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

outside world didn’t really exist for her. Although she read more easily than Father, and unlike him used to read novelettes as well as newspapers, she was unbelievably ignorant. I realised thiseven by the time I was ten years old. She certainly couldn’t have told you whether Ireland was east or west of England, and I doubt whether any time up to the outbreak of the Great War she could have told you who was Prime Minister. Moreover she hadn’t the smallest wish to know such things. Later on when I read books about Eastern countries where they practise polygamy, and the secret harems where the women are locked up with black eunuchs mounting guard over them, I used to think how shocked Mother would have been if she’d heard of it. I can almost hear her voice–‘Well, now! Shutting their wives up like that! The idea! ’ Not that she’d have known what a eunuch was. But in reality she lived her life in a space that must have been as small and almost as private as the average zenana. Even in our own house there were parts where she never set foot. She never went into the loft behind the yard and very seldom into the shop. I don’t think I ever remember her serving a customer. She wouldn’t have known where any of the things were kept, and until they were milled into flour she probably didn’t know the difference between wheat and oats. Why should she? The shop was Father’s business, it was ‘the man’s work’, and even about the money side of it she hadn’t very much curiosity. Her job, ‘the woman’s work’, was to look after the house and the meals and the laundry and the children. She’d have had a fit if she’d seen Father or anyone else of the male sex trying to sew on a button for himself.
    So far as the meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything goes like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It was more like some kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the table tomorrow morning in much the same way as you knew the sun would rise. All through her life Mother went to bed at nine and got up at five, and she’d have thought it vaguelywicked–sort of decadent and foreign and aristocratic–to keep later hours. Although she didn’t mind paying Katie Simmons to take Joe and me out for walks, she would never tolerate the idea of having a woman in to help with the housework. It was her firm belief that a hired woman always sweeps the dirt under the dresser. Our meals were always ready on the tick. Enormous meals–boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig’s head, apple pie, spotted dog and jam roly-poly–with grace before and after. The old ideas about bringing up children still held good, though they were going out fast. In theory children were still thrashed and put to bed on bread and water, and certainly you were liable to be sent away from table if you made too much noise eating, or choked, or refused something that was ‘good for you’, or ‘answered back’. In practice there wasn’t much discipline in our family, and of the two Mother was the firmer. Father, though he was always quoting ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’, was really much too weak with us, especially with Joe, who was a hard case from the start. He was always ‘going to’ give Joe a good hiding, and he used to tell us stories, which I now believe were lies, about the frightful thrashings his own father used to give him with a leather strap, but nothing ever came of it. By the time Joe was twelve he was too strong for Mother to get him across her knee, and after that there was no doing anything with him.
    At that time it was still thought proper for parents to say ‘don’t’ to their children all day long. You’d often hear a man boasting that he’d ‘thrash the life out of his son if he caught him smoking, or stealing apples, or robbing a bird’s nest. In some families these thrashings