Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  They met and married in a station in the hills of India, away from the heat and the dust, where she was teaching and he was on his annual summer leave. They then moved down to the heat and dust and, probably, a less grand lifestyle than she had been brought up with. Ida’s father, Bowker notes, was absent from the wedding – evidence that he disapproved of the age gap and Richard’s mediocrity. Whatever romance there was in the marriage was left, one suspects, a fading memory in the cool hills of the northwest.

  The parental Blairs have been called ‘mismatched’, but both, manifestly, were prepared to make painful financial sacrifices for their only son to ‘rise’. It was not just their pain. The investment in Eric meant, necessarily, neglect for the two girls, particularly the younger child of the 1907 furlough, Avril. She was destined for that dreariest of fates, being the ‘spinster’ daughter, helping around the house, an ‘old maid’ carer of her parents when they were elderly.

  Richard died in 1939, Ida in 1943, Eric’s elder sister Marjorie in 1946. Avril stayed in Southwold (where the Blairs had resettled, in 1921) – running, after 1933, a tea shop – over the years her family still required her service nearby. For Avril Blair life was probably the superintendence of whatever sink she was nearest, full of other people’s dirty crockery. Eric left and came back to the hated Southwold only when broke or at a very loose end. After Orwell’s death (and the leaving of his literary estate to his second wife), Avril (not the stepmother, Sonia) took over as carer for his son, young Richard, as she had cared for the old Richard. I remember hearing her on the radio, in the mid-1950s, saying how, as a little girl, she played French cricket with George, but he would never give up the bat. Orwell expresses uneasiness about the way the world – and (one can conjecture) he – treated Avril. But he evidently chose to leave her nothing directly in his will. She was the last of the family, dying in 1978.

  The eldest, clever, daughter, Marjorie, broke away early and married a family friend who, on what slender evidence survives, never had much time for uppity Eric. In the seven full-length biographies, the indexes make only bare passing reference to Marjorie, who seems to have been a woman of spirit, as well as clever. The three Blair women knew Eric best: what they knew, we never shall.

  Ida determined, when Richard returned in 1912, that there should be no more children, or the beastly act that went into the making of them (separate bedrooms). What went on behind doors in the Blairs’ many houses is, again, forever unknowable. Nonetheless, there is an interesting moment in A Clergyman’s Daughter, explaining the heroine’s lifelong horror of sex:

  And yet, though her sexual coldness seemed to her natural and inevitable, she knew well enough how it was that it had begun. She could remember, as clearly as though it were yesterday, certain dreadful scenes between her father and her mother – scenes that she had witnessed when she was no more than nine years old. They had left a deep, secret wound in her mind.

  Orwell was, like Dorothy, aged nine when his father retired in 1912. Attempts to reclaim ‘conjugal rights’, that male right to legally rape an uncooperative spouse, may have been witnessed, or heard behind closed bedroom doors. Richard, it seems, did not get his rights. The retired paterfamilias could, henceforth, find his pleasures on the golf course. There is some wispy recollection that women found his hopeful extramarital gallantries – like those of Mr Warburton in A Clergyman’s Daughter – unwelcome. Like D. H. Lawrence’s Mrs Morel, Ida’s ‘lover’, henceforth, was her gifted son. She had perceived, astutely and from the start, that those gifts were literary and precocious. It was she who took down, to his ‘dictation’, his ‘first poem’, composed ‘at the age of four or five’. ‘I cannot remember anything about it’, he much later recalled, ‘except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had “chair-like teeth” – a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger”.’3 My fancy is that it was Little Black Sambo, the story of the little Indian boy who is chased by tigers and runs so fast around a palm tree that the chasing tiger finally expires into a pool of ghee. Sambo’s loving mother, Black Mumbo, uses it to cook delicious pancake. It would be an interesting fact, though, if Mrs Blair had indeed read the Swedenborgian Blake to her four-year-old. But hard to picture.

  No detailed account of the mother-son relationship has survived. Virtually all the many letters Eric is known to have written her are lost. She would surely have kept them, but after her death in 1943 he must have destroyed them, as he destroyed a lot of records of his life. As Nineteen Eighty-Four testifies, ‘privacy’ was, for him, indivisible from freedom.

