Coming Up for Air by George Orwell Read Free Book Online

thing that a son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with a bathroom. Even now I’m a little above my origin, and at other times I’ve touched levels that we should never have dreamed of in those old days before the war.
    Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the answer will be ‘Which war?’ In my case the never-never land that people are thinking of when they say ‘before the war’ might almost be before the Boer War. I was born in ‘93, and I can actually remember the outbreak of the Boer War, because of the first-class row that Father and Uncle Ezekiel had about it. I’ve several other memories that would date from about a year earlier than that.
    The very first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin chaff. You went up the stone passage that led from the kitchen to the shop, and the smell of sainfoin got strongerall the way. Mother had fixed a wooden gate in the doorway to prevent Joe and myself (Joe was my elder brother) from getting into the shop. I can still remember standing there clutching the bars, and the smell of sainfoin mixed up with the damp plastery smell that belonged to the passage. It wasn’t till years later that I somehow managed to crash the gate and get into the shop when nobody was there. A mouse that had been having a go at one of the meal-bins suddenly plopped out and ran between my feet. It was quite white with meal. This must have happened when I was about six.
    When you’re very young you seem to suddenly become conscious of things that have been under your nose for a long time past. The things round about you swim into your mind one at a time, rather as they do when you’re waking from sleep. For instance, it was only when I was nearly four that I suddenly realised that we owned a dog. Nailer, his name was, an old white English terrier of the breed that’s gone out nowadays. I met him under the kitchen table and in some way seemed to grasp, having only learnt it that moment, that he belonged to us and that his name was Nailer. In the same way, a bit earlier, I’d discovered that beyond the gate at the end of the passage there was a place where the smell of sainfoin came from. And the shop itself, with the huge scales and the wooden measures and the tin shovel, and the white lettering on the window, and the bullfinch in its cage–which you couldn’t see very well even from the pavement, because the window was always dusty–all these things dropped into place in my mind one by one, like bits of a jigsaw puzzle.
    Time goes on, you get stronger on your legs, and by degrees you begin to get a grasp of geography. I suppose Lower Binfield was just like any other market town of about two thousand inhabitants. It was in Oxfordshire–I keep saying was , you notice, though after all the place stillexists–about five miles from the Thames. It lay in a bit of a valley, with a low ripple of hills between itself and the Thames, and higher hills behind. On top of the hills there were woods in sort of dim blue masses among which you could see a great white house with a colonnade. This was Binfield House (‘The Hall’, everybody called it), and the top of the hill was known as Upper Binfield, though there was no village there and hadn’t been for a hundred years or more. I must have been nearly seven before I noticed the existence of Binfield House. When you’re very small you don’t look into the distance. But by that time I knew every inch of the town, which was shaped roughly like a cross with the market-place in the middle. Our shop was in the High Street a little before you got to the marketplace, and on the corner there was Mrs Wheeler’s sweetshop where you spent a halfpenny when you had one. Mother Wheeler was a dirty old witch and people suspected her of sucking the bull’s-eyes and putting them back in the bottle, though this was never proved. Further down there was the barber’s shop with the advert for Abdulla