At
the sweet-shop on the corner Mother Wheeler is weighing out a ha’porth of brandy balls.
the sweet-shop on the corner Mother Wheeler is weighing out a ha’porth of brandy balls.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
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. You took it for
granted, just as you took the Bible, which you got in big doses in those days. There were
texts on every wall and you knew whole chapters of the O. T. by heart. Even now my
head’s stuffed full of bits out of the Bible. And the children of Israel did evil again in the
sight of the Lord. And Asher abode in his breeches. Followed them from Dan until thou
come unto Beersheba. Smote him under the fifth rib, so that he died. You never
understood it, you didn’t try to or want to, it was just a kind of medicine, a queer-tasting
stuff that you had to swallow and knew to be in some way necessary. An extraordinary
rigmarole about people with names like Shimei and Nebuchadnezzar and Ahithophel and
Hashbadada; people with long stiff garments and Assyrian beards, riding up and down on
camels among temples and cedar trees and doing extraordinary things. Sacrificing burnt
offerings, walking about in fiery furnaces, getting nailed on crosses, getting swallowed
by whales. And all mixed up with the sweet graveyard smell and the serge dresses and
the wheeze of the organ.
That was the world I went back to when I saw the poster about King Zog. For a moment I
didn’t merely remember it, I was IN it. Of course such impressions don’t last more than a
few seconds. A moment later it was as though I’d opened my eyes again, and I was forty-
five and there was a traffic jam in the Strand. But it had left a kind of after-effect behind.
Sometimes when you come out of a train of thought you feel as if you were coming up
from deep water, but this time it was the other way about, it was as though it was back in
1900 that I’d been breathing real air. Even now, with my eyes open, so to speak, all those
bloody fools hustling to and fro, and the posters and the petrol-stink and the roar of the
engines, seemed to me less real than Sunday morning in Lower Binfield thirty-eight years
ago.
I chucked away my cigar and walked on slowly. I could smell the corpse-smell. In a
manner of speaking I can smell it now. I’m back in Lower Binfield, and the year’s 1900.
Beside the horse- trough in the market-place the carrier’s horse is having its nose- bag.
At
the sweet-shop on the corner Mother Wheeler is weighing out a ha’porth of brandy balls.
Lady Rampling’s carriage is driving by, with the tiger sitting behind in his pipeclayed
breeches with his arms folded. Uncle Ezekiel is cursing Joe Chamberlain. The recruiting-
sergeant in his scarlet jacket, tight blue overalls, and pillbox hat, is strutting up and down
twisting his moustache. The drunks are puking in the yard behind the George. Vicky’s at
Windsor, God’s in heaven, Christ’s on the cross, Jonah’s in the whale, Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego are in the fiery furnace, and Sihon king of the Amorites and Og
the king of Bashan are sitting on their thrones looking at one another — not doing
anything exactly, just existing, keeping their appointed place, like a couple of fire-dogs,
or the Lion and the Unicorn.
Is it gone for ever? I’m not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong
to it. So do you.
PART II
1
The world I momentarily remembered when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster was so
different from the world I live in now that you might have a bit of difficulty in believing I
ever belonged to it.
I suppose by this time you’ve got a kind of picture of me in your mind — a fat middle-
aged bloke with false teeth and a red face — and subconsciously you’ve been imagining
that I was just the same even when I was in my cradle. But forty-five years is a long time,
and though some people don’t change and develop, others do. I’ve changed a great deal,
and I’ve had my ups and downs, mostly ups. It may seem queer, but my father would
probably be rather proud of me if he could see me now. He’d think it a wonderful thing
that a son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with a bathroom. Even now
I’m a little above my origin, and at other times I’ve touched levels that we should never
have dreamed of in those old days before the war.
Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the
answer will be ‘Which war? ’ In my case the never-never land that people are thinking of
when they say ‘before the war’ might almost be before the Boer War. I was born in ‘93,
and I can actually remember the outbreak of the Boer War, because of the first-class row
that Father and Uncle Ezekiel had about it. I’ve several other memories that would date
from about a year earlier than that.
The very first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin chaff. You went up the stone
passage that led from the kitchen to the shop, and the smell of sainfoin got stronger all the
way. Mother had fixed a wooden gate in the doorway to prevent Joe and myself (Joe was
my elder brother) from getting into the shop. I can still remember standing there
clutching the bars, and the smell of sainfoin mixed up with the damp plastery smell that
belonged to the passage. It wasn’t till years later that I somehow managed to crash the
gate and get into the shop when nobody was there. A mouse that had been having a go at
one of the meal-bins suddenly plopped out and ran between my feet. It was quite white
with meal. This must have happened when I was about six.
When you’re very young you seem to suddenly become conscious of things that have
been under your nose for a long time past. The things round about you swim into your
mind one at a time, rather as they do when you’re waking from sleep. For instance, it was
only when I was nearly four that I suddenly realized that we owned a dog. Nailer, his
name was, an old white English terrier of the breed that’s gone out nowadays. I met him
under the kitchen table and in some way seemed to grasp, having only learnt it that
moment, that he belonged to us and that his name was Nailer. In the same way, a bit
earlier, I’d discovered that beyond the gate at the end of the passage there was a place
where the smell of sainfoin came from. And the shop itself, with the huge scales and the
wooden measures and the tin shovel, and the white lettering on the window, and the
bullfinch in its cage — which you couldn’t see very well even from the pavement, because
the window was always dusty — all these things dropped into place in my mind one by
one, like bits of a jig-saw puzzle.
