Free Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

didn’t have them, but Mother felt safer behind them. All along, she said, she’d had a dreadful feeling that Jack the Ripper was hiding in Lower Binfield. The Crippencase–but that was years later, when I was almost grown up–upset her badly. I can hear her voice now. ‘Cutting his poor wife up and burying her in the coal cellar! The idea! What I’d do to that man if I got hold of him!’ And curiously enough, when she thought of the dreadful wickedness of that little American doctor who dismembered his wife (and made a very neat job of it by taking all the bones out and chucking the head into the sea, if I remember rightly) the tears actually came into her eyes.
    But what she mostly read on weekdays was Hilda’s Home Companion . In those days it was part of the regular furnishing of any home like ours, and as a matter of fact it still exists, though it’s been a bit crowded out by the more streamlined women’s papers that have come up since the war. I had a look at a copy only the other day. It’s changed, but less than most things. There are still the same enormous serial stories that go on for six months (and it all comes right in the end with orange blossoms to follow), and the same Household Hints, and the same ads. for sewing machines and remedies for bad legs. It’s chiefly the print and the illustrations that have changed. In those days the heroine had to look like an egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder. Mother was a slow reader and believed in getting her threepennyworth out of Hilda’s Home Companion . Sitting in the old yellow armchair beside the hearth, with her feet on the iron fender and the little pot of strong tea stewing on the hob, she’d work her way steadily from cover to cover, right through the serial, the two short stories, the Household Hints, the ads. for Zam-Buk and the answers to correspondents. Hilda’s Home Companion generally lasted her the week out, and some weeks she didn’t even finish it. Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the buzzing of the bluebottles on summer afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at about a quarter to six she’d wake up with a tremendous start,glance at the clock on the mantelpiece and then get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never late.
    In those days–till 1909, to be exact–Father could still afford an errand boy, and he used to leave the shop to him and come into tea with the backs of his hands all mealy. Then Mother would stop cutting slices of bread for a moment and say, ‘If you’ll give us grace, Father’, and Father, while we all bent our heads on our chests, would mumble reverently, ‘Fwat we bout to receive–Lord make us truly thankful–Amen.’ Later on, when Joe was a bit older, it would be ‘ You give us grace today, Joe’, and Joe would pipe it out. Mother never said grace: it had to be someone of the male sex.
    There were always bluebottles buzzing on summer afternoons. Ours wasn’t a sanitary house, precious few houses in Lower Binfield were. I suppose the town must have contained five hundred houses and there certainly can’t have been more than ten with bathrooms or fifty with what we should now describe as a W C . In summer our backyard always smelt of dustbins. And all houses had insects in them. We had blackbeetles in the wainscoting and crickets somewhere behind the kitchen range, besides, of course, the meal-worms in the shop. In those days even a house-proud woman like Mother didn’t see anything to object to in blackbeetles. They were as much a part of the kitchen as the dresser or the rolling-pin. But there were insects and insects. The houses in the bad street behind the brewery, where Katie Simmons lived, were overrun by bugs. Mother or any of the shopkeepers’ wives would have died of shame if they’d had bugs in the house. In fact it was considered proper to say that you didn’t even know a bug by sight.
    The great blue flies used to come sailing into the