Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  Orwell was singularly ungrateful for the start in life St Cyp’s would give him and the sacrifices his parents (and, involuntarily, his education-denied sisters) made for ‘the hope of the family’. Late in life, when he was furious about pretty well everything, he wrote a scathing and mendacious 15,000-word memoir of his St Cyprian’s schooldays, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’. Those days were not, as Orwell records them, enjoyable. The chronicle begins with eight-year-old ‘Blair’, newly arrived (with the statutory six pairs of pyjamas), being beaten for bedwetting. He had been continent for ‘four years’.14 It was, one may conjecture, biological shock. The convent, at which he was earlier educated, was all girls (bar him) and run by nuns. It was, to this point, the upbringing of a ‘sissy’. The beating, if we credit his 35-year recollection, was sadistic. He was flogged not once, but three times. Flip threatened publicly to get the whole sixth form to make a ‘gauntlet’ and thrash him up and down the length of the dormitory if he soiled another pair of sheets and stained the mattress (that detail always went down badly with prospective parents). When young Blair was overheard by Flip boasting, tearfully, that the second thrashing didn’t hurt that much, he was sent back for more of the same. But

  this time Sambo laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time that frightened and astonished me – about five minutes, it seemed – ending up by breaking the riding-crop. The bone handle went flying across the room.

  ‘Look what you’ve made me do!’ he said furiously, holding the broken crop.

  Blair was left a small, snivelling lump of boy – but it was shame, not the crop, that hurt most.

  St Cyp’s, as Orwell records, was not, like some private schools, a sexual hothouse. But this third whipping has something orgasmic about it – a lachrymose, and unusual, ejaculation of a kind. As often with him there is a hint of flagellophilia (five minutes’ ‘earnest’ flogging ‘does not hurt’? What does it do, then?) – the ‘English Vice’, as the non-English complacently call it.

  Snobs to the core, the Wilkeses, Orwell recalls, encouraged arrant snobbery in their ninety impressionable charges. They would never, he surmised, have thrashed the bare arse of a boy whose ‘pater’ earned £2,000, or who owned three miles of river and rolled up on speech days in a chauffeur-driven Daimler, ‘tipping’ all and sundry. Connolly, who spent vacations in the family home, Clontarf Castle, was not entirely spared the cane, by his own account, but his buttocks were only lightly and infrequently touched (he never, apparently, invited Eric home with him – a fact that may have galled). Eric was, as he claims, publicly shamed by being reminded, in front of Daimler-owning-class schoolmates, that he was a ‘halffees boy’. As often with Blair/Orwell, one sees him as someone who thinks that his problems would be solved by money, while despising the stuff and its ‘stink’. He was a dreadful bore on the subject of money, one of his later friends complained. So may some readers.

  Sambo was the flogger. Flip administered even more painful tongue-lashings. She blew hot and cold, mixing treacly friendliness with psychopathic sadism, as does the schoolmasterly O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘re-educating’ Winston (‘He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish’). Her harshness, Connolly said, ‘pierced like a rapier’.15 He was cannier at dodging the thrusts than Blair. And, of course, he wasn’t a half-fees boy.

  A long charge sheet is drawn up by Orwell against St Cyp’s: vomit-inducing food (he claimed still to taste the vile porridge decades later); foul lavatory and bathing conditions (turds in the bathwater, as well as the open-door unflushable wc); pointless learning based on mnemonic ‘facts, facts, facts’; and Latin, forced into the brain with the pedagogic equivalent of a pneumatic drill. ‘Cramming’ was the word. Any mistake might mean being sent ‘outside’ for a summary touch of the cane, then back to ‘where we left off’. Cane-cram-cane-cram. So it went.

  Stansky and Abrahams visited Mrs Wilkes in her retirement (a widow from 1947, she died in 1967) and found her, over the tea and cakes, a very nice old duck. Yes, she remembered young Blair, the ingrate. ‘A very small boy, with a very large chip on his shoulder’, she mildly called him. Mum was proud of the school she and Lewis had made (it burned down in 1939, Orwell was delighted to hear), and had reams of grateful testimony from former pupils. Several had even chosen to get married in the place where they had been so happy, and former pupils had routinely sent their own children there. There was a memorial blue plaque to ‘Mum’ where the school had been.

