Contents


The Spike (1931)
A Hanging (1931)
Bookshop Memories (1936)
Shooting an Elephant (1936)
Down the Mine (1937) (From "The Road to Wigan Pier")
North and South (1937) (From "The Road to Wigan Pier")
Spilling the Spanish Beans (1937)
Marrakech (1939)
Boys' Weeklies and Frank Richards's Reply (1940)
Charles Dickens (1940)
Charles Reade (1940)
Inside the Whale (1940)
The Art of Donald McGill (1941)
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941)
Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)
Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
Rudyard Kipling (1942)
Mark Twain--The Licensed Jester (1943)
Poetry and the Microphone (1943)
W B Yeats (1943)
Arthur Koestler (1944)
Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944)
Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944)
Antisemitism in Britain (1945)
Freedom of the Park (1945)
Future of a Ruined Germany (1945)
Good Bad Books (1945)
In Defence Of P. G. Wodehouse (1945)
Nonsense Poetry (1945)
Notes on Nationalism (1945)
Revenge is Sour (1945)
The Sporting Spirit (1945)
You and the Atomic Bomb (1945)
A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray (1946)
A Nice Cup of Tea (1946)
Books vs. Cigarettes (1946)
Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946)
Decline of the English Murder (1946)
How the Poor Die (1946)
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946)
Pleasure Spots (1946)
Politics and the English Language (1946)
Politics vs. Literature: an Examination of Gulliver's Travels (1946)
Riding Down from Bangor (1946)
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946)
The Prevention of Literature (1946)
Why I Write (1946)
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
Such, Such were the Joys (1947)
Writers and Leviathan (1948)
Reflections on Gandhi (1949)




THE SPIKE



It was late-afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman,
lay on the green waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk
much. We just sprawled about exhaustedly, with home-made cigarettes stick-
ing out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the chestnut branches were covered
with blossom, and beyond that great woolly clouds floated almost motion-
less in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban riff-
raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the sea-
shore.

What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil,
everyone agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable
dog. You couldn't call your soul your own when he was about, and many a
tramp had he kicked out in the middle of the night for giving a back an-
swer. When You, came to be searched, he fair held you upside down and
shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was hell to. Pay, and if
you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.

I had eightpence on me. 'For the love of Christ, mate,' the old hands ad-
vised me, 'don't you take it in. You'd get seven days for going into the
spike with eightpence!'

So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a
lump of flint. Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for
it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes, and one is supposed
to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in our socks, except for the
twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in
their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with con-
traband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephant-
iasis. But is an unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp Majors do not
search below the knee, and in the end only one man was caught. This was
Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by cockney out
of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at the wrong
moment, and was impounded.

At six, the gates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate
entered our names and other particulars in the register and took our bun-
dles away from us. The woman was sent off to the workhouse, and we others
into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly, limewashed place, consisting only
of a bathroom and dining-room and about a hundred narrow stone cells. The
terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us into the bathroom to
be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty, who gave
the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping-pond, shoving them
this way and that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when he came to
myself, he looked hard at me, and said:

'You are a gentleman?'

'I suppose so,' I said.

He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,' he
said, 'that's bloody bad luck, that is.' And thereafter he took it into
his head to treat me with compassion, even with a kind of respect.

It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our
underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of
string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary gar-
ments, some of them mere collections of holes, held together by dirt. The
room became a press of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the tramps
competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of
the men refused the bath, and washed only their 'toe-rags', the horrid,
greasy little clouts which tramps bind round their feet. Each of us had
three minutes in which to bathe himself. Six greasy, slippery roller towels
had to serve for the lot of us.

When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and we were
dressed in the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like nightshirts, reach-
ing to the middle of the thigh. Then we were sent into the dining-room,
where supper was set out on the deal tables. It was the invariable spike
meal, always the same, whether breakfast, dinner or supper--half a pound of
bread, a bit of margarine, and a pint of so-called tea. It took us five min-
utes to gulp down the cheap, noxious food. Then the Tramp Major served us
with three cotton blankets each, and drove us off to our cells for the night.
The doors were locked on the outside a little before seven in the evening,
and would stay locked for the next twelve hours.

The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting apparatus except
a tiny, barred window high up in the wall, and a spyhole in the door. There
were no bugs, and we had bedsteads and straw palliasses, rare luxuries both.
In many spikes one sleeps on a wooden shelf, and in some on the bare floor,
with a rolled-up coat for pillow. With a cell to myself, and a bed, I was hop-
ing for a sound night's rest. But I did not get it, for there is always some-
thing wrong in the spike, and the peculiar shortcoming here, as I discovered
immediately, was the cold. May had begun, and in honour of the season--a lit-
tle sacrifice to the gods of spring, perhaps--the authorities had cut off the
steam from the hot pipes. The cotton blankets were almost useless. One spent
the night in turning from side to side, falling asleep for ten minutes and
waking half frozen, and watching for dawn.

As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fall comfortably
asleep when it was time to get up. The Tramp Major came marching down the
passage with his heavy tread, unlocking the doors and yelling to us to show
a leg. Promptly the passage was full of squalid shirt-clad figures rushing
for the bathroom, for there was only one tub full of water between us all in
the morning, and it was first come first served. When I arrived twenty tramps
had already washed their faces. I gave one glance at the black scum on top
of the water, and decided to go dirty for the day.

We hurried into our clothes, and then went to the dining-room to bolt our
breakfast. The bread was much worse than usual, because the military-minded
idiot of a Tramp Major had cut it into slices overnight, so that it was as
hard as ship's biscuit. But we were glad of our tea after the cold, restless
night. I do not know what tramps would do without tea, or rather the stuff
they miscall tea. It is their food, their medicine, their panacea for all e-
vils. Without the half gallon or so of it that they suck down a day, I truly
believe they could not face their existence.

