Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  For the early months of the war Orwell found himself surplus to his country’s requirements. He was medically graded ‘C’ – ‘useless’, as the Spanish medics had said a couple of years earlier. He was too broken and too old to serve in any military capacity. And his political record had black marks (for example, ‘Trotskyist’), which blocked his serving in ‘intelligence’, as did fellow Etonians like David Astor, A. J. Ayer and Orwell’s new friend Malcolm Muggeridge. George Orwell could not be trusted. In the phoney war interval, he dug further into Coming Up for Air’s vein of English nostalgia and childhood, with two classic essays: on boys’ comics and Dickens.

  He and Eileen moved to London on weekdays: she to work in the government censorship department (‘inconceivably dull’). He landed a regular reviewing position with the eccentric Lady Rhonda’s Time and Tide and churned out for the magazine’s meagre readership low-grade pap on literature and film. Similarly dull. Avril and her mother found catering work in London. It was Wallington at weekends. Eileen found it (after the exhausting wartime blackout journey) dirtier than London and no break. She put up with a life of grime, an outside lavatory and midnight washing-up for George. A poignant letter, written a few days before her death, recorded her loyally stifled distaste at the life he insisted on for the two of them.

  As the country girded itself for another world war, Orwell became, briefly, excited about the LDV (Local Defence Volunteers) militia. It could use even old crocks like him. It brought back inflammatory recollections of Barcelona, 1936. Anthony Eden’s LDV radio appeal got a quarter of a million volunteers (including Eric Blair) in 24 hours, and another million in a month. There was a rally at Lord’s Cricket Ground, which Orwell attended. The LDV sparked the last flare-up of Orwell’s anarchist romanticism. He foresaw revolutionary things for a people’s army armed to the teeth (Orwell had sadly few remaining – and his musketry was a bit rusty). The ‘volunteers’ could be the shock-troops of radical reform. He had friends of the same extreme political opinion. They conspired enthusiastically among themselves at the LDV training camp at Osterley Park in west London. Its owner had allowed Tom Wintringham to set up a school for would-be fighters in the early summer of 1940. An oldschool Marxist and CPGB veteran blooded in Spain, Wintringham had gone off the Stalinist rails. Orwell saw him as a fellow ‘revolutionary patriot’. Strict doctrinal differences could be buried during total war.91 Wintringham was particularly keen on the guerrilla and street-fighting skills that had been effective with the International Brigade in Spain. Hulton’s Picture Post (then a radical picture paper) popularized the LDV.

  Churchill, when he took over as prime minister in May 1940, was wary, recalling the Irish stab in the back of 1916. There must be no enemies within. The LDV force was neutered into the ‘Home Guard’ – ‘Dad’s Army’. There was no risk of the Captain Mainwarings of England leading any uprising. Wintringham’s operation was closed down in September 1941. The LDV teeth were drawn, to be replaced by the toothless gums of the Home Guard. Orwell was, by then, well disillusioned. He had been promoted to sergeant in the St John’s Wood Home Guard unit but it took the authorities three months even to get him a uniform to stitch his three stripes onto. And he had to sit through interminable lectures by ‘wretched old blimps’. He did his bit for a year or so, with growing boredom, and resigned in late 1943. He had more than enough of a medical excuse, and the Wehrmacht was not, after all, on its way.

  His brother-in-law Lawrence had volunteered for the RAMC on the outbreak of war. He was a world leader in his surgical field and 36 years old. The Expeditionary Force in France had little need of thoracic/pulmonary specialisms at the front lines where, serving as a medic, Major O’Shaughnessy was blown to bits by a Stuka bomb (it is thought) during the chaotic Dunkirk evacuations in May 1940. Dunkirk was the lowest point of the war for Britain. Given the ‘little boats’ chaos, no telegram could be sent to Lawrence’s next of kin. His body was irrecoverable. Orwell vainly searched trains arriving at London stations, in the hope he might have survived, and was told to keep out of the way. It was a gallant death and merited an obituary in The Times. The loss shattered Eileen, whose love for her always-dependable brother, from various hints, had been stronger and simpler than her love for George, or for out-and-out rogues like Georges Kopp. If she desperately needed him, Eileen said, Laurence would always come. George perhaps not: ‘for him his work comes first’.

