Uncle Ezekiel is a shop owner with quite liberal beliefs, being a ' little Englander'. He kept an assortment of caged birds inside his shop as decoration.

Somehow the reality never lives up to the memory. Places from childhood are always smaller and shabbier than imagined. You wonder just why you got on with those folks so well, as you are now all stumbling to find something to say. The holiday destination you dreamed of years ago looks nothing like the pictures in your mind. Yet you still feel a strange kind of ownership over somewhere that used to mean a lot to you, and a sense of loss. Something has drifted away without you noticing. A bit of a negative attitude, sure, but he’s comfortable in this life, except that war is coming--just a few years off according to predictions. He was in the last war, and knows the changes war will bring. All this sets him to remembering his childhood, and giving us a picture of life in the early 1900’s, before the first war changed everything.A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. This final section represents the best writing in the book. Different again from what has gone before, we recognise George Bowling’s reactions, partly from experiences we may have had of our own, and also because the path has been so well prepared. This trip was doomed to failure, because the world moves on. But George Bowling poignantly could not believe that what he so wished to be true, was impossible. Gone is the side-splitting humour, as we find ourselves immersed in George Bowling’s childhood. This is a world of innocence, and of vivid sights and smells; of boyhood, family life and rambling in the country. We read about George and his older brother, living in their parents’ shop in “Lower Binfield” near the River Thames. It is a seed merchant’s, but selling sundry items too, and has a peculiar dusty smell. Such shops were rapidly becoming outmoded, and going downhill. It saddens George to think of his father, working so hard at a soul-destroying business and barely keeping his head above water:

George Bowling, the middle-aged, middle-income protagonist is a great vehicle for Orwell's musings on pre-WW2 England. Bowling is an insightful, straight talking Everyman character who conveys his thoughts with great honesty and self-deprecating humour. There is plenty of Orwellian social commentary here, but as a nostalgic person myself who has experienced a drastic change in civilization’s priorities along with the complete transformations of the places I once called home, I was caught up in the personal side of the story, and commiserated with George Bowling’s experiences. Kitapta böyle o kadar çok güzel nokta var ki... Mesela anlatım şeklini de çok sevdim hikayenin. Yazar direkt kahramanın bugünkü hayatından başlayıp geçmişe dönüp tekrar şu anki haline geliyor ama ne siz eski okur olarak kalıyorsunuz ne de kahraman eski kahraman olarak kalıyor. Adeta birlikte yoğruluyorsunuz hikayenin içinde. Bowling is wondering what to do with a modest sum of money that he has won on a horserace and which he has concealed from his wife and family. Much later (part III), he and his wife attend a Left Book Club meeting where he is horrified by the hate shown by the anti-fascist speaker and bemused by the Marxist ramblings of the communists who have participated in the meeting. Fed up with this, he seeks his friend Old Porteous, the retired schoolmaster. He usually enjoys Porteous' company, but on this occasion, his dry, dead classics make Bowling even more depressed. 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 the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for ever.”

So this story had a reassuring effect on me. To think, George Orwell went through this--the feeling that everything that meant being alive to you was taken away. Then my father went through it, and now me. The universality of the feeling takes the sting away. If the future they feared became the past I loved, chances are, this will keep happening, as the world continues tumbling along. In 1937 Orwell spent some months fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded in the throat in May 1937, by a Nationalist sniper at Huesca. [2] This first section is very reminiscent of H.G Wells, in his social novels such as “Kipps” or “The History of Mr. Polly”. We know that as a boy, Eric Blair did admire H.G. Wells, to the point of him being a favourite author. He enjoyed those novels, because they evoked particular aspects of life in England before the First World War, which made George Orwell recall comparable experiences of his own. Perhaps George Orwell had those novels in mind as a template. Their protagonists are very similar, although George Bowling tells his own story. One of Orwell’s less well known novels; it is a rather bleak comic novel written and set in 1938/1939. It is a well written novel about nostalgia, the lower middle classes, relationships between men and women and middle age. Orwell is primarily a political writer and as he said himself, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” Given works like 1984 and Animal Farm, it isn’t surprising that this one can be forgotten. Kitabı çok sevmemin bir diğer büyük sebebi de tabii ki George Orwell'in müthiş İngiliz ironisi ile bezediği anlatım. 1984'te daha çok karamsar ve iç karartıcı bir hava hakim iken burada son derece eğlenceli bir dil hakim. Bazı yerlerdeki anlatıma hayran kaldım diyebilirim. Mesela, İngiltere'de yaşayanlar bilirler, Mart ayında yalancı bir yaz havası ortaya çıkar ve hava birkaç günlüğüne inanılmaz güzel ve sıcak geçer. Hani Türkiye'de pastırma yazı kavramı vardır ya... Aynı ona benzer bir dönem. Onu bakın ne güzel ifade etmiş: