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

actually took place. Old Lovegrove, the saddler, caught his two sons, great lumps aged sixteen and fifteen, smoking in the garden shed and walloped them so that you could hear it all over thetown. Lovegrove was a very heavy smoker. The thrashings never seemed to have any effect, all boys stole apples, robbed birds’ nests and learned to smoke sooner or later, but the idea was still knocking around that children should be treated rough. Practically everything worth doing was forbidden, in theory anyway. According to Mother, everything that a boy ever wants to do was ‘dangerous’. Swimming was dangerous, climbing trees was dangerous, and so were sliding, snowballing, hanging on behind carts, using catapults and squailers and even fishing. All animals were dangerous, except Nailer, the two cats and Jackie the bullfinch. Every animal had its special recognised method of attacking you. Horses bit, bats got into your hair, earwigs got into your ears, swans broke your leg with a blow of their wings, bulls tossed you and snakes ‘stung’. All snakes stung, according to Mother, and when I quoted the penny encyclopedia to the effect that they didn’t sting but bit, she only told me not to answer back. Lizards, slow-worms, toads, frogs and newts also stung. All insects stung, except flies and blackbeetles. Practically all kinds of food, except the food you had at meals, were either poisonous or ‘bad for you’. Raw potatoes were deadly poison, and so were mushrooms unless you bought them at the greengrocer’s. Raw gooseberries gave you colic and raw raspberries gave you a skin-rash. If you had a bath after a meal you died of cramp, if you cut yourself between the thumb and forefinger you got lockjaw, and if you washed your hands in the water eggs were boiled in you got warts. Nearly everything in the shop was poisonous, which was why Mother had put the gate in the doorway. Cow-cake was poisonous, and so was chicken-corn, and so were mustard seed and Karswood poultry spice. Sweets were bad for you and eating between meals was bad for you, though curiously enough there were certain kinds of eating between meals that Mother always allowed. When she wasmaking plum jam she used to let us eat the syrupy stuff that was skimmed off the top, and we used to gorge ourselves with it till we were sick. Although nearly everything in the world was either dangerous or poisonous, there were certain things that had mysterious virtues. Raw onions were a cure for almost everything. A stocking tied round your neck was a cure for a sore throat. Sulphur in a dog’s drinking water acted as a tonic, and old Nailer’s bowl behind the back door always had a lump of sulphur in it which stayed there year after year, never dissolving.
    We used to have tea at six. By four Mother had generally finished the housework, and between four and six she used to have a quiet cup of tea and ‘read her paper’, as she called it. As a matter of fact she didn’t often read the newspaper except on Sundays. The weekday papers only had the day’s news, and it was only occasionally that there was a murder. But the editors of the Sunday papers had grasped that people don’t really mind whether their murders are up to date and when there was no new murder on hand they’d hash up an old one, sometimes going as far back as Dr Palmer and Mrs Manning. I think Mother thought of the world outside Lower Binfield chiefly as a place where murders were committed. Murders had a terrible fascination for her, because, as she often said, she just didn’t know how people could be so wicked. Cutting their wives’ throats, burying their fathers under cement floors, throwing babies down wells! How anyone could do such things! The Jack the Ripper scare had happened about the time when Father and Mother were married, and the big wooden shutters we used to draw over the shop windows every night dated from then. Shutters for shop windows were going out, most of the shops in the High Street