this way
and that with the streets, but stretching on and on, like an enormous plain that you could
have ridden over. Whichever way you cross London it’s twenty miles of houses almost
without a break. Christ! how can the bombers miss us when they come? We’re just one
great big bull’s-eye. And no warning, probably. Because who’s going to be such a bloody
fool as to declare war nowadays? If I was Hitler I’d send my bombers across in the
middle of a disarmament conference. Some quiet morning, when the clerks are streaming
across London Bridge, and the canary’s singing, and the old woman’s pegging the
bloomers on the line — zoom, whizz, plonk!
Houses going up into the air, bloomers soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses.
Seems a pity somehow, I thought. I looked at the great sea of roofs stretching on and on.
Miles and miles of streets, fried-fish shops, tin chapels, picture houses, little printing-
shops up back alleys, factories, blocks of flats, whelk stalls, dairies, power stations — on
and on and on. Enormous! And the peacefulness of it! Like a great wilderness with no
wild beasts. No guns firing, nobody chucking pineapples, nobody beating anybody else
up with a rubber truncheon. If you come to think of it, in the whole of England at this
moment there probably isn’t a single bedroom window from which anyone’s firing a
machine-gun.
But how about five years from now? Or two years? Or one year?
4
I’d dropped my papers at the office. Warner is one of these cheap American dentists, and
he has his consulting-room, or ‘parlour’ as he likes to call it, halfway up a big block of
offices, between a photographer and a rubber-goods wholesaler. I was early for my
appointment, but it was time for a bit of grub. I don’t know what put it into my head to go
into a milk-bar. They’re places I generally avoid. We five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers aren’t
well served in the way of eating-places in London. If your idea of the amount to spend on
a meal is one and threepence, it’s either Lyons, the Express Dairy, or the A. B. C. , or else
it’s the kind of funeral snack they serve you in the saloon bar, a pint of bitter and a slab of
cold pie, so cold that it’s colder than the beer. Outside the milk-bar the boys were yelling
the first editions of the evening papers.
Behind the bright red counter a girl in a tall white cap was fiddling with an ice-box, and
somewhere at the back a radio was playing, plonk-tiddle-tiddle-plonk, a kind of tinny
sound. Why the hell am I coming here? I thought to myself as I went in. There’s a kind of
atmosphere about these places that gets me down. Everything slick and shiny and
streamlined; mirrors, enamel, and chromium plate whichever direction you look in.
Everything spent on the decorations and nothing on the food. No real food at all. Just lists
of stuff with American names, sort of phantom stuff that you can’t taste and can hardly
believe in the existence of. Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it’s hauled out of
a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube. No comfort, no privacy.
Tall stools to sit on, a kind of narrow ledge to eat off, mirrors all round you. A sort of
propaganda floating round, mixed up with the noise of the radio, to the effect that food
doesn’t matter, comfort doesn’t matter, nothing matters except slickness and shininess
and streamlining. Everything’s streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler’s keeping
for you. I ordered a large coffee and a couple of frankfurters. The girl in the white cap
jerked them at me with about as much interest as you’d throw ants’ eggs to a goldfish.
Outside the door a newsboy yelled ‘StarnoosstanNERD! ’ I saw the poster flapping
against his knees: LEGS. FRESH DISCOVERIES. Just Tegs’, you notice. It had got
down to that. Two days earlier they’d found a woman’s legs in a railway waiting-room,
done up in a brown-paper parcel, and what with successive editions of the papers, the
whole nation was supposed to be so passionately interested in these blasted legs that they
didn’t need any further introduction. They were the only legs that were news at the
moment. It’s queer, I thought, as I ate a bit of roll, how dull the murders are getting
nowadays. All this cutting people up and leaving bits of them about the countryside. Not
a patch on the old domestic poisoning dramas, Crippen, Seddon, Mrs Maybrick; the truth
being, I suppose, that you can’t do a good murder unless you believe you’re going to
roast in hell for it.
At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and — Christ!
I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to
taste of nothing, like the roll. But this — well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and
describe it to you.
The fra nk furter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a
fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin.
And then suddenly — pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of
horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just
couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was
FISH! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked
straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.
Outside the newsboy shoved the Standard into my face and yelled, ‘Legs! ‘Orrible
revelations! All the winners! Legs! Legs! ’ I was still rolling the stuff round my tongue,
wondering where I could spit it out. I remembered a bit I’d read in the paper somewhere
about these food-factories in Gennany where everything’s made out of something else.
Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that THEY were making sausages out of fish,
and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into
the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That’s the way we’re going
nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else.
Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs
over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented
over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to
brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that’s what
you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.
When I’d got the new teeth in I felt a lot better. They sat nice and smooth over the gums,
and though very likely it sounds absurd to say that false teeth can make you feel younger,
it’s a fact that they did so. I tried a smile at myself in a shop window. They weren’t half
bad. Warner, though cheap, is a bit of an artist and doesn’t aim at making you look like a
toothpaste advert. He’s got huge cabinets full of false teeth — he showed them to me
once — all graded according to size and colour, and he picks them out like a jeweller
choosing stones for a necklace. Nine people out of ten would have taken my teeth for
natural.
