Free Coming Up for Air by George Orwell Page A

larder and sit longingly on the wire covers over the meat. ‘Dratthe flies!’ people used to say, but the flies were an act of God and apart from meat-covers and fly-papers you couldn’t do much about them. I said a little while back that the first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin, but the smell of dustbins is also a pretty early memory. When I think of Mother’s kitchen, with the stone floor and the beetle-traps and the steel fender and the blackleaded range, I always seem to hear the bluebottles buzzing and smell the dustbin, and also old Nailer, who carried a pretty powerful smell of dog. And God knows there are worse smells and sounds. Which would you sooner listen to, a bluebottle or a bombing plane?
    III
    Joe started going to Walton Grammar School two years before I did. Neither of us went there till we were nine. It meant a four-mile bike ride morning and evening, and Mother was scared of allowing us among the traffic, which by that time included a very few motor-cars.
    For several years we went to the dame-school kept by old Mrs Hewlett. Most of the shopkeepers’ children went there, to save them from the shame and come-down of going to the board school, though everyone knew that Mother Howlett was an old impostor and worse than useless as a teacher. She was over seventy, she was very deaf, she could hardly see through her spectacles, and all she owned in the way of equipment was a cane, a blackboard, a few dog-eared grammar books and a couple of dozen smelly slates. She could just manage the girls, but the boys simply laughed at her and played truant as often as they felt like it. Once there was a frightful scandal because a boy put his hand up a girl’s dress, a thing I didn’t understand at the time. Mother Hewlett succeeded inhushing it up. When you did something particularly bad her formula was ‘I’ll tell your father’, and on very rare occasions she did so. But we were quite sharp enough to see that she daren’t do it too often, and even when she let out at you with the cane she was so old and clumsy that it was easy to dodge.
    Joe was only eight when he got in with a tough gang of boys who called themselves the Black Hand. The leader was Sid Lovegrove, the saddler’s younger son, who was about thirteen, and there were two other shopkeepers’ sons, an errand boy from the brewery and two farm lads who sometimes managed to cut work and go off with the gang for a couple of hours. The farm lads were great lumps bursting out of corduroy breeches, with very broad accents and rather looked down on by the rest of the gang, but they were tolerated because they knew twice as much about animals as any of the others. One of them, nicknamed Ginger, would even catch a rabbit in his hands occasionally. If he saw one lying in the grass he used to fling himself on it like a spread-eagle. There was a big social distinction between the shopkeepers’ sons and the sons of labourers and farm-hands, but the local boys didn’t usually pay much attention to it till they were about sixteen. The gang had a secret password and an ‘ordeal’ which included cutting your finger and eating an earthworm, and they gave themselves out to be frightful desperadoes. Certainly they managed to make a nuisance of themselves, broke windows, chased cows, tore the knockers off doors and stole fruit by the hundredweight. Sometimes in winter they managed to borrow a couple of ferrets and go ratting, when the farmers would let them. They all had catapults and squailers, and they were always saving up to buy a saloon pistol, which in those days cost five shillings, but the savings never amounted to more than about threepence. In summer they used to go fishing and bird-nesting. WhenJoe was at Mrs Howlett’s he used to cut school at least once a week, and even at the Grammar School he managed it about once a fortnight. There was a boy at the Grammar School, an auctioneer’s son, who could copy any handwriting and for a penny he’d