  Gwen went to practise in Newcastle. Eileen complains, in one of her surviving letters, about the grim business of disposing of the O’Shaughnessy family house in Greenwich, the nearest thing she had ever had to a permanent home. She and Orwell lived like gypsies in wartime London at half a dozen addresses – some very seedy (a flat in St John’s Wood was the original for Victory Mansions, broken lift and all). For him it was solidarity with Londoners. For her it was Mrs Mopp and her bucket. So distraught was she that, as she ironically told a friend, air raids were positively restful interruptions from the drudgery of being Mrs Orwell. Eileen was now suffering unidentified gynaecological problems, whose more serious details she kept from her husband – and possibly herself. The couple realized that the children they wanted would never come. They dealt with pointlessness in different ways. She chain-smoked; he was promiscuous.

  Eileen’s secretarial skills were useful to the war effort. Typists were desperately needed for wartime bureaucracy and she had transferred to the Ministry of Food, where she formed a close friendship with Lettice Cooper.92 The two of them came up with scripts for the BBC’s The Kitchen Front (nice title) on how to create appetizing meals out of the ration-book allowances. Cunning variations on the famed Woolton Pie, scrag end and baconless bubble and squeak were jauntily recommended. Cooper (later an accomplished novelist, one of whose characters, in Black Bethlehem, is a tender portrait of Eileen) recalled her friend coming into work relaying, daily, how Animal Farm was coming along. There was, Cooper recalled, always housework for her friend. From Eileen’s confidences about his sexual waywardness, George, Cooper bleakly concluded, ‘was not the kind of person who likes being married all the time’. What was actually going on in the marriage will (probably) forever be unknown.

  There was an episode, during the war, which a clearly embarrassed Bernard Crick felt obliged to describe. Orwell had befriended the poet-critic William Empson, whose cubicle was near his in the wartime BBC offices (Empson is the too-clever-for-his-own-good Newspeak linguistician Ampleforth in Nineteen Eighty-Four). Orwell often socialized with Empson and his partner Hetta. They were all hard drinkers. One evening in high summer, writes Crick:

  The merest acquaintance from BBC days who had only come across Orwell before as a rather quiet and melancholy figure in the background of BBC pubs, met him again at the Empsons’, sitting on his own in a corner, drinking fairly heavily. When neither was able to get a taxi, Orwell insisted, very much against her inclination, as she was young and was nervous of him, on walking her home and then trying, while crossing [Hampstead] Heath, to make love to her far too persistently, somewhat violently even. To keep him off she promised to meet him again when next she was in London, but on not keeping the unlikely rendezvous, she received a violent letter of formal reproach.

  One knows so little about this side of things that no downright moral assumptions can be made. Except perhaps that after he knew, or even feared, that he was tubercularly infectious, it was grossly irresponsible. His line, if it came up, was that he had been infected but the ‘lesions’ were dead and ‘non-progressive’. But he coughed a lot. And it was known that coughed airborne saliva and spitting spread TB.

  Marital relations, given Eileen’s health problems, may have ceased. Moral codes relaxed in wartime on the ‘tomorrow we die’ principle – as even I, then a child, remember personally (used condoms on the pavement on the way to school). Eileen, as George routinely confided to women he fancied, may have taken lovers herself. It is doubtful, however, that she lured them to Hampstead Heath and pounced on them or that her health conditio
ns (cancer was grimly feared towards the end of her life) were catching.

  How the couple managed the decision to get Gwen to arrange the private adoption of an illegitimate child, from South Shields, in 1944 is unclear. Corners must have been cut, strings pulled. The June 1943 Adoption Act had tightened up regulations, following newspaper reports of the abuse of children orphaned, evacuated or displaced by bombing. Illegitimacy rates had shot up, as they inevitably do in wartime. Social services, answerable to councils, would not routinely have acceded to adoption by two chronically ill, elderly applicants with no fixed home address other than a primitive cottage without hot running water, well beyond the council follow-up inspection range. The agency would have been right to oppose the arrangement. Nonetheless, after a month’s approval process, Mr and Mrs Orwell took parental possession of one-month-old Richard Horatio Blair in summer 1944. Avril no longer had parents to care for (Ida had died in March 1943, Richard four years earlier). Her services to the family would be again called on – first to help out Eileen (who gave up her job for motherhood) and eventually to become young Richard’s fulltime adoptive mother. She did it very well. But like all Avril’s good services, they were largely unnoticed.