  It was Ida who planted the seed that would flower into George Orwell’s most influential essay (‘Politics vs. Literature’) by giving little Eric a copy of Gulliver’s Travels on his eighth birthday. He in fact found the present and devoured it, from beginning to end, the night before (by candlelight, and furtively, one supposes). In the Swift essay, he offers a vignette of the eight-year-old Eric Blair’s increasingly bleak view of the world. The quote is worth repeating:

  A child, when it is past the infantile stage but still looking at the world with fresh eyes, is moved by horror almost as often as by wonder – horror of snot and spittle, of the dogs’ excrement on the pavement, the dying toad full of maggots, the sweaty smell of grown-ups, the hideousness of old men, with their bald heads and bulbous noses.

  With his bucket of cold water ever at the ready, Crick suggests that the book must have been a children’s ‘expurgated’ version, without the Laputan totalitarianism and the Yahoo projectile diarrhoea. Nonetheless, it is pleasant to indulge a pretty picture: young Eric creeps downstairs, middle of the night, and is careful not to rustle the paper. Joy! The very book he was asking for. He goes back to his room and reads by night light (he has night terrors – will do as long as he lives). He comes, eyes devouring the page, on the passage in which, in Lilliput, little Gulliver gets out of bed for the nocturnal ‘natural necessity’. Eric has a ‘gesunder’ (goes under the bed) as well. Horror! Two giant rats are running up the bed-curtains ‘smelling backwards and forwards on the bed’! One of them comes sniffing at his face – ‘these horrible animals’ are about to attack his face. But he draws his tiny sword and disembowels one. The other scampers off. Eric will not sleep that night, and the horror (rats ‘smelling’ your face before biting) will remain with him till he dies.

  Orwell calibrated his family’s social standing, with contemptuous exactitude, as ‘lower-upper middle class’. His wilfully preferred company when he was old enough to choose was either the very low (like the illiterate Irish tramp Paddy)4 or the very upper classes, such as David Astor or Richard Rees: both very rich, generous and inexhaustibly patient with their difficult and chronically penurious friend. There were no poor people at his two funerals. And he rests, for all time, in the same churchyard as one of the richest men in England: David Astor.

  Eric’s first school experience was at a nearby convent school, Sunnylands, run by Ursuline nuns who were forbidden to teach in France because of their doctrinal severity. With the exception of young Eric Blair, apparently, it was an all-girls, French-themed establishment. His elder sister, Marjorie, went with him. It was Ida’s choice, clearly (Richard was in India). Among the women and girls, Eric experienced the stirrings of what would be in later life an uncontrollable libido. The object of his first love/lust fantasies was a pubescent girl called Elsie. The name has a working-class resonance:

  My friends were the plumber’s children up the road, and we used sometimes to play games of a vaguely erotic kind. About the same time I fell deeply in love, a far more worshipping kind of love than I have ever felt for anyone since, with a girl named Elsie at the convent school which I attended. She seemed to me grown up, so I suppose she must have been fifteen.5

  The phrase ‘a far more worshipping kind of love than . . . felt for anyone since’ is odd. And the age difference is odder. Since Sunnylands (lovely name) was an infant girls’ school, Elsie must have been a skivvy. Orw
ell immortalized Elsie as the hero’s first love in Coming Up for Air. That Elsie works not in a school but in a draper’s shop. As usual, there is a triggering reference to smell. In a passage oozing the lust of yesteryear, George (Bowling) reminisces:

  You know the atmosphere of a draper’s shop. It’s something peculiarly feminine. There’s a hushed feeling, a subdued light, a cool smell of cloth, and a faint whirring from the wooden balls of change rolling to and fro. Elsie was leaning against the counter, cutting off a length of cloth with the big scissors. There was something about her black dress and the curve of her breast against the counter – I can’t describe it, something curiously soft, curiously feminine. As soon as you saw her you knew that you could take her in your arms and do what you wanted with her [my italics].

