I was listening to this BBC Witness episode, where Nora Krug talks about how a person is a summation of all that came before them as opposed to living “in a historical vacuum”. She spoke as a witness to her family’s experience with Kristallnacht.
Here I could add, that even these collective memories will form a stronger substrate when it is through a generation that we have had physical connections with. For instance, the years post the second World War has credible resonance with me because it was in 1935 that my grandmother was born. Through her, I feel that I can tap into a long-gone zeitgeist. Everything after that also follows into the ambit of my sense of self.
I picked up Orwell’s Coming Up For Air from a stack of books that my family has been carrying around in mouldy suitcases. Yellowing paperback with speckled pages of rust, and a cover art that looked dreary- almost like what I remembered of his other book “The Road to Wigan Pier“. [Even in the midst of all the afore-mentioned connections that I feel with bygone eras, some pockets it seems, did stand back in isolated bubbles of apathy, like this latter book on the condition of coal-miners in UK].
As I read on, I realised that my empathies with the period described in the book was not only because of some fanciful zeitgeist, it was also because this book (Coming Up For Air) has a surprising resonance with our modern times!
We have here, an overweight man George “Fatty” Bowling , in his late thirties, who tramps to his dull insurance job “But I’d been a good husband and a father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it“. Yes, he lives like we do, in our mortgage-riddled houses “Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and the wife riding him like a nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches“. By this point, I was laughing out at Orwell’s brutal wit. Elsewhere, the character- Bowling, also thinks of his children as “unnatural little bastards“. This was beginning to really sound like the lives of everyone that I know.
Back in the mid-90s we had Chuck Palahniuk’s anarchic Fight Club. Well it seems that in the ’30s, we had Fatty Bowling imagining quiet violence- “Some quiet morning, when the clerks are streaming across London Bridge, and the canary’s singing, and the old woman’s pegging the bloomers on the line-zoom, whizz, plonk! Houses going up into the air, bloomers soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses.”
A visual cue during one of his commutes takes Bowling back along a nostalgic path of childhood, nostalgic when viewed from his adulthood. Growing up in pre-war England, at the lower end of the class-divisions, with boyhood brutalities, a domestic lack of stimulation, there is not much to be nostalgic about.
Or perhaps it is indeed nostalgic to look back from desk-jobs and wives who are so beaten down by life that her husband describes her as a person with three expressions all day – ” ‘We can’t afford it’, ‘It’s a great saving’, and ‘I don’t know where’s the money to come from’. She does everything for negative reasons. When she makes a cake she’s not thinking about the cake, only about how to save butter and eggs.”
The only true nostalgia however, seems to be his memories of fishing as a young boy. In yet another instance of resonance, Bowling’s thoughts on fishing reminds me of reading in my school days. And of walking down a hill to the Community Library to exchange books and sit in dimly lit rooms, taking in the smell of all the books. “The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool…belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.” Replace Hitler with The Internet and we are perfect mirror images of Bowling, separated only by years.
The tale continues with Bowling deciding to revisit his old village. A place that he hasn’t been to since the war. Of-course, like all our visitations to the past, there is nothing that has been preserved. Nothing is the same as what we remember.
When Bowling wanders around what remains of his village (swallowed in an urban sprawl), and when he stands shocked looking at the enormous garbage dump that has replaced his quiet fishing pool, I almost smiled. If that was the pace of economic disaster brought about in the ’30s, imagine what we are doing nowadays. There is nothing from the past. Everything has mutated.
And yet, what seems to continue is the Human Condition. This constant questioning of our existence. This life that we lead of civilised cockroaches – dressing up every morning to go and find bread crumbs under kitchen sinks. “And then calculate the time you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers.” Yes, nothing has changed from that time.
We still have “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“. We still have “the girls in these penniless middle-class families [who] will marry anything in trousers, just to get away from home“. We still get married to daughters/sons of mothers who are “so colourless that she was just like one of the faded photos on the wall“. “Why did you marry her? you say. But why did you marry yours?” [Orwell makes me laugh even as I type these lines]. It will all go on until “One night you go to bed, still feeling more or less young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and the next morning you wake up in full consciousness that you’re just a poor old fatty with nothing ahead of you this side of the grave except sweating your guts out to buy boots for the kids.“.
We even begin to beguile ourselves with nostalgia, imagining that there were moments before, when we had peace. Moments before, when we would “lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and the next war“.
But, allow me to end with Orwell’s own words “They don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we are in reaches up to the stratosphere.“
Sanctum Meum 