Coming Up for Air

Bowling’s wife Hilda is six years younger than her husband; she is 39 when the action of the novel begins, and she was 24 when they met. In Bowling’s memories, “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” (82). He describes her as having a “helpless, childish air” (82) and reflects in hindsight that she would have married “anything in trousers, just to get away from home” (83). In the present, Bowling considers Hilda to be something of a shrew, describing her as “very thin, and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes” (3). Her defining characteristics, in Bowling’s eyes, are her constant anxiety about money and her lack of curiosity about the wider world.

The novel presents Bowling’s frustration with his wife as evidence of his inability—or perhaps refusal—to see things from her perspective. In the first half of the novel, Bowling depicts Hilda as constantly worrying about money: “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” (3). Bowling knows the reason for this anxiety—he explains that “Hilda’s often told [him] that almost the first thing she can remember is a ghastly feeling that there was never enough money for anything” (85)—but rather than sympathizing with his wife, he dismisses her concerns over “petty disasters” (3). However, not only does Bowling give Hilda good additional reason to be worried (without registering that he does), but he also registers (albeit without self-awareness) his own anxiety over his insecure and insignificant—that is, “petty”—status:

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, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird (79).

Similarly, Bowling states that his wife and her friends learn nothing from the lectures they attend, although he offers no evidence to support this assessment, which, again, says more about him than her. In fact, Hilda’s consistent engagement with a number of clubs and causes suggests a wider range of interests than his own narrow nostalgia.

Elsie Waters is two years older than Bowling, and she is his first sexual partner. Their relationship lasts until a few months after goes to war, when Bowling stops writing to her. Although Bowling says, “I’m grateful to Elsie, because she was the first person who taught me to care about a woman” (63), his description of her as “kind of soft, kind of yielding, as though her body was a land of malleable stuff that you could do what you liked with” (65) undercuts his sentiment of gratitude, and his statement that “as soon as you saw her you knew that you could take her in your arms and do what you wanted with her” (63) is a blunt expression of exactly what she has meant to him.

This thoroughly self-centered—and un-self-reflective—attitude comes out in full view at the end of the novel, when Bowling encounters Elsie by chance during his visit to Lower Binfield. “Only twenty-four years” had passed, he says, “and the girl I’d known, with her milky-white skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair, had turned into this great round-shouldered hag, shambling along in twisted heels” (130). That this comes from a man who himself acknowledges that he has become fat and unattractive over the years underscores the irony of the situation, to which George Orwell adds the further twist that Elsie’s not recognizing Bowling mirrors his own inability to see himself.