by Simon Schama
CHAPTER
8
ENDURANCE
GEORGE ORWELL’S HISTORY could never have been the same as Winston Churchill’s, but his history teacher might have been. In the last year of his five-year internment at St Cyprian’s, a prep school in Eastbourne, he won the Classics Prize and was first runner-up for the Harrow History Prize. The man who invariably came to St Cyprian’s to present it was Churchill’s (and G. M. Trevelyan’s) old teacher, George Townsend Warner. Warner died in 1916, the year that Eric Blair won the prize, but there is no doubt that Eric would have seen the old master many times before, handing out the books and making the usual noises about the fate of the empire depending on its boys knowing their history.
Eric didn’t think much of this. History lessons, like all the other lessons at St Cyprian’s, were, he wrote much later in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (1947–8), his adult revenge on the ordeals of the school, just fact-cramming routines designed to drill the boys for the public school entrance examinations from which the prep school made its reputation and money. The island epics that even at St Cyprian’s Blair thought ‘not bad fun’ were reduced to ‘orgies of dates, with the keener boys leaping up and down in their places in their eagerness to shout out the right answers, and at the same time not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the mysterious events they were naming’. What stayed in Blair’s mind was the arbitrary coupling of names and phrases, or names and dates – Disraeli ‘brought peace with honour’, Clive, ‘astonished at his moderation’ – without the slightest attempt to explain their significance. History became pure mnemonics, the initial letters of ‘A black Negress was my aunt, there’s her house behind the barn’ for instance, spelling out the names of the principal battles of the Wars of the Roses.
Eric’s real history teacher at St Cyprian’s was not a Warner-like figure of erudite benevolence and inspiration but Flip (nicknamed for the flip-flop of her pendulous breasts as she advanced towards some cowering snot-nose). In Orwell’s scarred recollection Flip was the presiding sadist of the school, dispatching eight-year-old bed-wetters (miserably home-sick) to her husband Sambo, the headmaster, for a brutal bend-over. Beating the bed-wetters to the rhythmic chant of ‘You dir-ty lit-tle boy’ guaranteed the anxiety that would bring on another episode of the crime. In ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, Orwell describes the experience of one such terrorized micturator, ‘Night after night I prayed, with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers, “Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please God, do not let me wet my bed!” but it made remarkably little difference.’ To the small boy this helpless syndrome – pee, get beaten; pee, get beaten – was proof that he had landed in a nightmare world where it was ‘impossible to be good’.
Orwell’s memory and even his honesty in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ were indignantly contested by contemporary schoolmates who protested that the formidable but motherly Flip had been unjustly caricatured, and that the regime at St Cyprian’s taught ‘character’. Exaggerated or not, if that character were created from being forced to plunge into a slimy, freezing swimming bath every morning before picking one’s way through porridge eaten from pewter bowls, the rims caked with yesterday’s glop and today’s glop concealing unidentifiable foreign bodies of a generally hairy, crusty kind, then it was a character Eric Blair was not much interested in acquiring. The bright spots amidst the gloom were always moments when, left to himself and the English countryside (at its most gorgeous on the Sussex Downs), he would collect orange-bellied newts or the butterflies that, just as with Churchill, remained a lifelong passion. To England, and in fact to English history, Orwell would always respond with a leap of the pulse. At 11 he was enough of a little patriot to write a wartime recruiting poem, ‘Awake! Young Men of England’ (1914), published in his local newspaper in Henley-on-Thames. But St Cyprian’s was the other England; a place where children torn from home were incarcerated amidst ‘irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings’. It was the gap between the self-righteousness of the governing-class ideals – Christianity, cricket and civilizing the natives – and the reality of coercion that most offended him, even in his short-trousered days. The best that could be said for such places was that they gave the rulers of empire an opportunity of existing as white natives, of sampling what it was like to be on the receiving end of a system where good and evil were hopelessly confused.