Time goes on, you get stronger on your legs, and by degrees you begin to get a grasp of
geography. I suppose Lower Binfield was just like any other market town of about two
thousand inhabitants. It was in Oxfordshire — I keep saying WAS, you notice, though
after all the place still exists — about five miles from the Thames. It lay in a bit of a
valley, with a low ripple of hills between itself and the Thames, and higher hills behind.
On top of the hills there were woods in sort of dim blue masses among which you could
see a great white house with a colonnade. This was Binfield House (‘The Hall’,
everybody called it), and the top of the hill was known as Upper Binfield, though there
was no village there and hadn’t been for a hundred years or more. I must have been
nearly seven before I noticed the existence of Binfield House. When you’re very small
you don’t look into the distance. But by that time I knew every inch of the town, which
was shaped roughly like a cross with the market-place in the middle. Our shop was in the
High Street a little before you got to the market-place, and on the corner there was Mrs
Wheeler’s sweet-shop where you spent a halfpenny when you had one. Mother Wheeler
was a dirty old witch and people suspected her of sucking the bull’s-eyes and putting
them back in the bottle, though this was never proved. Farther down there was the
barber’s shop with the advert for Abdulla cigarettes — the one with the Egyptian soldiers
on it, and curiously enough they’re using the same advert to this day — and the rich boozy
smell of bay rum and latakia. Behind the houses you could see the chimneys of the
brewery. In the middle of the market-place there was the stone horse-trough, and on top
of the water there was always a fine film of dust and chaff.
Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.
I’m quite aware that that’s a delusion. I’m merely trying to tell you how things come
back to me. If I shut my eyes and think of Lower Binfield any time before I was, say,
eight, it’s always in summer weather that I remember it. Either it’s the market-place at
dinner-time, with a sort of sleepy dusty hush over everything and the carrier’s horse with
his nose dug well into his nose-bag, munching away, or it’s a hot afternoon in the great
green juicy meadows round the town, or it’s about dusk in the lane behind the allotments,
and there’s a smell of pipe-tobacco and night- stocks floating through the hedge. But in a
sense I do remember different seasons, because all my memories are bound up with
things to eat, which varied at different times of the year. Especially the things you used to
find in the hedges. In July there were dewberries — but they’re very rare — and the
blackberries were getting red enough to eat. In September there were sloes and hazel-
nuts. The best hazelnuts were always out of reach. Later on there were beech-nuts and
crab-apples. Then there were the kind of minor foods that you used to eat when there was
nothing better going. Haws — but they’re not much good — and hips, which have a nice
sharp taste if you clean the hairs out of them. Angelica is good in early summer,
especially when you’re thirsty, and so are the stems of various grasses. Then there’s
sorrel, which is good with bread and butter, and pig-nuts, and a kind of wood shamrock
which has a sour taste. Even plantain seeds are better than nothing when you’re a long
way from home and very hungry.
Joe was two years older than myself. When we were very small Mother used to pay Katie
Simmons eighteen pence a week to take us out for walks in the afternoons. Katie’s father
worked in the brewery and had fourteen children, so that the family were always on the
lookout for odd jobs. She was only twelve when Joe was seven and I was five, and her
mental level wasn’t very different from ours. She used to drag me by the ann and call me
‘Baby’, and she had just enough authority over us to prevent us from being run over by
dogcarts or chased by bulls, but so far as conversation went we were almost on equal
terms. We used to go for long, trailing kind of walks — always, of course, picking and
eating things all the way — down the lane past the allotments, across Roper’s Meadows,
and down to the Mill Fann, where there was a pool with newts and tiny carp in it (Joe and
I used to go fishing there when we were a bit older), and back by the Upper Binfield
Road so as to pass the sweet-shop that stood on the edge of the town. This shop was in
such a bad position that anyone who took it went bankrupt, and to my own knowledge it
was three times a sweet-shop, once a grocer’s, and once a bicycle-repair shop, but it had a
peculiar fascination for children. Even when we had no money, we’d go that way so as to
glue our noses against the window. Katie wasn’t in the least above sharing a farthing’s
worth of sweets and quarrelling over her share. You could buy things worth having for a
farthing in those days. Most sweets were four ounces a penny, and there was even some
stuff called Paradise Mixture, mostly broken sweets from other bottles, which was six.
Then there were Farthing Everlastings, which were a yard long and couldn’t be finished
inside half an hour. Sugar mice and sugar pigs were eight a penny, and so were liquorice
pistols, popcorn was a halfpenny for a large bag, and a prize packet which contained
several different kinds of sweets, a gold ring, and sometimes a whistle, was a penny. You
don’t see prize packets nowadays. A whole lot of the kinds of sweets we had in those
days have gone out. There was a kind of flat white sweet with mottoes printed on them,
and also a kind of sticky pink stuff in an oval matchwood box with a tiny tin spoon to eat
it with, which cost a halfpenny. Both of those have disappeared. So have Caraway
Comfits, and so have chocolate pipes and sugar matches, and even Hundreds and
Thousands you hardly ever see. Hundreds and Thousands were a great standby when
you’d only a farthing. And what about Penny Monsters? Does one ever see a Penny
Monster nowadays? It was a huge bottle, holding more than a quart of fizzy lemonade, all
for a penny. That’s another thing that the war killed stone dead.
