After the
frightful
battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman
kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy, and joy of life just vanish overnight.
kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy, and joy of life just vanish overnight.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
It knocked the Army nonsense out
of me, and it drove into the back of my head the notions that I’d picked up during the idle
year when I was reading novels. I don’t think I read a single book, barring detective
stories, all the time I was on the road. I wasn’t a highbrow any longer. I was down among
the realities of modern life. And what are the realities of modern life? Well, the chief one
is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. With most people it takes the fonn of
selling themselves — that’s to say, getting a job and keeping it. I suppose there hasn’t been
a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more
men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship
when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly
modem in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had.
That feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get
anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your
job, the next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the
bird — THAT, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.
But meanwhile I wasn’t badly off. I was earning a bit and I’d still got plenty of money in
the bank, nearly two hundred quid, and I wasn’t frightened for the future. I knew that
sooner or later I’d get a regular job. And sure enough, after about a year, by a stroke of
luck it happened. I say by a stroke of luck, but the fact is that I was bound to fall on my
feet. I’m not the type that starves. I’m about as likely to end up in the workhouse as to
end up in the House of Lords. I’m the middling type, the type that gravitates by a kind of
natural law towards the five-pound-a-week level. So long as there are any jobs at all I’ll
back myself to get one.
It happened when I was peddling paper-clips and typewriter ribbons. I’d just dodged into
a huge block of offices in Fleet Street, a building which canvassers weren’t allowed into,
as a matter of fact, but I’d managed to give the lift attendant the impression that my bag
of samples was merely an attache case. I was walking along one of the corridors looking
for the offices of a small toothpaste firm that I’d been recommended to try, when I saw
that some very big bug was coming down the corridor in the other direction. I knew
immediately that it was a big bug. You know how it is with these big business men, they
seem to take up more room and walk more loudly than any ordinary person, and they
give off a kind of wave of money that you can feel fifty yards away. When he got nearly
up to me I saw that it was Sir Joseph Cheam. He was in civvies, of course, but I had no
difficulty in recognizing him. I suppose he’d been there for some business conference or
other. A couple of clerks, or secretaries, or something, were following after him, not
actually holding up his train, because he wasn’t wearing one, but you somehow felt that
that was what they were doing. Of course I dodged aside instantly. But curiously enough
he recognized me, though he hadn’t seen me for years. To my surprise he stopped and
spoke to me.
‘Hullo, you! I’ve seen you somewhere before. What’s your name? It’s on the tip of my
tongue. ’
‘Bowling, sir. Used to be in the A. S. C. ’
‘Of course. The boy that said he wasn’t a gentleman. What are you doing here? ’
I might have told him I was selling typewriter ribbons, and there perhaps the whole thing
would have ended. But I had one of those sudden inspirations that you get occasionally —
a feeling that I might make something out of this if I handled it properly. I said instead:
‘Well, sir, as a matter of fact I’m looking for a job. ’
‘A job, eh? Hm. Not so easy, nowadays. ’
He looked me up and down for a second. The two train-bearers had kind of wafted
themselves a little distance away. I saw his rather good-looking old face, with the heavy
grey eyebrows and the intelligent nose, looking me over and realized that he’d decided to
help me. It’s queer, the power of these rich men. He’d been marching past me in his
power and glory, with his underlings after him, and then on some whim or other he’d
turned aside like an emperor suddenly chucking a coin to a beggar.
‘So you want a job? What can you do? ’
Again the inspiration. No use, with a bloke like this, cracking up your own merits. Stick
to the truth. I said: ‘Nothing, sir. But I want a job as a travelling salesman. ’
‘Salesman? Hm. Not sure that I’ve got anything for you at present. Let’s see. ’
He pursed his lips up. For a moment, half a minute perhaps, he was thinking quite deeply.
It was curious. Even at the time I realized that it was curious. This important old bloke,
who was probably worth at least half a million, was actually taking thought on my behalf.
I’d deflected him from his path and wasted at least three minutes of his time, all because
of a chance remark I’d happened to make years earlier. I’d stuck in his memory and
therefore he was willing to take the tiny bit of trouble that was needed to find me a job. I
dare say the same day he gave twenty clerks the sack. Finally he said:
‘How’d you like to go into an insurance firm? Always fairly safe, you know. People have
got to have insurance, same as they’ve got to eat. ’
Of course I jumped at the idea of going into an insurance firm. Sir Joseph was
‘interested’ in the Flying Salamander. God knows how many companies he was
‘interested’ in. One of the underlings wafted himself forward with a scribbling-pad, and
there and then, with the gold stylo out of his waistcoat pocket, Sir Joseph scribbled me a
note to some higher-up in the Flying Salamander. Then I thanked him, and he marched
on, and I sneaked off in the other direction, and we never saw one another again.
Well, I got the job, and, as I said earlier, the job got me. I’ve been with the Flying
Salamander close on eighteen years. I started off in the office, but now I’m what’s known
as an Inspector, or, when there’s reason to sound particularly impressive, a
Representative. A couple of days a week I’m working in the district office, and the rest of
the time I’m travelling around, interviewing clients whose names have been sent in by the
local agents, making assessments of shops and other property, and now and again
snapping up a few orders on my own account. I earn round about seven quid a week. And
properly speaking that’s the end of my story.
When I look back I realize that my active life, if I ever had one, ended when I was
sixteen. Everything that really matters to me had happened before that date. But in a
manner of speaking things were still happening — the war, for instance — up to the time
when I got the job with the Flying Salamander. After that — well, they say that happy
people have no histories, and neither do the blokes who work in insurance offices. From
that day forward there was nothing in my life that you could properly describe as an
event, except that about two and a half years later, at the beginning of ‘23, 1 got married.
10
I was living in a boarding-house in Ealing. The years were rolling on, or crawling on.
Lower Binfield had passed almost out of my memory. I was the usual young city worker
who scoots for the 8. 15 and intrigues for the other fellow’s job. I was fairly well thought
of in the firm and pretty satisfied with life. The post- war success dope had caught me,
more or less. You remember the line of talk. Pep, punch, grit, sand. Get on or get out.
There’s plenty of room at the top. You can’t keep a good man down. And the ads in the
magazines about the chap that the boss clapped on the shoulder, and the keen-jawed
executive who’s pulling down the big dough and attributes his success to so and so’s
correspondence course. It’s funny how we all swallowed it, even blokes like me to whom
it hadn’t the smallest application. Because I’m neither a go- getter nor a down-and-out,
and I’m by nature incapable of being either. But it was the spirit of the time. Get on!
Make good! If you see a man down, jump on his guts before he gets up again. Of course
this was in the early twenties, when some of the effects of the war had worn off and the
slump hadn’t yet arrived to knock the stuffing out of us.