I caught a full-length glimpse of myself in another window I was passing, and it struck
me that really I wasn’t such a bad figure of a man. A bit on the fat side, admittedly, but
nothing offensive, only what the tailors call a ‘full figure’, and some women like a man to
have a red face. There’s life in the old dog yet, I thought. I remembered my seventeen
quid, and definitely made up my mind that I’d spend it on a woman. There was time to
have a pint before the pubs shut, just to baptize the teeth, and feeling rich because of my
seventeen quid I stopped at a tobacconist’s and bought myself a sixpenny cigar of a kind
I’m rather partial to. They’re eight inches long and guaranteed pure Havana leaf all
through. I suppose cabbages grow in Havana the same as anywhere else.
When I came out of the pub I felt quite different.
I’d had a couple of pints, they’d wanned me up inside, and the cigar smoke oozing round
my new teeth gave me a fresh, clean, peaceful sort of feeling. All of a sudden I felt kind
of thoughtful and philosophic. It was partly because I didn’t have any work to do. My
mind went back to the thoughts of war I’d been having earlier that morning, when the
bomber flew over the train. I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you
foresee the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it.
I was walking westward up the Strand, and though it was coldish I went slowly to get the
pleasure of my cigar. The usual crowd that you can hardly fight your way through was
streaming up the pavement, all of them with that insane fixed expression on their faces
that people have in London streets, and there was the usual jam of traffic with the great
red buses nosing their way between the cars, and the engines roaring and horns tooting.
Enough noise to waken the dead, but not to waken this lot, I thought. I felt as if I was the
only person awake in a city of sleep-walkers. That’s an illusion, of course. When you
walk through a crowd of strangers it’s next door to impossible not to imagine that they’re
all waxworks, but probably they’re thinking just the same about you. And this kind of
prophetic feeling that keeps coming over me nowadays, the feeling that war’s just round
the corner and that war’s the end of all things, isn’t peculiar to me. We’ve all got it, more
or less. I suppose even among the people passing at that moment there must have been
chaps who were seeing mental pictures of the shellbursts and the mud. Whatever thought
you think there’s always a million people thinking it at the same moment. But that was
how I felt. We’re all on the burning deck and nobody knows it except me. I looked at the
dumb-bell faces streaming past. Like turkeys in November, I thought. Not a notion of
what’s coming to them. It was as if I’d got X-rays in my eyes and could see the skeletons
walking.
I looked forward a few years. I saw this street as it’ll be in five years’ time, say, or three
years’ time (1941 they say it’s booked for), after the fighting’s started.
No, not all smashed to pieces. Only a little altered, kind of chipped and dirty-looking, the
shop-windows almost empty and so dusty that you can’t see into them. Down a side street
there’s an enonnous bomb-crater and a block of buildings burnt out so that it looks like a
hollow tooth. Thermite. It’s all curiously quiet, and everyone’s very thin. A platoon of
soldiers comes marching up the street. They’re all as thin as rakes and their boots are
dragging. The sergeant’s got corkscrew moustaches and holds himself like a ramrod, but
he’s thin too and he’s got a cough that almost tears him open. Between his coughs he’s
trying to bawl at them in the old parade-ground style. ‘Nah then, Jones! Lift yer ‘ed up!
What yer keep starin’ at the ground for? All them fag- ends was picked up years ago. ’
Suddenly a fit of coughing catches him. He tries to stop it, can’t, doubles up like a ruler,
and almost coughs his guts out. His face turns pink and purple, his moustache goes limp,
and the water runs out of his eyes.
I can hear the air-raid sirens blowing and the loud-speakers bellowing that our glorious
troops have taken a hundred thousand prisoners. I see a top-floor-back in Birmingham
and a child of five howling and howling for a bit of bread. And suddenly the mother can’t
stand it any longer, and she yells at it, ‘Shut your trap, you little bastard! ’ and then she
ups the child’s frock and smacks its bottom hard, because there isn’t any bread and isn’t
going to be any bread. I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil
and the rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows.
Is it going to happen? No knowing. Some days it’s impossible to believe it. Some days I
say to myself that it’s just a scare got up by the newspapers. Some days I know in my
bones there’s no escaping it.
When I got down near Charing Cross the boys were yelling a later edition of the evening
papers. There was some more drivel about the murder. LEGS. FAMOUS SURGEON’S
STATEMENT. Then another poster caught my eye: KING ZOG’S WEDDING
POSTPONED. King Zog! What a name! It’s next door to impossible to believe a chap
with a name like that isn’t a jet-black Negro.
But just at that moment a queer thing happened. King Zog’s name — but I suppose, as I’d
already seen the name several times that day, it was mixed up with some sound in the
traffic or the smell of horse-dung or something — had started memories in me.
The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes
without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of
the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a
history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going,
and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that
at this moment.
I was back in the parish church at Lower B infield, and it was thirty-eight years ago. To
outward appearances, I suppose, I was still walking down the Strand, fat and forty-five,
with false teeth and a bowler hat, but inside me I was Georgie Bowling, aged seven,
younger son of Samuel Bowling, corn and seed merchant, of 57 High Street, Lower
Binlield. And it was Sunday morning, and I could smell the church. How I could smell it!