It always seems to be summer when I look back. I can feel the grass round me as tall as
myself, and the heat coming out of the earth. And the dust in the lane, and the warm
greeny light coming through the hazel boughs. I can see the three of us trailing along,
eating stuff out of the hedge, with Katie dragging at my ann and saying ‘Come on,
Baby! ’ and sometimes yelling ahead to Joe, ‘Joe! You come back ‘ere this minute! You’ll
catch it! ’ Joe was a hefty boy with a big, lumpy sort of head and tremendous calves, the
kind of boy who’s always doing something dangerous. At seven he’d already got into
short trousers, with the thick black stockings drawn up over the knee and the great
clumping boots that boys had to wear in those days. I was still in frocks — a kind of
holland overall that Mother used to make for me. Katie used to wear a dreadful ragged
parody of a grown-up dress that descended from sister to sister in her family. She had a
ridiculous great hat with her pigtails hanging down behind it, and a long, draggled skirt
which trailed on the ground, and button boots with the heels trodden down. She was a
tiny thing, not much taller than Joe, but not bad at ‘minding’ children. In a family like
that a child is ‘minding’ other children about as soon as it’s weaned. At times she’d try to
be grown-up and ladylike, and she had a way of cutting you short with a proverb, which
to her mind was something unanswerable. If you said ‘Don’t care’, she’d answer
immediately:
‘Don’t care was made to care, Don’t care was hung, Don’t care was put in a pot And
boiled till he was done. ’
Or if you called her names it would be ‘Hard words break no bones’, or, when you’d
been boasting, ‘Pride comes before a fall’. This came very true one day when I was
strutting along pretending to be a soldier and fell into a cowpat. Her family lived in a
filthy little rat-hole of a place in the slummy street behind the brewery. The place
swarmed with children like a kind of vermin. The whole family had managed to dodge
going to school, which was fairly easy to do in those days, and started running errands
and doing other odd jobs as soon as they could walk. One of the elder brothers got a
month for stealing turnips. She stopped taking us out for walks a year later when Joe was
eight and getting too tough for a girl to handle. He’d discovered that in Katie’s home they
slept five in a bed, and used to tease the life out of her about it.
Poor Katie! She had her first baby when she was fifteen. No one knew who was the
father, and probably Katie wasn’t too certain herself. Most people believe it was one of
her brothers. The workhouse people took the baby, and Katie went into service in
Walton. Some time afterwards she married a tinker, which even by the standards of her
family was a come-down. The last time I saw her was in 1913. I was biking through
Walton, and I passed some dreadful wooden shacks beside the railway line, with fences
round them made out of barrel-staves, where the gypsies used to camp at certain times of
the year, when the police would let them. A wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair
coming down and a smoky face, looking at least fifty years old, came out of one of the
huts and began shaking out a rag mat. It was Katie, who must have been twenty-seven.
2
Thursday was market day. Chaps with round red faces like pumpkins and dirty smocks
and huge boots covered with dry cow-dung, carrying long hazel switches, used to drive
their brutes into the market- place early in the morning. For hours there’d be a terrific
hullabaloo: dogs barking, pigs squealing, chaps in tradesmen’s vans who wanted to get
through the crush cracking their whips and cursing, and everyone who had anything to do
with the cattle shouting and throwing sticks. The big noise was always when they brought
a bull to market. Even at that age it struck me that most of the bulls were harmless law-
abiding brutes that only wanted to get to their stalls in peace, but a bull wouldn’t have
been regarded as a bull if half the town hadn’t had to turn out and chase it. Sometimes
some terrified brute, generally a half-grown heifer, used to break loose and charge down
a side street, and then anyone who happened to be in the way would stand in the middle
of the road and swing his anns backwards like the sails of a windmill, shouting, ‘Woo!
Woo! ’ This was supposed to have a kind of hypnotic effect on an animal and certainly it
did frighten them.