I had an ‘A’ subscription at Boots and went to half-crown dances and belonged to a local
tennis club. You know those tennis clubs in the genteel suburbs — little wooden pavilions
and high wire- netting enclosures where young chaps in rather badly cut white flannels
prance up and down, shouting ‘Fifteen forty! ’ and ‘Vantage all! ’ in voices which are a
tolerable imitation of the Upper Crust. I’d learned to play tennis, didn’t dance too badly,
and got on well with the girls. At nearly thirty I wasn’t a bad-looking chap, with my red
face and butter-coloured hair, and in those days it was still a point in your favour to have
fought in the war. I never, then or at any other time, succeeded in looking like a
gentleman, but on the other hand you probably wouldn’t have taken me for the son of a
small shopkeeper in a country town. I could keep my end up in the rather mixed society
of a place like Ealing, where the office-employee class overlaps with the middling-
professional class. It was at the tennis club that I first met Hilda.
At that time Hilda was twenty-four. She was a small, slim, rather timid girl, with dark
hair, beautiful movements, and — because of having very large eyes — a distinct
resemblance to a hare. She was one of those people who never say much, but remain on
the edge of any conversation that’s going on, and give the impression that they’re
listening. If she said anything at all, it was usually ‘Oh, yes, I think so too’, agreeing with
whoever had spoken last. At tennis she hopped about very gracefully, and didn’t play
badly, but somehow had a helpless, childish air. Her surname was Vincent.
If you’re married, there’ll have been times when you’ve said to yourself ‘Why the hell
did I do it? ’ and God knows I’ve said it often enough about Hilda. And once again,
looking at it across fifteen years, why DID I marry Hilda?
Partly, of course, because she was young and in a way very pretty. Beyond that I can only
say that because she came of totally different origins from myself it was very difficult for
me to get any grasp of what she was really like. I had to marry her first and find out about
her afterwards, whereas if I’d married say, Elsie Waters, I’d have known what I was
marrying. Hilda belonged to a class I only knew by hearsay, the poverty-stricken officer
class. For generations past her family had been soldiers, sailors, clergymen, Anglo-Indian
officials, and that kind of thing. They’d never had any money, but on the other hand none
of them had ever done anything that I should recognize as work. Say what you will,
there’s a kind of snob-appeal in that, if you belong as I do to the God-fearing shopkeeper
class, the low church, and high-tea class. It wouldn’t make any impression on me now,
but it did then. Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I don’t mean that I married Hilda
BECAUSE she belonged to the class I’d once served across the counter, with some
notion of jockeying myself up in the social scale. It was merely that I couldn’t understand
her and therefore was capable of being goofy about her. And one thing I certainly didn’t
grasp was that the girls in these penniless middle-class families will marry anything in
trousers, just to get away from home.
It wasn’t long before Hilda took me home to see her family. I hadn’t kn own till then that
there was a considerable Anglo-Indian colony in Ealing. Talk about discovering a new
world! It was quite a revelation to me.
Do you know these Anglo-Indian families? It’s almost impossible, when you get inside
these people’s houses, to remember that out in the street it’s England and the twentieth
century. As soon as you set foot inside the front door you’re in India in the eighties. You
know the kind of atmosphere. The carved teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-
skulls on the wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot pickles, the yellow photographs of
chaps in sun-helmets, the Hindustani words that you’re expected to know the meaning of,
the everlasting anecdotes about tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in
‘87. It’s a sort of little world of their own that they’ve created, like a kind of cyst. To me,
of course, it was all quite new and in some ways rather interesting. Old Vincent, Hilda’s
father, had been not only in India but also in some even more outlandish place, Borneo or
Sarawak, I forget which. He was the usual type, completely bald, almost invisible behind
his moustache, and full of stories about cobras and cummerbunds and what the district
collector said in ‘93. Hilda’s mother was so colourless that she was just like one of the
faded photos on the wall. There was also a son, Harold, who had some official job in
Ceylon and was home on leave at the time when I first met Hilda. They had a little dark
house in one of those buried back-streets that exist in Ealing. It smelt perpetually of
Trichinopoly cigars and it was so full of spears, blow-pipes, brass ornaments, and the
heads of wild animals that you could hardly move about in it.
Old Vincent had retired in 1910, and since then he and his wife had shown about as much
activity, mental or physical, as a couple of shellfish. But at the time I was vaguely
impressed by a family which had had majors, colonels, and once even an admiral in it.
My attitude towards the Vincents, and theirs towards me, is an interesting illustration of
what fools people can be when they get outside their own line. Put me among business
people — whether they’re company directors or commercial travellers — and I’m a fairly
good judge of character. But I had no experience whatever of the officer-rentier-
clergyman class, and I was inclined to kow- tow to these decayed throw-outs. I looked on
them as my social and intellectual superiors, while they on the other hand mistook me for
a rising young businessman who before long would be pulling down the big dough. To
people of that kind, ‘business’, whether it’s marine insurance or selling peanuts, is just a
dark mystery. All they know is that it’s something rather vulgar out of which you can
make money. Old Vincent used to talk impressively about my being ‘in business’ — once,
I remember, he had a slip of the tongue and said ‘in trade’ — and obviously didn’t grasp
the difference between being in business as an employee and being there on your own
account. He had some vague notion that as I was ‘in’ the Flying Salamander I should
sooner or later rise to the top of it, by a process of promotion. I think it’s possible that he
also had pictures of himself touching me for fivers at some future date. Harold certainly
had. I could see it in his eye. In fact, even with my income being what it is, I’d probably
be lending money to Harold at this moment if he were alive. Luckily he died a few years
after we were married, of enteric or something, and both the old Vincents are dead too.
Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop. Why did you marry
her? you say. But why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether
you’ll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing
Hilda. Of course in practice one never does these things, they’re only a kind of fantasy
that one enjoys thinking about. Besides, chaps who murder their wives always get
copped. However cleverly you’ve faked the alibi, they know perfectly well that it’s you
who did it, and they’ll pin it on to you somehow. When a woman’s bumped off, her
husband is always the first suspect — which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people
really think about marriage.
One gets used to everything in time. After a year or two I stopped wanting to kill her and
started wondering about her. Just wondering. For hours, sometimes, on Sunday
afternoons or in the evening when I’ve come home from work. I’ve lain on my bed with
all my clothes on except my shoes, wondering about women. Why they’re like that, how
they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose. It seems to be a most frightful
thing, the suddenness with which some women go to pieces after they’re married. It’s as
if they were strung up to do just that one thing, and the instant they’ve done it they wither
off like a flower that’s set its seed. What really gets me down is the dreary attitude
towards life that it implies. If marriage was just an open swindle — if the woman trapped
you into it and then turned round and said, ‘Now, you bastard, I’ve caught you and you’re
going to work for me while I have a good time! ’ — I wouldn’t mind so much. But not a bit
of it. They don’t want to have a good time, they merely want to slump into middle age as
quickly as possible.
After the frightful battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman
kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy, and joy of life just vanish overnight. It
was like that with Hilda. Here was this pretty, delicate girl, who’d seemed to me — and in
fact when I first knew her she WAS — a finer type of animal than myself, and within only
about three years she’d settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump. I’m
not denying that I was part of the reason. But whoever she’d married it would have been
much the same.