After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical inspection, which is
a precaution against smallpox. It was three quarters of an hour before the
doctor arrived, and one had time now to look about him and see what manner of
men we were. It was an instructive sight. We stood shivering naked to the
waist in two long ranks in the passage. The filtered light, bluish and cold,
lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can imagine, unless he has seen
such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate curs we looked. Shock heads, hairy,
crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat feet, sagging muscles--every kind of mal-
formation and physical rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured,
as all tramps are under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures seen
there stay ineradicably in my mind. Old 'Daddy', aged seventy-four, with his
truss, and his red, watering eyes, a herring-gutted starveling with sparse
beard and sunken cheeks, looking like the corpse of Lazarus in some primitive
picture: an imbecile, wandering hither and thither with vague giggles, coyly
pleased because his trousers constantly slipped down and left him nude. But
few of us were greatly better than these; there were not ten decently built
men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in hospital.

This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the week-end. As soon
as the doctor had gone we were herded back to the dining-room, and its door
shut upon us. It was a lime-washed, stone-floored room, unspeakably dreary
with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison smell. The win-
dows were so high up that one could not look outside, and the sole ornament
was a set of Rules threatening dire penalties to any casual who misconducted
himself. We packed the room so tight that one could not move an elbow without
jostling somebody. Already, at eight o'clock in the morning, we were bored
with our captivity. There was nothing to talk about except the petty gossip
of the road, the good and bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties,
the iniquities of the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get
away from these subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have
nothing worthy to be called conversation, because emptiness of belly leaves no
speculation in their souls. The world is too much with them. Their next meal
is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of anything except the next
meal.

Two hours dragged by. Old Daddy, witless with age, sat silent, his back bent
like a bow and his inflamed eyes dripping slowly on to the floor. George, a
dirty old tramp notorious for the queer habit of sleeping in his hat, grumbled
about a parcel of tommy that he had lost on the road. Bill the moocher, the
best built man of us all, a Herculean sturdy beggar who smelt of beer even af-
ter twelve hours in the spike, told tales of mooching, of pints stood him in
the boozers, and of a parson who had peached to the police and got him seven
days. William and, Fred, two young, ex-fishermen from Norfolk, sang a sad song
about Unhappy Bella, who was betrayed and died in the snow. The imbecile drive-
lled, about an imaginary toff, who had once given him two hundred and fifty-
seven golden sovereigns. So the time passed, with dun talk and dull obscenities.
Everyone was smoking, except Scotty, whose tobacco had been seized, and he was
so miserable in his smokeless state that I stood him the makings of a cigarette.
We smoked furtively, hiding our cigarettes like schoolboys when we heard the
Tramp Major's step, for smoking though connived at, was officially forbidden.

Most of the tramps spent ten consecutive hours in this dreary room. It is hard
to imagine how they put up with it. I have come to think that boredom is the
worst of all a tramp's evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than
the constant feeling of being socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty
to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog
in a barrel. Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can en-
dure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their
poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless
bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is
to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them to
endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their lives is spent in
doing nothing, they suffer agonies from boredom.

I was much luckier than the others, because at ten o'clock the Tramp Major pick-
ed me out for the most coveted of all jobs in the spike, the job of helping in
the workhouse kitchen. There was not really any work to be done there, and I was
able to make off and hide in a shed used for storing potatoes, together with some
workhouse paupers who were skulking to avoid the Sunday-morning service. There
was a stove burning there, and comfortable packing cases to sit on, and back num-
bers of the Family Herald, and even a copy of Raffles from the workhouse library.
It was paradise after the spike.

Also, I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was one of the biggest
meals I have ever eaten. A tramp does not see such a meal twice in the year, in
the spike or out of it. The paupers told me that they always gorged to the burst-
ing point on Sundays, and went hungry six days of the week. When the meal was over
the cook set me to do the washing-up, and told me to throw away the food that re-
mained. The wastage was astonishing; great dishes of beef, and bucketfuls of bread
and vegetables, were pitched away like rubbish, and then defiled with tea-leaves.
I filled five dustbins to overflowing with good food. And while I did so my follow
tramps were sitting two hundred yards away in the spike, their bellies half filled
with the spike dinner of the everlasting bread and tea, and perhaps two cold boil-
ed potatoes each in honour of Sunday. It appeared that the food was thrown away
from deliberate policy, rather than that it should be given to the tramps.

At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the spike. The, boredom in
that crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even smoking had ceased, for
a tramp's only tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and, like a browsing beast,
he starves if he is long away from the pavement-pasture. To occupy the time I talk-
ed with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and
was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from
the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had
literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott's novels on all his wanderings.
He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under
hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day
and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.

We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend
fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the
police. He spoke of his own case--six months at the public charge for want of
three pounds' worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.

Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I
thought of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awa-
kened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been fam-
ished, along with the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been
thrown away rather than given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.

'They have to do it,' he said. 'If they made these places too pleasant you'd have
all the scum of the country flocking into them. It's only the bad food as keeps
all that scum away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that's all that's wrong
with them. You don't want to go encouraging of them. They're scum.'

I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeat-
ing:

'You don't want to have any pity on these tramps--scum, they are. You don't want
to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They're scum, just
scum.'

It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow
tramps. He has been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to
imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared
far away, in the pure aether of the middle classes.

The clock's hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We were too bored even
to talk now, the only sound was of oaths and reverberating yawns. One would force
his eyes away from the clock for what seemed an age, and then look back again to
see that the hands had advanced three minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold
mutton fat. Our bones ached because of it. The clock's hands stood at four, and
supper was not till six, and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visit-
ing moon.

At last six o'clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his assistant arrived with
supper. The yawning tramps brisked up like lions at feeding-time. But the meal was
a dismal disappointment. The bread, bad enough in the morning, was now positively
uneatable; it was so hard that even the strongest jaws could make little impression
on it. The older men went almost supperless, and not a man could finish his portion,
hungry though most of us were. When we had finished, the blankets were served out
immediately, and we were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly cells.

Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed forth to squabble
over the water in the bathroom, and bolt our ration of bread and tea. Our time in
the spike was up, but we could not go until the doctor had examined us again, for
the authorities have a terror of smallpox and its distribution by tramps. The doc-
tor kept us waiting two hours this time, and it was ten o'clock before we finally
escaped.

