Lost in the excitement in 1939, here's an Orwell that isn't grim, bored, starving etc. A traveling salesman gets a chance to flake out to his childhood hometown having won a bit of money & the wife not aware. Everything has changed of course, and the modern world is showing its sinister shape more and more and everywhere. In all of England, he muses, no one right now is firing a machine gun out of an upper window -- but in a year or two? It's funny, breaks your heart and we can be glad Orwell didn't have to witness our day, and the things he was dead right about.