The dog-fight had turned into a private row between the little
Trotskyist
and the boy with
fair hair.
fair hair.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
.
Indignation of all decent
peoples. . . . Alliance of the democratic nations. . . . Firm stand. . . . Defence of
democracy. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. .
You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a
gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button, and it starts. Democracy, Fascism,
Democracy. But somehow it interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a
white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. What’s he
doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he’s stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest
to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It’s a queer thing, I thought, to be
known as ‘Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist’. A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This
fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do
before Hitler came along? And what’ll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question
applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers, and so forth, of course. But the grating voice
went on and on, and another thought struck me. He MEANS it. Not faking at all — feels
every word he’s saying. He’s trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that’s nothing
to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan’s gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all
you’d find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a chap
like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from
platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.
As well as I could from the back row I had a look at the audience. I suppose, if you come
to think of it, we people who’ll turn out on winter nights to sit in draughty halls listening
to Feft Book Club lectures (and I consider that I’m entitled to the ‘we’, seeing that I’d
done it myself on this occasion) have a certain significance. We’re the West Bletchley
revolutionaries. Doesn’t look hopeful at first sight. It struck me as I looked round the
audience that only about half a dozen of them had really grasped what the lecturer was
talking about, though by this time he’d been pitching into Hitler and the Nazis for over
half an hour. It’s always like that with meetings of this kind. Invariably half the people
come away without a notion of what it’s all about. In his chair beside the table Witchett
was watching the lecturer with a delighted smile, and his face looked a little like a pink
geranium. You could hear in advance the speech he’d make as soon as the lecturer sat
down — same speech as he makes at the end of the magic lantern lecture in aid of trousers
for the Melanesians: ‘Express our thanks — voicing the opinion of all of us — most
interesting — give us all a lot to think about — most stimulating evening! ’ In the front row
Miss Minns was sitting very upright, with her head cocked a little on one side, like a bird.
The lecturer had taken a sheet of paper from under the tumbler and was reading out
statistics about the Gennan suicide-rate. You could see by the look of Miss Minns’s long
thin neck that she wasn’t feeling happy. Was this improving her mind, or wasn’t it? If
only she could make out what it was all about! The other two were sitting there like
lumps of pudding. Next to them a little woman with red hair was knitting a jumper. One
plain, two purl, drop one, and knit two together. The lecturer was describing how the
Nazis chop people’s heads off for treason and sometimes the executioner makes a bosh
shot. There was one other woman in the audience, a girl with dark hair, one of the
teachers at the Council School. Unlike the other she was really listening, sitting forward
with her big round eyes fixed on the lecturer and her mouth a little bit open, drinking it
all in.
Just behind her two old blokes from the local Labour Party were sitting. One had grey
hair cropped very short, the other had a bald head and a droopy moustache. Both wearing
their overcoats. You know the type. Been in the Labour Party since the year dot. Lives
given up to the movement. Twenty years of being blacklisted by employers, and another
ten of badgering the Council to do something about the slums. Suddenly everything’s
changed, the old Labour Party stuff doesn’t matter any longer. Lind themselves
pitchforked into foreign politics — Hitler, Stalin, bombs, machine- guns, rubber
truncheons, Rome-Berlin axis, Popular Lront, anti- Comintern pact. Can’t make head or
tail of it. Immediately in front of me the local Communist Party branch were sitting. All
three of them very young. One of them’s got money and is something in the Hesperides
Estate Company, in fact I believe he’s old Crum’s nephew. Another’s a clerk at one of
the banks. He cashes cheques for me occasionally. A nice boy, with a round, very young,
eager face, blue eyes like a baby, and hair so fair that you’d think he peroxided it. He
only looks about seventeen, though I suppose he’s twenty. He was wearing a cheap blue
suit and a bright blue tie that went with his hair. Next to these three another Communist
was sitting. But this one, it seems, is a different kind of Communist and not-quite,
because he’s what they call a Trotskyist. The others have got a down on him. He’s even
younger, a very thin, very dark, nervous-looking boy. Clever face. Jew, of course. These
four were taking the lecture quite differently from the others. You knew they’d be on
their feet the moment question-time started. You could see them kind of twitching
already. And the little Trotskyist working himself from side to side on his bum in his
anxiety to get in ahead of the others.
I’d stopped listening to the actual words of the lecture. But there are more ways than one
of listening. I shut my eyes for a moment. The effect of that was curious. I seemed to see
the fellow much better when I could only hear his voice.
It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It’s a
ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by
the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s all get together and
have a good hate. Over and over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside
your skull and is hammering down on your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I
managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside HIS skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For
about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I WAS him. At any rate, I felt
what he was feeling.
I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn’t at all the kind of vision that can be
talked about. What he’s SAYING is merely that Hitler’s after us and we must all get
together and have a good hate. Doesn’t go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what
he’s SEEING is something quite different. It’s a picture of himself smashing people’s
faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. I KNOW that’s what he was seeing. It
was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him. Smash! Right in the
middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a
great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That’s what’s in his mind,
waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it’s all O. K.
because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his
voice.
But why? Likeliest explanation, because he’s scared. Every thinking person nowadays is
stiff with fright. This is merely a chap who’s got sufficient foresight to be a little more
frightened than the others. Hitler’s after us! Quick! Let’s all grab a spanner and get
together, and perhaps if we smash in enough faces they won’t smash ours. Gang up,
choose your Leader. Hitler’s black and Stalin’s white. But it might just as well be the
other way about, because in the little chap’s mind both Hitler and Stalin are the same.
