Mother Meakin
The Lambeth landlady: a dishevelled, jelly-soft old creature with a figure like a cottage loaf, who interferes with nothing so long as the rent is paid. She welcomes Gordon by carrying an aspidistra up to his attic to make the room more home-like.
Her lodgers to feel comfortable. She says so out loud while carrying a plant up three flights of stairs to a man she met that morning.
The book
At a glance
- Gordon's landlady in Lambeth, after he loses his bookshop job
- Brewer's Yard, off the Lambeth Cut, south London
- Eight shillings a week for an attic bed-sitting room
- In the basement, where she boils haddock
- Chapter 10
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMother Meakin keeps the lodging house in Brewer's Yard, off the Lambeth Cut in south London, where Gordon Comstock takes a room in the second half of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the novel George Orwell published in 1936. Gordon is a poet who has spent the book deliberately sinking, and this is the bottom of it: a bed-sitting room under the roof, eight shillings a week, shaped like a wedge of cheese, with a skylight, a gas-ring in the fireplace and bugs in the cracks of the wallpaper.
Orwell describes her as a dishevelled, jelly-soft old creature with a figure like a cottage loaf. She wheezes, she has trouble with the stairs, and when her arms are full she knocks on a door with her knee, or, as Orwell puts it, the place where her knee ought to have been. She lives somewhere in the basement and boils haddock down there, which you can smell from two floors up.
She is the opposite of Gordon's previous landlady, Mrs Wisbeach, who handled his letters before handing them over and put her head out of a door to inspect anyone crossing the hall. Mother Meakin does not interfere with anything. So long as the rent is paid you can come home drunk and crawl up the stairs, bring women in at any hour, and stay in bed all day. Gordon has wanted a house like this for two years, which is why the single kind thing she does for him hits him so hard.
How the book draws them
- The houseRooms at eight shillings a week, sheets changed once a fortnight, bare floorboards dark with dirt, and one large evil-smelling sink two flights down for the whole building. On the ground floor a house painter, his wife and five children live on the dole. Above them a baby cries without stopping and a young couple have loud quarrels and louder reconciliations.
- The cleaning that does not happenIn theory she does out the rooms every day. In practice, Orwell writes, four days out of five she finds the stairs too much for her. Lodgers make their own beds and cook their own meals on a gas-ring in the fender.
- The aspidistraOn the day Gordon moves in he hears her puffing up the stairs with her arms full. She knocks with her knee and comes in. "I knew as 'ow you'd like this. I likes all my lodgers to feel comfortable-like. Lemme put it on the table for you. There! That makes the room like a bit more 'ome-like, don't it now?" It is an aspidistra, the houseplant that stands in the novel for exactly the respectable life Gordon has spent two years running away from. It is also weedy and visibly dying.
- What the neighbourhood says about herThat in her youth she had been no better than she ought, which was the polite phrase for sleeping around, and Orwell adds that it was probably true. She has, he says, a loving manner towards anything in trousers, and some traces of respectability survive in her anyway.
- The rule of the housePay the rent and nobody asks anything. Gordon spends his weeks here shaving three times a week, washing only the parts that show, and lying on the bed reading thrillers until the early hours. Nobody comes upstairs to disapprove.