The collected george orw.., p.160
The Collected George Orwell, page 160
Well, I didn’t get that job. It seemed that nobody was anxious to pay me £2,000 a year for sitting among streamlined office furniture and dictating letters to a platinum blonde. I was discovering what three-quarters of the blokes who’d been officers were discovering—that from a financial point of view we’d been better off in the Army than we were ever likely to be again. We’d suddenly changed from gentlemen holding His Majesty’s commission into miserable out-of-works whom nobody wanted. My ideas soon sank from two thousand a year to three or £4 a week. But even jobs of the three or £4 a week kind didn’t seem to exist. Every mortal job was filled already, either by men who’d been a few years too old to fight, or by boys who’d been a few months too young. The poor bastards who’d happened to be born between 1890 and 1900 were left out in the cold. And still it never occurred to me to go back to the grocering business. Probably I could have got a job as a grocer’s assistant; old Grimmett, if he was still alive and in business (I wasn’t in touch with Lower Binfield and didn’t know), would have given me good refs. But I’d passed into a different orbit. Even if my social ideas hadn’t risen, I could hardly have imagined, after what I’d seen and learned, going back to the old safe existence behind the counter. I wanted to be travelling about and pulling down the big dough. Chiefly I wanted to be a travelling salesman, which I knew would suit me.
But there were no jobs for travelling salesmen—that’s to say, jobs with a salary attached. What there were, however, were on-commission jobs. That racket was just beginning on a big, scale. It’s a beautifully simple method of increasing your sales and advertising your stuff without taking any risks, and it always flourishes when times are bad. They keep you on a string by hinting that perhaps there’ll be a salaried job going in three months’ time, and when you get fed up there’s always some other poor devil ready to take over. Naturally it wasn’t long before I had an on-commission job, in fact I had quite a number in rapid succession. Thank God, I never came down to peddling vacuum-cleaners, or dictionaries. But I travelled in cutlery, in soap-powder, in a line of patent corkscrews, tin-openers, and similar gadgets, and finally in a line of office accessories—paper-clips, carbon paper, typewriter ribbons, and so forth. I didn’t do so badly either. I’m the type that can sell things on commission. I’ve got the temperament and I’ve got the manner. But I never came anywhere near making a decent living. You can’t, in jobs like that—and, of course, you aren’t meant to.
I had about a year of it altogether. It was a queer time. The cross-country journeys, the godless places you fetched up in, suburbs of Midland towns that you’d never hear of in a hundred normal lifetimes. The ghastly bed-and-breakfast houses where the sheets always smell faintly of slops and the fried egg at breakfast has a yolk paler than a lemon. And the other poor devils of salesmen that you’re always meeting, middle-aged fathers of families in moth-eaten overcoats and bowler hats, who honestly believe that sooner or later trade will turn the corner and they’ll jack their earnings up to five quid a week. And the traipsing from shop to shop, and the arguments with shopkeepers who don’t want to listen, and the standing back and making yourself small when a customer comes in. Don’t think that it worried me particularly. To some chaps that kind of life is torture. There are chaps who can’t even walk into a shop and open their bag of samples without screwing themselves up as though they were going over the top. But I’m not like that. I’m tough, I can talk people into buying things they don’t want, and even if they slam the door in my face it doesn’t bother me. Selling things on commission is actually what I like doing, provided I can see my way to making a bit of dough out of it. I don’t know whether I learned much in that year, but I unlearned a good deal. It knocked the Army nonsense out of me, and it drove into the back of my head the notions that I’d picked up during the idle year when I was reading novels. I don’t think I read a single book, barring detective stories, all the time I was on the road. I wasn’t a highbrow any longer. I was down among the realities of modern life. And what are the realities of modern life? Well, the chief one is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. With most people it takes the form of selling themselves—that’s to say, getting a job and keeping it. I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. 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.
But meanwhile I wasn’t badly off. I was earning a bit and I’d still got plenty of money in the bank, nearly two hundred quid, and I wasn’t frightened for the future. I knew that sooner or later I’d get a regular job. And sure enough, after about a year, by a stroke of luck it happened. I say by a stroke of luck, but the fact is that I was bound to fall on my feet. I’m not the type that starves. I’m about as likely to end up in the workhouse as to end up in the House of Lords. I’m the middling type, the type that gravitates by a kind of natural law towards the five-pound-a-week level. So long as there are any jobs at all I’ll back myself to get one.
It happened when I was peddling paper-clips and typewriter ribbons. I’d just dodged into a huge block of offices in Fleet Street, a building which canvassers weren’t allowed into, as a matter of fact, but I’d managed to give the lift attendant the impression that my bag of samples was merely an attache case. I was walking along one of the corridors looking for the offices of a small toothpaste firm that I’d been recommended to try, when I saw that some very big bug was coming down the corridor in the other direction. I knew immediately that it was a big bug. You know how it is with these big business men, they seem to take up more room and walk more loudly than any ordinary person, and they give off a kind of wave of money that you can feel fifty yards away. When he got nearly up to me I saw that it was Sir Joseph Cheam. He was in civvies, of course, but I had no difficulty in recognizing him. I suppose he’d been there for some business conference or other. A couple of clerks, or secretaries, or something, were following after him, not actually holding up his train, because he wasn’t wearing one, but you somehow felt that that was what they were doing. Of course I dodged aside instantly. But curiously enough he recognized me, though he hadn’t seen me for years. To my surprise he stopped and spoke to me.