What Hilda lacks — I discovered this about a week after we were married — is any kind of
joy in life, any kind of interest in things for their own sake. The idea of doing things
because you enjoy them is something she can hardly understand. It was through Hilda
that I first got a notion of what these decayed middle-class families are really like. The
essential fact about them is that all their vitality has been drained away by lack of money.
In families like that, which live on tiny pensions and annuities — that’s to say on incomes
which never get bigger and generally get smaller — there’s more sense of poverty, more
crust-wiping, and looking twice at sixpence, than you’d find in any farm-labourer’s
family, let alone a family like mine. Hilda’s often told me that almost the first thing she
can remember is a ghastly feeling that there was never enough money for anything. Of
course, in that kind of family, the lack of money is always at its worst when the kids are
at the school-age. Consequently they grow up, especially the girls, with a fixed idea not
only that one always IS hard-up but that it’s one’s duty to be miserable about it.
At the beginning we lived in a poky little maisonette and had a job to get by on my
wages. Later, when I was transferred to the West Bletchley branch, things were better,
but Hilda’s attitude didn’t change. Always that ghastly glooming about money! The milk
bill! The coal bill! The rent! The school fees! We’ve lived all our life together to the tune
of ‘Next week we’ll be in the workhouse. ’ It’s not that Hilda’s mean, in the ordinary
sense of the word, and still less that she’s selfish. Even when there happens to be a bit of
spare cash knocking about I can hardly persuade her to buy herself any decent clothes.
But she’s got this feeling that you OUGHT to be perpetually working yourself up into a
stew about lack of money. Just working up an atmosphere of misery from a sense of duty.
I’m not like that. I’ve got more the prole’s attitude towards money. Life’s here to be
lived, and if we’re going to be in the soup next week — well, next week is a long way off.
What really shocks her is the fact that I refuse to worry. She’s always going for me about
it. ‘But, George! You don’t seem to REALIZE! We’ve simply got no money at all! It’s
very SERIOUS! ’ She loves getting into a panic because something or other is ‘serious’.
And of late she’s got that trick, when she’s glooming about something, of kind of
hunching her shoulders and folding her arms across her breast. If you made a list of
Hilda’s remarks throughout the day, you’d find three bracketed together at the top — ‘We
can’t afford if, ‘It’s a great saving’, and ‘I don’t know where the money’s to come from’.
She does everything for negative reasons. When she makes a cake she’s not thinking
about the cake, only about how to save butter and eggs. When I’m in bed with her all she
thinks about is how not to have a baby. If she goes to the pictures she’s all the time
writhing with indignation about the price of the seats. Her methods of housekeeping, with
all the emphasis on ‘using things up’ and ‘making things do’, would have given Mother
convulsions. On the other hand, Hilda isn’t in the least a snob. She’s never looked down
on me because I’m not a gentleman. On the contrary, from her point of view I’m much
too lordly in my habits. We never have a meal in a tea-shop without a frightful row in
whispers because I’m tipping the waitress too much. And it’s a curious thing that in the
last few years she’s become much more definitely lower-middle-class, in outlook and
even in appearance, than I am. Of course all this ‘saving’ business has never led to
anything. It never does. We live just about as well or as badly as the other people in
Ellesmere Road. But the everlasting stew about the gas bill and the milk bill and the
awful price of butter and the kids’ boots and school-fees goes on and on. It’s a kind of
game with Hilda.
We moved to West Bletchley in ‘29 and started buying the house in Ellesmere Road the
next year, a little before Billy was born. After I was made an Inspector I was more away
from home and had more opportunities with other women. Of course I was unfaithful — I
won’t say all the time, but as often as I got the chance. Curiously enough, Hilda was
jealous. In a way, considering how little that kind of thing means to her, I wouldn’t have
expected her to mind. And like all jealous women she’ll sometimes show a cunning you
wouldn’t think her capable of. Sometimes the way she’s caught me out would have made
me believe in telepathy, if it wasn’t that she’s often been equally suspicious when I didn’t
happen to be guilty. I’m more or less pennanently under suspicion, though, God knows,
in the last few years — the last live years, anyway — I’ve been innocent enough. You have
to be, when you’re as fat as I am.
Taking it by and large, I suppose Hilda and I don’t get on worse than about half the
couples in Ellesmere Road. There’ve been times when I’ve thought of separation or
divorce, but in our walk of life you don’t do those things. You can’t afford to. And then
time goes on, and you kind of give up struggling. When you’ve lived with a woman for
fifteen years, it’s difficult to imagine life without her. She’s part of the order of things. I
dare say you might find things to object to in the sun and the moon, but do you really
want to change them? Besides, there were the kids. Kids are a ‘link’, as they say. Or a
‘tie’. Not to say a ball and fetter.
Of late years Hilda has made two great friends called Mrs Wheeler and Miss Minns. Mrs
Wheeler is a widow, and I gather she’s got very bitter ideas about the male sex. I can feel
her kind of quivering with disapproval if I so much as come into the room. She’s a faded
little woman and gives you a curious impression that she’s the same colour all over, a
kind of greyish dust-colour, but she’s full of energy. She’s a bad influence on Hilda,
because she’s got the same passion for ‘saving’ and ‘making things do’, though in a
slightly different form. With her it takes the form of thinking that you can have a good
time without paying for it. She’s for ever nosing out bargains and amusements that don’t
cost money. With people like that it doesn’t matter a damn whether they want a thing or
not, it’s merely a question of whether they can get it on the cheap. When the big shops
have their remnant sales Mrs Wheeler’s always at the head of the queue, and it’s her
greatest pride, after a day’s hard fighting round the counter, to come out without having
bought anything. Miss Minns is quite a different sort. She’s really a sad case, poor Miss
Minns. She’s a tall thin woman of about thirty-eight, with black patent-leather hair and a
very GOOD, trusting kind of face. She lives on some kind of tiny fixed income, an
annuity or something, and I fancy she’s a left- over from the old society of West
Bletchley, when it was a little country town, before the suburb grew up. It’s written all
over her that her father was a clergyman and sat on her pretty heavily while he lived.
They’re a special by-product of the middle classes, these women who turn into withered
bags before they even manage to escape from home. Poor old Miss Minns, for all her
wrinkles, still looks exactly like a child. It’s still a tremendous adventure to her not to go
to church. She’s always burbling about ‘modem progress’ and ‘the woman’s movement’,
and she’s got a vague yearning to do something she calls ‘developing her mind’, only she
doesn’t quite know how to start. I think in the beginning she cottoned on to Hilda and
Mrs Wheeler out of pure loneliness, but now they take her with them wherever they go.
And the times they’ve had together, those three! Sometimes I’ve almost envied them.
Mrs Wheeler is the leading spirit. You couldn’t name a kind of idiocy that she hasn’t
dragged them into at one time or another. Anything from theosophy to cat’s-cradle,
provided you can do it on the cheap. For months they went in for the food-crank business.