Both mean spanners and smashed faces.
War! I started thinking about it again. It’s coming soon, that’s certain. But who’s afraid
of war? That’s to say, who’s afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? ‘You are’, you
say. Yes, I am, and so’s anybody who’s ever seen them. But it isn’t the war that matters,
it’s the after- war. The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate- world, slogan-
world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where
the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep.
And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million
people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they
really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.
It’s all going to happen. Or isn’t it? Some days I know it’s impossible, other days I know
it’s inevitable. That night, at any rate, I knew it was going to happen. It was all in the
sound of the little lecturer’s voice.
So perhaps after all there IS a significance in this mingy little crowd that’ll turn out on a
winter night to listen to a lecture of this kind. Or at any rate in the five or six who can
grasp what it’s all about. They’re simply the outposts of an enonnous anny. They’re the
long-sighted ones, the first rats to spot that the ship is sinking. Quick, quick! The Fascists
are coming! Spanners ready, boys! Smash others or they’ll smash you. So terrified of the
future that we’re jumping straight into it like a rabbit diving down a boa-constrictor’s
throat.
And what’ll happen to chaps like me when we get Fascism in England? The truth is it
probably won’t make the slightest difference. As for the lecturer and those four
Communists in the audience, yes, it’ll make plenty of difference to them. They’ll be
smashing faces, or having their own smashed, according to who’s winning. But the
ordinary middling chaps like me will be carrying on just as usual. And yet it frightens
me — I tell you it frightens me. I’d just started to wonder why when the lecturer stopped
and sat down.
There was the usual hollow little sound of clapping that you get when there are only
about fifteen people in the audience, and then old Witchett said his piece, and before you
could say Jack Robinson the four Communists were on their feet together. They had a
good dog-fight that went on for about ten minutes, full of a lot of stuff that nobody else
understood, such as dialectical materialism and the destiny of the proletariat and what
Lenin said in 1918. Then the lecturer, who’d had a drink of water, stood up and gave a
summing-up that made the Trotskyist wriggle about on his chair but pleased the other
three, and the dog-fight went on unofficially for a bit longer. Nobody else did any talking.
Hilda and the others had cleared off the moment the lecture ended. Probably they were
afraid there was going to be a collection to pay for the hire of the hall. The little woman
with red hair was staying to finish her row. You could hear her counting her stitches in a
whisper while the others argued. And Witchett sat and beamed at whoever happened to
be speaking, and you could see him thinking how interesting it all was and making
mental notes, and the girl with black hair looked from one to the other with her mouth a
little open, and the old Labour man, looking rather like a seal with his droopy moustache
and his overcoat up to his ears, sat looking up at them, wondering what the hell it was all
about. And finally I got up and began to put on my overcoat.
The dog-fight had turned into a private row between the little Trotskyist and the boy with
fair hair. They were arguing about whether you ought to join the Anny if war broke out.
As I edged my way along the row of chairs to get out, the fair-haired one appealed to me.
‘Mr Bowling! Look here. If war broke out and we had the chance to smash Fascism once
and for all, wouldn’t you fight? If you were young, I mean. ’
I suppose he thinks I’m about sixty.
‘You bet I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I had enough to go on with last time. ’
‘But to smash Fascism! ’
‘Oh, b — Fascism! There’s been enough smashing done already, if you ask me. ’
The little Trotskyist chips in with social-patriotism and betrayal of the workers, but the
others cut him short:
‘But you’re thinking of 1914. That was just an ordinary imperialist war. This time it’s
different. Look here. When you hear about what’s going on in Germany, and the
concentration camps and the Nazis beating people up with rubber truncheons and making
the Jews spit in each other’s faces — doesn’t it make your blood boil? ’
They’re always going on about your blood boiling. Just the same phrase during the war, I
remember.
‘I went off the boil in 1916,’ I told him. ‘And so ’ll you when you know what a trench
smells like. ’
And then all of a sudden I seemed to see him. It was as if I hadn’t properly seen him till
that moment.
A very young eager face, might have belonged to a good-looking schoolboy, with blue
eyes and tow-coloured hair, gazing into mine, and for a moment actually he’d got tears in
his eyes! Felt as strongly as all that about the Gennan Jews! But as a matter of fact I
knew just what he felt. He’s a hefty lad, probably plays rugger for the bank. Got brains,
too. And here he is, a bank clerk in a godless suburb, sitting behind the frosted window,
entering figures in a ledger, counting piles of notes, bumsucking to the manager. Feels his
life rotting away. And all the while, over in Europe, the big stuffs happening. Shells
bursting over the trenches and waves of infantry charging through the drifts of smoke.
Probably some of his pals are fighting in Spain. Of course he’s spoiling for a war. How
can you blame him? For a moment I had a peculiar feeling that he was my son, which in
point of years he might have been. And I thought of that sweltering hot day in August
when the newsboy stuck up the poster ENGLAND DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY,
and we all rushed out on to the pavement in our white aprons and cheered.
‘Listen son,’ I said, ‘you’ve got it all wrong. In 1914 WE thought it was going to be a
glorious business. Well, it wasn’t. It was just a bloody mess. If it comes again, you keep
out of it. Why should you get your body plugged full of lead? Keep it for some girl. You
think war’s all heroism and V. C. charges, but I tell you it isn’t like that. You don’t have
bayonet-charges nowadays, and when you do it isn’t like you imagine. You don’t feel
like a hero. All you know is that you’ve had no sleep for three days, and stink like a
polecat, you’re pissing your bags with fright, and your hands are so cold you can’t hold
your rifle. But that doesn’t matter a damn, either. It’s the things that happen afterwards. ’
Makes no impression of course. They just think you’re out of date. Might as well stand at
the door of a knocking-shop handing out tracts.