Half-way through the morning some of the farmers would come into the shop and run
samples of seed through their fingers. Actually Father did very little business with the
farmers, because he had no delivery van and couldn’t afford to give long credits. Mostly
he did a rather petty class of business, poultry food and fodder for the tradesmen’s horses
and so forth. Old Brewer, of the Mill Farm, who was a stingy old bastard with a grey
chin-beard, used to stand there for half an hour, fingering samples of chicken corn and
letting them drop into his pocket in an absent-minded manner, after which, of course, he
finally used to make off without buying anything. In the evenings the pubs were full of
drunken men. In those days beer cost twopence a pint, and unlike the beer nowadays it
had some guts in it. All through the Boer War the recruiting sergeant used to be in the
four-ale bar of the George every Thursday and Saturday night, dressed up to the nines
and very free with his money. Sometimes next morning you’d see him leading off some
great sheepish, red-faced lump of a farm lad who’d taken the shilling when he was too
drunk to see and found in the morning that it would cost him twenty pounds to get out of
it. People used to stand in their doorways and shake their heads when they saw them go
past, almost as if it had been a funeral. ‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A
fine young fellow like that! ’ It just shocked them. Listing for a soldier, in their eyes, was
the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets. Their attitude to the war, and to the
Army, was very curious. They had the good old English notions that the red-coats are the
scum of the earth and anyone who joins the Army will die of drink and go straight to hell,
but at the same time they were good patriots, stuck Union Jacks in their windows, and
held it as an article of faith that the English had never been beaten in battle and never
could be. At that time everyone, even the Nonconformists, used to sing sentimental songs
about the thin red line and the soldier boy who died on the battlefield far away. These
soldier boys always used to die ‘when the shot and shell were flying’, I remember. It
puzzled me as a kid. Shot I could understand, but it produced a queer picture in my mind
to think of cockle-shells flying through the air. When Mafeking was relieved the people
nearly yelled the roof off, and there were at any rate times when they believed the tales
about the Boers chucking babies into the air and skewering them on their bayonets. Old
Brewer got so fed up with the kids yelling ‘Krooger! ’ after him that towards the end of
the war he shaved his beard off. The people’s attitude towards the Government was really
the same. They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen
that ever lived and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of
paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.
Before and after the war Lower Binfield was a Liberal constituency. During the war there
was a by-election which the Conservatives won. I was too young to grasp what it was all
about, I only knew that I was a Conservative because I liked the blue streamers better
than the red ones, and I chiefly remember it because of a drunken man who fell on his
nose on the pavement outside the George. In the general excitement nobody took any
notice of him, and he lay there for hours in the hot sun with his blood drying round him,
and when it dried it was purple. By the time the 1906 election came along I was old
enough to understand it, more or less, and this time I was a Liberal because everybody
else was. The people chased the Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a
pond full of duckweed. People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin
storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.
Very early in life, when the Boer War broke out, I remember the big row between Father
and Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel had a little boot-shop in one of the streets off the High
Street, and also did some cobbling. It was a small business and tended to get smaller,
which didn’t matter greatly because Uncle Ezekiel wasn’t married. He was only a half-
brother and much older than Father, twenty years older at least, and for the fifteen years
or so that I knew him he always looked exactly the same. He was a fine-looking old chap,
rather tall, with white hair and the whitest whiskers I ever saw — white as thistledown.
He had a way of slapping his leather apron and standing up very straight — a reaction
from bending over the last, I suppose — after which he’d bark his opinions straight in your
face, ending up with a sort of ghostly cackle. He was a real old nineteenth-century
Liberal, the kind that not only used to ask you what Gladstone said in ‘78 but could tell
you the answer, and one of the very few people in Lower Binfield who stuck to the same
opinions all through the war. He was always denouncing Joe Chamberlain and some gang
of people that he referred to as ‘the Park Lane riff-raff. I can hear him now, having one
of his arguments with Father. ‘Them and their far-flung Empire! Can’t fling it too far for
me. He-he-he! ’ And then Father’s voice, a quiet, worried, conscientious kind of voice,
coming back at him with the white man’s burden and our dooty to the pore blacks whom
these here Boars treated something shameful. For a week or so after Uncle Ezekiel gave it
out that he was a pro-Boer and a Little Englander they were hardly on speaking terms.
They had another row when the atrocity stories started. Father was very worried by the
tales he’d heard, and he tackled Uncle Ezekiel about it. Little Englander or no, surely he
couldn’t think it right for these here Boars to throw babies in the air and catch them on
their bayonets, even if they WERE only nigger babies? But Uncle Ezekiel just laughed in
his face. Father had got it all wrong! It wasn’t the Boars who threw babies in the air, it
was the British soldiers! He kept grabbing hold of me — I must have been about five — to
illustrate. ‘Throw them in the air and skewer them like frogs, I tell you! Same as I might
throw this youngster here! ’ And then he’d swing me up and almost let go of me, and I
had a vivid picture of myself flying through the air and landing plonk on the end of a
bayonet.
Father was quite different from Uncle Ezekiel. I don’t know much about my
grandparents, they were dead before I was born, I only know that my grandfather had
been a cobbler and late in life he married the widow of a seedsman, which was how we
came to have the shop. It was a job that didn’t really suit Father, though he knew the
business inside out and was everlastingly working. Except on Sunday and very
occasionally on week-day evenings I never remember him without meal on the backs of
his hands and in the lines of his face and in what was left of his hair. He’d married when
he was in his thirties and must have been nearly forty when I first remember him. He was
a small man, a sort of grey, quiet little man, always in shirtsleeves and white apron and
always dusty-looking because of the meal. He had a round head, a blunt nose, a rather
bushy moustache, spectacles, and butter-coloured hair, the same colour as mine, but he’d
lost most of it and it was always mealy. My grandfather had bettered himself a good deal
by marrying the seedsman’s widow, and Father had been educated at Walton Grammar
School, where the farmers and the better-off tradesmen sent their sons, whereas Uncle
Ezekiel liked to boast that he’d never been to school in his life and had taught himself to
read by a tallow candle after working hours. But he was a much quicker-witted man than
Father, he could argue with anybody, and he used to quote Carlyle and Spencer by the
yard.