  Wartime, when young Blair was in residence, 1912—17, had been difficult for schools. Mrs Wilkes’s husband (never dynamic, by all accounts) was, in his forties, too old to serve, and slowing down, and she had lost most of her male teachers to the war. Servants were hard to come by; rations were tight. She had five children of her own, a staff to manage, and a full teaching load. Many parents, with a father in the services, needed reduced ‘terms’ (and drastic reductions if they were killed or disabled). Former St Cyp’s boys were being killed – sadly commemorated in morning assembly. All this seemed to have passed young Blair by, so disturbed was he by the scummy quality of the bathwater.

  It is argued by Crick that Orwell’s account was conceived in 1938, as a riposte to Connolly’s milder account of the school (‘St Wulfric’s’ – the school was still in business) in Enemies of Promise. Connolly went so far as to describe Flip, Orwell’s ‘old sow’, as a ‘warm-hearted and inspired teacher’. He was, of course, chronically fork-tongued. Others, who have studied the evidence, argue for a post-war composition of ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ and finishing touches in 1948, when Orwell submitted it to his publisher. A typescript was shown to Mrs Wilkes by Fred Warburg shortly afterwards. She pronounced the essay a ‘tissue of lies’. The publisher, prudent like all their kind (or constitutionally ‘gutless’, as Orwell liked to think), duly had the piece ‘legalled’. The lawyers identified thirty-plus actionable paragraphs in the face of a mass of wholly credible pro-Wilkes testimony. Any publisher of the piece would be lucky to survive on the right side of bankruptcy. The essay was put to the side and not published until after Flip breathed her last, aged 91.

  A chorus of Cyprianites vouched for the fact that their beloved school did not live by the cane, like some latter-day equivalent of Thackeray’s Dr Birch’s Academy, or Wackford Squeers’s establishment. Of course there was corporal punishment: in what ‘good’ Edwardian school wasn’t there? Orwell himself, when briefly a schoolteacher in 1932, is recorded as ‘keeping a large stick by his desk’ and using it ‘fairly often’. One boy he beat recorded his buttocks being so badly bruised that he couldn’t sit down for a week.16 Boys were born to be beaten. But Orwell’s description of a St Cyp’s pupil being publicly thrashed for fifteen minutes was preposterous. Neither was it Mum’s practice, the pro-school faction protested, to mortify pupils by sneering at their parents’ income. She had a short fuse, no one denied that (she may have been menopausal in Blair’s last years at the school), but she was a terrific teacher. The honours board proved it. Orwell’s later doctrine of ‘windowpane’ prose can be traced back to ‘Mum’. One of her favourite exercises was to get her class to précis, or rewrite, bad writing with the simplicity, and eloquence, good English required. The St Cyprian confutation of ‘Such, Such Were the Lies’ continues to this day.17

  Bernard Crick, the ‘authorized’ biographer, was confronted with the awkward fact that he couldn’t trust what George Orwell wrote about Eric Blair. What does an ethical biographer do in that situation? Hums and hahs. The wetting of the bed, Crick ventures, is probably ‘laid on a bit thick’, but some lesser incontinence perhaps happened. ‘Five minutes’ of flogging, even with a right arm fortified by long drives down the fairway, was a trifle improbable. What are we talking about – ‘200 of the best’? But again, there was probably a lesser beating, magnified by hypersensitivity and indignation. One should make judicious use of the get-out-of-biographer’s-jail card, Crick suggested, of ‘
semi-fiction’. ‘Semi-fact’ might have been more like it. The pro-Cyprians had no problem at all with blowing ‘that human turd’ Crick’s wishy-washy defence out of the water. Orwell, had he not, had called the essay ‘autobiography’ when he sent it to his publisher? Answer that, Crick. And in the original typescript, Orwell used (outrageously) the real names of staff and pupils. And his own, of course: except that he did it, hiding, coward that he was, behind a pseudonym. The only possible defence for his lies was ‘tubercular mania’.18 There is no evidence, however, that Orwell, when he completed the essay, was ‘manic’, although he was certainly tubercular. So why did he perpetrate what he must have known to be untruths? One explanation is Connolly’s, that junior schools are ‘incubators of paranoia’. If anyone starts talking about their schooldays, just switch off until they’ve stopped. And if he, Connolly, said (as he did) that St Cyprian’s was ‘well run and did me a world of good’, don’t believe him, either.