  The last words strike an ominous note, as does the ‘curiously feminine’ smell of a draper’s shop.

  The ‘plumber’s children’ were of a lower class than the Blairs. Eric was forbidden by Ida to play with them – but clearly did. One recalls Stephen Spender’s rueful poem ‘My Parents Kept Me from Children who were Rough’. Young Stephen, a ‘good’ child, did as he was told. Wilful young Eric did not. The proles always knew fascinatingly more about sex than their betters.

  Little Eric had little love for the nuns; perhaps they were too free with their ferrules. In later life Orwell was oddly vengeful about Sunnylands. He recalled in a letter of 1931 to Brenda Salkeld, a clergyman’s daughter (who resolutely refused his amorous advances), that when he was a schoolchild

  we had a story that after Robin Hood was done to death in the Priory, his men raped & murdered the nuns, & burned the priory to the ground. It seems this has no foundation in the ballads – we must have made it up. An instance of the human instinct for a happy ending.6

  The ‘happy ending’ remark is, on the face of it, breathtaking, particularly since Orwell was writing to a teacher, Brenda, at St Felix School, Southwold, whom he hoped to marry. He proposed to her twice; the surmise is that she never slept with him, despite his urgent requests.

  Orwell recorded turning atheist aged fourteen. But Gordon Bowker suggests that the Ursulines implanted in the child Eric a lifelong sense of sin on the Jesuit principle, ‘give us a child until he is five and he is ours for life.’ Catholic imagery and iconography crop up regularly in Orwell’s writing, as in Winston Smith’s crazed fantasy about the dark-haired girl from the Fiction (that is, Pornosec) department, whom he thinks to be an agent of the Thought Police:

  Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.

  Orwell’s unleashed imagination can sometimes terrify and suggest Freudian slips. ‘Beautiful’ hallucinations? Unlike coevals such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, there was never any likelihood of Orwell’s ‘going across’. His attitude to the Catholic Church swung between contempt and paranoid fear. Bowker traces it back to the Ursuline influence.

  Around these formative five to six years, there occurred another traumatic event, the first of Eric’s recorded encounters with the ‘cane’. It happened as he was walking along the street in Henley with his mother. She stopped to talk to a ‘wealthy local brewer’, who was also a magistrate. He pointed angrily to a tarred fence, vandalized by chalk drawings, one of which was by little Eric:

  The magistrate stops, points disapprovingly with his stick and says, ‘We are going to catch the boys who draw on these walls, and we are going to order them six STROKES OF THE BIRCH ROD.’ (It was all in capitals in my mind.) My knees knock together, my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, and at the earliest possible moment I sneak away to spread the dreadful intelligence.

  On this occasion he escaped.7

  St Cyp’s

  If one is looking for a factual account for life at St Cyprian’s, this is not the place to seek it.

  PETER DAVISON, on ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’

  Eric Blair, at eight years old, was manifestly ‘bright’ and was expertly home-tutored by his adoring, former schoolteacher mother. There were no canes in the Blairs’ house in Vicarage Road.8 With his mother’s help and resourcefulness, Eric gained admission to a ‘prep’ school, St Cyprian’s, aged eight. Foreigners are invariably surprised by the English middle-and upper-class practice of entrusting their barely toilet-trained offspring to the care of remote institutions while they look so well after their dogs. Orwell in fact was older than some other entrants at his boarding school, recruited as early as six. It still happens. Foreigners are still astounded.

  On the face of it, ‘St Cyp’s’, as boys called it, was well chosen. It stood in handsome grounds in Eastbourne, on the Downs, and advertised its spacious, salubrious, airy setting, facilities and premises. From birth, young Eric had shown clear evidence of pulmonary weakness; ozone-laden breezes would be tonic – what the doctor ordered. Since Florence Nightingale’s revolution, the British were fanatical believers in fresh air: a freezing gale whipping across the sleeping child at night was supremely health-giving. The French have always disagreed on that point.