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. You took it for
granted, just as you took the Bible, which you got in big doses in those days. There were
texts on every wall and you knew whole chapters of the O. T. by heart. Even now my
head’s stuffed full of bits out of the Bible. And the children of Israel did evil again in the
sight of the Lord. And Asher abode in his breeches. Followed them from Dan until thou
come unto Beersheba. Smote him under the fifth rib, so that he died. You never
understood it, you didn’t try to or want to, it was just a kind of medicine, a queer-tasting
stuff that you had to swallow and knew to be in some way necessary. An extraordinary
rigmarole about people with names like Shimei and Nebuchadnezzar and Ahithophel and
Hashbadada; people with long stiff garments and Assyrian beards, riding up and down on
camels among temples and cedar trees and doing extraordinary things. Sacrificing burnt
offerings, walking about in fiery furnaces, getting nailed on crosses, getting swallowed
by whales. And all mixed up with the sweet graveyard smell and the serge dresses and
the wheeze of the organ.
That was the world I went back to when I saw the poster about King Zog. For a moment I
didn’t merely remember it, I was IN it. Of course such impressions don’t last more than a
few seconds. A moment later it was as though I’d opened my eyes again, and I was forty-
five and there was a traffic jam in the Strand. But it had left a kind of after-effect behind.
Sometimes when you come out of a train of thought you feel as if you were coming up
from deep water, but this time it was the other way about, it was as though it was back in
1900 that I’d been breathing real air. Even now, with my eyes open, so to speak, all those
bloody fools hustling to and fro, and the posters and the petrol-stink and the roar of the
engines, seemed to me less real than Sunday morning in Lower Binfield thirty-eight years
ago.
I chucked away my cigar and walked on slowly. I could smell the corpse-smell. In a
manner of speaking I can smell it now. I’m back in Lower Binfield, and the year’s 1900.
Beside the horse- trough in the market-place the carrier’s horse is having its nose- bag.
At
the sweet-shop on the corner Mother Wheeler is weighing out a ha’porth of brandy balls.
Lady Rampling’s carriage is driving by, with the tiger sitting behind in his pipeclayed
breeches with his arms folded. Uncle Ezekiel is cursing Joe Chamberlain. The recruiting-
sergeant in his scarlet jacket, tight blue overalls, and pillbox hat, is strutting up and down
twisting his moustache. The drunks are puking in the yard behind the George. Vicky’s at
Windsor, God’s in heaven, Christ’s on the cross, Jonah’s in the whale, Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego are in the fiery furnace, and Sihon king of the Amorites and Og
the king of Bashan are sitting on their thrones looking at one another — not doing
anything exactly, just existing, keeping their appointed place, like a couple of fire-dogs,
or the Lion and the Unicorn.
Is it gone for ever? I’m not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong
to it. So do you.
PART II
1
The world I momentarily remembered when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster was so
different from the world I live in now that you might have a bit of difficulty in believing I
ever belonged to it.
I suppose by this time you’ve got a kind of picture of me in your mind — a fat middle-
aged bloke with false teeth and a red face — and subconsciously you’ve been imagining
that I was just the same even when I was in my cradle. But forty-five years is a long time,
and though some people don’t change and develop, others do. I’ve changed a great deal,
and I’ve had my ups and downs, mostly ups. It may seem queer, but my father would
probably be rather proud of me if he could see me now. He’d think it a wonderful thing
that a son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with a bathroom. Even now
I’m a little above my origin, and at other times I’ve touched levels that we should never
have dreamed of in those old days before the war.
Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the
answer will be ‘Which war? ’ In my case the never-never land that people are thinking of
when they say ‘before the war’ might almost be before the Boer War. I was born in ‘93,
and I can actually remember the outbreak of the Boer War, because of the first-class row
that Father and Uncle Ezekiel had about it. I’ve several other memories that would date
from about a year earlier than that.
The very first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin chaff. You went up the stone
passage that led from the kitchen to the shop, and the smell of sainfoin got stronger all the
way. Mother had fixed a wooden gate in the doorway to prevent Joe and myself (Joe was
my elder brother) from getting into the shop. I can still remember standing there
clutching the bars, and the smell of sainfoin mixed up with the damp plastery smell that
belonged to the passage. It wasn’t till years later that I somehow managed to crash the
gate and get into the shop when nobody was there. A mouse that had been having a go at
one of the meal-bins suddenly plopped out and ran between my feet. It was quite white
with meal. This must have happened when I was about six.
When you’re very young you seem to suddenly become conscious of things that have
been under your nose for a long time past. The things round about you swim into your
mind one at a time, rather as they do when you’re waking from sleep. For instance, it was
only when I was nearly four that I suddenly realized that we owned a dog. Nailer, his
name was, an old white English terrier of the breed that’s gone out nowadays. I met him
under the kitchen table and in some way seemed to grasp, having only learnt it that
moment, that he belonged to us and that his name was Nailer. In the same way, a bit
earlier, I’d discovered that beyond the gate at the end of the passage there was a place
where the smell of sainfoin came from. And the shop itself, with the huge scales and the
wooden measures and the tin shovel, and the white lettering on the window, and the
bullfinch in its cage — which you couldn’t see very well even from the pavement, because
the window was always dusty — all these things dropped into place in my mind one by
one, like bits of a jig-saw puzzle.