You know the smell churches have, a peculiar, dank, dusty, decaying, sweetish sort of
smell. There’s a touch of candle-grease in it, and perhaps a whiff of incense and a
suspicion of mice, and on Sunday mornings it’s a bit overlaid by yellow soap and serge
dresses, but predominantly it’s that sweet, dusty, musty smell that’s like the smell of
death and life mixed up together. It’s powdered corpses, really.
In those days I was about four feet high. I was standing on the hassock so as to see over
the pew in front, and I could feel Mother’s black serge dress under my hand. I could also
feel my stockings pulled up over my knees — we used to wear them like that then — and
the saw edge of the Eton collar they used to buckle me into on Sunday mornings. And I
could hear the organ wheezing and two enormous voices bellowing out the psalm. In our
church there were two men who led the singing, in fact they did so much of the singing
that nobody else got much of a chance. One was Shooter, the fishmonger, and the other
was old Wetherall, the joiner and undertaker. They used to sit opposite one another on
either side of the nave, in the pews nearest the pulpit. Shooter was a short fat man with a
very pink, smooth face, a big nose, drooping moustache, and a chin that kind of fell away
beneath his mouth. Wetherall was quite different. He was a great, gaunt, powerful old
devil of about sixty, with a face like a death’s-head and stiff grey hair half an inch long
all over his head. I’ve never seen a living man who looked so exactly like a skeleton. You
could see every line of the skull in his face, his skin was like parchment, and his great
lantern jaw full of yellow teeth worked up and down just like the jaw of a skeleton in an
anatomical museum. And yet with all his leanness he looked as strong as iron, as though
he’d live to be a hundred and make coffins for everyone in that church before he’d
finished. Their voices were quite different, too. Shooter had a kind of desperate, agonized
bellow, as though someone had a knife at his throat and he was just letting out his last
yell for help. But Wetherall had a tremendous, churning, rumbling noise that happened
deep down inside him, like enormous barrels being rolled to and fro underground.
However much noise he let out, you always knew he’d got plenty more in reserve. The
kids nicknamed him Rumbletummy.
They used to get up a kind of antiphonal effect, especially in the psalms. It was always
Wetherall who had the last word. I suppose really they were friends in private life, but in
my kid’s way I used to imagine that they were deadly enemies and trying to shout one
another down. Shooter would roar out ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, and then Wetherall
would come in with ‘Therefore can I lack nothing’, drowning him completely. You
always knew which of the two was master. I used especially to look forward to that psalm
that has the bit about Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the king of Bashan (this was
what King Zog’s name had reminded me of). Shooter would start off with ‘Sihon king of
the Amorites’, then perhaps for half a second you could hear the rest of the congregation
singing the ‘and’, and then Wetherall’s enonnous bass would come in like a tidal wave
and swallow everybody up with ‘Og the king of Bashan’. I wish I could make you hear
the tremendous, rumbling, subterranean barrel-noise that he could get into that word
‘Og’. He even used to clip off the end of the ‘and’, so that when I was a very small kid I
used to think it was Dog the king of Bashan. But later, when I got the names right, I
formed a picture in my mind’s eye of Sihon and Og. I saw them as a couple of those great
Egyptian statues that I’d seen pictures of in the penny encyclopedia, enormous stone
statues thirty feet high, sitting on their thrones opposite one another, with their hands on
their knees and a faint mysterious smile on their faces.
How it came back to me! That peculiar feeling — it was only a feeling, you couldn’t
describe it as an activity — that we used to call ‘Church’. The sweet corpsy smell, the
rustle of Sunday dresses, the wheeze of the organ and the roaring voices, the spot of light
from the hole in the window creeping slowly up the nave. In some way the grown-ups
could put it across that this extraordinary performance was necessary.
householders — that’s to say Tories, yes-men, and bumsuckers. Daren’t kill the goose that
lays the gilded eggs! And the fact that actually we aren’t householders, that we’re all in
the middle of paying for our houses and eaten up with the ghastly fear that something
might happen before we’ve made the last payment, merely increases the effect. We’re all
bought, and what’s more we’re bought with our own money. Every one of those poor
downtrodden bastards, sweating his guts out to pay twice the proper price for a brick
doll’s house that’s called Belle Vue because there’s no view and the bell doesn’t ring —
every one of those poor suckers would die on the field of battle to save his country from
Bolshevism.
1 turned down Walpole Road and got into the High Street. There’s a train to London at
10. 14. 1 was just passing the Sixpenny Bazaar when 1 remembered the mental note I’d
made that morning to buy a packet of razor-blades. When I got to the soap counter the
floor- manager, or whatever his proper title is, was cursing the girl in charge there.
Generally there aren’t many people in the Sixpenny at that hour of the morning.
Sometimes if you go in just after opening-time you see all the girls lined up in a row and
given their morning curse, just to get them into trim for the day. They say these big
chain-stores have chaps with special powers of sarcasm and abuse who are sent from
branch to branch to ginger the girls up. The floor-manager was an ugly little devil, under-
sized, with very square shoulders and a spiky grey moustache. He’d just pounced on her
about something, some mistake in the change evidently, and was going for her with a
voice like a circular saw.
