Old Crimp

Old Crimp was the watchmaker's assistant in Lower Binfield, the small Oxfordshire market town where George Bowling grew up. Bowling narrates Coming Up for Air as a fat insurance salesman of forty-five in 1938, remembering the town as it was before the First World War. Crimp gets three sentences and never speaks.

Here is what they say. He was a skilled workman who had been at the job, man and boy, for fifty years. He got cataract and had to go into the workhouse. His grandchildren were howling in the street when they took him away. His wife went out charing, which meant cleaning other people's houses by the day, and by desperate efforts managed to send him a shilling a week for pocket-money.

He is there to make a point, and Bowling has just set it up. People before 1914, he says, worked harder, lived less comfortably and died more painfully than people did in 1938. Farm hands worked frightful hours for fourteen shillings a week and ended as worn-out cripples on a five-shilling pension. What was called respectable poverty, Bowling adds, was even worse, and he gives two cases. One is little Watson, a small draper at the other end of the High Street whose business failed after years of struggle, leaving personal assets of two pounds nine shillings and sixpence. He died almost at once of what was called gastric trouble, although the doctor let out that it was starvation, and he had clung to his frock coat to the last. The other case is Old Crimp.

What Bowling is arguing through the two men is that people of that time still had a feeling of continuity. They knew they were going to die, and some of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but it never occurred to them that the whole order of things could change.