Time goes on, you get stronger on your legs, and by degrees you begin to get a grasp of
geography. I suppose Lower Binfield was just like any other market town of about two
thousand inhabitants. It was in Oxfordshire — I keep saying WAS, you notice, though
after all the place still exists — about five miles from the Thames. It lay in a bit of a
valley, with a low ripple of hills between itself and the Thames, and higher hills behind.
On top of the hills there were woods in sort of dim blue masses among which you could
see a great white house with a colonnade. This was Binfield House (‘The Hall’,
everybody called it), and the top of the hill was known as Upper Binfield, though there
was no village there and hadn’t been for a hundred years or more. I must have been
nearly seven before I noticed the existence of Binfield House. When you’re very small
you don’t look into the distance. But by that time I knew every inch of the town, which
was shaped roughly like a cross with the market-place in the middle. Our shop was in the
High Street a little before you got to the market-place, and on the corner there was Mrs
Wheeler’s sweet-shop where you spent a halfpenny when you had one. Mother Wheeler
was a dirty old witch and people suspected her of sucking the bull’s-eyes and putting
them back in the bottle, though this was never proved. Farther down there was the
barber’s shop with the advert for Abdulla cigarettes — the one with the Egyptian soldiers
on it, and curiously enough they’re using the same advert to this day — and the rich boozy
smell of bay rum and latakia. Behind the houses you could see the chimneys of the
brewery. In the middle of the market-place there was the stone horse-trough, and on top
of the water there was always a fine film of dust and chaff.
Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.
I’m quite aware that that’s a delusion. I’m merely trying to tell you how things come
back to me. If I shut my eyes and think of Lower Binfield any time before I was, say,
eight, it’s always in summer weather that I remember it. Either it’s the market-place at
dinner-time, with a sort of sleepy dusty hush over everything and the carrier’s horse with
his nose dug well into his nose-bag, munching away, or it’s a hot afternoon in the great
green juicy meadows round the town, or it’s about dusk in the lane behind the allotments,
and there’s a smell of pipe-tobacco and night- stocks floating through the hedge. But in a
sense I do remember different seasons, because all my memories are bound up with
things to eat, which varied at different times of the year. Especially the things you used to
find in the hedges. In July there were dewberries — but they’re very rare — and the
blackberries were getting red enough to eat. In September there were sloes and hazel-
nuts. The best hazelnuts were always out of reach. Later on there were beech-nuts and
crab-apples. Then there were the kind of minor foods that you used to eat when there was
nothing better going. Haws — but they’re not much good — and hips, which have a nice
sharp taste if you clean the hairs out of them. Angelica is good in early summer,
especially when you’re thirsty, and so are the stems of various grasses. Then there’s
sorrel, which is good with bread and butter, and pig-nuts, and a kind of wood shamrock
which has a sour taste. Even plantain seeds are better than nothing when you’re a long
way from home and very hungry.
Joe was two years older than myself. When we were very small Mother used to pay Katie
Simmons eighteen pence a week to take us out for walks in the afternoons. Katie’s father
worked in the brewery and had fourteen children, so that the family were always on the
lookout for odd jobs. She was only twelve when Joe was seven and I was five, and her
mental level wasn’t very different from ours. She used to drag me by the ann and call me
‘Baby’, and she had just enough authority over us to prevent us from being run over by
dogcarts or chased by bulls, but so far as conversation went we were almost on equal
terms. We used to go for long, trailing kind of walks — always, of course, picking and
eating things all the way — down the lane past the allotments, across Roper’s Meadows,
and down to the Mill Fann, where there was a pool with newts and tiny carp in it (Joe and
I used to go fishing there when we were a bit older), and back by the Upper Binfield
Road so as to pass the sweet-shop that stood on the edge of the town. This shop was in
such a bad position that anyone who took it went bankrupt, and to my own knowledge it
was three times a sweet-shop, once a grocer’s, and once a bicycle-repair shop, but it had a
peculiar fascination for children. Even when we had no money, we’d go that way so as to
glue our noses against the window. Katie wasn’t in the least above sharing a farthing’s
worth of sweets and quarrelling over her share. You could buy things worth having for a
farthing in those days. Most sweets were four ounces a penny, and there was even some
stuff called Paradise Mixture, mostly broken sweets from other bottles, which was six.
Then there were Farthing Everlastings, which were a yard long and couldn’t be finished
inside half an hour. Sugar mice and sugar pigs were eight a penny, and so were liquorice
pistols, popcorn was a halfpenny for a large bag, and a prize packet which contained
several different kinds of sweets, a gold ring, and sometimes a whistle, was a penny. You
don’t see prize packets nowadays. A whole lot of the kinds of sweets we had in those
days have gone out. There was a kind of flat white sweet with mottoes printed on them,
and also a kind of sticky pink stuff in an oval matchwood box with a tiny tin spoon to eat
it with, which cost a halfpenny. Both of those have disappeared. So have Caraway
Comfits, and so have chocolate pipes and sugar matches, and even Hundreds and
Thousands you hardly ever see. Hundreds and Thousands were a great standby when
you’d only a farthing. And what about Penny Monsters? Does one ever see a Penny
Monster nowadays? It was a huge bottle, holding more than a quart of fizzy lemonade, all
for a penny. That’s another thing that the war killed stone dead.
