George Bowling

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

• How he opensThe first sentence of the book is his: the idea really came to him the day he got his new false teeth. He then describes shaving with a blunt blade, being shut out of his own bathroom by a seven-year-old, and going downstairs in a bad temper with a soapy neck.
• What he looks like in 1938A bricky-red face, butter-coloured hair and pale blue eyes, which he also calls boiled blue. He is forty-five and says he has never gone grey or bald. His arms are pudgy and freckled to the elbow, his upper half is close to the shape of a tub, and standing upright he can see only the front halves of his feet. Bending down makes him puff and blow.
• The two weightsThe book weighs him twice and the figures do not agree. In January he puts his weight at not much over fourteen stone and his waist at either forty-eight or forty-nine inches, he forgets which. In late June a slot machine on the towpath at Lower Binfield prints 14 stone 11 pounds, and he notes that he has put on four pounds in three days, probably on the drink.
• He has not always been fatHe has been fat for eight or nine years and dates it to 1930, when it arrived so suddenly that he compares it to a cannon ball lodging inside him. In France in 1916 the men in his company still called him George rather than Fatty. At nearly thirty he thought himself not bad-looking, with a red face and butter-coloured hair.
• The false teethHe says nine people out of ten would take the new set for natural, and that with them in he probably does not look forty-five. Out of his mouth and magnified in a tumbler of water on the bathroom shelf, they look to him like the teeth in a skull.
• What he wearsIn January it is a grey herring-bone suit a bit the worse for wear, a blue overcoat that cost fifty shillings, a bowler hat and no gloves. For the week in Lower Binfield in June he buys a blue flannel suit with a thin white stripe, which the tailor tells him has a reducing effect, and wears it with a trilby. He thinks it may pass him off as a stockbroker and decides by the end of the week that it does not.
• The boy in 1900At seven he was about four feet high and, by his own account, an ugly little boy, with butter-coloured hair cropped short except for a quiff at the front. He was not fat. On Sunday mornings he was buckled into a thick black suit and an Eton collar, with his stockings pulled up over his knees.
• Behind the counter at twentyFor his five years at Grimmett's from 1909 he describes an alert young chap with a round, pink, snubby face and butter-coloured hair no longer cropped but greased and slicked back. He worked in a white apron with a pencil behind his ear and spoke with a trace of a Cockney accent, which he later got rid of. By about 1911 there were a moustache, button boots and collars three inches high.
• The nicknameStrangers on trains call him Tubby without introducing themselves. A soap salesman named Waters greets him weekly in the saloon bar of the Crown at Pudley by prodding his ribs and singing "Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling", and the bar never tires of it. Bowling's observation is that nobody would give a hunchback a nickname about his back.
• What his trade has taught himHe says his own line, insurance, is a swindle, but an open one with the cards on the table, and that building societies are the cleverer racket because the victims think they are being done a kindness. He can talk a doubtful client into a policy by laying on the bonuses or by hinting at what will become of the man's widow.
• The fish sausageIn a chromium milk-bar off the Strand he bites into a frankfurter and it bursts. It is filled with fish. He walks out without touching his coffee, and decides he has bitten into the modern world and found out what it is made of.
• The prophetic moodTwice he describes seeing the future as clearly as if he had X-rays in his eyes: a bomber over the train in the morning, then a vision of the Strand in three years, chipped and dusty, a thin sergeant coughing his guts out, a child in Birmingham howling for bread. He is not frightened of the war, he says, but of the after-war.
• The primrosesStopping his car on a March road, he leans over a gate, looks at a wood fire gone to white ash with red under it, and finds he is happy. He squats down to pick primroses because he is too fat to bend, and throws them over the hedge when he hears a car coming rather than be seen holding them.
• The trip is a small crimeHe books a week off with a story about a relative, fixes Birmingham as his alibi, and gets a colleague travelling that way to post a letter from a hotel there. Driving west, he imagines the whole world in pursuit: Hilda and the children, the Flying Salamander directors in their Rolls-Royces, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, and Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle.
• The last name in the registerAt the George in Lower Binfield he gives his name very distinctly, expecting to be recognised — the Bowlings were an old family in the town and his father drank there every Saturday for thirty years. The clerk asks how it is spelled. Nobody in the town has heard of him.
• He decides he is the ghostFor two days he walks the new streets counting paces and placing hedges that are no longer there, feeling like a man in a Wells story who sees waterweed instead of furniture. Then, watching the morning crowds from a hotel window, he corrects himself: he is not seeing ghosts, he is one.
• What he does when the bomb whistlesHe recognises the sound after twenty years without having to think, and is flat on the pavement before anyone else has moved. He describes himself as looking like a rat squeezing under a door, and says he had time, while it was still falling, to fear that he had made a fool of himself for nothing.

George Bowling quotes

Lines spoken by or about George Bowling, each verified verbatim against the text and located in the book.