Old Hodges

Old Hodges is the lodge-keeper at Binfield House, the big country house on the hill above Lower Binfield, the invented Oxfordshire market town where George Bowling grew up. Bowling narrates George Orwell's Coming Up for Air as a man of forty-five in 1938, and the middle third of the book is his account of the town before 1914. Hodges belongs to that part of it. He is the man who lets Bowling into the grounds where the fish are.

Binfield House had stood empty for ten or twenty years. Its owner, Mr Farrel, could not afford to live in it and either could not or would not let it, so he lived in London on the rent of his farms and let the house and grounds go. The fences were green and rotting, the park was a mass of nettles, and the gardens had gone back to meadow. Hodges lived at the lodge by the gates, acted as a kind of caretaker, kept a vegetable garden beside the lodge and kept hens.

The boys of the town knew two things about the place. There was a rumour that somewhere in the grounds was a pond with enormous fish in it, and Hodges was down on boys. Nobody dared go inside. On one long summer afternoon the gang of boys Bowling's elder brother belonged to came past the lodge, found the old man digging his vegetable garden, and cheeked him over the fence until he chased them off.

Then, when Bowling was about fourteen, his father did Hodges a good turn. Bowling has forgotten what it was and thinks it was some medicine that cured the old man's fowls of worms. Hodges was a crabby old devil, but he did not forget a good turn. A little while afterwards he came down to the shop to buy chicken-corn, met the boy outside the door and stopped him in his surly way. He asked whether he was the fisherman, and then said that if he wanted to he could bring his line and have a try in the pool behind the Hall, where there were plenty of bream and jack. He added two conditions: tell nobody who had said so, and bring none of the other young whelps, or he would beat the skin off their backs. Then he went off with the sack of corn over his shoulder, as though he felt he had said too much already.

The next Saturday Bowling cycled up with his pockets full of worms and maggots, found Hodges just finished his dinner and a bit surly about it, and got him to show the way down. The pool was several hundred yards behind the house, completely hidden in beech woods, and about a hundred and fifty yards across. It was full of small bream, and it held pike big enough that Bowling never had tackle to hold one. He went perhaps a dozen times over two years.

On one of those afternoons the fish were not biting and he pushed through the blackberry bushes at the far end of the pool, and found a second pool that he had not known existed. It was twenty yards wide, dark, and very deep, and it held carp almost the length of his arm. He worked out that the two pools had once been joined, that the stream had dried up and the woods had closed round the smaller one, and that the fish had been left to grow. Nobody else knew about them. Bowling guessed that even Hodges had forgotten the second pool was there. Those carp are what he drives back to Lower Binfield for, twenty-five years later.

Hodges appears once more in the years before the war. By the time Bowling was courting Elsie Waters the old man was past seventy and getting very crusty, and the two of them slipped through a gap in the fence on a Sunday afternoon on the calculation that he would be asleep. In 1938 Bowling walks the churchyard and finds him among the names he grew up with, remembered by his tobacco-coloured teeth.