Mrs Wheeler had picked up a second-hand copy of some book called Radiant Energy
which proved that you should live on lettuces and other things that don’t cost money. Of
course this appealed to Hilda, who immediately began starving herself. She’d have tried
it on me and the kids as well, only I put my foot down. Then they had a go at faith-
healing. Then they thought of tackling Pelmanism, but after a lot of correspondence they
found that they couldn’t get the booklets free, which had been Mrs Wheeler’s idea. Then
it was hay-box cookery. Then it was some filthy stuff called bee wine, which was
supposed to cost nothing at all because you made it out of water. They dropped that after
they’d read an article in the paper saying that bee wine gives you cancer. Then they
nearly joined one of those women’s clubs which go for conducted tours round factories,
but after a lot of arithmetic Mrs Wheeler decided that the free teas the factories gave you
didn’t quite equal the subscription. Then Mrs Wheeler scraped acquaintance with
somebody who gave away free tickets for plays produced by some stage society or other.
I’ve known the three of them sit for hours listening to some highbrow play of which they
didn’t even pretend to understand a word — couldn’t even tell you the name of the play
afterwards — but they felt that they were getting something for nothing. Once they even
took up spiritualism. Mrs Wheeler had run across some down-and-out medium who was
so desperate that he’d give seances for eighteenpence, so that the three of them could
have a glimpse beyond the veil for a tanner a time. I saw him once when he came to give
a seance at our house. He was a seedy-looking old devil and obviously in mortal terror of
D. T. s. He was so shaky that when he was taking his overcoat off in the hall he had a sort
of spasm and a hank of butter-muslin dropped out of his trouser-leg. I managed to shove
it back to him before the women saw. Butter-muslin is what they make the ectoplasm
with, so I’m told. I suppose he was going on to another seance afterwards. You don’t get
manifestations for eighteen pence. Mrs Wheeler’s biggest find of the last few years is the
Left Book Club. I think it was in ‘36 that the news of the Left Book Club got to West
Bletchley. I joined it soon afterwards, and it’s almost the only time I can remember
spending money without Hilda protesting. She can see some sense in buying a book when
you’re getting it for a third of its proper price. These women’s attitude is curious, really.
Miss Minns certainly had a try at reading one or two of the books, but this wouldn’t even
have occurred to the other two. They’ve never had any direct connexion with the Left
Book Club or any notion what it’s all about — in fact I believe at the beginning Mrs
Wheeler thought it had something to do with books which had been left in railway
carriages and were being sold off cheap. But they do know that it means seven and
sixpenny books for half a crown, and so they’re always saying that it’s ‘such a good
idea’. Now and again the local Left Book Club branch holds meetings and gets people
down to speak, and Mrs Wheeler always takes the others along. She’s a great one for
public meetings of any kind, always provided that it’s indoors and admission free. The
three of them sit there like lumps of pudding. They don’t know what the meeting’s about
and they don’t care, but they’ve got a vague feeling, especially Miss Minns, that they’re
improving their minds, and it isn’t costing them anything.
Well, that’s Hilda. You see what she’s like. Take it by and large, I suppose she’s no
worse than I am. Sometimes when we were first married I felt I’d like to strangle her, but
later I got so that I didn’t care. And then I got fat and settled down. It must have been in
1930 that I got fat. It happened so suddenly that it was as if a cannon ball had hit me and
got stuck inside. You know how it is. One night you go to bed, still feeling more or less
young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and next morning you wake up in the full
consciousness that you’re just a poor old fatty with nothing ahead of you this side the
grave except sweating your guts out to buy boots for the kids.
And now it’s ‘38, and in every shipyard in the world they’re riveting up the battleships
for another war, and a name I chanced to see on a poster had stirred up in me a whole lot
of stuff which ought to have been buried God knows how many years ago.
PART III
1
When I came home that evening I was still in doubt as to what I’d spend my seventeen
quid on.
Hilda said she was going to the Left Book Club meeting. It seemed that there was a chap
coming down from London to lecture, though needless to say Hilda didn’t know what the
lecture was going to be about. I told her I’d go with her. In a general way I’m not much
of a one for lectures, but the visions of war I’d had that morning, starting with the bomber
flying over the train, had put me into a kind of thoughtful mood. After the usual argument
we got the kids to bed early and cleared off in time for the lecture, which was billed for
eight o’clock.
It was a misty kind of evening, and the hall was cold and not too well lighted. It’s a little
wooden hall with a tin roof, the property of some Nonconformist sect or other, and you
can hire it for ten bob. The usual crowd of fifteen or sixteen people had rolled up. On the
front of the platform there was a yellow placard announcing that the lecture was on ‘The
Menace of Fascism’. This didn’t altogether surprise me. Mr Witchett, who acts as
chairman of these meetings and who in private life is something in an architect’s office,
was taking the lecturer round, introducing him to everyone as Mr So-and-so (I forget his
name) ‘the well-known anti-Fascist’, very much as you might call somebody ‘the well-
known pianist’. The lecturer was a little chap of about forty, in a dark suit, with a bald
head which he’d tried rather unsuccessfully to cover up with wisps of hair.
Meetings of this kind never start on time. There’s always a period of hanging about on
the pretence that perhaps a few more people are going to turn up. It was about twenty-
five past eight when Witchett tapped on the table and did his stuff. Witchett’s a mild-
looking chap, with a pink, baby’s bottom kind of face that’s always covered in smiles. I
believe he’s secretary of the local Liberal Party, and he’s also on the Parish Council and
acts as M. C. at the magic lantern lectures for the Mothers’ Union. He’s what you might
call a born chairman. When he tells you how delighted we all are to have Mr So-and-so
on the platform tonight, you can see that he believes it. I never look at him without
thinking that he’s probably a virgin. The little lecturer took out a wad of notes, chiefly
newspaper cuttings, and pinned them down with his glass of water. Then he gave a quick
lick at his lips and began to shoot.
Do you ever go to lectures, public meetings, and what-not?
When I go to one myself, there’s always a moment during the evening when I find myself
thinking the same thought: Why the hell are we doing this? Why is it that people will turn
out on a winter night for this kind of thing? I looked round the hall. I was sitting in the
back row. I don’t ever remember going to any kind of public meeting when I didn’t sit in
the back row if I could manage it. Hilda and the others had planked themselves in front,
as usual. It was rather a gloomy little hall. You know the kind of place. Pitch-pine walls,
corrugated iron roof, and enough draughts to make you want to keep your overcoat on.
The little knot of us were sitting in the light round the platform, with about thirty rows of
empty chairs behind us. And the seats of all the chairs were dusty. On the platform
behind the lecturer there was a huge square thing draped in dust-cloths which might have
been an enormous coffin under a pall. Actually it was a piano.
At the beginning I wasn’t exactly listening. The lecturer was rather a mean-looking little
chap, but a good speaker. White face, very mobile mouth, and the rather grating voice
that they get from constant speaking. Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis.
I wasn’t particularly keen to hear what he was saying — get the same stuff in the News
Chronicle every morning — but his voice came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr,
with now and again a phrase that struck out and caught my attention.
‘Bestial atrocities. . . . Hideous outbursts of sadism. . . . Rubber truncheons. . . .