  Eileen and Richard.

  How Eileen actually died has never been clear. She went, discreetly (so as not to worry George), for an operation – a hysterectomy. It was arranged for the end of March 1945 in Newcastle, where Gwen could take care of her. There seems, strangely, to have been some ill-advised cost-cutting. Pre-NHS prices were high. She downplayed the forthcoming operation as a routine thing. It was in fact major surgery. She had a heart attack under anaesthetic and died on the table. She was six months short of forty. J. J. Ross assumes that she was allergic to chloroform. The inquest cleared the surgical team. As bad luck would have it, George was with the invasion force in Paris and Germany, reporting on the war for The Observer. He was in no physical condition to be in the field and was hospitalized himself. It was all muddle and telegrams. He kept his grief and, possibly, his guilt to himself. He should, of course, have been with her. The ‘victory’ he observed in the overrun ruined cities of Germany was no solace. The shocking debris convinced him that ‘civilization’ was at an end. For ever. Only the Fascist boot on the face would last.

  Among the few revealing pieces of evidence left us to form any picture of Mrs George Orwell (the name she adopted and died under) in the last years of the marriage are her last letters. They record candidly how much she had hated ‘nightmare’ London, what with the morally righteous (as Orwell saw it) squalor, the chronic shortage of cash, the forever unsettled residences, the lack of anything that could be called ‘home-life’.93 Wallington was no refuge: just another dirty sink, unwashed saucepans, clothes washed in buckets, chickens to feed, eggs to boil and, for the last two years, nappies to change without hot running water or decent sanitation. Yet Eileen Orwell thought it a sacrifice worth making and made it. George was always hardest on himself and made those around him guilty about how easy they had it by comparison. Eileen left everything to him, ‘including a house inherited from her mother’. Possessions, particularly houses, meant little to him. But the loss of her was material. Eileen’s typing had become essential to him. He was fast, but inaccurate, on the keyboard. Having to type the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four a few years later was something that hastened his death. Some commentators say it actually killed him. Had Eileen been up there, in Jura, making, as she had always done, the ‘fair copy’, he might have lived a few more years and written the two novels he felt he had in him when he died.94

  The Astor Connection

  It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers.

  ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940)

  In his fallow months after the outbreak of war, unwanted as he was for the ‘effort’, Orwell had had time to put his thoughts in order. Eileen told a friend, tartly, that George had ‘written a little book explaining how to be a Socialist though Tory’.95 The sarcasm is one of many fleeting hints that her political views were more consistently radical than his. And her wit razor-sharp.

  The little book was The Lion and the Unicorn. It was published, in February 1941, by Warburg under the new ‘Searchlight’ imprint, of which Orwell was an editor. Searchlights, as the Blitz began, were raking the skies by night. Publication coincided with the Blitz, and has the famous opening line, ‘As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’ They failed. But German bombers did manage to destroy Warburg’s paper stock, which put The Lion and the Unicorn out of print, after healthy early sales, in 1942. Score one for the Heinkel.

  Civilian bombing meant, Orwell said, that ‘blimpishness’ – ‘keep the home fires burning’ patriotism – was no longer viable. Ask not for whom the Luftwaffe bomb falls. It falls for thee, Civvy Street. The Orwells would, a little later in the war, be bombed out themselves. The Luftwaffe almost destroyed the only manuscript copy of the work in progress, Animal Farm, having done their worst on printed copies of The Lion and the Unicorn. Luckily the Orwells were out of the house when the VI fell. They usually weren’t: Orwell insisted on spending weekdays and, more dangerously, nights in London, even though he had a safe home in the country. It was, like the king and queen in Buckingham Palace, an act of solidarity with the East Enders (the docks were primary targets) who had no shelter by night other than the underground station (they smelled, Orwell observed).

