PART Ⅰ-1

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    The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

    I remember the m well. At about a quarter to eight I’d nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out. It was a beastly January m, with a dirty yellowish-grey sky. Down below, out of the little square of bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with a privet hedge round it and a bare pat the middle, that we call the back garden. There’s the same back garden, some privets, and same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road. Only difference— where there are no kids there’s no bare pat the middle.

    I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor-blade while the water ran into the bath. My face looked back at me out of the mirror, and underh, in a tumbler of water otle shelf over the washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face. It was the temporary set that Warner, my dentist, had giveo wear while the new ones were being made. I haven’t such a bad face, really. It’s one of those bricky-red faces that go with butter-coloured hair and pale-blue eyes. I’ve never gone grey or bald, thank God, and when I’ve got my teeth in I probably don’t look my age, which is forty-five.

    Making a mental <q></q>o buy razor-blades, I got into the bath and started soaping. I soaped my arms (I’ve got those kind of pudgy arms that are freckled up to the elbow) and then took the back- brush and soaped my shoulder-blades, whi the ordinary way I ’t reach. It’s a nuisance, but there are several parts of my body that I ’t reaowadays. The truth is that I’m ined to be a little bit o side. I don’t mean that I’m like something in a sideshow at a fair. My weight isn’t much over fourteen stone, and last time I measured round my waist it was either forty-eight or forty-nine, I fet which. And I’m not what they call ‘disgustingly’ fat, I haven’t got one of those bellies that sag half-way down to the knees. It’s merely that I’m a little bit broad in the beam, with a tendency to be barrel-shaped. Do you know the active, hearty kind of fat man, the athletic boung type that’s niamed Fatty or Tubby and is always the life and soul of the party? I’m that type. ‘Fatty’ they mostly call me. Fatty Bowling. Gee Bowling is my real name.

    But at that moment I didn’t feel like the life and soul of the party. And it struck me that nowadays I nearly always do have a morose kind of feeling in the early ms, although I sleep well and my digestion’s good. I knew what it was, of course—it was those bloody false teeth. The things were magnified by the water iumbler, and they were grinning at me like the teeth in a skull. It gives you a rotten feeling to have yums meet, a sort of pinched-up, withered feeling like when you’ve bitten into a sour apple. Besides, say what you will, false teeth are a landmark. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you  kid yourself that you’re a Hollywood sheik, is definitely at an end. And I was fat as well as forty-five. As I stood up to soap my crutch I had a look at my figure. It’s all rot about fat men being uo see their feet, but it’s a fact that when I stand upright I  only see the front halves of mine. No woman, I thought as I worked the soap round my belly, will ever look twice at me again, unless she’s paid to. Not that at that moment I particularly wanted any woman to look twice at me.

    But it struck me that this m there were reasons why I ought to have been in a better mood. To begin with I wasn’t w today. The old car, in which I ‘cover’ my district (I ought to tell you that I’m in the insurance business. The Flying Salamander. Life, fire, burglary, twins, shipwreck—everything), was temporarily in dock, and though I’d got to look in at the London office to drop some papers, I was really taking the day off to go ach my new false teeth. And besides, there was another busihat had been in and out of my mind for some time past. This was that I had seventeen quid whiobody else had heard about—nobody in the family, that is. It had happehis way. A chap in our firm, Mellors by name, had got hold of a book called Astrology applied to Horse-rag which proved that it’s all a question of influence of the plas on the colours the jockey is wearing. Well, in some race or other there was a mare called Corsair’s Bride, a plete outsider, but her jockey’s colour was green, which it seemed was just the colour for the plahat happeo be in the asdant. Mellors, who was deeply bitten with this astrology business, utting several quid on the horse a down on his ko me to do the same. In the end, chiefly to shut him up, I risked ten bob, though I don’t bet as a general rule. Sure enough Corsair’s Bride came home in a walk. I fet the exact odds, but my share worked out at seventeen quid. By a kind of instinct—rather queer, and probably indig another landmark in my life—I just quietly put the money in the bank and said nothing to anybody. I’d never done anything of this kind before. A good husband and father would have spent it on a dress for Hilda (that’s my wife) and boots for the kids. But I’d been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it.

    After I’d soaped myself all over I felt better and lay down ih to think about my seventeen quid and what to spend it on. The alternatives, it seemed to me, were either a week-end with a woman or dribbling it quietly away on odds and ends such as cigars and double whiskies. I’d just turned on some more hot water and was thinking about women and cigars when there was a noise like a herd of buffaloes ing dowwo steps that lead to the bathroom. It was the kids, of course. Two kids in a house the size of ours is like a qua<strike></strike>rt of beer in a pint mug. There was a frantic stamping outside and then a yell of agony.

    ‘Dadda! I wanna e in!’

    ‘Well, you ’t. Clear out!’

    ‘But dadda! I wanna go somewhere!’

    ‘Go somewhere else, then. Hop it. I’m having<strike>九九藏书</strike> my bath.’

    ‘Dad-DA! I wanna GO SOME—WHERE!’