Concentration camps. . . .
of me, and it drove into the back of my head the notions that I’d picked up during the idle
year when I was reading novels. I don’t think I read a single book, barring detective
stories, all the time I was on the road. I wasn’t a highbrow any longer. I was down among
the realities of modern life. And what are the realities of modern life? Well, the chief one
is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. With most people it takes the fonn of
selling themselves — that’s to say, getting a job and keeping it. I suppose there hasn’t been
a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more
men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship
when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly
modem in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had.
That feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get
anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your
job, the next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the
bird — THAT, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.
But meanwhile I wasn’t badly off. I was earning a bit and I’d still got plenty of money in
the bank, nearly two hundred quid, and I wasn’t frightened for the future. I knew that
sooner or later I’d get a regular job. And sure enough, after about a year, by a stroke of
luck it happened. I say by a stroke of luck, but the fact is that I was bound to fall on my
feet. I’m not the type that starves. I’m about as likely to end up in the workhouse as to
end up in the House of Lords. I’m the middling type, the type that gravitates by a kind of
natural law towards the five-pound-a-week level. So long as there are any jobs at all I’ll
back myself to get one.
It happened when I was peddling paper-clips and typewriter ribbons. I’d just dodged into
a huge block of offices in Fleet Street, a building which canvassers weren’t allowed into,
as a matter of fact, but I’d managed to give the lift attendant the impression that my bag
of samples was merely an attache case. I was walking along one of the corridors looking
for the offices of a small toothpaste firm that I’d been recommended to try, when I saw
that some very big bug was coming down the corridor in the other direction. I knew
immediately that it was a big bug. You know how it is with these big business men, they
seem to take up more room and walk more loudly than any ordinary person, and they
give off a kind of wave of money that you can feel fifty yards away. When he got nearly
up to me I saw that it was Sir Joseph Cheam. He was in civvies, of course, but I had no
difficulty in recognizing him. I suppose he’d been there for some business conference or
other. A couple of clerks, or secretaries, or something, were following after him, not
actually holding up his train, because he wasn’t wearing one, but you somehow felt that
that was what they were doing. Of course I dodged aside instantly. But curiously enough
he recognized me, though he hadn’t seen me for years. To my surprise he stopped and
spoke to me.
‘Hullo, you! I’ve seen you somewhere before. What’s your name? It’s on the tip of my
tongue. ’
‘Bowling, sir. Used to be in the A. S. C. ’
‘Of course. The boy that said he wasn’t a gentleman. What are you doing here? ’
I might have told him I was selling typewriter ribbons, and there perhaps the whole thing
would have ended. But I had one of those sudden inspirations that you get occasionally —
a feeling that I might make something out of this if I handled it properly. I said instead:
‘Well, sir, as a matter of fact I’m looking for a job. ’
‘A job, eh? Hm. Not so easy, nowadays. ’
He looked me up and down for a second. The two train-bearers had kind of wafted
themselves a little distance away. I saw his rather good-looking old face, with the heavy
grey eyebrows and the intelligent nose, looking me over and realized that he’d decided to
help me. It’s queer, the power of these rich men. He’d been marching past me in his
power and glory, with his underlings after him, and then on some whim or other he’d
turned aside like an emperor suddenly chucking a coin to a beggar.
‘So you want a job? What can you do? ’
Again the inspiration. No use, with a bloke like this, cracking up your own merits. Stick
to the truth. I said: ‘Nothing, sir. But I want a job as a travelling salesman. ’
‘Salesman? Hm. Not sure that I’ve got anything for you at present. Let’s see. ’
He pursed his lips up. For a moment, half a minute perhaps, he was thinking quite deeply.
It was curious. Even at the time I realized that it was curious. This important old bloke,
who was probably worth at least half a million, was actually taking thought on my behalf.
I’d deflected him from his path and wasted at least three minutes of his time, all because
of a chance remark I’d happened to make years earlier. I’d stuck in his memory and
therefore he was willing to take the tiny bit of trouble that was needed to find me a job. I
dare say the same day he gave twenty clerks the sack. Finally he said:
‘How’d you like to go into an insurance firm? Always fairly safe, you know. People have
got to have insurance, same as they’ve got to eat. ’
Of course I jumped at the idea of going into an insurance firm. Sir Joseph was
‘interested’ in the Flying Salamander. God knows how many companies he was
‘interested’ in. One of the underlings wafted himself forward with a scribbling-pad, and
there and then, with the gold stylo out of his waistcoat pocket, Sir Joseph scribbled me a
note to some higher-up in the Flying Salamander. Then I thanked him, and he marched
on, and I sneaked off in the other direction, and we never saw one another again.
Well, I got the job, and, as I said earlier, the job got me. I’ve been with the Flying
Salamander close on eighteen years. I started off in the office, but now I’m what’s known
as an Inspector, or, when there’s reason to sound particularly impressive, a
Representative. A couple of days a week I’m working in the district office, and the rest of
the time I’m travelling around, interviewing clients whose names have been sent in by the
local agents, making assessments of shops and other property, and now and again
snapping up a few orders on my own account. I earn round about seven quid a week. And
properly speaking that’s the end of my story.
When I look back I realize that my active life, if I ever had one, ended when I was
sixteen. Everything that really matters to me had happened before that date. But in a
manner of speaking things were still happening — the war, for instance — up to the time
when I got the job with the Flying Salamander. After that — well, they say that happy
people have no histories, and neither do the blokes who work in insurance offices. From
that day forward there was nothing in my life that you could properly describe as an
event, except that about two and a half years later, at the beginning of ‘23, 1 got married.
10
I was living in a boarding-house in Ealing. The years were rolling on, or crawling on.
Lower Binfield had passed almost out of my memory. I was the usual young city worker
who scoots for the 8. 15 and intrigues for the other fellow’s job. I was fairly well thought
of in the firm and pretty satisfied with life. The post- war success dope had caught me,
more or less. You remember the line of talk. Pep, punch, grit, sand. Get on or get out.
There’s plenty of room at the top. You can’t keep a good man down. And the ads in the
magazines about the chap that the boss clapped on the shoulder, and the keen-jawed
executive who’s pulling down the big dough and attributes his success to so and so’s
correspondence course. It’s funny how we all swallowed it, even blokes like me to whom
it hadn’t the smallest application. Because I’m neither a go- getter nor a down-and-out,
and I’m by nature incapable of being either. But it was the spirit of the time. Get on!
Make good! If you see a man down, jump on his guts before he gets up again. Of course
this was in the early twenties, when some of the effects of the war had worn off and the
slump hadn’t yet arrived to knock the stuffing out of us.