At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard. How bright everything
looked, and how sweet the winds did blow, after the gloomy, reeking spike! The
Tramp Major handed each man his bundle of confiscated possessions, and a hunk of
bread and cheese for midday dinner, and then we took the road, hastening to get
out of sight of the spike and its discipline, This was our interim of freedom. Af-
ter a day and two nights of wasted time we had eight hours or so to take our recre-
ation, to scour the roads for cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also,
we had to make our ten, fifteen, or it might be twenty miles to the next spike,
where the game would begin anew.

I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a respectable, downheart-
ed tramp who carried a spare pair of boots and visited all the Labour Exchanges.
Our late companions were scattering north, south, east and west, like bugs into a
mattress. Only the imbecile loitered at the spike gates, until the Tramp Major had
to chase him away.

Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were no cars passing,
the blossom covered the chestnut trees like great wax candles. Everything was so
quiet and smelt so clean, it was hard to realize that only a few minutes ago we
had been packed with that band of prisoners in a stench of drains and soft soap.
The others had all disappeared; we two seemed to be the only tramps on the road.

Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my arm. It was little
Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket.
He wore a friendly smile, like a man who is repaying an obligation.

'Here y'are, mate,' he said cordially. 'I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a
smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out
this morning. One good turn deserves another--here y'are.'

And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand.

First published in Adelphi, April 1931. Later reduced and reshaped to form
Chapters 27 and 35 of Down and Out in Paris and London
c


A HANGING



It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tin-
foil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside
the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal
cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except
for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were
squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the
condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a
man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache,
absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films.
Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows.
Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed
him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed
his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands al-
ways on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to
make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and
may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limp-
ly to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.

Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from
the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from
the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the
sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice.
"For God's sake hurry up, Francis," he said irritably. "The man ought to have been
dead by this time. Aren't you ready yet?"

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles,
waved his black hand. "Yes sir, yes sir," he bubbled. "All iss satisfactorily prepar-
ed. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed."

"Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can't get their breakfast till this job's o-
ver."

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with
their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm
and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magis-
trates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the pro-
cession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened--a
dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us
with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with
glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Aire-
dale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could
stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face.
Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

“Who let that bloody brute in here?” said the superintendent angrily. “Catch it,
someone!”

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and
gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eur-
asian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it
dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail walls. The
prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was
another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to
catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once
more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner
marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily,
with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his
muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his
feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped
him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a
healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw
the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.
This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body
were working –bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues form-
ing – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood
on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His
eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw,
reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together,
seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sud-
den snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and o-
vergrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed,
with planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling.
The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting be-
side his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Fran-
cis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed
him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman limbed up and
fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gal-
lows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It
was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”, not urgent and fearful like a pray-
er or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog
answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a
small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the
sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!
Ram!”

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The
steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram!” never falter-
ing for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the
ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed
number – fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone
grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lash-
ed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries – each cry another second of life;
the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abom-
inable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion
with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope
was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of
the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a cor-
ner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went
round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed
straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated,
slightly. “He’s all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gal-
lows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly.
He glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morn-
ing, thank God.”

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having
misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemn-
ed cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The con-
victs, under the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their break-
fast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with
buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the
hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an im-
pulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering
gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing
smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal
had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. Kindly take one
of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah,
two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.”

Several people laughed – at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass
passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished – flick! like that.
It iss not always so – oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go
beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!”

“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.

“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the
bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it
took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My
dear fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!” But
no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!”

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintend-
ent grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he
said quite genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.”

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his
legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We
all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily
funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The
dead man was a hundred yards away.



Bookshop Memories



When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don't work in one,
as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound
folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our
shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our
customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than
lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner
still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were com-
monest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere
but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a
book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read
such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she
doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does
remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of
pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of
old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you
worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which
he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but
we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch
them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. It
used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare
and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and
then would vanish never to return. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable
paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most
ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money
— stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. In a town like London
there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they
tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where
you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to
know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something
moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very often, when we were dealing with an obvious
paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and then put them back on the
shelves the moment he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books
away without paying for them; merely to order them was enough — it gave them, I suppose,
the illusion that they were spending real money.

Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand
typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors
are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women,
apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums.
We also sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the
Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them myself,
but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their horoscopes
had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are highly
attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good deal of
business in children's books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather
horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give
a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and
wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a
feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome
things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to see
the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the
Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase
from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with
rabbits’.

But our principal sideline was a lending library — the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’
library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those
libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for
twopence, remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless
booksellers generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books
stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by
demanding a deposit.

Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were
frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers
were a fair cross-section of London's reading public. It is therefore worth noting that
of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was — Priestley?
Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second
and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women,
but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful
spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels,
but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly
speaking, what one might call the average novel — the ordinary, good-bad, Gals-
worthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel — seems to exist only
for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories.
But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my
knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others
which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the
same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read
every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for
ever in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author's names, but he could tell by
merely glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.

In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one
thing that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped
out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope,
etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a
nineteenth-century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that's old!’ and shy away immediately. Yet
it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare.
Dickens is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the
Bible, he is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a
burglar and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was
found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that
is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another — the
publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years — is the unpopularity of
short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly
always starts by saying ‘I don't want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little
stories’, as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they
sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with
every story; they like to ‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the
first chapter. I believe, though, that the writers are more to blame here than the
readers. Most modern short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and
worthless, far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are popular
enough, vide D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular as his novels.

Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole — in spite of my employer's
kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop — no.

Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able
to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it
is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know
anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don't. You can get their measure
by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don't see
an ad. for Boswell's Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the
Floss by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized
beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller
out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work
are very long — I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a seventy-hour
week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books — and it is an unheal-
thy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the
windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more
and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is
the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while
I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that
gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them
and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the
sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old.
Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country
auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in
that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd
volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For
casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to
go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a
back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I
stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring
and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book
that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying
paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac
customers and dead bluebottles.