‘Hullo, you! I’ve seen you somewhere before. What’s your name? It’s on the tip of my tongue.’
‘Bowling, sir. Used to be in the A.S.C.’
‘Of course. The boy that said he wasn’t a gentleman. What are you doing here?’
I might have told him I was selling typewriter ribbons, and there perhaps the whole thing would have ended. But I had one of those sudden inspirations that you get occasionally—a feeling that I might make something out of this if I handled it properly. I said instead:
‘Well, sir, as a matter of fact I’m looking for a job.’
‘A job, eh? Hm. Not so easy, nowadays.’
He looked me up and down for a second. The two train-bearers had kind of wafted themselves a little distance away. I saw his rather good-looking old face, with the heavy grey eyebrows and the intelligent nose, looking me over and realized that he’d decided to help me. It’s queer, the power of these rich men. He’d been marching past me in his power and glory, with his underlings after him, and then on some whim or other he’d turned aside like an emperor suddenly chucking a coin to a beggar.
‘So you want a job? What can you do?’
Again the inspiration. No use, with a bloke like this, cracking up your own merits. Stick to the truth. I said: ‘Nothing, sir. But I want a job as a travelling salesman.’
‘Salesman? Hm. Not sure that I’ve got anything for you at present. Let’s see.’
He pursed his lips up. For a moment, half a minute perhaps, he was thinking quite deeply. It was curious. Even at the time I realized that it was curious. This important old bloke, who was probably worth at least half a million, was actually taking thought on my behalf. I’d deflected him from his path and wasted at least three minutes of his time, all because of a chance remark I’d happened to make years earlier. I’d stuck in his memory and therefore he was willing to take the tiny bit of trouble that was needed to find me a job. I dare say the same day he gave twenty clerks the sack. Finally he said:
‘How’d you like to go into an insurance firm? Always fairly safe, you know. People have got to have insurance, same as they’ve got to eat.’
Of course I jumped at the idea of going into an insurance firm. Sir Joseph was ‘interested’ in the Flying Salamander. God knows how many companies he was ‘interested’ in. One of the underlings wafted himself forward with a scribbling-pad, and there and then, with the gold stylo out of his waistcoat pocket, Sir Joseph scribbled me a note to some higher-up in the Flying Salamander. Then I thanked him, and he marched on, and I sneaked off in the other direction, and we never saw one another again.
Well, I got the job, and, as I said earlier, the job got me. I’ve been with the Flying Salamander close on eighteen years. I started off in the office, but now I’m what’s known as an Inspector, or, when there’s reason to sound particularly impressive, a Representative. A couple of days a week I’m working in the district office, and the rest of the time I’m travelling around, interviewing clients whose names have been sent in by the local agents, making assessments of shops and other property, and now and again snapping up a few orders on my own account. I earn round about seven quid a week. And properly speaking that’s the end of my story.
When I look back I realize that my active life, if I ever had one, ended when I was sixteen. Everything that really matters to me had happened before that date. But in a manner of speaking things were still happening—the war, for instance—up to the time when I got the job with the Flying Salamander. After that—well, they say that happy people have no histories, and neither do the blokes who work in insurance offices. From that day forward there was nothing in my life that you could properly describe as an event, except that about two and a half years later, at the beginning of ’23, I got married.
10
I was living in a boarding-house in Ealing. The years were rolling on, or crawling on. Lower Binfield had passed almost out of my memory. I was the usual young city worker who scoots for the 8.15 and intrigues for the other fellow’s job. I was fairly well thought of in the firm and pretty satisfied with life. The post-war success dope had caught me, more or less. You remember the line of talk. Pep, punch, grit, sand. Get on or get out. There’s plenty of room at the top. You can’t keep a good man down. And the ads in the magazines about the chap that the boss clapped on the shoulder, and the keen-jawed executive who’s pulling down the big dough and attributes his success to so and so’s correspondence course. It’s funny how we all swallowed it, even blokes like me to whom it hadn’t the smallest application. Because I’m neither a go-getter nor a down-and-out, and I’m by nature incapable of being either. But it was the spirit of the time. Get on! Make good! If you see a man down, jump on his guts before he gets up again. Of course this was in the early twenties, when some of the effects of the war had worn off and the slump hadn’t yet arrived to knock the stuffing out of us.