I had an ‘A’ subscription at Boots and went to half-crown dances and belonged to a local
tennis club. You know those tennis clubs in the genteel suburbs — little wooden pavilions
and high wire- netting enclosures where young chaps in rather badly cut white flannels
prance up and down, shouting ‘Fifteen forty! ’ and ‘Vantage all! ’ in voices which are a
tolerable imitation of the Upper Crust. I’d learned to play tennis, didn’t dance too badly,
and got on well with the girls. At nearly thirty I wasn’t a bad-looking chap, with my red
face and butter-coloured hair, and in those days it was still a point in your favour to have
fought in the war. I never, then or at any other time, succeeded in looking like a
gentleman, but on the other hand you probably wouldn’t have taken me for the son of a
small shopkeeper in a country town. I could keep my end up in the rather mixed society
of a place like Ealing, where the office-employee class overlaps with the middling-
professional class. It was at the tennis club that I first met Hilda.
At that time Hilda was twenty-four. She was a small, slim, rather timid girl, with dark
hair, beautiful movements, and — because of having very large eyes — a distinct
resemblance to a hare. She was one of those people who never say much, but remain on
the edge of any conversation that’s going on, and give the impression that they’re
listening. If she said anything at all, it was usually ‘Oh, yes, I think so too’, agreeing with
whoever had spoken last. At tennis she hopped about very gracefully, and didn’t play
badly, but somehow had a helpless, childish air. Her surname was Vincent.
If you’re married, there’ll have been times when you’ve said to yourself ‘Why the hell
did I do it? ’ and God knows I’ve said it often enough about Hilda. And once again,
looking at it across fifteen years, why DID I marry Hilda?
Partly, of course, because she was young and in a way very pretty. Beyond that I can only
say that because she came of totally different origins from myself it was very difficult for
me to get any grasp of what she was really like. I had to marry her first and find out about
her afterwards, whereas if I’d married say, Elsie Waters, I’d have known what I was
marrying. Hilda belonged to a class I only knew by hearsay, the poverty-stricken officer
class. For generations past her family had been soldiers, sailors, clergymen, Anglo-Indian
officials, and that kind of thing. They’d never had any money, but on the other hand none
of them had ever done anything that I should recognize as work. Say what you will,
there’s a kind of snob-appeal in that, if you belong as I do to the God-fearing shopkeeper
class, the low church, and high-tea class. It wouldn’t make any impression on me now,
but it did then. Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I don’t mean that I married Hilda
BECAUSE she belonged to the class I’d once served across the counter, with some
notion of jockeying myself up in the social scale. It was merely that I couldn’t understand
her and therefore was capable of being goofy about her. And one thing I certainly didn’t
grasp was that the girls in these penniless middle-class families will marry anything in
trousers, just to get away from home.
It wasn’t long before Hilda took me home to see her family. I hadn’t kn own till then that
there was a considerable Anglo-Indian colony in Ealing. Talk about discovering a new
world! It was quite a revelation to me.
Do you know these Anglo-Indian families? It’s almost impossible, when you get inside
these people’s houses, to remember that out in the street it’s England and the twentieth
century. As soon as you set foot inside the front door you’re in India in the eighties. You
know the kind of atmosphere. The carved teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-
skulls on the wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot pickles, the yellow photographs of
chaps in sun-helmets, the Hindustani words that you’re expected to know the meaning of,
the everlasting anecdotes about tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in
‘87. It’s a sort of little world of their own that they’ve created, like a kind of cyst. To me,
of course, it was all quite new and in some ways rather interesting. Old Vincent, Hilda’s
father, had been not only in India but also in some even more outlandish place, Borneo or
Sarawak, I forget which. He was the usual type, completely bald, almost invisible behind
his moustache, and full of stories about cobras and cummerbunds and what the district
collector said in ‘93. Hilda’s mother was so colourless that she was just like one of the
faded photos on the wall. There was also a son, Harold, who had some official job in
Ceylon and was home on leave at the time when I first met Hilda. They had a little dark
house in one of those buried back-streets that exist in Ealing. It smelt perpetually of
Trichinopoly cigars and it was so full of spears, blow-pipes, brass ornaments, and the
heads of wild animals that you could hardly move about in it.
Old Vincent had retired in 1910, and since then he and his wife had shown about as much
activity, mental or physical, as a couple of shellfish. But at the time I was vaguely
impressed by a family which had had majors, colonels, and once even an admiral in it.
My attitude towards the Vincents, and theirs towards me, is an interesting illustration of
what fools people can be when they get outside their own line. Put me among business
people — whether they’re company directors or commercial travellers — and I’m a fairly
good judge of character. But I had no experience whatever of the officer-rentier-
clergyman class, and I was inclined to kow- tow to these decayed throw-outs. I looked on
them as my social and intellectual superiors, while they on the other hand mistook me for
a rising young businessman who before long would be pulling down the big dough. To
people of that kind, ‘business’, whether it’s marine insurance or selling peanuts, is just a
dark mystery. All they know is that it’s something rather vulgar out of which you can
make money. Old Vincent used to talk impressively about my being ‘in business’ — once,
I remember, he had a slip of the tongue and said ‘in trade’ — and obviously didn’t grasp
the difference between being in business as an employee and being there on your own
account. He had some vague notion that as I was ‘in’ the Flying Salamander I should
sooner or later rise to the top of it, by a process of promotion. I think it’s possible that he
also had pictures of himself touching me for fivers at some future date. Harold certainly
had. I could see it in his eye. In fact, even with my income being what it is, I’d probably
be lending money to Harold at this moment if he were alive. Luckily he died a few years
after we were married, of enteric or something, and both the old Vincents are dead too.
Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop. Why did you marry
her? you say. But why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether
you’ll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing
Hilda. Of course in practice one never does these things, they’re only a kind of fantasy
that one enjoys thinking about. Besides, chaps who murder their wives always get
copped. However cleverly you’ve faked the alibi, they know perfectly well that it’s you
who did it, and they’ll pin it on to you somehow. When a woman’s bumped off, her
husband is always the first suspect — which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people
really think about marriage.
One gets used to everything in time. After a year or two I stopped wanting to kill her and
started wondering about her. Just wondering. For hours, sometimes, on Sunday
afternoons or in the evening when I’ve come home from work. I’ve lain on my bed with
all my clothes on except my shoes, wondering about women. Why they’re like that, how
they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose. It seems to be a most frightful
thing, the suddenness with which some women go to pieces after they’re married. It’s as
if they were strung up to do just that one thing, and the instant they’ve done it they wither
off like a flower that’s set its seed. What really gets me down is the dreary attitude
towards life that it implies. If marriage was just an open swindle — if the woman trapped
you into it and then turned round and said, ‘Now, you bastard, I’ve caught you and you’re
going to work for me while I have a good time! ’ — I wouldn’t mind so much. But not a bit
of it. They don’t want to have a good time, they merely want to slump into middle age as
quickly as possible.
After the frightful battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman
kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy, and joy of life just vanish overnight. It
was like that with Hilda. Here was this pretty, delicate girl, who’d seemed to me — and in
fact when I first knew her she WAS — a finer type of animal than myself, and within only
about three years she’d settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump. I’m
not denying that I was part of the reason. But whoever she’d married it would have been
much the same.