‘Ho, no! Course you couldn’t count it! COURSE you couldn’t. Too much trouble, that’d
be. Ho, no! ’
Before I could stop myself I’d caught the girl’s eye. It wasn’t so nice for her to have a fat
middle-aged bloke with a red face looking on while she took her cursing. I turned away
as quickly as I could and pretended to be interested in some stuff at the next counter,
curtain rings or something. He was on to her again. He was one of those people who turn
away and then suddenly dart back at you, like a dragon-fly.
‘COURSE you couldn’t count it! Doesn’t matter to YOU if we’re two bob out. Doesn’t
matter at all. What’s two bob to YOU? Couldn’t ask YOU to go to the trouble of
counting it properly. Ho, no! Nothing matters ‘ere ‘cept YOUR convenience. You don’t
think about others, do you? ’
This went on for about five minutes in a voice you could hear half across the shop. He
kept turning away to make her think he’d finished with her and then darting back to have
another go. As I edged a bit farther off I had a glance at them. The girl was a kid about
eighteen, rather fat, with a sort of moony face, the kind that would never get the change
right anyway. She’d turned pale pink and she was wriggling, actually wriggling with
pain. It was just the same as if he’d been cutting into her with a whip. The girls at the
other counters were pretending not to hear. He was an ugly, stiff-built little devil, the sort
of cock-sparrow type of man that sticks his chest out and puts his hands under his
coattails — the type that’d be a sergeant-major only they aren’t tall enough. Do you notice
how often they have under-sized men for these bullying jobs? He was sticking his face,
moustaches and all, almost into hers so as to scream at her better. And the girl all pink
and wriggling.
Finally he decided that he’d said enough and strutted off like an admiral on the quarter-
deck, and I came up to the counter for my razor-blades. He knew I’d heard every word,
and so did she, and both of them knew I knew they knew. But the worst of it was that for
my benefit she’d got to pretend that nothing had happened and put on the standoffish
keep-your-distance attitude that a shopgirl’s supposed to keep up with male customers.
Had to act the grown-up young lady half a minute after I’d seen her cursed like a skivvy!
Her face was still pink and her hands were trembling. I asked her for penny blades and
she started fumbling in the threepenny tray. Then the little devil of a floor-manager
turned our way and for a moment both of us thought he was coming back to begin again.
The girl flinched like a dog that sees the whip. But she was looking at me out of the
comer of her eye. I could see that because I’d seen her cursed she hated me like the devil.
Queer!
I cleared out with my razor-blades. Why do they stand it? I was thinking. Pure funk, of
course. One back-answer and you get the sack. It’s the same everywhere. I thought of the
lad that sometimes serves me at the chain-store grocery we deal at. A great hefty lump of
twenty, with cheeks like roses and enormous fore- arms, ought to be working in a
blacksmith’s shop. And there he is in his white jacket, bent double across the counter,
rubbing his hands together with his ‘Yes, sir! Very true, sir! Pleasant weather for the time
of the year, sir! What can I have the pleasure of getting you today, sir? ’ practically asking
you to kick his bum. Orders, of course. The customer is always right. The thing you can
see in his face is mortal dread that you might report him for impertinence and get him
sacked. Besides, how’s he to know you aren’t one of the narks the company sends round?
Fear! We swim in it. It’s our element. Everyone that isn’t scared stiff of losing his job is
scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something. Jews sweating when they
think of Hitler. It crossed my mind that that little bastard with the spiky moustache was
probably a damn sight more scared for his job than the girl was. Probably got a family to
support. And perhaps, who knows, at home he’s meek and mild, grows cucumbers in the
back garden, lets his wife sit on him and the kids pull his moustache. And by the same
token you never read about a Spanish Inquisitor or one of these higher-ups in the Russian
Ogpu without being told that in private life he was such a good kind man, best of
husbands and fathers, devoted to his tame canary, and so forth.
The girl at the soap counter was looking after me as I went out of the door. She’d have
murdered me if she could. How she hated me because of what I’d seen! Much more than
she hated the floor- manager.
3
There was a bombing plane flying low overhead. For a minute or two it seemed to be
keeping pace with the train. Two vulgar kind of blokes in shabby overcoats, obviously
commercials of the lowest type, newspaper canvassers probably, were sitting opposite
me. One of them was reading the Mail and the other was reading the Express. I could see
by their manner that they’d spotted me for one of their kind. Up at the other end of the
carriage two lawyers’ clerks with black bags were keeping up a conversation full of legal
baloney that was meant to impress the rest of us and show that they didn’t belong to the
common herd.
I was watching the backs of the houses sliding past. The line from West Bletchley runs
most of the way through slums, but it’s kind of peaceful, the glimpses you get of little
backyards with bits of flowers stuck in boxes and the flat roofs where the women peg out
the washing and the bird-cage on the wall. The great black bombing plane swayed a little
in the air and zoomed ahead so that I couldn’t see it. I was sitting with my back to the
engine. One of the commercials cocked his eye at it for just a second. I knew what he was
thinking. For that matter it’s what everybody else is thinking. You don’t have to be a
highbrow to think such thoughts nowadays. In two years’ time, one year’s time, what
shall we be doing when we see one of those things? Making a dive for the cellar, wetting
our bags with fright.