The people were beginning to clear off. Witchett was taking the lecturer home. The three
Communists and the little Jew went up the road together, and they were going at it again
with proletarian solidarity and dialectic of the dialectic and what Trotsky said in 1917.
They’re all the same, really. It was a damp, still, very black night. The lamps seemed to
hang in the darkness like stars and didn’t light the road. In the distance you could hear the
trains booming along the High Street. I wanted a drink, but it was nearly ten and the
nearest pub was half a mile away. Besides, I wanted somebody to talk to, the way you
can’t talk in a pub. It was funny how my brain had been on the go all day. Partly the
result of not working, of course, and partly of the new false teeth, which had kind of
freshened me up. All day I’d been brooding on the future and the past. I wanted to talk
about the bad time that’s either coming or isn’t coming, the slogans and the coloured
shirts and the streamlined men from eastern Europe who are going to knock old England
cock-eyed. Hopeless trying to talk to Hilda. Suddenly it occurred to me to go and look up
old Porteous, who’s a pal of mine and keeps late hours.
Porteous is a retired public-school master. He lives in rooms, which luckily are in the
lower half of the house, in the old part of the town, near the church. He’s a bachelor, of
course. You can’t imagine that kind married. Lives all alone with his books and his pipe
and has a woman in to do for him. He’s a learned kind of chap, with his Greek and Latin
and poetry and all that. I suppose that if the local Left Book Club branch represents
Progress, old Porteous stands for Culture. Neither of them cuts much ice in West
Bletchley.
The light was burning in the little room where old Porteous sits reading till all hours of
the night. As I tapped on the front door he came strolling out as usual, with his pipe
between his teeth and his lingers in a book to keep the place. He’s rather a striking
looking chap, very tall, with curly grey hair and a thin, dreamy kind of face that’s a bit
discoloured but might almost belong to a boy, though he must be nearly sixty. It’s funny
how some of these public-school and university chaps manage to look like boys till their
dying day. It’s something in their movements. Old Porteous has got a way of strolling up
and down, with that handsome head of his, with the grey curls, held a little back that
makes you feel that all the while he’s dreaming about some poem or other and isn’t
conscious of what’s going on round him. You can’t look at him without seeing the way
he’s lived written all over him. Public School, Oxford, and then back to his old school as
a master. Whole life lived in an atmosphere of Latin, Greek, and cricket. He’s got all the
mannerisms. Always wears an old Harris tweed jacket and old grey flannel bags which he
likes you to call ‘disgraceful’, smokes a pipe and looks down on cigarettes, and though he
sits up half the night I bet he has a cold bath every morning. I suppose from his point of
view I’m a bit of a bounder. I haven’t been to a public school, I don’t know any Latin and
don’t even want to. He tells me sometimes that it’s a pity I’m ‘insensible to beauty’,
which I suppose is a polite way of saying that I’ve got no education. All the same I like
him. He’s very hospitable in the right kind of way, always ready to have you in and talk
at all hours, and always got drinks handy. When you live in a house like ours, more or
less infested by women and kids, it does you good to get out of it sometimes into a
bachelor atmosphere, a kind of book- pipe-fire atmosphere. And the classy Oxford
feeling of nothing mattering except books and poetry and Greek statues, and nothing
worth mentioning having happened since the Goths sacked Rome — sometimes that’s a
comfort too.
He shoved me into the old leather armchair by the fire and dished out whisky and soda.
I’ve never seen his sitting-room when it wasn’t dim with pipe-smoke. The ceiling is
almost black. It’s a smallish room and, except for the door and the window and the space
over the fireplace, the walls are covered with books from the floor right up to the ceiling.
On the mantelpiece there are all the things you’d expect. A row of old briar pipes, all
filthy, a few Greek silver coins, a tobacco jar with the arms of old Porteous’s college on
it, and a little earthenware lamp which he told me he dug up on some mountain in Sicily.
Over the mantelpiece there are photos of Greek statues. There’s a big one in the middle,
of a woman with wings and no head who looks as if she was stepping out to catch a bus. I
remember how shocked old Porteous was when the first time I saw it, not knowing any
better, I asked him why they didn’t stick a head on it.
Porteous started refilling his pipe from the jar on the mantelpiece.
‘That intolerable woman upstairs has purchased a wireless set,’ he said. ‘I had been
hoping to live the rest of my life out of the sound of those things. I suppose there is
nothing one can do? Do you happen to know the legal position? ’
I told him there was nothing one could do. I rather like the Oxfordy way he says
‘intolerable’, and it tickles me, in 1938, to find someone objecting to having a radio in the
house. Porteous was strolling up and down in his usual dreamy way, with his hands in his
coat pockets and his pipe between his teeth, and almost instantly he’d begun talking
about some law against musical instruments that was passed in Athens in the time of
Pericles. It’s always that way with old Porteous. All his talk is about things that happened
centuries ago. Whatever you start off with it always comes back to statues and poetry and
the Greeks and Romans. If you mention the Queen Mary he’d start telling you about
Phoenician triremes. He never reads a modern book, refuses to know their names, never
looks at any newspaper except The Times, and takes a pride in telling you that he’s never
been to the pictures. Except for a few poets like Keats and Wordsworth he thinks the
modem world — and from his point of view the modern world is the last two thousand
years — just oughtn’t to have happened.