It always seems to be summer when I look back. I can feel the grass round me as tall as
myself, and the heat coming out of the earth. And the dust in the lane, and the warm
greeny light coming through the hazel boughs. I can see the three of us trailing along,
eating stuff out of the hedge, with Katie dragging at my ann and saying ‘Come on,
Baby! ’ and sometimes yelling ahead to Joe, ‘Joe! You come back ‘ere this minute! You’ll
catch it! ’ Joe was a hefty boy with a big, lumpy sort of head and tremendous calves, the
kind of boy who’s always doing something dangerous. At seven he’d already got into
short trousers, with the thick black stockings drawn up over the knee and the great
clumping boots that boys had to wear in those days. I was still in frocks — a kind of
holland overall that Mother used to make for me. Katie used to wear a dreadful ragged
parody of a grown-up dress that descended from sister to sister in her family. She had a
ridiculous great hat with her pigtails hanging down behind it, and a long, draggled skirt
which trailed on the ground, and button boots with the heels trodden down. She was a
tiny thing, not much taller than Joe, but not bad at ‘minding’ children. In a family like
that a child is ‘minding’ other children about as soon as it’s weaned. At times she’d try to
be grown-up and ladylike, and she had a way of cutting you short with a proverb, which
to her mind was something unanswerable. If you said ‘Don’t care’, she’d answer
immediately:
‘Don’t care was made to care, Don’t care was hung, Don’t care was put in a pot And
boiled till he was done. ’
Or if you called her names it would be ‘Hard words break no bones’, or, when you’d
been boasting, ‘Pride comes before a fall’. This came very true one day when I was
strutting along pretending to be a soldier and fell into a cowpat. Her family lived in a
filthy little rat-hole of a place in the slummy street behind the brewery. The place
swarmed with children like a kind of vermin. The whole family had managed to dodge
going to school, which was fairly easy to do in those days, and started running errands
and doing other odd jobs as soon as they could walk. One of the elder brothers got a
month for stealing turnips. She stopped taking us out for walks a year later when Joe was
eight and getting too tough for a girl to handle. He’d discovered that in Katie’s home they
slept five in a bed, and used to tease the life out of her about it.
Poor Katie! She had her first baby when she was fifteen. No one knew who was the
father, and probably Katie wasn’t too certain herself. Most people believe it was one of
her brothers. The workhouse people took the baby, and Katie went into service in
Walton. Some time afterwards she married a tinker, which even by the standards of her
family was a come-down. The last time I saw her was in 1913. I was biking through
Walton, and I passed some dreadful wooden shacks beside the railway line, with fences
round them made out of barrel-staves, where the gypsies used to camp at certain times of
the year, when the police would let them. A wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair
coming down and a smoky face, looking at least fifty years old, came out of one of the
huts and began shaking out a rag mat. It was Katie, who must have been twenty-seven.
2
Thursday was market day. Chaps with round red faces like pumpkins and dirty smocks
and huge boots covered with dry cow-dung, carrying long hazel switches, used to drive
their brutes into the market- place early in the morning. For hours there’d be a terrific
hullabaloo: dogs barking, pigs squealing, chaps in tradesmen’s vans who wanted to get
through the crush cracking their whips and cursing, and everyone who had anything to do
with the cattle shouting and throwing sticks. The big noise was always when they brought
a bull to market. Even at that age it struck me that most of the bulls were harmless law-
abiding brutes that only wanted to get to their stalls in peace, but a bull wouldn’t have
been regarded as a bull if half the town hadn’t had to turn out and chase it. Sometimes
some terrified brute, generally a half-grown heifer, used to break loose and charge down
a side street, and then anyone who happened to be in the way would stand in the middle
of the road and swing his anns backwards like the sails of a windmill, shouting, ‘Woo!
Woo! ’ This was supposed to have a kind of hypnotic effect on an animal and certainly it
did frighten them.
