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Part 1, Chapter 1
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I'd
nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut
the kids out. It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty
yellowish-grey sky. Down below, out of the little square of
bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with
a privet hedge round it and a bare patch in the middle, that we call
the back garden. There's the same back garden, some privets, and
same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road. Only difference--
where there are no kids there's no bare patch in the middle.
I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor-blade while the water
ran into the bath. My face looked back at me out of the mirror,
and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the
washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face. It was the
temporary set that Warner, my dentist, had given me to wear while
the new ones were being made. I haven't such a bad face, really.
It's one of those bricky-red faces that go with butter-coloured
hair and pale-blue eyes. I've never gone grey or bald, thank God,
and when I've got my teeth in I probably don't look my age, which
is forty-five.
Making a mental note to buy razor-blades, I got into the bath and
started soaping. I soaped my arms (I've got those kind of pudgy
arms that are freckled up to the elbow) and then took the back-
brush and soaped my shoulder-blades, which in the ordinary way I
can't reach. It's a nuisance, but there are several parts of my
body that I can't reach nowadays. The truth is that I'm inclined
to be a little bit on the fat side. I don't mean that I'm like
something in a sideshow at a fair. My weight isn't much over
fourteen stone, and last time I measured round my waist it was
either forty-eight or forty-nine, I forget which. And I'm not what
they call 'disgustingly' fat, I haven't got one of those bellies
that sag half-way down to the knees. It's merely that I'm a little
bit broad in the beam, with a tendency to be barrel-shaped. Do you
know the active, hearty kind of fat man, the athletic bouncing type
that's nicknamed Fatty or Tubby and is always the life and soul of
the party? I'm that type. 'Fatty' they mostly call me. Fatty
Bowling. George Bowling is my real name.
But at that moment I didn't feel like the life and soul of the
party. And it struck me that nowadays I nearly always do have a
morose kind of feeling in the early mornings, although I sleep well
and my digestion's good. I knew what it was, of course--it was
those bloody false teeth. The things were magnified by the water
in the tumbler, and they were grinning at me like the teeth in a
skull. It gives you a rotten feeling to have your gums meet, a
sort of pinched-up, withered feeling like when you've bitten into
a sour apple. Besides, say what you will, false teeth are a
landmark. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can
kid yourself that you're a Hollywood sheik, is definitely at an
end. And I was fat as well as forty-five. As I stood up to soap
my crutch I had a look at my figure. It's all rot about fat men
being unable to see their feet, but it's a fact that when I stand
upright I can only see the front halves of mine. No woman, I
thought as I worked the soap round my belly, will ever look twice
at me again, unless she's paid to. Not that at that moment I
particularly wanted any woman to look twice at me.
But it struck me that this morning there were reasons why I ought
to have been in a better mood. To begin with I wasn't working
today. The old car, in which I 'cover' my district (I ought to
tell you that I'm in the insurance business. The Flying
Salamander. Life, fire, burglary, twins, shipwreck--everything),
was temporarily in dock, and though I'd got to look in at the
London office to drop some papers, I was really taking the day off
to go and fetch my new false teeth. And besides, there was another
business that had been in and out of my mind for some time past.
This was that I had seventeen quid which nobody else had heard
about--nobody in the family, that is. It had happened this way.
A chap in our firm, Mellors by name, had got hold of a book called
Astrology applied to Horse-racing which proved that it's all a
question of influence of the planets on the colours the jockey is
wearing. Well, in some race or other there was a mare called
Corsair's Bride, a complete outsider, but her jockey's colour was
green, which it seemed was just the colour for the planets that
happened to be in the ascendant. Mellors, who was deeply bitten
with this astrology business, was putting several quid on the horse
and went down on his knees to me to do the same. In the end,
chiefly to shut him up, I risked ten bob, though I don't bet as a
general rule. Sure enough Corsair's Bride came home in a walk. I
forget the exact odds, but my share worked out at seventeen quid.
By a kind of instinct--rather queer, and probably indicating
another landmark in my life--I just quietly put the money in the
bank and said nothing to anybody. I'd never done anything of this
kind before. A good husband and father would have spent it on a
dress for Hilda (that's my wife) and boots for the kids. But I'd
been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was
beginning to get fed up with it.
After I'd soaped myself all over I felt better and lay down in the
bath to think about my seventeen quid and what to spend it on. The
alternatives, it seemed to me, were either a week-end with a woman
or dribbling it quietly away on odds and ends such as cigars and
double whiskies. I'd just turned on some more hot water and was
thinking about women and cigars when there was a noise like a herd
of buffaloes coming down the two steps that lead to the bathroom.
It was the kids, of course. Two kids in a house the size of ours
is like a quart of beer in a pint mug. There was a frantic
stamping outside and then a yell of agony.
'Dadda! I wanna come in!'
'Well, you can't. Clear out!'
'But dadda! I wanna go somewhere!'
'Go somewhere else, then. Hop it. I'm having my bath.'
'Dad-DA! I wanna GO SOME--WHERE!'