    No use! I khe danger signal. The W.C. is ihroom—it would be, of course, in a house like ours. I hooked the plug out of the bath and got partially dry as quickly as I could. As I opehe door, little Billy—my you, aged seven—shot past me, dodging the smack which I aimed at his he<abbr></abbr>ad. It was only when I was nearly dressed and looking for a tie that I discovered that my neck was still soapy.

    It’s a rotten thing to have a soapy neck. It gives you a disgusting sticky feeling, and the queer thing is that, however carefully you spo away, when you’ve once discovered that your neck is soapy you feel sticky for the rest of the day. I went downstairs in a bad temper and ready to make myself disagreeable.

    Our dining-room, like the other dining-rooms in Ellesmere Road, is a poky little place, fourtee by twelve, or maybe it’s twelve by ten, and the Japanese oak sideboard, with the two empty deters and the silver egg-stand that Hilda’s mave us for a wedding present, doesn’t leave mu. Old Hilda was glooming behind the teapot, in her usual state of alarm and dismay because the News icle had annouhat the price of butter was going up, or something. She hadn’t lighted the gas-fire, and though the windows were shut it was beastly cold. I bent dout a match to the fire, breathing rather loudly through my nose (bending always makes me puff and blow) as a kind of hint to Hilda. She gave me the little sidelong glahat she always gives me whehinks I’m doing somethiravagant.

    Hilda is thirty-nine, and when I first knew her she looked just like a hare. So she does still, but she’s got very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes, and when she’s more upset than usual she’s got a trick of humping her shoulders and folding her arms across her breast, like an old gypsy woman over her fire. She’s one of those people who get their main ki life out of foreseeing disasters. Only petty disasters, of course. As for wars, earthquakes, plagues, famines, and revolutions, she pays no attention to them. Butter is going up, and the gas-bill is enormous, and the kids’ boots are wearing out, and there’s another instalment due on the radio—that’s Hilda’s litany. She gets what I’ve finally decided is a definite pleasure out of rog herself to and fro with her arms across her breast, and glooming at me, ‘But, Gee, it’s very SERIOUS! I don’t know what we’re going to DO! I don’t know where the money’s ing from! You don’t seem to realize how serious it IS!’ and so on and so forth. It’s fixed firmly in her head that we shall end up in the workhouse. The funny thing is that if we ever do get to the workhouse Hilda won’t mind it a quarter as much as I shall, in fact she’ll probably rather enjoy the feeling of security.

    The kids were downstairs already, having washed and dressed at lightning speed, as they always do when there’s no ce to keep anyone else out of the bathroom. When I got to the breakfast table they were having an argument which went to the tune of ‘Yes, you did!’ ‘No, I didn’t!’ ‘Yes, you did!’ ‘No, I didn’t!’ and looked like going on for the rest of the m, until I told them to cheese it. There are only the two of them, Billy, aged seven, and Lorna, aged eleven. It’s a peculiar feeling that I have towards the kids. A great deal of the time I  hardly stick the sight of them. As for their versation, it’s just unbearable. They’re at that dreary bread-and-butter age when a kid’s mind revolves round things like rulers, pencil-boxes, and who got top marks in French. At other times, especially when they’re asleep, I have quite a different feeling. Sometimes I’ve stood over their cots, on summer evenings when it’s light, and watched them sleeping, with their round faces and their tow-coloured hair, several shades lighter than mine, and it’s givehat feeling you read about in the Bible when it says your bowels yearn. At such times I feel that I’m just a kind of dried-up seed-pod that doesn’t matter twopend that my sole importance has been t these creatures into the world ahem while they’re growing. But that’s only at moments. Most of the time my separate existence looks pretty important to me, I feel that there’s life in the old dog yet and plenty of good times ahead, and the notion of myself as a kind of tame dairy-cow for a lot of women <strike>藏书网</strike>and kids to chase up and dow appeal to me.

    We didn’t talk much at breakfast. Hilda was in her ‘I don’t know what we’re going to DO!’ mood, partly owing to the price of butter and partly because the Christmas holidays were nearly over and there was still five pounds owing on the school fees for last term. I ate my boiled egg and spread a piece of bread with Golden armalade. Hilda will persist in buying the stuff. It’s fivepence-halfpenny a pound, and the label tells you, in the smallest print the law allows, that it tains ‘a certain proportion of ral fruit-juice’. This started me off, iher irritating way I have sometimes, talking about ral fruit-trees, w what they looked like and what tries they grew in, until finally Hilda got angry. It’s not that she minds me chipping her, it’s only that in some obscure way she thinks it’s wicked to make jokes about anything you save money on.

    I had a look at the paper, but there wasn’t muews. Down in Spain and over in a they were murdering one another as usual, a woman’s legs had been found in a railway waiting-room, and King Zog’s wedding was wavering in the balance. Finally, at about ten o’clock, rather earlier than I’d intended, I started out for town. The kids had gone off to play in the public gardens. It was a beastly raw m. As I stepped out of the front door a nasty little gust of wind caught the soapy paty ned made me suddenly feel that my clothes didn’t fit and that I was sticky all over.

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