The commercial bloke put down his Daily Mail.
‘Templegate’s winner come in,’ he said.
The lawyers’ clerks were sprouting some learned rot about fee- simple and peppercorns.
The other commercial felt in his waistcoat pocket and took out a bent Woodbine. He felt
in the other pocket and then leaned across to me.
‘Got a match, Tubby? ’
I felt for my matches. ‘Tubby’, you notice. That’s interesting, really. For about a couple
of minutes I stopped thinking about bombs and began thinking about my figure as I’d
studied it in my bath that morning.
It’s quite true I’m tubby, in fact my upper half is almost exactly the shape of a tub. But
what’s interesting, I think, is that merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost
anyone, even a total, stranger, will take it for granted to give you a nickname that’s an
insulting comment on your personal appearance. Suppose a chap was a hunchback or had
a squint or a hare-lip — would you give him a nickname to remind him of it? But every fat
man’s labelled as a matter of course. I’m the type that people automatically slap on the
back and punch in the ribs, and nearly all of them think I like it. I never go into the saloon
bar of the Crown at Pudley (I pass that way once a week on business) without that ass
Waters, who travels for the Seafoam Soap people but who’s more or less a permanency in
the saloon bar of the Crown, prodding me in the ribs and singing out ‘Here a sheer hulk
lies poor Tom Bowling! ’ which is a joke the bloody fools in the bar never get tired of.
Waters has got a linger like a bar of iron. They all think a fat man doesn’t have any
feelings.
The commercial took another of my matches, to pick his teeth with, and chucked the box
back. The train whizzed on to an iron bridge. Down below I got a glimpse of a baker’s
van and a long string of lorries loaded with cement. The queer thing, I was thinking, is
that in a way they’re right about fat men. It’s a fact that a fat man, particularly a man
who’s been fat from birth — from childhood, that’s to say — isn’t quite like other men. He
goes through his life on a different plane, a sort of light-comedy plane, though in the case
of blokes in side-shows at fairs, or in fact anyone over twenty stone, it isn’t so much light
comedy as low farce. I’ve been both fat and thin in my life, and I know the difference
fatness makes to your outlook. It kind of prevents you from taking things too hard. I
doubt whether a man who’s never been anything but fat, a man who’s been called Fatty
ever since he could walk, even knows of the existence of any really deep emotions. How
could he? He’s got no experience of such things. He can’t ever be present at a tragic
scene, because a scene where there’s a fat man present isn’t tragic, it’s comic. Just
imagine a fat Hamlet, for instance! Or Oliver Hardy acting Romeo. Funnily enough I’d
been thinking something of the kind only a few days earlier when I was reading a novel
I’d got out of Boots. Wasted Passion, it was called. The chap in the story finds out that
his girl has gone off with another chap. He’s one of these chaps you read about in novels,
that have pale sensitive faces and dark hair and a private income. I remember more or
less how the passage went:
David paced up and down the room, his hands pressed to his forehead. The news seemed
to have stunned him. For a long time he could not believe it. Sheila untrue to him! It
could not be! Suddenly realization rushed over him, and he saw the fact in all its stark
horror. It was too much. He flung himself down in a paroxysm of weeping.
Anyway, it went something like that. And even at the time it started me thinking. There
you have it, you see. That’s how people — some people — are expected to behave. But how
about a chap like me? Suppose Hilda went off for a week-end with somebody else- -not
that I’d care a damn, in fact it would rather please me to find that she’d still got that much
kick left in her — but suppose I did care, would I fling myself down in a paroxysm of
weeping? Would anyone expect me to? You couldn’t, with a figure like mine. It would be
downright obscene.
The train was running along an embankment. A little below us you could see the roofs of
the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a
bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them. Funny how
we keep on thinking about bombs. Of course there’s no question that it’s coming soon.
You can tell how close it is by the cheer- up stuff they’re talking about it in the
newspaper. I was reading a piece in the News Chronicle the other day where it said that
bombing planes can’t do any damage nowadays. The anti-aircraft guns have got so good
that the bomber has to stay at twenty thousand feet. The chap thinks, you notice, that if an
aeroplane’s high enough the bombs don’t reach the ground. Or more likely what he really
meant was that they’ll miss Woolwich Arsenal and only hit places like Ellesmere Road.
But taking it by and large, I thought, it’s not so bad to be fat. One thing about a fat man is
that he’s always popular. There’s really no kind of company, from bookies to bishops,
where a fat man doesn’t fit in and feel at home. As for women, fat men have more luck
with them than people seem to think. It’s all bu nk to imagine, as some people do, that a
woman looks on a fat man as just a joke. The truth is that a woman doesn’t look on ANY
man as a joke if he can kid her that he’s in love with her.
