Coming Up For War: George Orwell and the poetry of Edward Thomas

 

Coming Up For War: George Orwell and the poetry of Edward Thomas

A study of the ways in which the poetry of Edward Thomas and George Orwell’s “Coming Up For Air” address the effect of war on England’s landscape, society and culture. 

 “I am so sad for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming …the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out.”[1] D. H Lawrence

“Those born after 1914 are incapable of happiness”[2] Bertrand Russell

While it is possible to call Edward Thomas a war poet, it would be inaccurate to see him as a “trench” poet like Sassoon or Owen. Thomas fought and died in the Great War, but never wrote of mud, shrapnel or mustard gas. He preferred to write more indirectly, associating the war with progress, technology and the modern world, and he mourned the inevitable changes that war was bringing to his beloved English countryside. In “Coming Up For Air” (1938), George Orwell manages to look back fondly to the same unspoiled, pre-war “golden age” in England that Thomas both celebrates and mourns in his verse. His concern is also nostalgic, for idealised halcyon day. However, darkening Orwell’s novel is the realisation that the coming conflict- the Second World War- is likely to destroy more than rural peace and quiet, with fascism threatening to destroy democracy and freedom. Both of these very English writers delve into aspects of the past, present and future, exploring their attitudes to much-missed times of innocence- before having to face up to the horrors of war and how in all likelihood it will change the country they love.

Both men express a physical, almost visceral connection with the country of their birth. Orwell wrote in “England, Your England” that:

“When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately a sensation of breathing a different air…the beer is bitterer, the grass is greener…”[3]

Thomas’ love for his native land was even more down to earth. When asked by his friend Eleanor Farjeon why he had decided to fight in the war, Thomas bent down and picked up a pinch of soil. He crumbled it between a finger and thumb and then replied ‘Literally, for this.” He said later: “It was not mine unless I were willing and prepared to die rather than leave it.”[4]

 

 

A Subtle Loss

For Thomas, the rural tranquillity before 1914 was, according to Michael Kirkham, “that of an endangered England, one about to disappear from men’s consciousness.” Many of his poems, written in the Spring of 1916, resonate with “imminent loss, as belonging to a dying order of life, a world coming to an end”[5].  Thomas writes purposefully in the present, reflecting the daily toll that the war is beginning to have on his own beloved South Downs. While his verse embraces the immediate beauty of the natural world, it creates a sense that the war has exposed the fragility of this perfection. He writes vividly, precisely and lovingly about the varied flora and fauna as it appears to him on his walks; “much of the reverberative richness of Thomas’ poems is a result of fidelity to observed facts” [6]. However, at the same time, he often implies a sense of loss. For example, he believes that “Fifty Faggots”, while being on one level an “underwood of hazel and ash in Jenny Pink’s close”, will also:

“Light several Winters’ fires. Before they are done The war will have ended, many other things Have ended, maybe, that I can no more Foresee or more control than robin and wren.” (Fifty Faggots)

For Thomas, the future is beginning to look bleak in terms of the change being inflicted on his environment; even more concerning and frustrating for him is his inability to prevent it.

In “Coming Up For Air”, Orwell has a similar outlook to Thomas; in both writers’ work “a large part is devoted to a lyrical celebration of the sleepy English countryside but there is a powerful sense…that the beauty of that landscape may be doomed by the relentless movement of vast, unseen historical forces”[7]. Thomas warns his unsuspecting readers about the profound changes that war was beginning to inflict upon rural British society; that is, the physical and cultural destruction that the approaching Second World War would bring to both the countryside and society in general. The rural, simple and uncomplicated world he grew up in is the same world as that of Orwell. In his novel, Orwell idealises his childhood rural paradise via flashbacks, lyrical, dream-like sections that are inspired by the grim realities of his present-day experiences. While his landscape appears to have escaped much of the change as predicted by Thomas, it seems to Orwell, twenty years later, consigned to having “bombs bury many of its landmarks.”[8] For Orwell, living away from the idealised pastoral of his childhood is bad enough. Modern consumer society, with new towns being built upon farmland, has become a suburban “prison, with cells all in a row”, (CUFA, p.31). The future is terrifyingly dystopian, as Orwell outlines plainly, in the words of the practical George Bowling:

“It’s all going to happen. The bombs, the food queues, the rubber truncheons…it’s just something that’s got to happen.” (CUFA p.224)

Thomas’s warnings are not quite as direct. Possibly, his fears were unconscious, and he expresses them indirectly through his poetry; indeed, it seems possible to read much of his subtle verse without perceiving any of the warnings that Kirkham has felt. His sense of loss is not overt; indeed, many observers have been oblivious to such readings, for example:

“Edward Thomas…refused to let the conflict interfere with his nostalgic rural visions…”[9] and

“In his loving concentration on the unchanging order of nature and rural society, the war exists only as a brooding but deliberately excluded presence…”[10]

Kirkham, however, seems more perceptive, and identifies Thomas’ fears. Specifically, the war colours his verse, not directly by its violence and inhumanity, or even via the fear of being invaded by fascists, but by becoming a catalyst for the progress, change and technology which will destroy his beloved rural environment. In “Tall Nettles”, Thomas captures a precise detail:

“As well as any bloom upon a flower I like the dust on the nettles…”

The war is never mentioned; Thomas describes overgrown nettles as uncut and straggling, perhaps, we may reflect, because farm labourers are away in the trenches. He hints that the nettles are covering, hiding and making redundant the farm’s tools and machinery, now rusting in an unkempt farmyard. Thomas seems to suggest that objects, representing his idealised past, are now, like the memories of his childhood, slowly becoming rendered out of date and defunct.

“Tall nettles cover up, as they have done These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough Long worn out…” (Tall Nettles)

Thomas senses rather than predicts this loss in much of his work. “The Barn”, for example has outlived its purpose and has been “outgrown” by an elm, once small, but now dripping rain onto the barn’s thatch.

Social Awareness 

“Coming Up For Air” was written in 1938 in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, with another major conflict about to erupt. Like Thomas, Orwell expresses his fears for what war will do to England; he looks back at the freedoms of his childhood in Edwardian England and fears losing this precious democracy and liberty to invading fascists. Orwell’s worries are for all mankind and, altruistically, he writes in that vein. His central character, George Bowling, is “alternately proud and contemptuous…alternately nostalgic and cynical about the past…”[11] (Hunter, p.33). While living and existing very pragmatically in the real world Bowling is, like most of us (as Orwell seems to be suggesting), extremely nostalgic for the “good old days” when society was, he believes, happier and less complicated, and he wasn’t “almost exactly the shape of a tub” (CUFA, p. 18). Orwell sets Bowling’s selfish demands alongside his desire to warn the whole of society, and while reviews were at time condescending about Orwell’s choice of a non-intellectual anti-hero, Bernard Crick argues that Orwell was not only writing his book about the lower-middle class- “the real England”-but “aiming his book at them, trying to stir them up, wanting them to assert themselves.”[12]

While Thomas’ concerns are rarely overtly political, the effects of war become a tragedy, which initially grows out of his own personal disappointment at the departure of an uncomplicated and timeless rural haven. This develops into an all-embracing love for his country and a fear that England, too, might be changed irreparably. The enemy in 1916 is not fascism and Nazism, as it is for Orwell in 1938. However, Thomas occasionally echoes the sort of fears that Orwell expresses twenty years later:

“I am one in crying, God save England, lest We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.” (This is no case of petty right or wrong)

Thomas, then, combines a personal sense of loss with a shared sense of grief. This is perhaps the closest he ever comes to a direct representation of what the country might become, politically, as a result of war. His approach is usually more indirect.

Rose Tinted Spectacles

In the parts of “Coming Up For Air” in which Bowling is transported back in time to his Edwardian childhood, Orwell convinces the reader to share his yearning for a “golden world frozen in time”[13] (Shelden p.339). His prose in these sections is flowing and poetic; as readers, we cannot help but be drawn into the safe charm of Bowling’s images of comfort and safety:

“A Sunday afternoon- summer of course, always summer- a smell of roast pork and greens still floating in the air…” (CUFA p.37)