What Hilda lacks — I discovered this about a week after we were married — is any kind of
joy in life, any kind of interest in things for their own sake. The idea of doing things
because you enjoy them is something she can hardly understand. It was through Hilda
that I first got a notion of what these decayed middle-class families are really like. The
essential fact about them is that all their vitality has been drained away by lack of money.
In families like that, which live on tiny pensions and annuities — that’s to say on incomes
which never get bigger and generally get smaller — there’s more sense of poverty, more
crust-wiping, and looking twice at sixpence, than you’d find in any farm-labourer’s
family, let alone a family like mine. Hilda’s often told me that almost the first thing she
can remember is a ghastly feeling that there was never enough money for anything. Of
course, in that kind of family, the lack of money is always at its worst when the kids are
at the school-age. Consequently they grow up, especially the girls, with a fixed idea not
only that one always IS hard-up but that it’s one’s duty to be miserable about it.
At the beginning we lived in a poky little maisonette and had a job to get by on my
wages. Later, when I was transferred to the West Bletchley branch, things were better,
but Hilda’s attitude didn’t change. Always that ghastly glooming about money! The milk
bill! The coal bill! The rent! The school fees! We’ve lived all our life together to the tune
of ‘Next week we’ll be in the workhouse. ’ It’s not that Hilda’s mean, in the ordinary
sense of the word, and still less that she’s selfish. Even when there happens to be a bit of
spare cash knocking about I can hardly persuade her to buy herself any decent clothes.
But she’s got this feeling that you OUGHT to be perpetually working yourself up into a
stew about lack of money. Just working up an atmosphere of misery from a sense of duty.
I’m not like that. I’ve got more the prole’s attitude towards money. Life’s here to be
lived, and if we’re going to be in the soup next week — well, next week is a long way off.
What really shocks her is the fact that I refuse to worry. She’s always going for me about
it. ‘But, George! You don’t seem to REALIZE! We’ve simply got no money at all! It’s
very SERIOUS! ’ She loves getting into a panic because something or other is ‘serious’.
And of late she’s got that trick, when she’s glooming about something, of kind of
hunching her shoulders and folding her arms across her breast. If you made a list of
Hilda’s remarks throughout the day, you’d find three bracketed together at the top — ‘We
can’t afford if, ‘It’s a great saving’, and ‘I don’t know where the money’s to come from’.
She does everything for negative reasons. When she makes a cake she’s not thinking
about the cake, only about how to save butter and eggs. When I’m in bed with her all she
thinks about is how not to have a baby. If she goes to the pictures she’s all the time
writhing with indignation about the price of the seats. Her methods of housekeeping, with
all the emphasis on ‘using things up’ and ‘making things do’, would have given Mother
convulsions. On the other hand, Hilda isn’t in the least a snob. She’s never looked down
on me because I’m not a gentleman. On the contrary, from her point of view I’m much
too lordly in my habits. We never have a meal in a tea-shop without a frightful row in
whispers because I’m tipping the waitress too much. And it’s a curious thing that in the
last few years she’s become much more definitely lower-middle-class, in outlook and
even in appearance, than I am. Of course all this ‘saving’ business has never led to
anything. It never does. We live just about as well or as badly as the other people in
Ellesmere Road. But the everlasting stew about the gas bill and the milk bill and the
awful price of butter and the kids’ boots and school-fees goes on and on. It’s a kind of
game with Hilda.
We moved to West Bletchley in ‘29 and started buying the house in Ellesmere Road the
next year, a little before Billy was born. After I was made an Inspector I was more away
from home and had more opportunities with other women. Of course I was unfaithful — I
won’t say all the time, but as often as I got the chance. Curiously enough, Hilda was
jealous. In a way, considering how little that kind of thing means to her, I wouldn’t have
expected her to mind. And like all jealous women she’ll sometimes show a cunning you
wouldn’t think her capable of. Sometimes the way she’s caught me out would have made
me believe in telepathy, if it wasn’t that she’s often been equally suspicious when I didn’t
happen to be guilty. I’m more or less pennanently under suspicion, though, God knows,
in the last few years — the last live years, anyway — I’ve been innocent enough. You have
to be, when you’re as fat as I am.
Taking it by and large, I suppose Hilda and I don’t get on worse than about half the
couples in Ellesmere Road. There’ve been times when I’ve thought of separation or
divorce, but in our walk of life you don’t do those things. You can’t afford to. And then
time goes on, and you kind of give up struggling. When you’ve lived with a woman for
fifteen years, it’s difficult to imagine life without her. She’s part of the order of things. I
dare say you might find things to object to in the sun and the moon, but do you really
want to change them? Besides, there were the kids. Kids are a ‘link’, as they say. Or a
‘tie’. Not to say a ball and fetter.
Of late years Hilda has made two great friends called Mrs Wheeler and Miss Minns. Mrs
Wheeler is a widow, and I gather she’s got very bitter ideas about the male sex. I can feel
her kind of quivering with disapproval if I so much as come into the room. She’s a faded
little woman and gives you a curious impression that she’s the same colour all over, a
kind of greyish dust-colour, but she’s full of energy. She’s a bad influence on Hilda,
because she’s got the same passion for ‘saving’ and ‘making things do’, though in a
slightly different form. With her it takes the form of thinking that you can have a good
time without paying for it. She’s for ever nosing out bargains and amusements that don’t
cost money. With people like that it doesn’t matter a damn whether they want a thing or
not, it’s merely a question of whether they can get it on the cheap. When the big shops
have their remnant sales Mrs Wheeler’s always at the head of the queue, and it’s her
greatest pride, after a day’s hard fighting round the counter, to come out without having
bought anything. Miss Minns is quite a different sort. She’s really a sad case, poor Miss
Minns. She’s a tall thin woman of about thirty-eight, with black patent-leather hair and a
very GOOD, trusting kind of face. She lives on some kind of tiny fixed income, an
annuity or something, and I fancy she’s a left- over from the old society of West
Bletchley, when it was a little country town, before the suburb grew up. It’s written all
over her that her father was a clergyman and sat on her pretty heavily while he lived.
They’re a special by-product of the middle classes, these women who turn into withered
bags before they even manage to escape from home. Poor old Miss Minns, for all her
wrinkles, still looks exactly like a child. It’s still a tremendous adventure to her not to go
to church. She’s always burbling about ‘modem progress’ and ‘the woman’s movement’,
and she’s got a vague yearning to do something she calls ‘developing her mind’, only she
doesn’t quite know how to start. I think in the beginning she cottoned on to Hilda and
Mrs Wheeler out of pure loneliness, but now they take her with them wherever they go.
And the times they’ve had together, those three! Sometimes I’ve almost envied them.
Mrs Wheeler is the leading spirit. You couldn’t name a kind of idiocy that she hasn’t
dragged them into at one time or another. Anything from theosophy to cat’s-cradle,
provided you can do it on the cheap. For months they went in for the food-crank business.