  Floreat Etona and After

  To say a great deal about Eton is not to say much about Orwell.

  BERNARD CRICK

  Orwell cruised to a full scholarship to Eton, along with his chum ‘Tim’ Connolly. It was lucky for the Blairs that he did, since it was scholarship or nothing. As one of the elite fifteen ‘Collegers’, his fees (around £200 p.a. with incidentals) would be a sixth of those paid by the majority of unscholarly Etonians. Richard Blair would have been stretched on his £450 p.a. pension.

  The progress he had made at St Cyprian’s had been a credit to the hated place. His name was, doubtless, painted on the honours board. He had come far in this educational hothouse, where the only thing that mattered was passing exams. His first weekly letters home (around twenty survive) are primitive. His later letters are of full adult quality. His extracurricular reading was similarly adult in his last years at the school. He and Connolly were caned (inevitably), he records, for clandestinely reading Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, a novel with sex in it and probably as offensive to the Wilkeses for its satire of the prep school (Randell House) the hero attends. A book worth a caning.19 Another book enjoyed by Eric and Tim, provoking a tug of war as to who could read it first, was H. G. Wells’s collection of short stories The Country of the Blind.

  Both boys cultivated an interest in what Orwell would later call, and praise as, ‘Good-Bad Literature’ that made you think about ‘things’. In later life he wrote a couple of influential essays about novels that were frowned on but which had more good in them than those one was made to read.20 There were also Bad-Bad Novels – something enlarged on, sneeringly, in Gordon Comstock’s ordeal as custodian of a ‘tuppenny library’ in the opening chapters of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The value of Good-Bad novels, as George Bowling says in Coming Up for Air (he steeps himself in them during the boring watches of his war service), is that they foster ‘a kind of questioning attitude’ – scepticism – about the official view of the world. They are healthily seditious.

  This interest of Orwell’s and his essays on Good-Bad Literature (along with his other classic essay on boys’ comics) have been plausibly credited as the seed from which the modern academic discipline of Cultural Studies has grown. A list of Good-Bad Books, for Orwell, would include: The Singing Bone, R. Austin Freeman; Dracula, Bram Stoker; anything featuring Sherlock Holmes or Raffles; H. G. Wells’s ‘scientific romances’; Rain, Somerset Maugham; King Solomon’s Mines, Rider Haggard. Top of the list would be Wells’s History of Mr Polly. Jack London’s People of the Abyss would be level pegging. Bad-Bad Books would be anything by Ethel M. Dell; No Orchids for Miss Blandish, James Hadley Chase; Sorrell and Son, Warwick Deeping. Edgar Wallace held an ambiguous position between the categories. Connolly did his bit for Good-Bad Books by introducing Raymond Chandler to English readers, as editor of Horizon in the 1950s.

  Orwell had been at St Cyprian’s for two years when war was declared in summer 1914. Caught up in the mass euphoria, he penned a sub-Kitchener (‘Your Country Needs You’) ode for the occasion. It would be his first publication, printed in the family’s local newspaper, the Henley and South Oxfordshire Gazette. D. J. Taylor suggests that Ida sent it to the paper. Quite plausibly she also co-wrote the thing, on patriotic fire with the Hun’s invasion of her ancestral France:

  Awake! Young Men of England

  Oh! give me the strength of the Lion,

  The wisdom of Reynard the Fox;

  And then I’ll hurl troops at the Germans

  And give them the hardest of knocks.

  This bugle call in verse does not sound like the work of a ten-year-old. Nor is the sentiment ‘Orwellian’. Blair’s enthusiasm for his school’s Officer Training Corps over the years that followed was less than tepid. It was, he later said, ‘a mark of enlightenment’ to be slack on parades. No hard knocks for cadet Blair. Whether it was a momentary patriotic spasm, or his mother’s invisible (aux armes, vos jeunes!) hand, Eric Blair’s name was at the bottom of the doggerel. He was ‘in print’. On the outbreak of the Second World War he strove to remember, in toto, what he recalled of the First World War. ‘Margarine’ was the word that came to mind. That does indeed sound Orwellian. It’s a nice speculation as to what he would have done had he been born three years earlier. Would he have answered the call (conscription after 1916)? Or would he have ‘dodged’, using the wholly legitimate excuse of a dodgy set of lungs? The merest whiff of mustard gas would probably have killed him.

