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

packet which contained several different kinds of sweets, a gold ring and sometimes a whistle, was a penny. You don’t see prize packets nowadays. A whole lot of the kinds of sweets we had in those days have gone out. There was a kind of flat white sweet with mottoes printed on them, and also a kind of sticky pink stuff in an oval matchwood box with a tiny tin spoon to eat it with, which cost a halfpenny. Both of those have disappeared. So have Caraway Comfits, and so have chocolate pipes and sugar matches, and even Hundreds and Thousands you hardly ever see. Hundreds and Thousands were a great standby when you’d only a farthing. And what about Penny Monsters? Does one ever see a Penny Monster nowadays? It was a huge bottle, holding more than a quart of fizzy lemonade, all for apenny. That’s another thing that the war killed stone dead.
    It always seems to be summer when I look back. I can feel the grass round me as tall as myself, and the heat coming out of the earth. And the dust in the lane, and the warm greeny light coming through the hazel boughs. I can see the three of us trailing along, eating stuff out of the hedge, with Katie dragging at my arm and saying ‘Come on, Baby!’ and sometimes yelling ahead to Joe, ‘Joe! You come back ‘ere this minute! You’ll catch it!’ Joe was a hefty boy with a big, lumpy sort of head and tremendous calves, the kind of boy who’s always doing something dangerous. At seven he’d already got into short trousers, with the thick black stockings drawn up over the knee and the great clumping boots that boys had to wear in those days. I was still in frocks–a kind of holland overall that Mother used to make for me. Katie used to wear a dreadful ragged parody of a grown-up dress that descended from sister to sister in her family. She had a ridiculous great hat with her pigtails hanging down behind it, and a long, draggled skirt which trailed on the ground, and button boots with the heels trodden down. She was a tiny thing, not much taller than Joe, but not bad at ‘minding’ children. In a family like that a child is ‘minding’ other children about as soon as it’s weaned. At times she’d try to be grown-up and ladylike, and she had a way of cutting you short with a proverb, which to her mind was something unanswerable. If you said ‘Don’t care’, she’d answer immediately:
‘ Don’t care was made to care,
Don’t care was hung,
Don’t care was put in a pot
And boiled till he was done .’
    Or if you called her names it would be ‘Hard words break no bones’, or, when you’d been boasting, ‘Pride comes before a fall’. This came very true one day when I wasstrutting along pretending to be a soldier and fell into a cow-pat. Her family lived in a filthy little rat-hole of a place in the slummy street behind the brewery. The place swarmed with children like a kind of vermin. The whole family had managed to dodge going to school, which was fairly easy to do in those days, and started running errands and doing other odd jobs as soon as they could walk. One of her elder brothers got a month for stealing turnips. She stopped taking us out for walks a year later when Joe was eight and getting too tough for a girl to handle. He’d discovered that in Katie’s home they slept five in a bed, and used to tease the life out of her about it.
    Poor Katie! She had her first baby when she was fifteen. No one knew who was the father, and probably Katie wasn’t too certain herself. Most people believed it was one of her brothers. The workhouse people took the baby, and Katie went into service in Walton. Some time afterwards she married a tinker, which even by the standards of her family was a come-down. The last time I saw her was in 1913. I was biking through Walton, and I passed some dreadful wooden shacks beside the railway line, with fences round them made out of barrel-staves, where the gypsies used to camp at certain times of the year, when the police would let