Private Lidgebird

Private Lidgebird is the only other man at Twelve Mile Dump, a supply depot on the north Cornish coast in George Orwell's Coming Up for Air. George Bowling, who narrates the novel, was posted there from the middle of 1917 to the beginning of 1919, and the two of them spent that time guarding eleven tins of bully beef for an organisation that did not exist.

Bowling had been sent down in the middle of 1917 to check whether any stores existed at the dump. They consisted of eleven tins of bully beef, left behind by officers who had been there earlier on some other errand. Before he could report this, a telegram arrived putting him in charge of the stores and telling him to stay until further notice. He wired back that there were no stores. The following day an official letter made him officer commanding Twelve Mile Dump, and he stayed until the beginning of 1919. The West Coast Defence Force that the dump was supposed to belong to never got past being an idea.

It was a lonely stretch of coast where the only people Bowling ever saw were a few local men who had barely heard there was a war on. A quarter of a mile away and down a hill, the sea broke over enormous flats of sand. It rained nine months of the year, and for the other three a wind blew off the Atlantic. There was nothing on the site but two Army huts, the eleven tins, Bowling and Lidgebird. Once a month a form arrived asking for the number and condition of pick-axes, entrenching tools, barbed wire, blankets, groundsheets, first-aid outfits, corrugated iron and tins of plum-and-apple jam. Bowling wrote nil against everything and posted it back.

Lidgebird had been left there by the earlier officers, and Bowling never found out what he was supposed to be doing. He was very deaf, he was old, and he was surly. In eighteen months Bowling got one fact out of him: before he joined the Army he had been a market gardener.

That fact accounts for everything else he does. Before Bowling even arrived he had dug a patch of ground round one of the huts and planted potatoes. In the autumn he dug a second patch, and went on until he had about half an acre under cultivation. At the beginning of 1918 he started keeping hens, and by the end of that summer there were a good number of them. Towards the end of the year he produced a pig, and Bowling never discovered where it came from. He does not think it ever crossed the old man's mind to wonder what the two of them were doing on that coast, or what the West Coast Defence Force was, or whether it existed.

Bowling finishes the account by saying it would not surprise him to hear that Lidgebird is still there, raising pigs and potatoes on the spot where Twelve Mile Dump used to be, and that he hopes he is.