Yet, perhaps, these nostalgic images are too persuasive; it is likely that Orwell intends us to realise quite quickly that Bowling’s romanticism is counter-productive as he “reaches into childhood memories in a predictably vain attempt to renew a life which has grown fretful and pointless”[14] (Hunter p.43). Indeed, Bowling is practical enough to know that “I didn’t want to go back and live there,” (CUFA, p.151). Orwell suggests that there is a danger that we are likely to be unprepared for the horrors of the upcoming war if we expend too much energy trying to dwell in the past or recreate a society which has disappeared, even if we remember that society as being far better than the present. Crick argues that there is a danger that Bowling’s nostalgia is seen to be “a contradiction of Orwell’s socialist hopes.”[15]

Yet the novel recreates an idealised past so convincingly and thoroughly that “the gloom is pierced by more than a few beams of bright light.” Orwell and Thomas can be paralleled in this regard; “it is the glow from these passages (ie the memories of the past) which linger in the reader’s mind as a reminder of what will be lost in ‘total’ war and the price that will be paid for ignoring its approach.”[16]

Thomas’ love for a world that he believes to be fast disappearing is expressed subtly. He rarely makes specific emotional connections; his sadness is expressed more through the tone and cadence of his verse. The reader understands and recognises Thomas’ personal appreciation of a timeless pastoral landscape while sharing an unspoken sadness in the recognition that it is slipping away. In The Barn, Thomas writes of an ancient elm, adding a wistfully ironic “maybe” to the end of a line:

“Tomorrow they cut it down. They will leave The barn, as I shall be left, maybe.”

Similarly, Thomas’ image of a dying tree obliquely represents the slow obliteration of a way of life again in his poem In the Team’s Head-Brass:

“I sat among the boughs of a fallen elm…”

He learns that this dead tree still lies rotting. Farmhands have been called to war and those that remain in the village, the old and the wounded, cannot maintain and manage the land, which is implicitly in decline:

“The second day In France they killed him. It was back in March, The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.” (In the Team’s Head-Brass)

Natural Motifs

Orwell uses natural motifs similarly. In “Coming Up For Air” George Bowling yearns for the peaceful simplicity of his childhood days in Lower Binfield, where he would go fishing on his own. In the midst of his dull, repressed suburban existence of 1938 he remembers a vivid image from when he was ten or so; a glimpse of a deep, well-hidden pond, full of large fish, in the grounds of a country estate. For Bowling, this private and unsullied memory represents the purity and perfection of a world before the Great War, so painfully mourned by Edward Thomas. Bowling was determined to find the pool and to recapture the potential and naïve innocence of childhood.

“Maybe, even, it was still hidden in the woods, and from that day to this no-one had discovered it had existed. It was quite possible. “ (CUFA, p.210)

The pool, of course, had been destroyed. It had beenturned into a municipal park. As Orwell noted bitterly later, such dreams are destined never to be realised. …men of forty-five can’t go fishing. ..it’s just a dream , there’ll be no more fishing this side of the grave.”[17]

In a similar vein, Thomas writes of a mysterious old chalk-pit which was believed to have once been a thriving place of work a hundred years ago. Now, like the tumbledown “The Barn”, it is full of:

“ash trees standing ankle deep in briar” (The Chalk Pit)

While Orwell’s hidden pond and Thomas’ chalk pit are comparable in that they represent lost or even fabled locations, both writers have chosen to discuss their significance by means of a conversation. They reflect both a conservationist viewpoint and also that of a less country-spirited urban newcomer. Thomas’ pair (a visitor…a man of forty…who smoked and strolled about”) possibly represent alternative, or younger, versions of himself. Both do not sense the same spirit of the pit. This enhances the feeling that there is magic in the air:

“It was not empty, silent, still, but full Of life of some kind, perhaps tragical.” (The Chalk Pit)

and the last speaker realises that he would prefer to be alone, even though he fails to understand such a place (“imperfect friends, we men and trees…). Orwell’s companion is middle class and crassly modern, not aware of the fish pond’s history, but still determined to celebrate its historic significance. He does not understand Bowling’s deep personal connection with the place; the man’s response is representative of the fake commercialism that Bowling so despises. The local houses are “mock-tudor”, and the area is known as the “pixy glen” to those live locally. The disappearance of both the Chalk Pit and the fish pond represent aspects of Orwell and Thomas’ outlooks. Orwell sees his past destroyed and replaced with what hates the most- phony profiteering. The man he meets is “a health-food crank or something to do with the boy-scouts…one of those men who have never grown up…” (CUFA p.212). Orwell sees the future as the replacing of rural simplicity with urban dishonesty and superficiality. Jeffrey Meyers notes that Coming Up For Air “…satirises the same subjects as The Road To Wigan Pier; the crankish swarm of vegetarians, health-food addicts, fruit-juice drinkers, sandal wearers, nudists…”[18]