I’m part of the modern world myself, but I like to hear him talk. He’ll stroll round the
shelves and haul out first one book and then another, and now and again he’ll read you a
piece between little puffs of smoke, generally having to translate it from the Latin or
something as he goes. It’s all kind of peaceful, kind of mellow. All a little like a school-
master, and yet it soothes you, somehow. While you listen you aren’t in the same world
as trains and gas bills and insurance companies. It’s all temples and olive trees, and
peacocks and elephants, and chaps in the arena with their nets and tridents, and winged
lions and eunuchs and galleys and catapults, and generals in brass armour galloping their
horses over the soldiers’ shields. It’s funny that he ever cottoned on to a chap like me.
But it’s one of the advantages of being fat that you can fit into almost any society.
Besides we meet on common ground when it comes to dirty stories. They’re the one
modem thing he cares about, though, as he’s always reminding me, they aren’t modern.
He’s rather old-maidish about it, always tells a story in a veiled kind of way. Sometimes
he’ll pick out some Latin poet and translate a smutty rhyme, leaving a lot to your
imagination, or he’ll drop hints about the private lives of the Roman emperors and the
things that went on in the temples of Ashtaroth. They seem to have been a bad lot, those
Greeks and Romans. Old Porteous has got photographs of wall-paintings somewhere in
Italy that would make your hair curl.
When I’m fed up with business and home life it’s often done me a lot of good to go and
have a talk with Porteous. But tonight it didn’t seem to. My mind was still running on the
same lines as it had been all day. Just as I’d done with the Left Book Club lecturer, I
didn’t exactly listen to what Porreous was saying, only to the sound of his voice. But
whereas the lecturer’s voice had got under my skin, old Porteous’s didn’t. It was too
peaceful, too Oxfordy. Finally, when he was in the middle of saying something, I chipped
in and said:
‘Tell me, Porteous, what do you think of Hitler? ’
Old Porteous was leaning in his lanky, graceful kind of way with his elbows on the
mantelpiece and a foot on the fender. He was so surprised that he almost took his pipe out
of his mouth.
‘Hitler? This Gennan person? My dear fellow! I DON’T think of him. ’
‘But the trouble is he’s going to bloody well make us think about him before he’s
finished. ’
Old Porteous shies a bit at the world ‘bloody’, which he doesn’t like, though of course
it’s part of his pose never to be shocked. He begins walking up and down again, puffing
out smoke.
‘I see no reason for paying any attention to him. A mere adventurer. These people come
and go. Ephemeral, purely ephemeral. ’
I’m not certain what the word ‘ephemeral’ means, but I stick to my point:
‘I think you’ve got it wrong. Old Hitler’s something different. So’s Joe Stalin. They
aren’t like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off
and so forth, just for the fun of it. They’re after something quite new — something that’s
never been heard of before. ’
‘My dear fellow! There is nothing new under the sun. ’
Of course that’s a favourite saying of old Porteous’s. He won’t hear of the existence of
anything new. As soon as you tell him about anything that’s happening nowadays he says
that exactly the same thing happened in the reign of King So-and-so. Even if you bring
up things like aeroplanes he tells you that they probably had them in Crete, or Mycenae,
or wherever it was. I tried to explain to him what I’d felt while the little bloke was
lecturing and the kind of vision I’d had of the bad time that’s coming, but he wouldn’t
listen. Merely repeated that there’s nothing new under the sun. Finally he hauls a book
out of the shelves and reads me a passage about some Greek tyrant back in the B. C. s who
certainly might have been Hitler’s twin brother.
The argument went on for a bit. All day I’d been wanting to talk to somebody about this
business. It’s funny. I’m not a fool, but I’m not a highbrow either, and God knows at
nonnal times I don’t have many interests that you wouldn’t expect a middle-aged seven-
pound-a-weeker with two kids to have. And yet I’ve enough sense to see that the old life
we’re used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. I can see the war
that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the
loudspeakers telling you what to think. And I’m not even exceptional in this. There are
millions of others like me. Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run across in
pubs, bus drivers, and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the
world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet. And
yet here’s this learned chap, who’s lived all his life with books and soaked himself in
history till it’s running out of his pores, and he can’t even see that things are changing.
Doesn’t think Hitler matters. Refuses to believe there’s another war coming. In any case,
as he didn’t fight in the last war, it doesn’t enter much into his thoughts — he thinks it was
a poor show compared with the siege of Troy. Doesn’t see why one should bother about
the slogans and the loudspeakers and the coloured shirts. What intelligent person would
pay any attention to such things? he always says. Hitler and Stalin will pass away, but
something which old Porteous calls ‘the eternal verities’ won’t pass away. This, of
course, is simply another way of saying that things will always go on exactly as he’s
known them. For ever and ever, cultivated Oxford blokes will stroll up and down studies
full of books, quoting Latin tags and smoking good tobacco out of jars with coats of arms
on them. Really it was no use talking to him. I’d have got more change out of the lad with
tow- coloured hair. By degrees the conversation twisted off, as it always does, to things
that happened B. C. Then it worked round to poetry. Finally old Porteous drags another
book out of the shelves and begins reading Keat’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (or maybe it
was a skylark — I forget).