Eric Blair had in fact been born into the narco-empire in Motihari, Bengal, in 1903. His father, Richard, was a small cog in a big business: assistant sub-deputy agent of the Opium Department, third class, devoted to stocking the Chinese (and the world’s) hard-drug habit. In the first decade of the 20th century profits from opium exports, averaging 4000 tons a year, amounted to £6.5 million, or one-sixth of the total revenues of the government of India. Without the drug business Curzon would have been unable to build the Victoria Memorial Monument. Richard Blair’s job was to stalk the poppy fields seeing that crop yields were satisfactory and the quality pure; then to see the product properly transported to shipping depots. Since the future of the trade was under a cloud, increasingly criticized both at home and abroad, the pressure on Blair and the department to amass all they could in the way of profits was probably intense. He must have done his job conscientiously, as if he were supervising Assam tea or Patna rice.
Transferred to a remote up-country area, Blair decided in 1904 to send his wife, Ida (half-French), together with their daughter, Marjorie, and tow-haired, chubby-cheeked baby, Eric Arthur, back to England. He would serve out his time, like countless other drones of the empire, by himself, in some hill station, and then come home. The Blairs were not particularly well off. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) Orwell would describe the family, accurately, as ‘shabby-genteel’ or ‘lower-upper-middle class’, with an income of hundreds, rather than thousands, of pounds a year. This gave them the taste for, and knowledge of, a genteel life – how to order a meal in a restaurant, which knives and forks to use – without the means to enjoy it. At St Cyprian’s he was constantly being reminded by Flip and Sambo that, unlike more fortunate boys, he did not have the luxury to waste his ‘precious opportunities’.
‘Home’ was Vicarage Road, Henley-on-Thames, sempiternal England, the ‘Lower Binfield’ of Orwell’s wonderful novel Coming Up for Air (1939): willows hanging over the river, cow parsley in the lanes, paddling swans, brick-fronted breweries, regatta blazers, cream teas, punts and the ‘great green juicy meadows round the town’. Ida’s house in Vicarage Road was decorated with exotic items – ivory and oriental rugs – which spoke of her ‘difference’. In an upmarket move to Rose Lawn, Station Road, Shiplake, the Blairs acquired a garden of about an acre and Eric and his sister got a tantalizingly brief taste of real country pleasures. But the expenses were too much even after Richard Blair had finally been promoted to (full) sub-deputy agent, third grade. Bowing to criticism, the opium business was being quietly wound down and in 1913 would stop altogether as a result of a treaty with China. In 1912, Richard accepted early retirement and a pension of £400 a year, never quite enough to support the family pretensions. During the later years of the First World War, while Ida was doing some public-service work, the Blairs first lived in west London at Cromwell Court, Earl’s Court. The Churchills, on the other hand, were living in the Cromwell Road. The verbal difference was minute; the social difference immense.
But it was Eric, not Winston, who went to Randolph Churchill’s old school Eton. He went, of course, on a scholarship and, despite the usual initiation rites of beatings administered by older boys, seems to have enjoyed it a lot more than St Cyprian’s. At Eton he affected a style of laconic rebellion, which in post-war Britain was all the rage and made him, he admitted, both a snob and a rebel. There was much debating the socialism of Shaw and Wells; much jeering at the cadet corps. Of a class of 17 boys asked to nominate their hero, 15 chose Lenin. When Blair left, he presented the school library with a book of plays, which included Shaw’s Misallianc
e, the preface to which, ‘Parents and Children’, featured a fierce attack on British schools, which it castigated as prison camps of the young – worse, in fact, since they tortured mind as well as body.
It may have been Eric’s studied pose of taciturn insolence that deceived his teachers into assuming that silence was a sign of intellectual dimness. At any rate, his father was told by his classics master, ‘Granny’ Gow, that there was not the slightest chance that the boy would win a scholarship to an Oxford or Cambridge college, the next step on the routine ascent to the governing classes. On Richard’s pension there was no question of being able to pay for an education among the dreaming spires, so the plum-stone game in which Etonians chanted ‘Army, Navy, the Church, the Law’ did not apply. The obvious alternative was to follow in his father’s footsteps and seek a career in the colonies, though no one ever thought of designating one of those plum-stones ‘Police’.
