Coming Up for Air

by George Orwell

At perhaps one house in fifty some anti-social type who’ll probably end in the workhouse has painted his front door blue instead of green.

nine-tenths of the people in Ellesmere Road are under the impression that they own their houses. Ellesmere Road, and the whole quarter surrounding it, until you get to the High Street, is part of a huge racket called the Hesperides Estate, the property of the Cheerful Credit Building Society. Building societies are probably the cleverest racket of modern times. My own line, insurance, is a swindle, I admit, but it’s an open swindle with the cards on the table. But the beauty of the building society swindles is that your victims think you’re doing them a kindness. You wallop them, and they lick your hand.

We’re all bought, and what’s more we’re bought with our own money.

It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of.

They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen that ever lived, and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.

Now all the ponds are drained, and when the streams aren’t poisoned with chemicals from factories, they’re full of rusty tins and motor-bike tyres.

Nobody believed the atrocity stories and the gallant little Belgium stuff any longer. The soldiers thought the Germans were good fellows and hated the French like poison. Every junior officer looked on the General Staff as mental defectives.

That feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, the next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird That, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.

I’m neither a go- getter nor a down-and-out, and I’m by nature incapable of being either.

He was so shaky that when he was taking his overcoat off in the hall, he had a sort of spasm and a hank of butter-muslin dropped out of his trouser-leg. I managed to shove it back to him before the women saw. Butter-muslin is what they make the ectoplasm with, so I’m told. I suppose he was going on to another seance afterwards. You don’t get manifestations for eighteen pence.

I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn’t at all the kind of vision that can be talked about. What he’s saying is merely that Hitler’s after us and we must all get together and have a good hate. Doesn’t go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what he’s seeing is something quite different. It’s a picture of himself smashing people’s faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course.

perhaps if we smash in enough faces, they won’t smash ours. Gang up, choose your Leader. Hitler’s black and Stalin’s white. But it might just as well be the other way about, because in the little chap’s mind both Hitler and Stalin are the same. Both mean spanners and smashed faces.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

But what about the new kind of men from eastern Europe, the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets? They’re on our track. Not long before they catch up with us. No Marquess of Queensbury rules for those boys.

Why don’t people, instead of the idiocies they do spend their time on, just walk round LOOKING at things?