Half-way through the morning some of the farmers would come into the shop and run
samples of seed through their fingers. Actually Father did very little business with the
farmers, because he had no delivery van and couldn’t afford to give long credits. Mostly
he did a rather petty class of business, poultry food and fodder for the tradesmen’s horses
and so forth. Old Brewer, of the Mill Farm, who was a stingy old bastard with a grey
chin-beard, used to stand there for half an hour, fingering samples of chicken corn and
letting them drop into his pocket in an absent-minded manner, after which, of course, he
finally used to make off without buying anything. In the evenings the pubs were full of
drunken men. In those days beer cost twopence a pint, and unlike the beer nowadays it
had some guts in it. All through the Boer War the recruiting sergeant used to be in the
four-ale bar of the George every Thursday and Saturday night, dressed up to the nines
and very free with his money. Sometimes next morning you’d see him leading off some
great sheepish, red-faced lump of a farm lad who’d taken the shilling when he was too
drunk to see and found in the morning that it would cost him twenty pounds to get out of
it. People used to stand in their doorways and shake their heads when they saw them go
past, almost as if it had been a funeral. ‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A
fine young fellow like that! ’ It just shocked them. Listing for a soldier, in their eyes, was
the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets. Their attitude to the war, and to the
Army, was very curious. They had the good old English notions that the red-coats are the
scum of the earth and anyone who joins the Army will die of drink and go straight to hell,
but at the same time they were good patriots, stuck Union Jacks in their windows, and
held it as an article of faith that the English had never been beaten in battle and never
could be. At that time everyone, even the Nonconformists, used to sing sentimental songs
about the thin red line and the soldier boy who died on the battlefield far away. These
soldier boys always used to die ‘when the shot and shell were flying’, I remember. It
puzzled me as a kid. Shot I could understand, but it produced a queer picture in my mind
to think of cockle-shells flying through the air. When Mafeking was relieved the people
nearly yelled the roof off, and there were at any rate times when they believed the tales
about the Boers chucking babies into the air and skewering them on their bayonets. Old
Brewer got so fed up with the kids yelling ‘Krooger! ’ after him that towards the end of
the war he shaved his beard off. The people’s attitude towards the Government was really
the same. They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen
that ever lived and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of
paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.
Before and after the war Lower Binfield was a Liberal constituency. During the war there
was a by-election which the Conservatives won. I was too young to grasp what it was all
about, I only knew that I was a Conservative because I liked the blue streamers better
than the red ones, and I chiefly remember it because of a drunken man who fell on his
nose on the pavement outside the George. In the general excitement nobody took any
notice of him, and he lay there for hours in the hot sun with his blood drying round him,
and when it dried it was purple. By the time the 1906 election came along I was old
enough to understand it, more or less, and this time I was a Liberal because everybody
else was. The people chased the Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a
pond full of duckweed. People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin
storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.
Very early in life, when the Boer War broke out, I remember the big row between Father
and Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel had a little boot-shop in one of the streets off the High
Street, and also did some cobbling. It was a small business and tended to get smaller,
which didn’t matter greatly because Uncle Ezekiel wasn’t married. He was only a half-
brother and much older than Father, twenty years older at least, and for the fifteen years
or so that I knew him he always looked exactly the same. He was a fine-looking old chap,
rather tall, with white hair and the whitest whiskers I ever saw — white as thistledown.
He had a way of slapping his leather apron and standing up very straight — a reaction
from bending over the last, I suppose — after which he’d bark his opinions straight in your
face, ending up with a sort of ghostly cackle. He was a real old nineteenth-century
Liberal, the kind that not only used to ask you what Gladstone said in ‘78 but could tell
you the answer, and one of the very few people in Lower Binfield who stuck to the same
opinions all through the war. He was always denouncing Joe Chamberlain and some gang
of people that he referred to as ‘the Park Lane riff-raff. I can hear him now, having one
of his arguments with Father. ‘Them and their far-flung Empire! Can’t fling it too far for
me. He-he-he! ’ And then Father’s voice, a quiet, worried, conscientious kind of voice,
coming back at him with the white man’s burden and our dooty to the pore blacks whom
these here Boars treated something shameful. For a week or so after Uncle Ezekiel gave it
out that he was a pro-Boer and a Little Englander they were hardly on speaking terms.
They had another row when the atrocity stories started. Father was very worried by the
tales he’d heard, and he tackled Uncle Ezekiel about it. Little Englander or no, surely he
couldn’t think it right for these here Boars to throw babies in the air and catch them on
their bayonets, even if they WERE only nigger babies? But Uncle Ezekiel just laughed in
his face. Father had got it all wrong! It wasn’t the Boars who threw babies in the air, it
was the British soldiers! He kept grabbing hold of me — I must have been about five — to
illustrate. ‘Throw them in the air and skewer them like frogs, I tell you! Same as I might
throw this youngster here! ’ And then he’d swing me up and almost let go of me, and I
had a vivid picture of myself flying through the air and landing plonk on the end of a
bayonet.
Father was quite different from Uncle Ezekiel. I don’t know much about my
grandparents, they were dead before I was born, I only know that my grandfather had
been a cobbler and late in life he married the widow of a seedsman, which was how we
came to have the shop. It was a job that didn’t really suit Father, though he knew the
business inside out and was everlastingly working. Except on Sunday and very
occasionally on week-day evenings I never remember him without meal on the backs of
his hands and in the lines of his face and in what was left of his hair. He’d married when
he was in his thirties and must have been nearly forty when I first remember him. He was
a small man, a sort of grey, quiet little man, always in shirtsleeves and white apron and
always dusty-looking because of the meal. He had a round head, a blunt nose, a rather
bushy moustache, spectacles, and butter-coloured hair, the same colour as mine, but he’d
lost most of it and it was always mealy. My grandfather had bettered himself a good deal
by marrying the seedsman’s widow, and Father had been educated at Walton Grammar
School, where the farmers and the better-off tradesmen sent their sons, whereas Uncle
Ezekiel liked to boast that he’d never been to school in his life and had taught himself to
read by a tallow candle after working hours. But he was a much quicker-witted man than
Father, he could argue with anybody, and he used to quote Carlyle and Spencer by the
yard.