Shooting an Elephant



In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in
my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divis-
ional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European
feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman
went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress.
As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to
do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (ano-
ther Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This hap-
pened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me
everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on
my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thou-
sands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand
on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind
that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it
the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all
against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more
bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of
Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the
lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the
men who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense
of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I
had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman
in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know
that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.
All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage
against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one
part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something
clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another
part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a
Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism;
ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny
incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real
nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one
morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on
the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and
do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old 44 Winchester
and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in
terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s doings.
It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must.” It had been
chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but on the
previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could
manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong
direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had
suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite
helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and
raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish
van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and
inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter
where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid
bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that
it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the
people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite
information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough
at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some
of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had
gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made
up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance
away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this instant!” and an
old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing
away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and
exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I
rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black
Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people
said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him
with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the
rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a
couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply
twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared
and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that
the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of
the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a
rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to
borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with
fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile
some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below,
only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of
the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were
all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different
now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an
English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no
intention of shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if
necessary – and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the
hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing
army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts,
there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards
across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The
elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not
the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating
them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty
that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought
not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the
elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his
attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly
about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to
shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did
not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense
crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long
distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish
clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant
was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to
perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was
momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the
elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel
their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as
I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the
futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun,
standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece;
but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow
faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his
own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the
conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall
spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to
do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had
got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle.
A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind
and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people
marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was
impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the
East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed
to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing
animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems
worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be considered.
Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the
value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some
experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the
elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you
left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say,
twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if
he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But
also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the
ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and
I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even
then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces
behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary
sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in
front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind
was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught,
trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that
happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on
the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as
of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats.
They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German
thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would
shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as
the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed
several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when
a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In
that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get
there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor
fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken,
immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without
knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time – it might have been five
seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous
senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years
old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed
with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head
drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the
agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But
in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he
seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree.
He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me,
with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the
elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically
with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His
mouth was wide open – I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a
long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two
remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled
out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the
shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very
slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could
damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed
dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die,
and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot
after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The
tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him
half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dash and baskets even before I left, and I was
told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant.
The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I
had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its
owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I
was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a
coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards
I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it
gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of
the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Published by New Writing, 2, Autumn 1936



Down the Mine



Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one
realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and
the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon
coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance
only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders
nearly everything that is not grimy is supported. For this reason the actual
process by which coal is extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance
and are willing to take the trouble.

When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal face when
the ‘fillers’ are at work. This is not easy, because when the mine is working
visitors are a nuisance and are not encouraged, but if you go at any other time, it
is possible to come away with a totally wrong impression. On a Sunday, for
instance, a mine seems almost peaceful. The time to go there is when the machines
are roaring and the air is black with coal dust, and when you can actually see what
the miners have to do. At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate like
my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are if there
— heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped
space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there except the
feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the
clouds of coal dust.

When you have finally got there — and getting there is a job in itself: I will explain
that in a moment — you crawl through the last line of pit props and see opposite
you a shiny black wall three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is
the smooth ceiling made by the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is
the rock again, so that the gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal
itself, probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all,
overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the
conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog
of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side of
you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five yards, driving
their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left
shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber belt a
couple of feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a
glittering river of coal races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying away
several tons of coal every minute. It bears it off to some place in the main roads
where it is shot into tubs holding half a tun, and thence dragged to the cages and
hoisted to the outer air.

It is impossible to watch the ‘fillers’ at work without feelling a pang of envy for
their toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost superhuman job by the
standard of an ordinary person. For they are not only shifting monstrous quantities
of coal, they are also doing it in a position that doubles or trebles the work.
They have got to remain kneeling all the while — they could hardly rise from their
knees without hitting the ceiling — and you can easily see by trying it what a
tremendous effort this means. Shovelling is comparatively easy when you are
standing up, because you can use your knee and thigh to drive the shovel along;
kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown upon your arm and belly muscles.
And the other conditions do not exactly make things easier. There is the heat — it
varies, but in some mines it is suffocating — and the coal dust that stuffs up your
throat and nostrils and collects along your eyelids, and the unending rattle of the
conveyor belt, which in that confined space is rather like the rattle of a machine
gun. But the fillers look and work as though they were made of iron. They really do
look like iron hammered iron statues — under the smooth coat of coal dust which
clings to them from head to foot. It is only when you see miners down the mine and
naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men
are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble
bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced
buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the
hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the
hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads. You can hardly tell by the look
of them whether they are young or old. They may be any age up to sixty or even
sixty-five, but when they are black and naked they all look alike. No one could do
their work who had not a young man's body, and a figure fit for a guardsman at
that, just a few pounds of extra flesh on the waist-line, and the constant bending
would be impossible. You can never forget that spectacle once you have seen it —
the line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their, huge
shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed. They are on the job for
seven and a half hours, theoretically without a break, for there is no time ‘off’.
Actually they, snatch a quarter of an hour or so at some time during the shift to
eat the food they have brought with them, usually a hunk of bread and dripping and
a bottle of cold tea. The first time I was watching the ‘fillers’ at work I put my
hand upon some dreadful slimy thing among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of
tobacco. Nearly all the miners chew tobacco, which is said to be good against
thirst.

Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get much grasp of
the processes that are going on round you. This is chiefly because the mere effort
of getting from place to place; makes it difficult to notice anything else, In some
ways it is even disappointing, or at least is unlike what you have, expected. You
get into the cage, which is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two
or three times as long. It holds ten men, but they pack it like pilchards in a tin,
and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The steel door shuts upon you, and
somebody working the winding gear above drops you into the void. You have the usual
momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation in the cars, but not much
sensation of movement till you get near the bottom, when the cage slows down so
abruptly that you could swear it is going upwards again. In the middle of the run
the cage probably touches sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it
touches even more. When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four hundred
yards underground. That is to say you have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of
you; hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints,
roots of growing things, green grass and cows grazing on it — all this suspended
over your head and held back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg.
But because of the speed at which the cage has brought you down, and the complete
blackness through which you have travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down
than you would at the bottom of the Piccadilly tube.

