Coming Up For Air - Characters

Characters

• George Bowling is a fat, married, middle-aged (45 years old) insurance salesman, with 'two kids and a house in the suburbs'.

Orwell's brother-in-law, Humphry Dakin, the husband of Orwell's elder sister Marjorie, a 'short, stout, loquacious' man, thought that Bowling might be a portrait of him. He had known Blair (Orwell) since they were youngsters, when the Blairs lived at Henley-on-Thames and later when they lived at Southwold where he marrried Orwell's sister Marjorie.

• Joe Bowling is George's older brother. He was not intellectual, and, according to George 'therefore he had a slight proficiency in mechanics'. He never did any sizable amount of work and worked for his dad as an 'errand boy'. One day whilst George was younger, Joe stole all the money from the shop till. He was said to have always wanted to emigrate to America, and was never mentioned again.
• Uncle Ezekiel was a shop owner and had quite liberal beliefs, being a 'little Englander'. He kept an assortment of caged birds inside his shop as decoration.
• Hilda Bowling, his wife, belonged to the poverty-striken officer class of an Anglo-Indian family who after marriage has settled-down into a depressed lifeless middle-aged frump. 39 years old, 'very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes.'
• Old Porteus, a retired public-school master whose whole life has been lived in an atmosphere of Latin, Greek, and cricket.
• Elsie, George's ex-partner, they met in the vicar's reading circle, and was said to be 'deeply feminine'. They stayed together 'living in sin' until George enlisted. Shortly afterwards he loses contact with her. Upon his 1939 return to Lower Binfield, George sees her and remarks that 'the milky white skin was gone...' and that she was now a cylinder with lumps sticking out. She also now speaks with a strong cockney accent and married a shop owner, also named George.