These interlopers represent, for Orwell, a future of city dwellers being sold a contrived and sanitised version of the past to give a false meaning to their views of their real heritage. Thomas’ position is less certain. He sometimes gives hope that change might be just part of the natural cycle of things, and that all will be well:

“’Twas gone- the narrow copse…as I look…a tributary’s tributary rises there…” (First Known When Lost)

And

“Now I know that Spring will come again” (March)

Yet on many occasions, his mood is sombre and unclear:

“Look at the old house Outmoded, undignified Dark and untenanted With grass growing instead” (The Old House)

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding On the old road where all that passed are dead, The petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding, This early May morn when there is none to wed.” (The Cherry Trees)

Jennifer Black sees Thomas as an early eco-warrior: “pre-empting the approach of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Charlotte Mew, (Thomas) expresses the enormity of the impact of war by the extent to which it disrupts embedded cultural and religious associations of Easter and spring.”[19] Carol Langley writes that, unlike Thomas’ more optimistic moments, “the poem folds the war dead into the death of old England.”[20]

Individuals

Orwell, like Thomas, personifies his concerns by telling the stories of individual country-dwellers who face suffering and rejection. A number of the inhabitants of Lower Binfield are changed drastically by the effects of modernisation and progress. One such is Elsie, his childhood sweetheart. When Bowling revisits the village after “twenty four years”, he is shocked by the changes; none are more chilling than when he catches sight of Elsie,

“the girl I’d known, with her milky white skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair had turned into this great round-shouldered hag, shambling along on twisted heels.” (CUFA p.204)

Thomas’ images of those who people his landscape are often striking, quaint individuals likely to disappear as the countryside becomes less capable of sustaining diversification. For Orwell, Elsie seems to epitomise what capitalism and commercialism has done to the innocence of the beautiful community he remembers. The urbanisation of his village has reduced his childhood sweetheart into a grotesque. Thomas is also concerned about changes to country folk:

“A recurrent theme of Edward Thomas’s war poetry is the disappearance of country people from the landscape and the impact of their absences on the land.”[21]

Thomas remembers the music and free spirit of “The Gypsy”; while it “outlasted all the fair, the farmer and auctioneer”, it seems to be memorable for its rarity and the impending obsolescence of the gypsy lifestyle. A similar sense is expressed in “A Private”; Thomas remembers an itinerant ploughman who slept rough in the fields, never to return from the war, embodying a type that seems certain to disappear. In “Women he liked”, Thomas remembers a long dead farmer, memorable for his love of elms (an often repeated motif of decay in Thomas’ poetry) and for the name he gave to an obscure lane:

“the mist and the rain Out of the elms have turned the lane to slough And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob’s Lane” (Women he liked)

In a passage that seems discordant with the rest of “Coming Up For Air”, Orwell spends time with a friend, “old Porteous”, an ageing intellectual who lives in a world of books and learning, largely untouched by modernity. Bowling secretly admires this ability to shut out the present in favour of Greek and Roman poetry. Yet in a moment of clarity, Orwell realises that Porteous is “dead…a ghost…not capable of change…just moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time…” (CUFA p.160) Ironically, while Bowling cannot see anything to be optimistic about in the modern world, he realises that to bury oneself in the past is even more unwise.

