Suburbs
The road where George Bowling lives in – “Ellesmere Road, West Bletchley” – is the last place where he wants to be. Even if you haven’t ever been there, you can easily imagine it, for it looks like “fifty others.” The streets like it “fester all over the inner-outer suburbs.” “Streets like that are “always the same.” Ellesmere Road consists of “long, long rows of little semi-detached houses,” the numbers in Ellesmere Road “run to 212” and George’s is “191.” The houses are “as much alike as council houses and generally uglier.” “The stucco front,” “the creosoted” gates, “the privet hedge,” and “the green front door.” This imagery evokes a feeling of distaste.
A modern god
In spite of the fact that George Bowling doesn’t like Ellesmere Road, he admires “the beauty of the building society” that can swindle in such a way that its “victims” think it is “doing them a kindness.” You “wallop” them, and they “lick your hand.” The man entertains himself by imagining “an enormous statue to the god of building societies.” It would be “a queer sort of god.” Among other things it “would be bisexual.” The “top half” would be “a managing director” and “the bottom half would be a wife in the family way.” This imagery evokes a bittersweet feeling. A life without a roof under a head is a frightful kind of life. This is why people start praying to “the god of building societies.”
Scared
Hilda – George’s wife – is “thirty-nine,” and when he first knew her she looked “just like a hare.” “So she does still,” but she has got “very thin and rather wizened.” There is “a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes,” and when she’s more upset than usual she’s got “a trick of humping her shoulders and folding her arms across her breast, like an old gipsy woman over the fire.” She is “one of those people” who get their main kick in life out of “foreseeing disasters.” This imagery shows how little does George think of his wife.