Mind you, I haven’t always been fat. I’ve been fat for eight or nine years, and I suppose
I’ve developed most of the characteristics. But it’s also a fact that internally, mentally,
I’m not altogether fat. No! Don’t mistake me. I’m not trying to put myself over as a kind
of tender flower, the aching heart behind the smiling face and so forth. You couldn’t get
on in the insurance business if you were anything like that. I’m vulgar, I’m insensitive,
and I fit in with my environment. So long as anywhere in the world things are being sold
on commission and livings are picked up by sheer brass and lack of finer feelings, chaps
like me will be doing it. In almost all circumstances I’d manage to make a living — always
a living and never a fortune — and even in war, revolution, plague, and famine I’d back
myself to stay alive longer than most people. I’m that type. But also I’ve got something
else inside me, chiefly a hangover from the past. I’ll tell you about that later. I’m fat, but
I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as
they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?
The chap who’d borrowed my matches was having a good pick at his teeth over the
Express.
‘Legs case don’t seem to get much forrader,’ he said.
‘They’ll never get ‘im,’ said the other. “Ow could you identify a pair of legs? They’re all
the bleeding same, aren’t they? ’
‘Might trace ‘im through the piece of paper ‘e wrapped ‘em up in,’ said the first.
Down below you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, twisting this way
and that with the streets, but stretching on and on, like an enormous plain that you could
have ridden over. Whichever way you cross London it’s twenty miles of houses almost
without a break. Christ! how can the bombers miss us when they come? We’re just one
great big bull’s-eye. And no warning, probably. Because who’s going to be such a bloody
fool as to declare war nowadays? If I was Hitler I’d send my bombers across in the
middle of a disarmament conference. Some quiet morning, when the clerks are streaming
across London Bridge, and the canary’s singing, and the old woman’s pegging the
bloomers on the line — zoom, whizz, plonk!
Houses going up into the air, bloomers soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses.
Seems a pity somehow, I thought. I looked at the great sea of roofs stretching on and on.
Miles and miles of streets, fried-fish shops, tin chapels, picture houses, little printing-
shops up back alleys, factories, blocks of flats, whelk stalls, dairies, power stations — on
and on and on. Enormous! And the peacefulness of it! Like a great wilderness with no
wild beasts. No guns firing, nobody chucking pineapples, nobody beating anybody else
up with a rubber truncheon. If you come to think of it, in the whole of England at this
moment there probably isn’t a single bedroom window from which anyone’s firing a
machine-gun.
But how about five years from now? Or two years? Or one year?
4
I’d dropped my papers at the office. Warner is one of these cheap American dentists, and
he has his consulting-room, or ‘parlour’ as he likes to call it, halfway up a big block of
offices, between a photographer and a rubber-goods wholesaler. I was early for my
appointment, but it was time for a bit of grub. I don’t know what put it into my head to go
into a milk-bar. They’re places I generally avoid. We five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers aren’t
well served in the way of eating-places in London. If your idea of the amount to spend on
a meal is one and threepence, it’s either Lyons, the Express Dairy, or the A. B. C. , or else
it’s the kind of funeral snack they serve you in the saloon bar, a pint of bitter and a slab of
cold pie, so cold that it’s colder than the beer. Outside the milk-bar the boys were yelling
the first editions of the evening papers.
Behind the bright red counter a girl in a tall white cap was fiddling with an ice-box, and
somewhere at the back a radio was playing, plonk-tiddle-tiddle-plonk, a kind of tinny
sound. Why the hell am I coming here? I thought to myself as I went in. There’s a kind of
atmosphere about these places that gets me down. Everything slick and shiny and
streamlined; mirrors, enamel, and chromium plate whichever direction you look in.
Everything spent on the decorations and nothing on the food. No real food at all. Just lists
of stuff with American names, sort of phantom stuff that you can’t taste and can hardly
believe in the existence of. Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it’s hauled out of
a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube. No comfort, no privacy.
Tall stools to sit on, a kind of narrow ledge to eat off, mirrors all round you. A sort of
propaganda floating round, mixed up with the noise of the radio, to the effect that food
doesn’t matter, comfort doesn’t matter, nothing matters except slickness and shininess
and streamlining. Everything’s streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler’s keeping
for you. I ordered a large coffee and a couple of frankfurters. The girl in the white cap
jerked them at me with about as much interest as you’d throw ants’ eggs to a goldfish.
Outside the door a newsboy yelled ‘StarnoosstanNERD! ’ I saw the poster flapping
against his knees: LEGS. FRESH DISCOVERIES. Just Tegs’, you notice. It had got
down to that. Two days earlier they’d found a woman’s legs in a railway waiting-room,
done up in a brown-paper parcel, and what with successive editions of the papers, the
whole nation was supposed to be so passionately interested in these blasted legs that they
didn’t need any further introduction. They were the only legs that were news at the
moment. It’s queer, I thought, as I ate a bit of roll, how dull the murders are getting
nowadays. All this cutting people up and leaving bits of them about the countryside. Not
a patch on the old domestic poisoning dramas, Crippen, Seddon, Mrs Maybrick; the truth
being, I suppose, that you can’t do a good murder unless you believe you’re going to
roast in hell for it.