What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal distances that
have to be travelled underground. Before I had been down a mine I had vaguely
imagined the miner stepping out of the cage and getting to work on a ledge of coal
a few yards away. I had not realized that before he even gets to work he may have
had to creep along passages as long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the
beginning, of course, a mine shaft is sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as
that seam is worked out and fresh seams are followed up, the workings get further
and further from the pit bottom. If it is a mile from the pit bottom to the coal
face, that is probably an average distance; three miles is a fairly normal one;
there are even said to be a few mines where it is as much as five miles. But these
distances bear no relation to distances above ground. For in all that mile or three
miles as it may be, there is hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many
places even there, where a man can stand upright.

You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred yards. You
start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight or ten feet wide and
about five high, with the walls built up with slabs of shale, like the stone walls
in Derbyshire. Every yard or two there are wooden props holding up the beams and
girders; some of the girders have buckled into fantastic curves under which you
have to duck. Usually it is bad going underfoot — thick dust or jagged chunks of
shale, and in some mines where there is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also
there is the track for the coal tubs, like a miniature railway track with sleepers
a foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk on. Everything is grey with shale
dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which seems to be the same in all mines. You see
mysterious machines of which you never learn the purpose, and bundles of tools
slung together on wires, and sometimes mice darting away from the beam of the
lamps. They are surprisingly common, especially in mines where there are or have
been horses. It would be interesting to know how they got there in the first place;
possibly by falling down the shaft — for they say a mouse can fall any distance
uninjured, owing to its surface area being so large relative to its weight. You
press yourself against the wall to make way for lines of tubs jolting slowly
towards the shaft, drawn by an endless steel cable operated from the surface. You
creep through sacking curtains and thick wooden doors which, when they are opened,
let out fierce blasts of air. These doors are an important part of the ventilation
system. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by means of fans, and the
fresh air enters the other of its own accord. But if left to itself the air will
take the shortest way round, leaving the deeper workings unventilated; so all the
short cuts have to be partitioned off.

At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that soon wears
off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when the roof falls to four
feet or less it is a tough job for anybody except a dwarf or a child. You not only
have to bend double, you have also got to keep your head up all the while so as to
see the beams and girders and dodge them when they come. You have, thehefore, a
constant crick in the neck, but this is nothing to the pain in your knees and
thighs. After half a mile it becomes (I am not exaggerating) an unbearable agony.
You begin to wonder whether you will ever get to the end — still more, how on earth
you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and slower. You come to a stretch
of a couple of hundred yards where it is all exceptionally low and you have to work
yourself along in a squatting position. Then suddenly the roof opens out to a
mysterious height — scene of and old fall of rock, probably — and for twenty whole
yards you can stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this there is
another low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams which you
have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a relief after the
squatting business. But when you come to the end of the beams and try to get up
again, you find that your knees have temporarily struck work and refuse to lift
you. You call a halt, ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a
minute or two. Your guide (a miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles are
not the same as his. ‘Only another four hundred yards,’ he says encouragingly; you
feel that he might as well say another four hundred miles. But finally you do
somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have gone a mile and taken the best part
of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than twenty minutes. Having got
there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your strength back for several
minutes before you can even watch the work in progress with any kind of
intelligence.

Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired out but
because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You get through the low
places at the speed of a tortoise, and you have no shame now about calling a halt
when your knees give way. Even the lamp you are carrying becomes a nuisance and
probably when you stumble you drop it; whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes
out. Ducking the beams becomes more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget
to duck. You try walking head down as the miners do, and then you bang your
backbone. Even the miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why
in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most of the miners
have what they call ‘buttons down the back’ — that is, a permanent scab on each
vertebra. When the track is down hill the miners sometimes fit their clogs, which
are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and slide down. In mines where the
‘travelling’ is very bad all the miners carry sticks about two and a half feet
long, hollowed out below the handle. In normal places you keep your hand on top of
the stick and in the low places you slide your hand down into the hollow. These
sticks are a great help, and the wooden crash-helmets — a comparatively recent
invention — are a godsend. They look like a French or Italian steel helmet, but
they are made of some kind of pith and very light, and so strong, that you can take
a violent blow on the head without feeling it. When finally you get back to the
surface you have been perhaps three hours underground and travelled two miles, and
you, are more exhausted than you would be by a twenty-five-mile walk above ground.
For a week afterwards your thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a
difficult feat; you have to work your way down in a peculiar sidelong manner,
without bending the knees. Your miner friends notice the stiffness of your walk and
chaff you about it. (‘How'd ta like to work down pit, eh?’ etc.) Yet even a miner
who has been long away front work — from illness, for instance — when he comes back
to the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.

It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been down an
old-fashioned pit (most of the pits in England are old-fashioned) and actually gone
as far as the coal face, is likely to say so. But what I want to emphasize is this.
Here is this frightful business of crawling to and fro, which to any normal person
is a hard day's work in itself; and it is not part of the miner's work at all, it
is merely an extra, like the City man's daily ride in the Tube. The miner does that
journey to and fro, and sandwiched in between there are seven and a half hours of
savage work. I have never travelled much more than a mile to the coal face; but
often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other than coal-miners
would never get there at all. This is the kind of point that one is always liable
to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you think of depth, heat, darkness,
blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you don't think, necessarily, of those
miles of creeping to and fro. There is the question of time, also. A miner's
working shift of seven and a half hours does not sound very long, but one has got
to add on to it at least an hour a day for ‘travelling’, more often two hours and
sometimes three. Of course, the ‘travelling’ is not technically work and the miner
is not paid for it; but it is as like work as makes no difference. It is easy to
say that miners don't mind all this. Certainly, it is not the same for them as it
would be for you or me. They have done it since childhood, they have the right
muscles hardened, and they can move to and fro underground with a startling and
rather horrible agility. A miner puts his head down and runs, with a long swinging
stride, through places where I can only stagger. At the workings you see them on
all fours, skipping round the pit props almost like dogs. But it is quite a mistake
to think that they enjoy it. I have talked about this to scores of miners and they
all admit that the ‘travelling’ is hard work; in any case when you hear them
discussing a pit among themselves the ‘travelling’ is always one of the things they
discuss. It is said that a shift always returns from work faster than it goes;
nevertheless the miners all say that it is the coming away after a hard day's work,
that is especially irksome. It is part of their work and they are equal to it, but
certainly it is an effort. It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing a smallish
mountain before and after your day's work.