  Orwell asked his mother for two copies of the paper containing his poem, for Mrs Wilkes to admire. She read it out (‘well done, Blair!’) at the school assembly and pasted it in her scrapbook; she would show it to Stansky and Abrahams fifty years later. At school, at St Cyp’s and at Eton (where his silence on the subject is recorded), Blair kept angrily quiet about his own father, who, having retired aged 55 in 1912, answered the call and joined the colours (‘Awake! Old Men of England’). It was the occasion of a family photograph.

  Blair family portrait, c. 1914. Eric has a pronounced unmilitary air. Ida leans away from her husband, using Avril as a barrier. Richard has the bearing of a major-general, at least.

  Richard gained fame, of a kind, over the next five years as the oldest 2nd Lieutenant in the army. Meanwhile, eighteen-year-old ensigns were dying in their thousands at the front. Some of the wounded may have had their pain deadened by the opium that Richard had helped to produce (not all of it went to stupefy the Chinese addict). There was another, gloomier honours board at St Cyprian’s, and at Eton, commemorating gloriously ‘fallen’ former pupils. 2nd Lt Blair was a minor inconvenience to the War Office, and a major embarrassment for his son. At one point Richard was officer in charge of pack mules in Marseilles. A donkey-driver. All this with the humiliating single pip on his shoulder. He retired from military service in 1919, having done his bit. One feels for him. Eric Blair didn’t. In one of his few comments, to one of his few close friends at Eton, Orwell dismissed his father, cruelly, as a man who ‘didn’t do much of anything’. He also confided that he increasingly found Ida ‘frivolous’. What does Philip Larkin call it? ‘A son’s harsh patronage’.

  Over the war years, the Blairs, less Eric and Richard, and with Marjorie serving (dashingly, as a Woman’s Legion dispatch rider), moved the family home to Earls Court, London. Ida took up a job in the Ministry of Pensions. She may, Crick hints, in the relaxed moral mood of wartime, have taken a lover – male or female. She was still in her thirties when the war started, and unencumbered with domestic duties or her husband’s nocturnal attentions. During the disturbances of moving and war, Eric was lodged with the Wilkeses over the vacations – a kindness (unacknowledged by him) on their part. He would have registered the Zeppelin raids, London’s painful introduction to modern warfare. As he would later say, there is nothing like a bit of civilian bombing to shut up the Home Front Colonel Blimps.21

  The entrance exams for Eton, which Eric and Connolly took in 1916, centred on Latin and Greek. Orwell never had any problem with languages. As he casually div
ulged in a late essay, he had mastered at least seven in the course of his life, two dead. He could talk as fluently with a Burmese priest as with a French poule or a Spanish compañero. His multilingualism was, however, never shown off in obedience to that Orwellian fifth rule of good writing: ‘Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.’22

  The five Etonian years, 1917–22, are one of the mysteries of Orwell’s life. He was primed to fly high at the school, and he flew just about as low as an Etonian scholar could. He resolutely ‘slacked’ (his word) and ‘dodged’ (one of his teachers’ words). It was the first of many non serviams.23 In his second year, after much chopping and changing of classes and subjects, he came 117th out of 140 in his year. He was never one for academic field specialism, and paid the price. ‘Skimming’ might have been a more appropriate word than ‘slacking’. ‘Bright boys teach themselves,’ Crick sagely reminds us.

  Dished by Gow; Damned for Doggerel

  In the final school examinations for his year (‘elections’, as they were called), Eric Blair came 137th out of 168. The shame was such that Andrew Gow, his longest-serving tutor, told Richard, when he came to enquire what should be done with Eric, that it would be a ‘disgrace’ to Eton, specifically the top dogs’ college, even to allow Blair to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. Lesser institutions (say London University, or Manchester) were unthinkable. Eton would have had to raise a ‘Dishonours’ board. As regards higher education, Gow might as well have worn a black cap.