Julia Comstock
Gordon's older sister, who was taken out of school at sixteen so his fees could be paid, works a seventy-two-hour week in a teashop, and has been lending him money he does not repay for most of her adult life.
For Gordon to make good and for the family to stop dwindling. She has believed since he was a child that he alone of the Comstocks could retrieve their fortunes, and she is still saying so at thirty, greying, after every one of his refusals.
The book
At a glance
- Gordon's older sister; works in a teashop near Earl's Court Underground Station
- Nearly thirty, and looks much older
- A seventy-two-hour week
- Twenty-five shillings plus her lunch and tea; up by ten shillings in six years
- A bed-sitting room in Earl's Court, second floor back, nine bob a week unfurnished
- One or two poor, dingy little boarding schools; taken away for good at sixteen
- Chapters 3, 7, 10 and 12
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeJulia Comstock is five years older than her brother, and George Orwell sets her position out in one sentence: Gordon was "the boy" and Julia was "the girl", and it seemed natural to everyone that the girl should be sacrificed to the boy. She was sent to one or two poor, dingy little boarding schools and taken away for good at sixteen, while about a hundred and twenty pounds a year went on schools for him. She is tall and ungainly, with a thin face and a neck just a little too long, one of those girls who at their most youthful remind you irresistibly of a goose. Her nature is simple and affectionate. She idolised him as a child, went in rags so that he would have the right clothes for school, and saved her pocket-money to buy him Christmas presents.
Her adult life is a routine she does not think of as unhappy. She works in a ladylike little teashop near Earl's Court Underground Station, seventy-two hours a week for twenty-five shillings and her lunch and tea; in six years her wages have gone up by ten shillings. The proprietress is a semi-friend as well as an employer, which means she can sweat and bully Julia to the tune of "dearest" and "darling". She lives in a bed-sitting room in Earl's Court, second floor back, nine bob a week unfurnished, and has furnished it slowly, each object representing a period of semi-starvation: a divan that can nearly be mistaken for a sofa, a chintz armchair from Drage's on thirteen monthly payments, a birchwood calendar with "It's a long lane that has no turning" done on it in pokerwork. Her hair is going grey fast, and she does her sewing at night by a tiny gas-fire.
Gordon almost never goes to see her except to borrow money, and he knows it. He has taken perhaps a hundred pounds off her over the years, including the last penny of her savings during the seven months when he was out of work and on the street. What she cannot forgive, and what she never says, is not the money. It is that he alone of the Comstocks had it in him to succeed and chose not to. "None of us ever seems to make any money!" is her perpetual lament, and in her wordless way, Orwell writes, she knows that the sin against money is the ultimate sin.
How the book draws them
- How she has agedNearly thirty in Chapter 3, and looking much older. She is thinner than ever, though healthy enough, with a deep line scored down each thin red cheek. Her hair is not greying at the temples but in handfuls: by Chapter 7 whole locks of it are quite grey, and Gordon reckons that a little more and it will simply be grey hair.
- Old maid at sixteenTall and ungainly, much taller than Gordon, with a thin face and a neck just a little too long. Orwell's word for the effect is goose, and he uses it again for the tender way she hovers over the tea-caddy. She was a self-effacing, home-keeping, ironing, darning and mending kind of girl, and at sixteen, he writes, she already had old maid written all over her.
- Saving gasWhen he knocks she takes him up and kneels at the gas-fire, saying she will light it "again". No fire had been lit that evening. The room is beastly cold, because Julia always saves gas when she is alone.
- The purse in the linen drawerSmall, worn, black leather, hidden at the bottom of the drawer. She never refuses him. He knows as she reaches for it exactly what the five shillings will cost: fewer Christmas presents.
- ChristmasThe great event of her year. She hunts the bargain counters late at night after the teashop shuts, for handkerchief sachets, letter racks, teapots and manicure sets, and scrapes towards it all year out of her wages. She once gave Gordon the Selected Poems of John Drinkwater in green morocco, because he was fond of poetry. He sold it for half a crown.
- The parcels for Aunt AngelaShe smuggles packets of cakes and bread and butter out of the teashop to her aunt at Highgate, who would otherwise go hungry on ninety-eight pounds a year. They are always presented as just a few little things that it seemed a pity to throw away, with the pretence maintained on both sides.
- What she does not understandHis motives, entirely. All she grasps is that a good job was offered and he refused it. When he explains, she weeps, without grace or dignity, in her little Drage-furnished bed-sitting room. She is thirty and there is grey in her hair, and it is the death of all her hopes.
- The allianceShe and Rosemary had never met before Gordon lost his job. Afterwards they get to know each other, and the only thing they have in common is their rage at his maddening behaviour. They write to him and go to see him separately and together, and he finds it unbearable.
- What she was never toldThat their mother's lungs were failing while she gave piano lessons at two shillings an hour to keep Gordon at school. Julia knew. It was a secret between the two women, carefully kept from him.
She never learns that the five pounds Gordon set aside for her out of the American cheque was spent on a drunken evening and a prostitute.