When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get some grasp of the
processes that are going on underground. (I ought to say, by the way, that I know
nothing whatever about the technical side of mining: I am merely describing what I
have seen.) Coal lies in thin seams between enormous layers of rock, so that
essentially the process of getting it out is like scooping the central layer from a
Neapolitan ice. In the old days the miners used to cut straight into the coal with
pick and crowbar — a very slow job because coal, when lying in its virgin state, is
almost as hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary work is done by an
electrically-driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely tough and
powerful band-saw, running horizontally instead of vertically, with teeth a couple
of inches long and half an inch or an inch thick. It can move backwards or forwards
on its own power, and the men operating it can rotate it this way or that.
Incidentally it makes one of the most awful noises I have ever heard, and sends
forth clouds of coal dust which make it impossible to see more than two to three
feet and almost impossible to breathe. The machine travels along the coal face
cutting into the base of the coal and undermining it to the depth of five feet or
five feet and a half; after this it is comparatively easy to extract the coal to
the depth to which it has been undermined. Where it is ‘difficult getting’,
however, it has also to be loosened with explosives. A man with an electric drill,
like a rather small version of the drills used in street-mending, bores holes at
intervals in the coal, inserts blasting powder, plugs it with clay, goes round the
corner if there is one handy (he is supposed to retire to twenty-five yards
distance) and touches off the charge with an electric current. This is not intended
to bring the coal out, only to loosen it. Occasionally, of course, the charge is
too powerful, and then it not only brings the coal out but brings the roof down as
well.

After the blasting has been done the ‘fillers’ can tumble the coal out, break it up
and shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It comes out first in monstrous boulders
which may weigh anything up to twenty tons. The conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs,
and the tubs are shoved into the main road and hitched on to an endlessly revolving
steel cable which drags them to the cage. Then they are hoisted, and at the surface
the coal is sorted by being run over screens, and if necessary is washed as well.
As far as possible the ‘dirt’ — the shale, that is — is used for making the roads
below. All what cannot be used is sent to the surface and dumped; hence the
monstrous ‘dirt-heaps’, like hideous grey mountains, which are the characteristic
scenery of the coal areas. When the coal has been extracted to the depth to which
the machine has cut, the coal face has advanced by five feet. Fresh props are put
in to hold up the newly exposed roof, and during the next shift the conveyor belt
is taken to pieces, moved five feet forward and re-assembled. As far as possible
the three operations of cutting, blasting and extraction are done in three separate
shifts, the cutting in the afternoon, the blasting at night (there is a law, not
always kept, that forbids its being done when other men are working near by), and
the ‘filling’ in the morning shift, which lasts from six in the morning until half
past one.

Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only watch it for a
short time, and it is not until you begin making a few calculations that you
realize what a stupendous task the ‘fillers’ are performing. Normally each o man
has to clear a space four or five yards wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to
the depth of five feet, so that if the seam of coal is three or four feet high,
each man has to cut out, break up and load on to the belt something between seven
and twelve cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking a cubic yard as weighing
twenty-seven hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a speed approaching
two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel work to be able
to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two
tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is
tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don't have to work kneeling down, a
thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every
breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner's
job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze
or to win the Grand National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never
shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to.
At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a
tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I
become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes
people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can
quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably majority of
people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary
counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to
crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use
of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war
breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on
working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal.
Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking and shovelling have got to
continue without a pause, or at any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks
at the most. In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may
denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the poets
may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole
we are not aware of it; we all know that we ‘must have coal’, but we seldom or
never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my
comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the
coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors
in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the
stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I
connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just ‘coal’ —
something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from
nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could
quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember
that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal.
Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit
world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the
flower.

It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There
are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground,
with the harness round their waists, and a chain that passed between their legs,
crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even
when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without
pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than
deprive ourselves of coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to
forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us
alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than anyone else, perhaps, the
miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so
exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote
from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it
as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch
coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an
‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at
least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out
that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times
Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of
Marxism for Infants — all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to
poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal
dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.



North And South



As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice
much difference until you are beyond Birmingham. In Coventry you might as well be
in Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham is not unlike Norwich Market, and
between all the towns of the Midlands there stretches a villa-civilization
indistinguishable from that of the South. It is only when you get a little further
north, to the pottery towns and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real
ugliness of industrialism—an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are
obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.

A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless.
It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant's dust-bin.
On the outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your
horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud
and ashes and over-head the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across
miles of country. Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the
red rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue
flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of expiring and always spring out
again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does ultimately, only an evil brown grass
grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface. One in the slums of Wigan, used
as a playground, looks like a choppy sea suddenly frozen; 'the flock mattress', it
is called locally. Even centuries hence when the plough drives over the places
where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still be
distinguishable from an aeroplane.

I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the
lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were,
between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their
plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud,
criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the
slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the 'flashes'—pools of stagnant water that
had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was
horribly cold. The 'flashes' were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the
bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It
seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except
smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. But even Wigan is beautiful compared
with Sheffield. Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest
town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in
everything, very likely do make that claim for it. It has a population of half a
million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian
village of five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling
sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that runs
through the town is-usually bright yellow with some chemical or other. Once I
halted in the street and counted the factory chimneys I could see; there were
thirty-three of them, but there would have been far more if the air had not been
obscured by smoke. One scene especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch of
waste ground (somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a squalor that
would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered with
newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four-roomed
houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory
chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a
railway embankment made of the slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of
waste ground, a cubical building of red and yellow brick, with the sign 'Thomas
Grocock, Haulage Contractor'.