So far as I’m concerned a little poetry goes a long way. But it’s a curious fact that I rather
like hearing old Porteous reading it aloud. There’s no question that he reads well. He’s
got the habit, of course — used to reading to classes of boys.
peoples. . . . Alliance of the democratic nations. . . . Firm stand. . . . Defence of
democracy. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. .
You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a
gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button, and it starts. Democracy, Fascism,
Democracy. But somehow it interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a
white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. What’s he
doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he’s stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest
to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It’s a queer thing, I thought, to be
known as ‘Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist’. A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This
fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do
before Hitler came along? And what’ll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question
applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers, and so forth, of course. But the grating voice
went on and on, and another thought struck me. He MEANS it. Not faking at all — feels
every word he’s saying. He’s trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that’s nothing
to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan’s gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all
you’d find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a chap
like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from
platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.
As well as I could from the back row I had a look at the audience. I suppose, if you come
to think of it, we people who’ll turn out on winter nights to sit in draughty halls listening
to Feft Book Club lectures (and I consider that I’m entitled to the ‘we’, seeing that I’d
done it myself on this occasion) have a certain significance. We’re the West Bletchley
revolutionaries. Doesn’t look hopeful at first sight. It struck me as I looked round the
audience that only about half a dozen of them had really grasped what the lecturer was
talking about, though by this time he’d been pitching into Hitler and the Nazis for over
half an hour. It’s always like that with meetings of this kind. Invariably half the people
come away without a notion of what it’s all about. In his chair beside the table Witchett
was watching the lecturer with a delighted smile, and his face looked a little like a pink
geranium. You could hear in advance the speech he’d make as soon as the lecturer sat
down — same speech as he makes at the end of the magic lantern lecture in aid of trousers
for the Melanesians: ‘Express our thanks — voicing the opinion of all of us — most
interesting — give us all a lot to think about — most stimulating evening! ’ In the front row
Miss Minns was sitting very upright, with her head cocked a little on one side, like a bird.
The lecturer had taken a sheet of paper from under the tumbler and was reading out
statistics about the Gennan suicide-rate. You could see by the look of Miss Minns’s long
thin neck that she wasn’t feeling happy. Was this improving her mind, or wasn’t it? If
only she could make out what it was all about! The other two were sitting there like
lumps of pudding. Next to them a little woman with red hair was knitting a jumper. One
plain, two purl, drop one, and knit two together. The lecturer was describing how the
Nazis chop people’s heads off for treason and sometimes the executioner makes a bosh
shot. There was one other woman in the audience, a girl with dark hair, one of the
teachers at the Council School. Unlike the other she was really listening, sitting forward
with her big round eyes fixed on the lecturer and her mouth a little bit open, drinking it
all in.
Just behind her two old blokes from the local Labour Party were sitting. One had grey
hair cropped very short, the other had a bald head and a droopy moustache. Both wearing
their overcoats. You know the type. Been in the Labour Party since the year dot. Lives
given up to the movement. Twenty years of being blacklisted by employers, and another
ten of badgering the Council to do something about the slums. Suddenly everything’s
changed, the old Labour Party stuff doesn’t matter any longer. Lind themselves
pitchforked into foreign politics — Hitler, Stalin, bombs, machine- guns, rubber
truncheons, Rome-Berlin axis, Popular Lront, anti- Comintern pact. Can’t make head or
tail of it. Immediately in front of me the local Communist Party branch were sitting. All
three of them very young. One of them’s got money and is something in the Hesperides
Estate Company, in fact I believe he’s old Crum’s nephew. Another’s a clerk at one of
the banks. He cashes cheques for me occasionally. A nice boy, with a round, very young,
eager face, blue eyes like a baby, and hair so fair that you’d think he peroxided it. He
only looks about seventeen, though I suppose he’s twenty. He was wearing a cheap blue
suit and a bright blue tie that went with his hair. Next to these three another Communist
was sitting. But this one, it seems, is a different kind of Communist and not-quite,
because he’s what they call a Trotskyist. The others have got a down on him. He’s even
younger, a very thin, very dark, nervous-looking boy. Clever face. Jew, of course. These
four were taking the lecture quite differently from the others. You knew they’d be on
their feet the moment question-time started. You could see them kind of twitching
already. And the little Trotskyist working himself from side to side on his bum in his
anxiety to get in ahead of the others.
I’d stopped listening to the actual words of the lecture. But there are more ways than one
of listening. I shut my eyes for a moment. The effect of that was curious. I seemed to see
the fellow much better when I could only hear his voice.
It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It’s a
ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by
the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s all get together and
have a good hate. Over and over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside
your skull and is hammering down on your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I
managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside HIS skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For
about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I WAS him. At any rate, I felt
what he was feeling.
I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn’t at all the kind of vision that can be
talked about. What he’s SAYING is merely that Hitler’s after us and we must all get
together and have a good hate. Doesn’t go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what
he’s SEEING is something quite different. It’s a picture of himself smashing people’s
faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. I KNOW that’s what he was seeing. It
was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him. Smash! Right in the
middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a
great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That’s what’s in his mind,
waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it’s all O. K.
because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his
voice.
But why? Likeliest explanation, because he’s scared. Every thinking person nowadays is
stiff with fright. This is merely a chap who’s got sufficient foresight to be a little more
frightened than the others. Hitler’s after us! Quick! Let’s all grab a spanner and get
together, and perhaps if we smash in enough faces they won’t smash ours. Gang up,
choose your Leader. Hitler’s black and Stalin’s white. But it might just as well be the
other way about, because in the little chap’s mind both Hitler and Stalin are the same.