No use! I knew the danger signal. The W.C. is in the bathroom--it
would be, of course, in a house like ours. I hooked the plug out
of the bath and got partially dry as quickly as I could. As I
opened the door, little Billy--my youngest, aged seven--shot past
me, dodging the smack which I aimed at his head. It was only when
I was nearly dressed and looking for a tie that I discovered that
my neck was still soapy.
It's a rotten thing to have a soapy neck. It gives you a disgusting
sticky feeling, and the queer thing is that, however carefully you
sponge it away, when you've once discovered that your neck is soapy
you feel sticky for the rest of the day. I went downstairs in a bad
temper and ready to make myself disagreeable.
Our dining-room, like the other dining-rooms in Ellesmere Road, is
a poky little place, fourteen feet by twelve, or maybe it's twelve
by ten, and the Japanese oak sideboard, with the two empty
decanters and the silver egg-stand that Hilda's mother gave us for
a wedding present, doesn't leave much room. Old Hilda was glooming
behind the teapot, in her usual state of alarm and dismay because
the News Chronicle had announced that the price of butter was going
up, or something. She hadn't lighted the gas-fire, and though the
windows were shut it was beastly cold. I bent down and put a match
to the fire, breathing rather loudly through my nose (bending
always makes me puff and blow) as a kind of hint to Hilda. She
gave me the little sidelong glance that she always gives me when
she thinks I'm doing something extravagant.
Hilda is thirty-nine, and when I first knew her she looked just
like a hare. So she does still, but she's got very thin and rather
wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes, and
when she's more upset than usual she's got a trick of humping her
shoulders and folding her arms across her breast, like an old gypsy
woman over her fire. She's one of those people who get their main
kick in life out of foreseeing disasters. Only petty disasters,
of course. As for wars, earthquakes, plagues, famines, and
revolutions, she pays no attention to them. Butter is going up,
and the gas-bill is enormous, and the kids' boots are wearing out,
and there's another instalment due on the radio--that's Hilda's
litany. She gets what I've finally decided is a definite pleasure
out of rocking herself to and fro with her arms across her breast,
and glooming at me, 'But, George, it's very SERIOUS! I don't know
what we're going to DO! I don't know where the money's coming
from! You don't seem to realize how serious it IS!' and so on and
so forth. It's fixed firmly in her head that we shall end up in
the workhouse. The funny thing is that if we ever do get to the
workhouse Hilda won't mind it a quarter as much as I shall, in fact
she'll probably rather enjoy the feeling of security.
The kids were downstairs already, having washed and dressed at
lightning speed, as they always do when there's no chance to keep
anyone else out of the bathroom. When I got to the breakfast table
they were having an argument which went to the tune of 'Yes, you
did!' 'No, I didn't!' 'Yes, you did!' 'No, I didn't!' and looked
like going on for the rest of the morning, until I told them to
cheese it. There are only the two of them, Billy, aged seven, and
Lorna, aged eleven. It's a peculiar feeling that I have towards
the kids. A great deal of the time I can hardly stick the sight of
them. As for their conversation, it's just unbearable. They're at
that dreary bread-and-butter age when a kid's mind revolves round
things like rulers, pencil-boxes, and who got top marks in French.
At other times, especially when they're asleep, I have quite a
different feeling. Sometimes I've stood over their cots, on summer
evenings when it's light, and watched them sleeping, with their
round faces and their tow-coloured hair, several shades lighter
than mine, and it's given me that feeling you read about in the
Bible when it says your bowels yearn. At such times I feel that
I'm just a kind of dried-up seed-pod that doesn't matter twopence
and that my sole importance has been to bring these creatures into
the world and feed them while they're growing. But that's only at
moments. Most of the time my separate existence looks pretty
important to me, I feel that there's life in the old dog yet and
plenty of good times ahead, and the notion of myself as a kind of
tame dairy-cow for a lot of women and kids to chase up and down
doesn't appeal to me.
We didn't talk much at breakfast. Hilda was in her 'I don't know
what we're going to DO!' mood, partly owing to the price of butter
and partly because the Christmas holidays were nearly over and
there was still five pounds owing on the school fees for last term.
I ate my boiled egg and spread a piece of bread with Golden Crown
marmalade. Hilda will persist in buying the stuff. It's
fivepence-halfpenny a pound, and the label tells you, in the
smallest print the law allows, that it contains 'a certain
proportion of neutral fruit-juice'. This started me off, in the
rather irritating way I have sometimes, talking about neutral
fruit-trees, wondering what they looked like and what countries
they grew in, until finally Hilda got angry. It's not that she
minds me chipping her, it's only that in some obscure way she
thinks it's wicked to make jokes about anything you save money on.
I had a look at the paper, but there wasn't much news. Down in
Spain and over in China they were murdering one another as usual,
a woman's legs had been found in a railway waiting-room, and King
Zog's wedding was wavering in the balance. Finally, at about ten
o'clock, rather earlier than I'd intended, I started out for town.
The kids had gone off to play in the public gardens. It was a
beastly raw morning. As I stepped out of the front door a nasty
little gust of wind caught the soapy patch on my neck and made me
suddenly feel that my clothes didn't fit and that I was sticky all
over.
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