At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the blackness of
everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister magnificence.
Sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like
circular saws, squeeze themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry
chimneys. Through the open doors of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being
hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers
and the scream of the iron under the blow. The pottery towns are almost equally
ugly in a pettier way. Right in among the rows of tiny blackened houses, part of
the street as it were, are the 'pot banks'—conical brick chimneys like gigantic
burgundy bottles buried in the soil and belching their smoke almost in your face.
You come upon monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and almost as deep,
with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the other
workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the cliff
with their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather, and even the snow was black.
The best thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they are fairly small and
stop abruptly. Less than ten miles away you can stand in un-defiled country, on the
almost naked hills, and the pottery towns are only a smudge in the distance.

When you contemplate such ugliness as this, there are two questions that strike
you. First, is it inevitable? Secondly, does it matter?

I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably ugly about
industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of its own nature to be
ugly, any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a cathedral. It all depends on the
architectural tradition of the period. The industrial towns of the North are ugly
because they happen to have been built at a time when modern methods of
steel-construction and smoke-abatement were unknown, and when everyone was too busy
making money to think about anything else. They go on being ugly largely because
the Northerners have got used to that kind of thing and do not notice it. Many of
the people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they smelled the air along the Cornish
cliffs, would probably declare that it had no taste in it. But since the war,
industry has tended to shift southward and in doing so has grown almost comely. The
typical post-war factory is not a gaunt barrack or an awful chaos of blackness and
belching chimneys; it is a glittering white structure of concrete, glass, and
steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips. Look at the factories you pass
as you travel out of London on the G.W.R.; they may not be aesthetic triumphs but
certainly they are not ugly in the same way as the Sheffield gasworks. But in any
case, though the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about it and
the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it is centrally
important. And perhaps it is not even desirable, industrialism being what it is,
that it should learn to disguise itself as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has
truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not
like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods. Moreover, even in the worst of the
industrial towns one sees a great deal that is not ugly in the narrow aesthetic
sense. A belching chimney or a stinking slum is repulsive chiefly because it
implies warped lives and ailing children. Look at it from a purely aesthetic
standpoint and it may, have a certain macabre appeal. I find that anything
outrageously strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I abominate it. The
landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the
qualities of nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was
obliged to write a novel about them to get rid of them. (In all novels about the
East the scenery is the real subject-matter.) It would probably be quite easy to
extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did, from the blackness of the
industrial towns; one can easily imagine Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem
about a slag-heap. But the beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters. Its
real evil lies far deeper and is quite uneradicable. It is important to remember
this, because there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless
so long as it is clean and orderly.

But when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the
unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of
certain real differences which do exist, but still more because of the North-South
antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a long time past. There exists in
England a curious cult of Northernness, sort of Northern snobbishness. A
Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you
as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North
that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only
'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by
rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour',
plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate, and
lazy—that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate
for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing
among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the
spirit of a barbarian out for loot. And feelings of this kind, which are the result
of tradition, are not affected by visible facts. Just as an Englishman five feet
four inches high and twenty-nine inches round the chest feels that as an Englishman
he is the physical superior of Carnera (Carnera being a Dago), so also with the
Northerner and the Southerner. I remember a weedy little Yorkshireman, who would
almost certainly have run away if a fox-terrier had snapped at him, telling me that
in the South of England he felt 'like a wild invader'. But the cult is often
adopted by people who are not by birth Northerners themselves. A year or two ago a
friend of mine, brought up in the South but now living in the North, was driving me
through Suffolk in a car. We passed through a rather beautiful village. He glanced
disapprovingly at the cottages and said:

'Of course most of the villages in Yorkshire are hideous; but the Yorkshiremen are
splendid chaps. Down here it's just the other way about—beautiful villages and
rotten people. All the people in those cottages there are worthless, absolutely
worthless.'

I could not help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody in that village. No,
he did not know them; but because this was East Anglia they were obviously
worthless. Another friend of mine, again a Southerner by birth, loses no
opportunity of praising the North to the detriment of the South. Here is an extract
from one of his letters to me:

I am in Clitheroe, Lancs...I think running water is much more attractive in moor
and mountain country than in the fat and sluggish South. 'The smug and silver
Trent,' Shakespeare says; and the South-er the smugger, I say.

Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only are you and I
and everyone else in the South of England written off as 'fat and sluggish', but
even water when it gets north of a certain latitude, ceases to be H2O and becomes
something mystically superior. But the interest of this passage is that its writer
is an extremely intelligent man of 'advanced' opinions who would have nothing but
con-tempt for nationalism in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as
'One Britisher is worth three foreigners', and he would repudiate it with horror.
But when it is a question of North versus South, he is quite ready to generalize.
All nationalistic distinctions—all claims to be better than somebody else because
you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect—are entirely
spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them. There is no
doubt about the Englishman's inbred conviction that those who live to the south of
him are his inferiors; even our foreign policy is governed by it to some extent. I
think, therefore, that it is worth pointing out when and why it came into being.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and,
noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the
pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The
histories I was given when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining
in the naivest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made
them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the
superior energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been
current for at least a hundred years. 'Better is it for us', writes a Quarterly
Reviewer of 1827, 'to be condemned to labour for our country's good than to
luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices.' 'Olives, vines, and vices' sums up the
normal English attitude towards the Latin races. In the mythology of Carlyle,
Creasey, etc., the Northerner ('Teutonic', later 'Nordic') is pictured as a hefty,
vigorous chap with blond moustaches and pure morals, while the Southerner is sly,
cowardly, and licentious. This theory was never pushed to its logical end, which
would have meant assuming that the finest people in the world were the Eskimos, but
it did involve admitting that the people who lived to the north of us were superior
to ourselves. Hence, partly, the cult of Scotland and of Scotch things which has so
deeply marked English life during the past fifty years. But it was the
industrialization of the North that gave the North-South antithesis its peculiar
slant. Until comparatively recently the northern part of England was the backward
and feudal part, and such industry as existed was concentrated in London and the
South-East. In the Civil War for instance, roughly speaking a war of money versus
feudalism, the North and West were for the King and the South and East for the
Parliament. But with the increasing use of coal industry passed to the North, and
there grew up a new type of man, the self-made Northern business man—the Mr
Rouncewell and Mr Bounderby of Dickens. The Northern business man, with his hateful
'get on or get out' philosophy, was the dominant figure of the nineteenth century,
and as a sort of tyrannical corpse he rules us still. This is the type edified by
Arnold Bennett—the type who starts off with half a crown and ends up with fifty
thousand pounds, and whose chief pride is to be an even greater boor after he has
made his money than before. On analysis his sole virtue turns out to be a talent
for making money. We were bidden to admire him because though he might be
narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant, grasping, and uncouth, he had 'grit', he 'got on';
in other words, he knew how to make money.