Both mean spanners and smashed faces.
War! I started thinking about it again. It’s coming soon, that’s certain. But who’s afraid
of war? That’s to say, who’s afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? ‘You are’, you
say. Yes, I am, and so’s anybody who’s ever seen them. But it isn’t the war that matters,
it’s the after- war. The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate- world, slogan-
world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where
the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep.
And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million
people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they
really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.
It’s all going to happen. Or isn’t it? Some days I know it’s impossible, other days I know
it’s inevitable. That night, at any rate, I knew it was going to happen. It was all in the
sound of the little lecturer’s voice.
So perhaps after all there IS a significance in this mingy little crowd that’ll turn out on a
winter night to listen to a lecture of this kind. Or at any rate in the five or six who can
grasp what it’s all about. They’re simply the outposts of an enonnous anny. They’re the
long-sighted ones, the first rats to spot that the ship is sinking. Quick, quick! The Fascists
are coming! Spanners ready, boys! Smash others or they’ll smash you. So terrified of the
future that we’re jumping straight into it like a rabbit diving down a boa-constrictor’s
throat.
And what’ll happen to chaps like me when we get Fascism in England? The truth is it
probably won’t make the slightest difference. As for the lecturer and those four
Communists in the audience, yes, it’ll make plenty of difference to them. They’ll be
smashing faces, or having their own smashed, according to who’s winning. But the
ordinary middling chaps like me will be carrying on just as usual. And yet it frightens
me — I tell you it frightens me. I’d just started to wonder why when the lecturer stopped
and sat down.
There was the usual hollow little sound of clapping that you get when there are only
about fifteen people in the audience, and then old Witchett said his piece, and before you
could say Jack Robinson the four Communists were on their feet together. They had a
good dog-fight that went on for about ten minutes, full of a lot of stuff that nobody else
understood, such as dialectical materialism and the destiny of the proletariat and what
Lenin said in 1918. Then the lecturer, who’d had a drink of water, stood up and gave a
summing-up that made the Trotskyist wriggle about on his chair but pleased the other
three, and the dog-fight went on unofficially for a bit longer. Nobody else did any talking.
Hilda and the others had cleared off the moment the lecture ended. Probably they were
afraid there was going to be a collection to pay for the hire of the hall. The little woman
with red hair was staying to finish her row. You could hear her counting her stitches in a
whisper while the others argued. And Witchett sat and beamed at whoever happened to
be speaking, and you could see him thinking how interesting it all was and making
mental notes, and the girl with black hair looked from one to the other with her mouth a
little open, and the old Labour man, looking rather like a seal with his droopy moustache
and his overcoat up to his ears, sat looking up at them, wondering what the hell it was all
about. And finally I got up and began to put on my overcoat.
The dog-fight had turned into a private row between the little Trotskyist and the boy with
fair hair. They were arguing about whether you ought to join the Anny if war broke out.
As I edged my way along the row of chairs to get out, the fair-haired one appealed to me.
‘Mr Bowling! Look here. If war broke out and we had the chance to smash Fascism once
and for all, wouldn’t you fight? If you were young, I mean. ’
I suppose he thinks I’m about sixty.
‘You bet I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I had enough to go on with last time. ’
‘But to smash Fascism! ’
‘Oh, b — Fascism! There’s been enough smashing done already, if you ask me. ’
The little Trotskyist chips in with social-patriotism and betrayal of the workers, but the
others cut him short:
‘But you’re thinking of 1914. That was just an ordinary imperialist war. This time it’s
different. Look here. When you hear about what’s going on in Germany, and the
concentration camps and the Nazis beating people up with rubber truncheons and making
the Jews spit in each other’s faces — doesn’t it make your blood boil? ’
They’re always going on about your blood boiling. Just the same phrase during the war, I
remember.
‘I went off the boil in 1916,’ I told him. ‘And so ’ll you when you know what a trench
smells like. ’
And then all of a sudden I seemed to see him. It was as if I hadn’t properly seen him till
that moment.
A very young eager face, might have belonged to a good-looking schoolboy, with blue
eyes and tow-coloured hair, gazing into mine, and for a moment actually he’d got tears in
his eyes! Felt as strongly as all that about the Gennan Jews! But as a matter of fact I
knew just what he felt. He’s a hefty lad, probably plays rugger for the bank. Got brains,
too. And here he is, a bank clerk in a godless suburb, sitting behind the frosted window,
entering figures in a ledger, counting piles of notes, bumsucking to the manager. Feels his
life rotting away. And all the while, over in Europe, the big stuffs happening. Shells
bursting over the trenches and waves of infantry charging through the drifts of smoke.
Probably some of his pals are fighting in Spain. Of course he’s spoiling for a war. How
can you blame him? For a moment I had a peculiar feeling that he was my son, which in
point of years he might have been. And I thought of that sweltering hot day in August
when the newsboy stuck up the poster ENGLAND DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY,
and we all rushed out on to the pavement in our white aprons and cheered.
‘Listen son,’ I said, ‘you’ve got it all wrong. In 1914 WE thought it was going to be a
glorious business. Well, it wasn’t. It was just a bloody mess. If it comes again, you keep
out of it. Why should you get your body plugged full of lead? Keep it for some girl. You
think war’s all heroism and V. C. charges, but I tell you it isn’t like that. You don’t have
bayonet-charges nowadays, and when you do it isn’t like you imagine. You don’t feel
like a hero. All you know is that you’ve had no sleep for three days, and stink like a
polecat, you’re pissing your bags with fright, and your hands are so cold you can’t hold
your rifle. But that doesn’t matter a damn, either. It’s the things that happen afterwards. ’
Makes no impression of course. They just think you’re out of date. Might as well stand at
the door of a knocking-shop handing out tracts.