I had an ‘A’ subscription at Boots and went to half-crown dances and belonged to a local tennis club. You know those tennis clubs in the genteel suburbs—little wooden pavilions and high wire-netting enclosures where young chaps in rather badly cut white flannels prance up and down, shouting ‘Fifteen forty!’ and ‘Vantage all!’ in voices which are a tolerable imitation of the Upper Crust. I’d learned to play tennis, didn’t dance too badly, and got on well with the girls. At nearly thirty I wasn’t a bad-looking chap, with my red face and butter-coloured hair, and in those days it was still a point in your favour to have fought in the war. I never, then or at any other time, succeeded in looking like a gentleman, but on the other hand you probably wouldn’t have taken me for the son of a small shopkeeper in a country town. I could keep my end up in the rather mixed society of a place like Ealing, where the office-employee class overlaps with the middling-professional class. It was at the tennis club that I first met Hilda.
At that time Hilda was twenty-four. She was a small, slim, rather timid girl, with dark hair, beautiful movements, and—because of having very large eyes—a distinct resemblance to a hare. She was one of those people who never say much, but remain on the edge of any conversation that’s going on, and give the impression that they’re listening. If she said anything at all, it was usually ‘Oh, yes, I think so too’, agreeing with whoever had spoken last. At tennis she hopped about very gracefully, and didn’t play badly, but somehow had a helpless, childish air. Her surname was Vincent.
If you’re married, there’ll have been times when you’ve said to yourself ‘Why the hell did I do it?’ and God knows I’ve said it often enough about Hilda. And once again, looking at it across fifteen years, why did I marry Hilda?
Partly, of course, because she was young and in a way very pretty. Beyond that I can only say that because she came of totally different origins from myself it was very difficult for me to get any grasp of what she was really like. I had to marry her first and find out about her afterwards, whereas if I’d married say, Elsie Waters, I’d have known what I was marrying. Hilda belonged to a class I only knew by hearsay, the poverty-stricken officer class. For generations past her family had been soldiers, sailors, clergymen, Anglo-Indian officials, and that kind of thing. They’d never had any money, but on the other hand none of them had ever done anything that I should recognize as work. Say what you will, there’s a kind of snob-appeal in that, if you belong as I do to the God-fearing shopkeeper class, the low church, and high-tea class. It wouldn’t make any impression on me now, but it did then. Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I don’t mean that I married Hilda because she belonged to the class I’d once served across the counter, with some notion of jockeying myself up in the social scale. It was merely that I couldn’t understand her and therefore was capable of being goofy about her. And one thing I certainly didn’t grasp was that the girls in these penniless middle-class families will marry anything in trousers, just to get away from home.
It wasn’t long before Hilda took me home to see her family. I hadn’t known till then that there was a considerable Anglo-Indian colony in Ealing. Talk about discovering a new world! It was quite a revelation to me.
Do you know these Anglo-Indian families? It’s almost impossible, when you get inside these people’s houses, to remember that out in the street it’s England and the twentieth century. As soon as you set foot inside the front door you’re in India in the eighties. You know the kind of atmosphere. The carved teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-skulls on the wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot pickles, the yellow photographs of chaps in sun-helmets, the Hindustani words that you’re expected to know the meaning of, the everlasting anecdotes about tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in ’87. It’s a sort of little world of their own that they’ve created, like a kind of cyst. To me, of course, it was all quite new and in some ways rather interesting. Old Vincent, Hilda’s father, had been not only in India but also in some even more outlandish place, Borneo or Sarawak, I forget which. He was the usual type, completely bald, almost invisible behind his moustache, and full of stories about cobras and cummerbunds and what the district collector said in ’93. Hilda’s mother was so colourless that she was just like one of the faded photos on the wall. There was also a son, Harold, who had some official job in Ceylon and was home on leave at the time when I first met Hilda. They had a little dark house in one of those buried back-streets that exist in Ealing. It smelt perpetually of Trichinopoly cigars and it was so full of spears, blow-pipes, brass ornaments, and the heads of wild animals that you could hardly move about in it.
Old Vincent had retired in 1910, and since then he and his wife had shown about as much activity, mental or physical, as a couple of shellfish. But at the time I was vaguely impressed by a family which had had majors, colonels, and once even an admiral in it. My attitude towards the Vincents, and theirs towards me, is an interesting illustration of what fools people can be when they get outside their own line. Put me among business people—whether they’re company directors or commercial travellers—and I’m a fairly good judge of character. But I had no experience whatever of the officer-rentier-clergyman class, and I was inclined to kow-tow to these decayed throw-outs. I looked on them as my social and intellectual superiors, while they on the other hand mistook me for a rising young businessman who before long would be pulling down the big dough. To people of that kind, ‘business’, whether it’s marine insurance or selling peanuts, is just a dark mystery. All they know is that it’s something rather vulgar out of which you can make money. Old Vincent used to talk impressively about my being ‘in business’—once, I remember, he had a slip of the tongue and said ‘in trade’—and obviously didn’t grasp the difference between being in business as an employee and being there on your own account. He had some vague notion that as I was ‘in’ the Flying Salamander I should sooner or later rise to the top of it, by a process of promotion. I think it’s possible that he also had pictures of himself touching me for fivers at some future date. Harold certainly had. I could see it in his eye. In fact, even with my income being what it is, I’d probably be lending money to Harold at this moment if he were alive. Luckily he died a few years after we were married, of enteric or something, and both the old Vincents are dead too.