This kind of cant is nowadays a pure anachronism, for the Northern business man is
no longer prosperous. But traditions are not killed by facts, and the tradition of
Northern' grit' lingers. It is still dimly felt that a Northerner will 'get on',
i.e. make money, where a Southerner will fail. At the back of the mind of every
Yorkshireman and every Scotchman who comes to London is a sort of Dick Whittington
picture of himself as the boy who starts off by selling newspapers and ends up as
Lord Mayor. And that, really, is at the bottom of his bumptiousness. But where one
can make a great mistake is in imagining that this feeling extends to the genuine
working class. When I first went to Yorkshire, some years ago, I imagined that I
was going to a country of boors. I was used to the London Yorkshireman with his
interminable harangues and his pride in the sup-posed raciness of his dialect ('"A
stitch in time saves nine", as we say in the West Riding'), and I expected to meet
with a good deal of rudeness. But I met with nothing of the kind, and least of all
among the miners. Indeed the Lancashire and Yorkshire miners treated me with a
kindness and courtesy that were even embarrassing; for if there is one type of man
to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner. Certainly no one showed any
sign of despising me for coming from a different part of the country. This has its
importance when one remembers that the English regional snobberies are nationalism
in miniature; for it suggests that place-snobbery is not a working-class
characteristic.

There is nevertheless a real difference between North and South, and there is at
least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as one enormous Brighton
inhabited by lounge-lizards. For climatic reasons the parasitic dividend-drawing
class tend to settle in the South. In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably
go for months on end without once hearing an 'educated' accent, whereas there can
hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without
hitting the niece of a bishop. Consequently, with no petty gentry to set the pace,
the bourgeoisification of the working class, though it is taking place in the
North, is taking place more slowly. All the Northern accents, for instance, persist
strongly, while the Southern ones are collapsing before the movies and the B.B.C.
Hence your 'educated' accent stamps you rather as a foreigner than as a chunk of
the petty gentry; and this is an immense advantage, for it makes it much easier to
get into contact with the working class.

But is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class? I shall have
to discuss that later; I will only say here that I do not think it is possible. But
undoubtedly it is easier in the North than it would be in the South to meet
working-class people on approximately equal terms. It is fairly easy to live in a
miner's house and be accepted as one of the family; with, say, a farm labourer in
the Southern counties it probably would be impossible. I have seen just enough of
the working class to avoid idealizing them, but I do know that you can learn a
great deal in a working-class home, if only you can get there. The essential point
is that your middle-class ideals and prejudices are tested by contact with others
which are not necessarily better but are certainly different.

Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A working-class family
hangs together as a middle-class one does, but the relationship is far less
tyrannical. A working man has not that deadly weight of family prestige hanging
round his neck like a millstone. I have pointed out earlier that a middle-class
person goes utterly to pieces under the influence of poverty; and this is generally
due to the behaviour of his family—to the fact that he has scores of relations
nagging and badgering him night and day for failing to 'get on'. The fact that the
working class know how to combine and the middle class don't is probably due to
their different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot have an effective trade
union of middle-class workers, be-cause in times of strikes almost every
middle-class wife would be egging her husband on to blackleg and get the other
fellow's job. Another working-class characteristic, disconcerting at first, is
their plain-spokenness towards anyone they regard as an equal. If you offer a
working man something he doesn't want, he tells you that he doesn't want it; a
middle-class person would accept it to avoid giving offence. And again, take the
working-class attitude towards 'education'. How different it is from ours, and how
immensely sounder! Working people often have a vague reverence for learning in
others, but where 'education' touches their own lives they see through it and
reject it by a healthy instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite
imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and
set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job'
should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one
working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave
school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish
like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school
till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a
great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his
parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing
his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be
caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel
Butler's Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked
back on his public school and university education and found it a 'sickly,
debilitating debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and
debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.

In a working-class home—I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of
comparatively prosperous homes—you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere
which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he
is in steady work and drawing good wages—an 'if which gets bigger and bigger—has a
better chance of being happy than an 'educated' man. His home life seems to fall
more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the
peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class
interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows
in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in
shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing
finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy
with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag
mat—it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but
sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though not in so
many as before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one question—whether
Father is in work. But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class
family sitting round the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs only to
our own moment of time and could not belong either to the future or the past. Skip
forward two hundred years into the Utopian future, and the scene is totally
different. Hardly one of the things I have imagined will still be there. In that
age when there is no manual labour and everyone is 'educated', it is hardly likely
that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes to sit in
shirt-sleeves and says 'Ah wur coomin' oop street'. And there won't be a coal fire
in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of
rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there
will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a
world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of
the earth. Dogs, too, will have been suppressed on grounds of hygiene. And there
won't be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way. But
move backwards into the Middle Ages and you are in a world almost equally foreign.
A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes in your face because there is no
chimney, mouldy bread, 'Poor John', lice, scurvy, a yearly child-birth and a yearly
child-death, and the priest terrifying you with tales of Hell.

Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, nor the radio, nor
the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels whi

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