The people were beginning to clear off. Witchett was taking the lecturer home. The three
Communists and the little Jew went up the road together, and they were going at it again
with proletarian solidarity and dialectic of the dialectic and what Trotsky said in 1917.
They’re all the same, really. It was a damp, still, very black night. The lamps seemed to
hang in the darkness like stars and didn’t light the road. In the distance you could hear the
trains booming along the High Street. I wanted a drink, but it was nearly ten and the
nearest pub was half a mile away. Besides, I wanted somebody to talk to, the way you
can’t talk in a pub. It was funny how my brain had been on the go all day. Partly the
result of not working, of course, and partly of the new false teeth, which had kind of
freshened me up. All day I’d been brooding on the future and the past. I wanted to talk
about the bad time that’s either coming or isn’t coming, the slogans and the coloured
shirts and the streamlined men from eastern Europe who are going to knock old England
cock-eyed. Hopeless trying to talk to Hilda. Suddenly it occurred to me to go and look up
old Porteous, who’s a pal of mine and keeps late hours.
Porteous is a retired public-school master. He lives in rooms, which luckily are in the
lower half of the house, in the old part of the town, near the church. He’s a bachelor, of
course. You can’t imagine that kind married. Lives all alone with his books and his pipe
and has a woman in to do for him. He’s a learned kind of chap, with his Greek and Latin
and poetry and all that. I suppose that if the local Left Book Club branch represents
Progress, old Porteous stands for Culture. Neither of them cuts much ice in West
Bletchley.
The light was burning in the little room where old Porteous sits reading till all hours of
the night. As I tapped on the front door he came strolling out as usual, with his pipe
between his teeth and his lingers in a book to keep the place. He’s rather a striking
looking chap, very tall, with curly grey hair and a thin, dreamy kind of face that’s a bit
discoloured but might almost belong to a boy, though he must be nearly sixty. It’s funny
how some of these public-school and university chaps manage to look like boys till their
dying day. It’s something in their movements. Old Porteous has got a way of strolling up
and down, with that handsome head of his, with the grey curls, held a little back that
makes you feel that all the while he’s dreaming about some poem or other and isn’t
conscious of what’s going on round him. You can’t look at him without seeing the way
he’s lived written all over him. Public School, Oxford, and then back to his old school as
a master. Whole life lived in an atmosphere of Latin, Greek, and cricket. He’s got all the
mannerisms. Always wears an old Harris tweed jacket and old grey flannel bags which he
likes you to call ‘disgraceful’, smokes a pipe and looks down on cigarettes, and though he
sits up half the night I bet he has a cold bath every morning. I suppose from his point of
view I’m a bit of a bounder. I haven’t been to a public school, I don’t know any Latin and
don’t even want to. He tells me sometimes that it’s a pity I’m ‘insensible to beauty’,
which I suppose is a polite way of saying that I’ve got no education. All the same I like
him. He’s very hospitable in the right kind of way, always ready to have you in and talk
at all hours, and always got drinks handy. When you live in a house like ours, more or
less infested by women and kids, it does you good to get out of it sometimes into a
bachelor atmosphere, a kind of book- pipe-fire atmosphere. And the classy Oxford
feeling of nothing mattering except books and poetry and Greek statues, and nothing
worth mentioning having happened since the Goths sacked Rome — sometimes that’s a
comfort too.
He shoved me into the old leather armchair by the fire and dished out whisky and soda.
I’ve never seen his sitting-room when it wasn’t dim with pipe-smoke. The ceiling is
almost black. It’s a smallish room and, except for the door and the window and the space
over the fireplace, the walls are covered with books from the floor right up to the ceiling.
On the mantelpiece there are all the things you’d expect. A row of old briar pipes, all
filthy, a few Greek silver coins, a tobacco jar with the arms of old Porteous’s college on
it, and a little earthenware lamp which he told me he dug up on some mountain in Sicily.
Over the mantelpiece there are photos of Greek statues. There’s a big one in the middle,
of a woman with wings and no head who looks as if she was stepping out to catch a bus. I
remember how shocked old Porteous was when the first time I saw it, not knowing any
better, I asked him why they didn’t stick a head on it.
Porteous started refilling his pipe from the jar on the mantelpiece.
‘That intolerable woman upstairs has purchased a wireless set,’ he said. ‘I had been
hoping to live the rest of my life out of the sound of those things. I suppose there is
nothing one can do? Do you happen to know the legal position? ’
I told him there was nothing one could do. I rather like the Oxfordy way he says
‘intolerable’, and it tickles me, in 1938, to find someone objecting to having a radio in the
house. Porteous was strolling up and down in his usual dreamy way, with his hands in his
coat pockets and his pipe between his teeth, and almost instantly he’d begun talking
about some law against musical instruments that was passed in Athens in the time of
Pericles. It’s always that way with old Porteous. All his talk is about things that happened
centuries ago. Whatever you start off with it always comes back to statues and poetry and
the Greeks and Romans. If you mention the Queen Mary he’d start telling you about
Phoenician triremes. He never reads a modern book, refuses to know their names, never
looks at any newspaper except The Times, and takes a pride in telling you that he’s never
been to the pictures. Except for a few poets like Keats and Wordsworth he thinks the
modem world — and from his point of view the modern world is the last two thousand
years — just oughtn’t to have happened.