  The fairly newly opened St Cyp’s had in twelve years gained a formidable reputation under the energetic management of a young couple, the Vaughan Wilkeses, for getting its pupils into ‘top’ public schools. First-class tickets for life, or, as Cyril Connolly wittily put it, ‘hotting boys up . . . like little Alfa Romeos for the Brooklands of life’.9 Lewis Chitty Vaughan Wilkes taught classics; his wife, Cicely, was the driving force in the marriage and the running of the school. She taught, to sixth-form level, English, History and French. The ‘filthy old sow’, as Orwell called her (he never liked pigs, and liked her even less), was in fact 37, and the mother of five children – a sizeable litter – when Eric arrived. The boys nicknamed Mr Vaughan Wilkes ‘Sambo’ (he was, presumably, swarthy in his youth) and her ‘Flip’ for her flippy-floppy bosom. More docile pupils (most of them, in point of fact) called her more fondly – but still with an eye on the bosom – ‘Mum’, as presumably did her own children.10

  Demonstrably (the school honours board displayed the fact) ‘Mum’ could bring her pupils up to Eton and Harrow entry standard – or, if they were not that bright, get them into one of the less galactic public schools, such as Uppingham. Orwell describes one luckless lad, who failed the lowly Uppingham exams first time round, being flogged into exam competence like a ‘foundered horse’. One St Cyprian, a school contemporary of Orwell’s, Alaric Jacob, glows in memory of Mum’s pedagogy:

  Her classes in English verse would have done credit to an Oxford tutor; by the time I was twelve I was well grounded in poesy and could write a sonnet or an ode that would not have disgraced a much older boy.11

  Orwell himself became a published schoolboy versifier (see below) under her hand.

  Flip had no recorded higher education. Lewis Vaughan Wilkes was a Perse School and Oxford man, dark blue to the core. The couple had met when both were employed at another Eastbourne school, she as a matron, he an assistant master. He (b. 1869) was six years her senior. Flip was the daughter of a stockbroker, and there was, presumably, money enough in her family to found St Cyprian’s and get it off the ground. It was soaring by the time Eric Blair arrived.

  The fees, £180 p.a., were far beyond the Blairs’ means. Richard’s salary peaked at £650 p.a. in service, and he would, after 1912, be pensioned on £200 less. But Ida wangled half-fees for Eric. She was helped by the fact that her brother Charlie Limouzin lived in Eastbourne and, a hero on the local links, played golf with Lewis, captain of the club. A vigorous man even in middle age, Wilkes believed in mens sana in corpore sano – and so, of course, should his boys. The fact that his wife had family in the Indian service may also have helped Ida’s petition. In return for the commuted charge, Eric was expected to reimburse St Cyp’s by gaining entry to a top public school. He was ‘scholarship fodder’. Cyri
l Connolly, who was at the school when Eric arrived, offers a pen portrait of the St Cyp’s new ‘flier’: ‘Tall, pale with his flaccid cheeks, large spatulate fingers and supercilious voice, he was one of those boys who seem born old.’12 And manifestly not strong on the corpore sano front.

  Cyril (nicknamed ‘Tim’ at school, after Dickens’s Tiny Tim) was himself no oil painting and even less athletic than Blair. Short and podgy, he had, through life, a facial resemblance to an insatiably lustful frog. But he was possessed of quick wit and mischievous charm. He was ‘winning’. And he, like Eric, was ‘scholarship fodder’. The two of them would be chums for life. It would be Connolly, as editor of the wartime magazine Horizon, who published many of the essays that made Orwell’s name as a socio-political commentator.

  Henry Longhurst, later the famous golfer (did he swing his first clubs with Lewis?), came to the school three years after Blair, whom he cordially hated:

  We were transported from Eastbourne Station in a charabanc run by a gas balloon on the roof and met at the door by the most formidable, distinguished and unforgettable woman I am likely to meet in my lifetime. This was Mrs L. C. Vaughan Wilkes or ‘Mum’, the undisputed ruler not only of about 90 boys but of a dozen masters and mistresses, a matron, under-matron, several maids, a school sergeant, a carpenter, two or three gardeners, Mr Wilkes and their two sons and three daughters.13