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.