Mrs Wheeler had picked up a second-hand copy of some book called Radiant Energy
which proved that you should live on lettuces and other things that don’t cost money. Of
course this appealed to Hilda, who immediately began starving herself. She’d have tried
it on me and the kids as well, only I put my foot down. Then they had a go at faith-
healing. Then they thought of tackling Pelmanism, but after a lot of correspondence they
found that they couldn’t get the booklets free, which had been Mrs Wheeler’s idea. Then
it was hay-box cookery. Then it was some filthy stuff called bee wine, which was
supposed to cost nothing at all because you made it out of water. They dropped that after
they’d read an article in the paper saying that bee wine gives you cancer. Then they
nearly joined one of those women’s clubs which go for conducted tours round factories,
but after a lot of arithmetic Mrs Wheeler decided that the free teas the factories gave you
didn’t quite equal the subscription. Then Mrs Wheeler scraped acquaintance with
somebody who gave away free tickets for plays produced by some stage society or other.
I’ve known the three of them sit for hours listening to some highbrow play of which they
didn’t even pretend to understand a word — couldn’t even tell you the name of the play
afterwards — but they felt that they were getting something for nothing. Once they even
took up spiritualism. Mrs Wheeler had run across some down-and-out medium who was
so desperate that he’d give seances for eighteenpence, so that the three of them could
have a glimpse beyond the veil for a tanner a time. I saw him once when he came to give
a seance at our house. He was a seedy-looking old devil and obviously in mortal terror of
D. T. s. He was so shaky that when he was taking his overcoat off in the hall he had a sort
of spasm and a hank of butter-muslin dropped out of his trouser-leg. I managed to shove
it back to him before the women saw. Butter-muslin is what they make the ectoplasm
with, so I’m told. I suppose he was going on to another seance afterwards. You don’t get
manifestations for eighteen pence. Mrs Wheeler’s biggest find of the last few years is the
Left Book Club. I think it was in ‘36 that the news of the Left Book Club got to West
Bletchley. I joined it soon afterwards, and it’s almost the only time I can remember
spending money without Hilda protesting. She can see some sense in buying a book when
you’re getting it for a third of its proper price. These women’s attitude is curious, really.
Miss Minns certainly had a try at reading one or two of the books, but this wouldn’t even
have occurred to the other two. They’ve never had any direct connexion with the Left
Book Club or any notion what it’s all about — in fact I believe at the beginning Mrs
Wheeler thought it had something to do with books which had been left in railway
carriages and were being sold off cheap. But they do know that it means seven and
sixpenny books for half a crown, and so they’re always saying that it’s ‘such a good
idea’. Now and again the local Left Book Club branch holds meetings and gets people
down to speak, and Mrs Wheeler always takes the others along. She’s a great one for
public meetings of any kind, always provided that it’s indoors and admission free. The
three of them sit there like lumps of pudding. They don’t know what the meeting’s about
and they don’t care, but they’ve got a vague feeling, especially Miss Minns, that they’re
improving their minds, and it isn’t costing them anything.
Well, that’s Hilda. You see what she’s like. Take it by and large, I suppose she’s no
worse than I am. Sometimes when we were first married I felt I’d like to strangle her, but
later I got so that I didn’t care. And then I got fat and settled down. It must have been in
1930 that I got fat. It happened so suddenly that it was as if a cannon ball had hit me and
got stuck inside. You know how it is. One night you go to bed, still feeling more or less
young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and next morning you wake up in the full
consciousness that you’re just a poor old fatty with nothing ahead of you this side the
grave except sweating your guts out to buy boots for the kids.
And now it’s ‘38, and in every shipyard in the world they’re riveting up the battleships
for another war, and a name I chanced to see on a poster had stirred up in me a whole lot
of stuff which ought to have been buried God knows how many years ago.
PART III
1
When I came home that evening I was still in doubt as to what I’d spend my seventeen
quid on.
Hilda said she was going to the Left Book Club meeting. It seemed that there was a chap
coming down from London to lecture, though needless to say Hilda didn’t know what the
lecture was going to be about. I told her I’d go with her. In a general way I’m not much
of a one for lectures, but the visions of war I’d had that morning, starting with the bomber
flying over the train, had put me into a kind of thoughtful mood. After the usual argument
we got the kids to bed early and cleared off in time for the lecture, which was billed for
eight o’clock.
It was a misty kind of evening, and the hall was cold and not too well lighted. It’s a little
wooden hall with a tin roof, the property of some Nonconformist sect or other, and you
can hire it for ten bob. The usual crowd of fifteen or sixteen people had rolled up. On the
front of the platform there was a yellow placard announcing that the lecture was on ‘The
Menace of Fascism’. This didn’t altogether surprise me. Mr Witchett, who acts as
chairman of these meetings and who in private life is something in an architect’s office,
was taking the lecturer round, introducing him to everyone as Mr So-and-so (I forget his
name) ‘the well-known anti-Fascist’, very much as you might call somebody ‘the well-
known pianist’. The lecturer was a little chap of about forty, in a dark suit, with a bald
head which he’d tried rather unsuccessfully to cover up with wisps of hair.
Meetings of this kind never start on time. There’s always a period of hanging about on
the pretence that perhaps a few more people are going to turn up. It was about twenty-
five past eight when Witchett tapped on the table and did his stuff. Witchett’s a mild-
looking chap, with a pink, baby’s bottom kind of face that’s always covered in smiles. I
believe he’s secretary of the local Liberal Party, and he’s also on the Parish Council and
acts as M. C. at the magic lantern lectures for the Mothers’ Union. He’s what you might
call a born chairman. When he tells you how delighted we all are to have Mr So-and-so
on the platform tonight, you can see that he believes it. I never look at him without
thinking that he’s probably a virgin. The little lecturer took out a wad of notes, chiefly
newspaper cuttings, and pinned them down with his glass of water. Then he gave a quick
lick at his lips and began to shoot.
Do you ever go to lectures, public meetings, and what-not?
When I go to one myself, there’s always a moment during the evening when I find myself
thinking the same thought: Why the hell are we doing this? Why is it that people will turn
out on a winter night for this kind of thing? I looked round the hall. I was sitting in the
back row. I don’t ever remember going to any kind of public meeting when I didn’t sit in
the back row if I could manage it. Hilda and the others had planked themselves in front,
as usual. It was rather a gloomy little hall. You know the kind of place. Pitch-pine walls,
corrugated iron roof, and enough draughts to make you want to keep your overcoat on.
The little knot of us were sitting in the light round the platform, with about thirty rows of
empty chairs behind us. And the seats of all the chairs were dusty. On the platform
behind the lecturer there was a huge square thing draped in dust-cloths which might have
been an enormous coffin under a pall. Actually it was a piano.
At the beginning I wasn’t exactly listening. The lecturer was rather a mean-looking little
chap, but a good speaker. White face, very mobile mouth, and the rather grating voice
that they get from constant speaking. Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis.
I wasn’t particularly keen to hear what he was saying — get the same stuff in the News
Chronicle every morning — but his voice came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr,
with now and again a phrase that struck out and caught my attention.
‘Bestial atrocities. . . . Hideous outbursts of sadism. . . . Rubber truncheons. . . .
Concentration camps. . . .