At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and — Christ!
I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to
taste of nothing, like the roll. But this — well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and
describe it to you.
The fra nk furter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a
fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin.
And then suddenly — pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of
horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just
couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was
FISH! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked
straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.
Outside the newsboy shoved the Standard into my face and yelled, ‘Legs! ‘Orrible
revelations! All the winners! Legs! Legs! ’ I was still rolling the stuff round my tongue,
wondering where I could spit it out. I remembered a bit I’d read in the paper somewhere
about these food-factories in Gennany where everything’s made out of something else.
Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that THEY were making sausages out of fish,
and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into
the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That’s the way we’re going
nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else.
Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs
over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented
over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to
brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that’s what
you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.
When I’d got the new teeth in I felt a lot better. They sat nice and smooth over the gums,
and though very likely it sounds absurd to say that false teeth can make you feel younger,
it’s a fact that they did so. I tried a smile at myself in a shop window. They weren’t half
bad. Warner, though cheap, is a bit of an artist and doesn’t aim at making you look like a
toothpaste advert. He’s got huge cabinets full of false teeth — he showed them to me
once — all graded according to size and colour, and he picks them out like a jeweller
choosing stones for a necklace. Nine people out of ten would have taken my teeth for
natural.
I caught a full-length glimpse of myself in another window I was passing, and it struck
me that really I wasn’t such a bad figure of a man. A bit on the fat side, admittedly, but
nothing offensive, only what the tailors call a ‘full figure’, and some women like a man to
have a red face. There’s life in the old dog yet, I thought. I remembered my seventeen
quid, and definitely made up my mind that I’d spend it on a woman. There was time to
have a pint before the pubs shut, just to baptize the teeth, and feeling rich because of my
seventeen quid I stopped at a tobacconist’s and bought myself a sixpenny cigar of a kind
I’m rather partial to. They’re eight inches long and guaranteed pure Havana leaf all
through. I suppose cabbages grow in Havana the same as anywhere else.
When I came out of the pub I felt quite different.
I’d had a couple of pints, they’d wanned me up inside, and the cigar smoke oozing round
my new teeth gave me a fresh, clean, peaceful sort of feeling. All of a sudden I felt kind
of thoughtful and philosophic. It was partly because I didn’t have any work to do. My
mind went back to the thoughts of war I’d been having earlier that morning, when the
bomber flew over the train. I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you
foresee the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it.
I was walking westward up the Strand, and though it was coldish I went slowly to get the
pleasure of my cigar. The usual crowd that you can hardly fight your way through was
streaming up the pavement, all of them with that insane fixed expression on their faces
that people have in London streets, and there was the usual jam of traffic with the great
red buses nosing their way between the cars, and the engines roaring and horns tooting.
Enough noise to waken the dead, but not to waken this lot, I thought. I felt as if I was the
only person awake in a city of sleep-walkers. That’s an illusion, of course. When you
walk through a crowd of strangers it’s next door to impossible not to imagine that they’re
all waxworks, but probably they’re thinking just the same about you. And this kind of
prophetic feeling that keeps coming over me nowadays, the feeling that war’s just round
the corner and that war’s the end of all things, isn’t peculiar to me. We’ve all got it, more
or less. I suppose even among the people passing at that moment there must have been
chaps who were seeing mental pictures of the shellbursts and the mud. Whatever thought
you think there’s always a million people thinking it at the same moment. But that was
how I felt. We’re all on the burning deck and nobody knows it except me. I looked at the
dumb-bell faces streaming past. Like turkeys in November, I thought. Not a notion of
what’s coming to them. It was as if I’d got X-rays in my eyes and could see the skeletons
walking.
I looked forward a few years. I saw this street as it’ll be in five years’ time, say, or three
years’ time (1941 they say it’s booked for), after the fighting’s started.
No, not all smashed to pieces. Only a little altered, kind of chipped and dirty-looking, the
shop-windows almost empty and so dusty that you can’t see into them. Down a side street
there’s an enonnous bomb-crater and a block of buildings burnt out so that it looks like a
hollow tooth. Thermite. It’s all curiously quiet, and everyone’s very thin. A platoon of
soldiers comes marching up the street. They’re all as thin as rakes and their boots are
dragging. The sergeant’s got corkscrew moustaches and holds himself like a ramrod, but
he’s thin too and he’s got a cough that almost tears him open. Between his coughs he’s
trying to bawl at them in the old parade-ground style. ‘Nah then, Jones! Lift yer ‘ed up!
What yer keep starin’ at the ground for? All them fag- ends was picked up years ago. ’
Suddenly a fit of coughing catches him. He tries to stop it, can’t, doubles up like a ruler,
and almost coughs his guts out. His face turns pink and purple, his moustache goes limp,
and the water runs out of his eyes.
I can hear the air-raid sirens blowing and the loud-speakers bellowing that our glorious
troops have taken a hundred thousand prisoners. I see a top-floor-back in Birmingham
and a child of five howling and howling for a bit of bread. And suddenly the mother can’t
stand it any longer, and she yells at it, ‘Shut your trap, you little bastard! ’ and then she
ups the child’s frock and smacks its bottom hard, because there isn’t any bread and isn’t
going to be any bread. I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil
and the rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows.
