Story: George Bowling remembers his childhood and being fed up with routine life wants to have fresh air. He goes back to his original place where he has grown up. He sees, to his astonishment, everything gone. Wife is Hilda Bowling. A good descriptive book how the changes surprise you and ultimately force you to accept them.

Some good lines from the book:

But I’d been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it.

She’s one of those people who get their main kick in life out of foreseeing disasters. Only petty disasters, of course.

Fear! We swim in it. It’s our element. Everyone that isn’t scared of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or fascism or communism or something.

The truth is that a woman doesn’t look on any man as a joke if he can kid her that he’s in love with her.

Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside very fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?

Whatever thought you think there’s always a million people thinking it at the same moment.

The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality. It’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some change sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going and the past doesn’t merely comeback to you, you’re actually in the past.

When you’re very young you seem to suddenly become conscious of things that have been under your nose for a long time past. The things round about you swim into your mind one at a time, rather as they do when you’re waking from sleep.

Time goes on, you get stronger on your legs and by degrees you being to get a grasp of geography.

When you’re very small you don’t look into the distance.

Listing for a soldier, in their eyes, was the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets.

When you look back over a long period you seem to see human beings always fixed in some special place and some characteristic attitude. It seems to you that they were always doing exactly the same thing.

There is always a fascination in watching anybody do a job which he really understands.

The truth is that kids aren’t in any way poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish. A boy isn’t interested in meadows, groves and so forth. He never looks at a landscape, doesn’t give a damn for flowers unless they affect him in some way, such as being good to eat, he doesn’t know one plant from another. Killing things – that about as near to poetry as a boy gets. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up and feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on forever.

I’d got a job and the job had got me.

It was a bit before my 16^th birthday that I began to get glimpses of what people call ‘real life’ meaning unpleasantness.

These books I’m speaking of weren’t in the least high brow. But now and again it so happens that you strike a book which is exactly at the mental level you’ve reached at the moment, so much so that it seems to have been written especially for you.

Authors: Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W.W.Jacobs, Pelf Ridge, Oliver Onions, Compton Mackenzie, H.Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKumna, May Sinclair Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, Elinor Glyn, Stephen Leacock, Silar Hocking and Jean Stratton Porter.

At any rate that year or ‘reading novels’ was the only real education in the sense of book-reading, ‘that’ I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life in a normal sensible way. But I wonder if you can understand this – the thing that really changed me, really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the rotten meaninglessness of the life I was leading.

You know how it is with these big business men, and they seem to take up more room and walk more loudly than any ordinary person, and they give off a kind of wave of money, that you can feel fifty years away.

Get on! Make Good! If you see a man down, jump on his before he gets up again.

If you’re married, there’ll have been times when you’ve said to yourself ‘why the hell did I do it?’

And one thing I certainly didn’t grasp was that the girls in these penniless middle-class families will marry any thing in trousers to get away from home.

One gets used to everything in time.

For hours, sometimes, on Sunday afternoons or in the evening when I’ve come home from work, I’ve lain on my bed with all my clothes on, wondering about women why they’re like that, how they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose. It seems to be a most frightful thing, the suddenness with which some women go to pieces after they’re married. It’s as if they were strung up to do just that one thing, and the instant they’ve done it they wither off like a flower that’s set its seed. What really gets me down in the dreary attitude towards life that it implies. If marriage was just an open swindle – if the woman trapped you into it and then turned around and said, ‘now, you bastard, I’ve caught you and you’re going to work for me while I have a good time!’ – I wouldn’t mind so much. But not a bit of it. They don’t want to have a good time. They merely want to slump into middle age as quickly as possible. After the frightful battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy and joy of life just vanish overnight.

The essential fact about middle class families is that all their vitality has been chained away by lack of money. In families like that, which live on tiny pensions and annuities – that’s to say on incomes which never get bigger and generally get smaller – there’s more sense of poverty, more crust- wiping and looking twice at six pence, than you’d find in any farm – laborer’s families.

We say that a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don’t stop working – hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.

Isn’t it queer how we go through life, always thinking that the things we want to do are the things that can’t be done?