Red in Tooth and Claw

Birds, too, become odd symbols of displacement and suffering caused by the war and its effects. Orwell manages to persuade us that cruelty to birds and their chicks, while being unpleasant, is gruesome yet inevitable, a common habit of small boys brought up in a rural environment unspoilt by moral issues and without any urban sense of sentimentality; “we had a theory that birds can’t count and that it’s alright if you leave just one egg, but we were cruel little beasts and sometimes we’d just knock the nest down and trample on the eggs or chicks” (CUFA p.68) Although a countryman, Thomas was educated in the city and perhaps never experienced such adventures; never in his verse could he countenance such behaviour. His view of nature is more idealised and, perhaps, less accessible. Birds, for Thomas, are sacred creatures worthy of our care and protection, and he frequently represents them as symbols of what must be protected and cherished, either through the familiarity of personification or idealised deification :

The glory of the beauty in the morning- The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew The blackbird that has found it, and the dove That tempts me on to something sweeter than love” (The Glory)

Perhaps Orwell’s view of this lost world, more “red in tooth and claw” than Thomas’ more idealised perspective, is more realistic. Thomas, growing up in urban Battersea and becoming a late convert to the joys of rural living, may thereby have a skewed or even become over-precious with an idealised attitude to the harshness of nature.

Urban Influences

Both writers feel strongly about the tawdry, de-personalised existence caused by industrialisation and capitalism in the mid twentieth century, particularly affecting the “respectable” lower-middle classes. Orwell despairs at how society has changed from the simplicity of an Edwardian, rural world; George Bowling, who might have been expected to take over his father’s village shop, has relocated from the sleepy village into a suburb, “West Bletchley”, servicing the greed of big business while exploiting those, like himself, working and trapped in it: “it’s the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers (who) quake and shiver” (CUFA, p.11). Bowling plays his part in this: “the beauty of the Building-Society swindle is that your victims think that you’re doing them a kindness” (CUFA, p.11). Clearly one effect of the Great War was to open up the need for workers in factories in towns and cities, which ensured that rural England was changed forever.

Industrialisation affects Thomas also. As the nearby cities grew, overspill and housing shortages meant that villages such as Lower Binfield and Steep, Thomas’ home, were threatened by changes to agricultural land. More immediately, the government demanded men, munitions and wheat to feed the population.

“The number of men permanently employed in agriculture in January 1918 dropped by twenty eight point seven per cent below the figure at the beginning of the war and continued to decline throughout the century as education levels increased and workers sought employment in towns and cities.”[22]

The poem “Man and Dog” focuses on men, “marginal and displaced”[23], who were forced off the land by the war to look further afield for work. Thomas naturally creates a sense of empathy for these victims with the same passion that Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen describe the fate of soldiers: “The isolation of an individual displaced by larger forces of modernity and economic instability is accentuated by the man’s only companion being a mongrel dog.”[24] Crafts traditional in Thomas’ pastoral ideal became under threat; there were once blacksmiths and inns noisy and busy with:

“The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing- The sounds that for these fifty years have been…” (Aspens)

Now there are only “ghosts” in the “silent smithy, the silent inn… to turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.” (Aspens).

“These disappearances emphasise the vulnerability of humans, as well as nature, to the changes brought by war and modernity.”[25] Putting such men into historical context makes them feel timeless; Thomas Morton notes that “the places he experiences are shaped not only by current conflict, but by a whole history of human action or inaction.”[26]

Differences

Perhaps the differences between the writers is too profound. Unlike Thomas, Bowling has the knowledge of what happened after 1918. He has seen the growth of capitalism, a technology, commercialism resulting in “everything fake- ersatz”. Clearly, the England of his childhood is where he would prefer to be, yet he decides that the “past can only exist if it is recoverable.” He soon discovers it is not; it is as if he has been in a trance in believing that it was ever possible. He accepts that he was wholly wrong to try to bring his past back to life and becomes resigned to his fate, epitomised by his imprisonment in the stifling petit-bourgeois world of East Bletchley. In forseeing the horrors of war, fascism and “rubber truncheons”, he takes comfort in his condition, his ordinariness and powerless anonymity: “holding down our jobs- that’s our future….”[27]

Thomas does not have this luxury, writing in early 1916, but he is as resigned as Orwell to a greatly-changed world without knowing exactly what it will be like. Like Orwell, Thomas writes with apparent certainty about loss, decay and an irretrievable spirit being destroyed. Neither can be specific: Bowling claims that he cannot predict the future as “it hardly interests me…” (CUFA p,225). Both men, though, realise that there is in England an indefinable spirit and set of values at stake. Thomas in 1916 cannot yet define this spirit, but Orwell in 1938 seems to speak for both: “…the fields, the beech spinneys, the farmhouses and churches… “ (CUFA p.224).

