Coming Up for Air by George Orwell Read Free Book Online Page A

cigarettes–the one with the Egyptian soldiers on it, and curiously enough they’re using the same advert to this day–and the rich boozy smell of bay rum and latakia. Behind the houses you could see the chimneys of the brewery. In the middle of the market-place there was the stone horse-trough, and on top of the water there was always a fine film of dust and chaff.
    Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round. I’m quite aware that that’s a delusion. I’m merely trying to tell you how things come back to me. If I shut my eyes and think of Lower Binfield any time before I was, say, eight, it’s always in summer weather that I remember it. Either it’s the market-place at dinner-time, with a sort of sleepy dusty hush over everything and the carrier’s horse with his nose dug well into hisnose-bag, munching away, or it’s a hot afternoon in the great green juicy meadows round the town, or it’s about dusk in the lane behind the allotments, and there’s a smell of pipe-tobacco and night-stocks floating through the hedge. But in a sense I do remember different seasons, because all my memories are bound up with things to eat, which varied at different times of the year. Especially the things you used to find in the hedges. In July there were dewberries–but they’re very rare–and the blackberries were getting red enough to eat. In September there were sloes and hazel-nuts. The best hazel-nuts were always out of reach. Later on there were beech-nuts and crab-apples. Then there were the kind of minor foods that you used to eat when there was nothing better going. Haws–but they’re not much good–and hips, which have a nice sharp taste if you clean the hairs out of them. Angelica is good in early summer, especially when you’re thirsty, and so are the stems of various grasses. Then there’s sorrel, which is good with bread and butter, and pig-nuts, and a kind of wood shamrock which has a sour taste. Even plantain seeds are better than nothing when you’re a long way from home and very hungry.
    Joe was two years older than myself. When we were very small Mother used to pay Katie Simmons eighteen pence a week to take us out for walks in the afternoons. Katie’s father worked in the brewery and had fourteen children, so that the family were always on the lookout for odd jobs. She was only twelve when Joe was seven and I was five, and her mental level wasn’t very different from ours. She used to drag me by the arm and call me ‘Baby’, and she had just enough authority over us to prevent us from being run over by dogcarts or chased by bulls, but so far as conversation went we were almost on equal terms. We used to go for long, trailing kind of walks–always, of course, picking and eating things all the way–down thelane past the allotments, across Roper’s Meadows and down to the Mill Farm, where there was a pool with newts and tiny carp in it (Joe and I used to go fishing there when we were a bit older), and back by the Upper Binfield Road so as to pass the sweet-shop that stood on the edge of the town. This shop was in such a bad position that anyone who took it went bankrupt, and to my own knowledge it was three times a sweet-shop, once a grocer’s and once a bicycle-repair shop, but it had a peculiar fascination for children. Even when we had no money, we’d go that way so as to glue our noses against the window. Katie wasn’t in the least above sharing a farthing’s worth of sweets and quarrelling over her share. You could buy things worth having for a farthing in those days. Most sweets were four ounces a penny, and there was even some stuff called Paradise Mixture, mostly broken sweets from other bottles, which was six. Then there were Farthing Everlastings, which were a yard long and couldn’t be finished inside half an hour. Sugar mice and sugar pigs were eight a penny, and so were liquorice pistols, popcorn was a halfpenny for a large bag, and a prize