Explore "Coming Up For Air" by George Orwell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The dining-room had changed, too.
I could remember the old room, though I'd never had a meal there, with its brown mantelpiece and its bronzy-yellow wallpaper--I never knew whether it was meant to be that colour, or had just got like that from age and smoke--and the oil-painting, also by Wm. Sandford, Painter & Carpenter, of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir. Now they'd got the place up in a kind of medieval style. Brick fireplace with inglenooks, a huge beam across the ceiling, oak panelling on the walls, and every bit of it a fake that you could have spotted fifty yards away. The beam was genuine oak, came out of some old sailing-ship, probably, but it didn't hold anything up, and I had my suspicions of the panels as soon as I set eyes on them. As I sat down at my table, and the slick young waiter came towards me fiddling with his napkin, I tapped the wall behind me. Yes! Thought so! Not even wood. They fake it up with some kind of composition and then paint it over.