But he also fears the modern world -the world in 1939- since he knows that war is imminent. And he forsees the after-war, the food queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.
George attempts to escape to the pre-modern world of his childhood, to the village he nostalgically remembers, to the peacefulness of civilization “before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.”
George’s wife,Hilda:
<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… >
Children:
“It’s a peculiar feeling that I have towards the kids”
“A great deal of time I can hardly stick the sight of them. As for their conversation, it’s just unbearable… At other times, especially when they’re asleep, I have quite a different feeling. Sometimes I’ve stood over their cots, on summer nights when it’s light, and watched them sleep with their round faces and their sandy 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 two-pence 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…”
“And the next war coming over the horizon 1941, they say. Three more circles of the sun, and we whiz straight into it.”
“There’ll be air-raids, of course, but they won’t hit everybody. Besides even if that kind of danger exists, it doesn’t really enter into one’s thoughts beforehand. As I’ve said several times already, I’m not frightened of the war, only of the after-war.”
“The barbed wire! The slogans! The enormous faces! The cork-lined cellars where the executioner plugs you from behind! For that matter it frightens other chaps who are intellectually a good deal dumber than I am.from behind! For that matter it frightens other chaps who are intellectually a good deal dumber than I am.from behind! For that matter it frightens other chaps who are intellectually a good deal dumber than I am.from behind! For that matter it frightens other chaps who are intellectually a good deal dumber than I am.
But why? Because it means good-bye to this thing I’ve been telling you about, this special feeling inside you. Call it peace, if you like. But when I say peace, I don’t mean absence of war, I mean peace, a feeling in your guts. And it’s gone forever if the rubber-truncheon boys get hold of us.”
“I picked up my bunch of primroses and had a smell at them. I was thinking of Lower Binfield. It was funny how for two months past it had been in and out of my mind all the time, after twenty years during which I’d practically forgotten it. And just at this moment there was the zoom of a car coming up the road; it brought me up with a kind of jolt. I suddenly realized what I was doing – wandering round picking primroses when I ought to have been going through the inventory at that ironmonger’s shop in Pudley. What was more, it suddenly struck me what I’d look like if those people in the car saw me. A fat man in a bowler hat holding a bunch of primroses. It wouldn’t look right, at all. Fat men mustn’t pick primroses, at any rate in public.
I just had time to chuck them over the hedge before the car came in sight.”
“Why did I want to go back to Lower Binfield? You say. Why Lower Binfield in particular? What did I mean to do when I got there?
I didn’t mean to do anything.
That was part of the point.
I wanted peace and quiet. Peace! We had it once, in Lower Binfield. I’ve told you something about our old life there, before the war. I’m not pretending it was perfect. I dare say it was a dull, sluggish, vegetable kind of life. You can say we were like turnips, if you like. But turnips don’t live in terror of the boss, they don’t lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and the next war. We had peace inside us.”
“The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air! Like big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses out and fill their lungs with a great gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and octopuses. We’re all stifling at the bottom of a dustbin, but I’ve found the way to the top. Back to Lower Binfield1 I kept my foot on the accelerator until the old car worked up to her maximum spped of nearly forty miles an hour.”