Ultimately, perhaps the most fundamental comparison between Orwell’s “Coming Up For Air” and Edward Thomas’ poetry lies is the possibility of what Annette Federico calls “an assertion of hope constructed from the memories of commonplace pastimes”.[28] Possibly, we can sense that underlying Thomas’s fears for the future he holds a deeper belief that nature will be strong enough to prevail. He certainly does not share the pessimism of D. H Lawrence (“no new things coming”); His belief is that “now I know that Spring will come again” (March).

Orwell seems to offer less optimism: “1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It’ll never come again.” (CUFA p.22). Yet Orwell, too, seems to be warning us rather than stating a pessimistic certainty: “What’s coming, I don’t know…everything you’ve ever known is going down, down, into the muck, with the machine guns rattling all the time” (CUFA p.225).

 

0Bergonzi, Bernard Heroes’ Twilight London, 1965 p.85

Black, Jennifer Edward Thomas’ Ecocentric War Poetry Manchester Met. 1916

Crick, Bernard George Orwell A Life Penguin 1980 p.376

Dakers, C. The Countryside at War 1914-18. London: Constable 1987

Farjeon, E. The Last Four Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979.

Federico, Annette Making Do: George Orwell’s “Coming Up For Air” Studies in the Novel Vol.37 No.1 Spring 2005 p. 60

Johnston J. J. English Poetry of the First World War London, 1964 p.128

Hunter, Jeffrey Orwell, Wells and Coming Up For Air University of Chicago Press 1980 p 45

Kirkham, Michael The Imagination of Edward Thomas Cambridge University Press 1986 p.119

Langley, Carol The Collected Works of Edward Thomas Bloodaxe p.293

Lawrence, D.H. Letters. Vol.2 1913-16 Cambridge 1969

Meyers, Jeffrey Orwell  Norton 2000

Morton, T. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2012.

Motion, Andrew The Poetry of Edward Thomas Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980 p.69

Orwell, George England Your England Secker & Warburg 1941 p.36

Orwell, George Interview with Celia Paget Goodman 1949 (quoted in Meyers p.310)

Russell, Bertrand Autobiography 1944-69 New York 1969

Shelden, Michael Orwell Minerva 1991 p.338

 

 

[1] Lawrence, D.H. Letters. Vol.2 1913-16 Cambridge 1981 

[2] Russell, Bertrand Autobiography 1944-69 New York 1969

[3] Orwell, George England Your England Secker & Warburg 1941 p.36

[4] Farjeon, E. The Last Four Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979.

[5] Kirkham, Michael The Imagination of Edward Thomas Cambridge University Press 1986 p.119

[6] Motion, Andrew The Poetry of Edward Thomas Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980 p.69

[7] Shelden, Michael Orwell Minerva 1991 p.338

[8] Shelden, ibid

[9] J. J. Johnston English Poetry of the First World War London, 1964 p.128

[10] Bernard Bergonzi Heroes’ Twilight London, 1965 p.85

[11] Hunter p.33

[12] Crick, Bernard George Orwell A Life Penguin 1980 p.376

[13] Shelden (ibid.) p.339

[14] Hunter (ibid. p.43)

[15] Crick (ibid.)

[16] Shelden (ibid) p. 339

[17] Orwell George Interview with Celia Paget Goodman 1949 (quoted in Meyers p.310)

[18] Meyers Jeffrey Orwell  Norton 2000

[19] Black, Jennifer Edward Thomas’ Ecocentric War Poetry Manchester Met. 1916

[20] Langley, Carol The Collected Works of Edward Thomas Bloodaxe p.293

[21] Black, Elizabeth ibid.

[22] Dakers, C.. The Countryside at War 1914-18. London: Constable 1987

[23] Black ibid.

[24] Black ibid.

[25] Black ibid.

[26] Morton, T. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2012.

[27] Hunter, Jeffrey Orwell, Wells and Coming Up For Air University of Chicago Press 1980 p 45

[28] Federico, Annette Making Do: George Orwell’s “Coming Up For Air” Studies in the Novel Vol.37 No.1 Spring 2005 p. 60