  The less self-sacrificing Cyril Connolly took himself, and his magazine, to Cornwall (along with Sonia Brownell, or ‘Buttocks Brownell’ as she was nicknamed, a woman in whom Orwell was always interested). Cyril enjoyed the lobsters, his co-editor Stephen Spender recalled. Horizon was, meanwhile, doing very well by Orwell, publishing his best, most thoughtful meditations. Its six-figure circulation was the highest ever recorded by a literary magazine. Orwell helped raise it.96

  Un-blimpish patriotism was, Orwell believed, possible. It was a duty, in fact, with invasion imminent. There was, he concluded as the bombs rained down and the AA barrage made every night Guy Fawkes Night, enough of old England left (the England he had celebrated in Coming Up for Air) to be worth dying for. The Tory political oligarchs (those ‘wrong people’ at the head of the great English family), the soft-faced profiteers, the sandal-wearing vegetarians, the half-megaphone/half-microphone commissars ranting in the LSE, and the Stalinist Trade Unionists could be dealt with later. The title, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, harks back to the heraldic inscription: ‘Ich dien’ – ‘I serve’. Bolshy George Orwell would, at last, bend the knee. The book contains his most tenderly Anglophiliac iconography: the old spinsters, so revered by John Major, cycling through the autumn mist to early communion, the warm beer, the greener grass, the knobbly faces, the bad teeth (all that oversweetened tea, the national tipple), English ‘gentleness’ (the man ahead of you in the orderly bus queue will not be carrying a knife) – above all, the English ‘air’. His first ‘sniff’ of it, on his return from Burma, convinced him this was where he had to be. It was Bowling’s ‘real air’ – the good smell of England.

  The book caught the attention of David Astor. Orwell’s scathing attack on the ‘moneyed classes’ bounced off him. Astor was, of course, one of the most obscenely moneyed men in England. The Astors’ original wealth – now generations ‘clean’ – had come from the American fur trade. But, of course, Orwell’s family money (although it was now all gone) had come, substantially, from the slave trade, the opium trade and ‘blood timber’. The Blairs and the Limouzins were not morally superior, just financially unluckier, than the Astors. Losers in the great capitalistic, social-Darwinistic struggle. The British Astors owned The Observer Sunday newspaper. Cyril Connolly suggested that David, who took a close interest in its columns, might use Orwell, as he (Connolly) was using him, as a free-ranging essayist, on his and Peter Watson’s magazine, Horizon. The four of them had all been at Eton – ‘that festering centre of snobbishness�
�� as Orwell called it in The Lion and the Unicorn. No matter.97 Connolly arranged an introduction and Orwell and Astor met at a tea shop near the BBC. They hit it off and struck up what was the strongest friendship in both their later lives. Orwell’s ‘war’ was, by 1942, getting better; Astor was having a very good war indeed. A captain in the Marines, the epitome of sangfroid and daring, he survived the disastrous Dieppe raid. He went to a London party a few hours later and was reportedly good company, if a trifle subdued.98 He slummed it in Orwell’s flat and Orwell, presumably, visited the Astors’ establishment, Cliveden in Berkshire.

  Astor was later seconded to SOE, the secret service, organizing, among much else, underground resistance to the Nazis in Europe. Long after Orwell’s death, Astor was asked if he had somehow involved Orwell in ‘intelligence’ work.99 He said no, but suspicions remain. He was, for example, suspiciously keen about bending regulations to get Orwell into front-line war reporting missions – work for which he was about as medically unfit as to join Captain Astor in the Royal Marines. Malcolm Muggeridge, also up to his armpits in the intelligence war, begins to figure centrally in Orwell’s life. The wittiest man of his time, Mug wrote diaries that contain the most acrid vignettes of the knight of the mournful countenance.

  Astor gave Orwell a freehold on The Observer’s columns. At last he had the power of Fleet Street behind his prose. And, more lastingly, he had the power to raise political journalism to what he thought it should be – an influential prose art. His influence on The Observer itself was formative. As the historian of the paper Richard Cockett notes, Orwell was ‘the man who more than any other . . . helped to shape the new Observer’. It is one of his most lasting, yet least visible, achievements. After the war, in 1948, Astor took direct editorial authority of the paper. The Observer organized liberal opinion in Britain into a powerful extra-parliamentary, contra-establishment force. The paper, despite its patrician ownership (a little doublethink never hurt any newspaper), adopted the Orwellian line that the Tory governing ‘elite’ were so many ‘holes in the air’. Anti-imperialism was the paper’s constant mission. It climaxed with the Suez debacle, in 1956. The Observer mobilized the nation’s revulsion, which, with the toppling of Eden and Macmillan’s follow-up ‘winds of change’, led to the winding up of the British Empire. It cost the paper, temporarily, half its massive circulation – a price worth paying. And it was Orwell’s proudest moment. He was not, alas, there to enjoy what he had helped bring about.100