I’m part of the modern world myself, but I like to hear him talk. He’ll stroll round the
shelves and haul out first one book and then another, and now and again he’ll read you a
piece between little puffs of smoke, generally having to translate it from the Latin or
something as he goes. It’s all kind of peaceful, kind of mellow. All a little like a school-
master, and yet it soothes you, somehow. While you listen you aren’t in the same world
as trains and gas bills and insurance companies. It’s all temples and olive trees, and
peacocks and elephants, and chaps in the arena with their nets and tridents, and winged
lions and eunuchs and galleys and catapults, and generals in brass armour galloping their
horses over the soldiers’ shields. It’s funny that he ever cottoned on to a chap like me.
But it’s one of the advantages of being fat that you can fit into almost any society.
Besides we meet on common ground when it comes to dirty stories. They’re the one
modem thing he cares about, though, as he’s always reminding me, they aren’t modern.
He’s rather old-maidish about it, always tells a story in a veiled kind of way. Sometimes
he’ll pick out some Latin poet and translate a smutty rhyme, leaving a lot to your
imagination, or he’ll drop hints about the private lives of the Roman emperors and the
things that went on in the temples of Ashtaroth. They seem to have been a bad lot, those
Greeks and Romans. Old Porteous has got photographs of wall-paintings somewhere in
Italy that would make your hair curl.
When I’m fed up with business and home life it’s often done me a lot of good to go and
have a talk with Porteous. But tonight it didn’t seem to. My mind was still running on the
same lines as it had been all day. Just as I’d done with the Left Book Club lecturer, I
didn’t exactly listen to what Porreous was saying, only to the sound of his voice. But
whereas the lecturer’s voice had got under my skin, old Porteous’s didn’t. It was too
peaceful, too Oxfordy. Finally, when he was in the middle of saying something, I chipped
in and said:
‘Tell me, Porteous, what do you think of Hitler? ’
Old Porteous was leaning in his lanky, graceful kind of way with his elbows on the
mantelpiece and a foot on the fender. He was so surprised that he almost took his pipe out
of his mouth.
‘Hitler? This Gennan person? My dear fellow! I DON’T think of him. ’
‘But the trouble is he’s going to bloody well make us think about him before he’s
finished. ’
Old Porteous shies a bit at the world ‘bloody’, which he doesn’t like, though of course
it’s part of his pose never to be shocked. He begins walking up and down again, puffing
out smoke.
‘I see no reason for paying any attention to him. A mere adventurer. These people come
and go. Ephemeral, purely ephemeral. ’
I’m not certain what the word ‘ephemeral’ means, but I stick to my point:
‘I think you’ve got it wrong. Old Hitler’s something different. So’s Joe Stalin. They
aren’t like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off
and so forth, just for the fun of it. They’re after something quite new — something that’s
never been heard of before. ’
‘My dear fellow! There is nothing new under the sun. ’
Of course that’s a favourite saying of old Porteous’s. He won’t hear of the existence of
anything new. As soon as you tell him about anything that’s happening nowadays he says
that exactly the same thing happened in the reign of King So-and-so. Even if you bring
up things like aeroplanes he tells you that they probably had them in Crete, or Mycenae,
or wherever it was. I tried to explain to him what I’d felt while the little bloke was
lecturing and the kind of vision I’d had of the bad time that’s coming, but he wouldn’t
listen. Merely repeated that there’s nothing new under the sun. Finally he hauls a book
out of the shelves and reads me a passage about some Greek tyrant back in the B. C. s who
certainly might have been Hitler’s twin brother.
The argument went on for a bit. All day I’d been wanting to talk to somebody about this
business. It’s funny. I’m not a fool, but I’m not a highbrow either, and God knows at
nonnal times I don’t have many interests that you wouldn’t expect a middle-aged seven-
pound-a-weeker with two kids to have. And yet I’ve enough sense to see that the old life
we’re used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. I can see the war
that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the
loudspeakers telling you what to think. And I’m not even exceptional in this. There are
millions of others like me. Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run across in
pubs, bus drivers, and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the
world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet. And
yet here’s this learned chap, who’s lived all his life with books and soaked himself in
history till it’s running out of his pores, and he can’t even see that things are changing.
Doesn’t think Hitler matters. Refuses to believe there’s another war coming. In any case,
as he didn’t fight in the last war, it doesn’t enter much into his thoughts — he thinks it was
a poor show compared with the siege of Troy. Doesn’t see why one should bother about
the slogans and the loudspeakers and the coloured shirts. What intelligent person would
pay any attention to such things? he always says. Hitler and Stalin will pass away, but
something which old Porteous calls ‘the eternal verities’ won’t pass away. This, of
course, is simply another way of saying that things will always go on exactly as he’s
known them. For ever and ever, cultivated Oxford blokes will stroll up and down studies
full of books, quoting Latin tags and smoking good tobacco out of jars with coats of arms
on them. Really it was no use talking to him. I’d have got more change out of the lad with
tow- coloured hair. By degrees the conversation twisted off, as it always does, to things
that happened B. C. Then it worked round to poetry. Finally old Porteous drags another
book out of the shelves and begins reading Keat’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (or maybe it
was a skylark — I forget).
So far as I’m concerned a little poetry goes a long way. But it’s a curious fact that I rather
like hearing old Porteous reading it aloud. There’s no question that he reads well. He’s
got the habit, of course — used to reading to classes of boys.