Is it going to happen? No knowing. Some days it’s impossible to believe it. Some days I
say to myself that it’s just a scare got up by the newspapers. Some days I know in my
bones there’s no escaping it.
When I got down near Charing Cross the boys were yelling a later edition of the evening
papers. There was some more drivel about the murder. LEGS. FAMOUS SURGEON’S
STATEMENT. Then another poster caught my eye: KING ZOG’S WEDDING
POSTPONED. King Zog! What a name! It’s next door to impossible to believe a chap
with a name like that isn’t a jet-black Negro.
But just at that moment a queer thing happened. King Zog’s name — but I suppose, as I’d
already seen the name several times that day, it was mixed up with some sound in the
traffic or the smell of horse-dung or something — had started memories in me.
The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes
without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of
the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a
history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going,
and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that
at this moment.
I was back in the parish church at Lower B infield, and it was thirty-eight years ago. To
outward appearances, I suppose, I was still walking down the Strand, fat and forty-five,
with false teeth and a bowler hat, but inside me I was Georgie Bowling, aged seven,
younger son of Samuel Bowling, corn and seed merchant, of 57 High Street, Lower
Binlield. And it was Sunday morning, and I could smell the church. How I could smell it!
You know the smell churches have, a peculiar, dank, dusty, decaying, sweetish sort of
smell. There’s a touch of candle-grease in it, and perhaps a whiff of incense and a
suspicion of mice, and on Sunday mornings it’s a bit overlaid by yellow soap and serge
dresses, but predominantly it’s that sweet, dusty, musty smell that’s like the smell of
death and life mixed up together. It’s powdered corpses, really.
In those days I was about four feet high. I was standing on the hassock so as to see over
the pew in front, and I could feel Mother’s black serge dress under my hand. I could also
feel my stockings pulled up over my knees — we used to wear them like that then — and
the saw edge of the Eton collar they used to buckle me into on Sunday mornings. And I
could hear the organ wheezing and two enormous voices bellowing out the psalm. In our
church there were two men who led the singing, in fact they did so much of the singing
that nobody else got much of a chance. One was Shooter, the fishmonger, and the other
was old Wetherall, the joiner and undertaker. They used to sit opposite one another on
either side of the nave, in the pews nearest the pulpit. Shooter was a short fat man with a
very pink, smooth face, a big nose, drooping moustache, and a chin that kind of fell away
beneath his mouth. Wetherall was quite different. He was a great, gaunt, powerful old
devil of about sixty, with a face like a death’s-head and stiff grey hair half an inch long
all over his head. I’ve never seen a living man who looked so exactly like a skeleton. You
could see every line of the skull in his face, his skin was like parchment, and his great
lantern jaw full of yellow teeth worked up and down just like the jaw of a skeleton in an
anatomical museum. And yet with all his leanness he looked as strong as iron, as though
he’d live to be a hundred and make coffins for everyone in that church before he’d
finished. Their voices were quite different, too. Shooter had a kind of desperate, agonized
bellow, as though someone had a knife at his throat and he was just letting out his last
yell for help. But Wetherall had a tremendous, churning, rumbling noise that happened
deep down inside him, like enormous barrels being rolled to and fro underground.
However much noise he let out, you always knew he’d got plenty more in reserve. The
kids nicknamed him Rumbletummy.
They used to get up a kind of antiphonal effect, especially in the psalms. It was always
Wetherall who had the last word. I suppose really they were friends in private life, but in
my kid’s way I used to imagine that they were deadly enemies and trying to shout one
another down. Shooter would roar out ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, and then Wetherall
would come in with ‘Therefore can I lack nothing’, drowning him completely. You
always knew which of the two was master. I used especially to look forward to that psalm
that has the bit about Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the king of Bashan (this was
what King Zog’s name had reminded me of). Shooter would start off with ‘Sihon king of
the Amorites’, then perhaps for half a second you could hear the rest of the congregation
singing the ‘and’, and then Wetherall’s enonnous bass would come in like a tidal wave
and swallow everybody up with ‘Og the king of Bashan’. I wish I could make you hear
the tremendous, rumbling, subterranean barrel-noise that he could get into that word
‘Og’. He even used to clip off the end of the ‘and’, so that when I was a very small kid I
used to think it was Dog the king of Bashan. But later, when I got the names right, I
formed a picture in my mind’s eye of Sihon and Og. I saw them as a couple of those great
Egyptian statues that I’d seen pictures of in the penny encyclopedia, enormous stone
statues thirty feet high, sitting on their thrones opposite one another, with their hands on
their knees and a faint mysterious smile on their faces.
How it came back to me! That peculiar feeling — it was only a feeling, you couldn’t
describe it as an activity — that we used to call ‘Church’. The sweet corpsy smell, the
rustle of Sunday dresses, the wheeze of the organ and the roaring voices, the spot of light
from the hole in the window creeping slowly up the nave. In some way the grown-ups
could put it across that this extraordinary performance was necessary.