While broken-down tenors were still singing ‘On the Road to Mandalay’ in the London music halls, in November 1922, Eric found himself actually on it, destined for the Indian Imperial Police training school. The Burma police has a good claim to be the most thankless service in the most poorly regarded colony in the British Empire. Burma was a paradigm of plunder, its long-time plantation wealth in teak and tea, as well as rubies, now supplemented by the best of all 20th-century bonanzas: oil in the Irrawaddy delta. The resources were so precious, the resistance of Buddhist priests so troublesome, and the old Burmese royal family so unreliable a collaborator that in 1885 the usual solution had been applied: a military campaign ending in the annexation of the entire country. But there were 13 million Burmese and an even thinner ratio of British administrators to natives than elsewhere in the Asian empire, which made the police force the crucial weapon with which to enforce order. It is entirely possible that, when he arrived, Blair shared at least some of the official idealism that the police were there to do good: keep the peace, round up bandits preying on defenceless villages – that sort of thing. But five years in the ‘stifling, stultifying world’ of British Burma cured him of that.
As George Orwell, he looked back with ironic gratitude to his time in the police because in that service, at least, the coercion on which imperial power was based was nakedly exposed. At the beginning of ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936), the essay that distilled the essence of that experience, he sardonically remarks, ‘In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.’ Initially, the young officer in pith helmet and khaki shorts tried to do his job respectably if not enthusiastically, rounding up petty criminals, looking the other way when they were beaten. But it did not take him long to understand that, for all the lofty talk of keeping the Pax Britannica (known in the Rangoon brothels more accurately as the Pox Britannica), he was little more than the hired muscle of big economic interests. In Syriam on the Irrawaddy he supervised the guarding of Burmah Oil’s tanks. Up-country, at Katha, he was in the heart of teak-planter country. Instead of being exhilarated by power, caught between the racist ranting of the planters and the sullen hostility of the Burmese, he squirmed at its exercise.
The British types he was forced to encounter in the club bored and repelled him with their predictable endless moans, faithfully recorded in his early novel Burmese Days (1934): ‘“We seem to have no authority over the natives nowadays, with all these dreadful Reforms, and the insolence they learn from the newspapers. … And such a short time ago, even just before the War, they were so nice and respectful! The way they salaamed when you passed them on the road – it was really quite charming. I remember when we paid our butler only twelve rupees a month, and really that man loved us like a dog.”’ It was when he was sneered at for being an Old Etonian that Eric understood the paranoia of this generation of sunset imperialists – their terror at being demoted to the true shabby-genteel class from which most of them had, in fact, come. The whole point of empire for them was the opportunity to acquire the horses and the servants that were simply unaffordable in Britain. This was the real affront and the threat posed by men like Gandhi or the ‘Bolshie’ journalists and silently defiant Buddhist bonzes: that they would take away those low-rent butlers.
But if Eric despised what the novelist E.M. Forster called the ‘pinko-grey’ classes, he found himself almost equally alienated from the Burmese – even though, intellectually, he knew that many of those classed as criminals ought to have been more accurately thought of as the victims of foreign conquest and occupation. To his horror he sometimes found himself treating the natives like sub-humans, delivering kicks or blows with his stick. The nausea accumulated: ‘The wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos, the women and children howling when their menfolk were led away under arrest – things like these are beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them.’ Attending a hanging, he was suddenly shocked into recognizing gallows fodder as fellow human beings when one prisoner, walking to the scaffold, instinctively stepped aside to avoid a puddle. ‘It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. … His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling … and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone.’
Eric dealt with his self-loathing by cultivating the air of an eccentric outsider, racing his Harley motorcycle around the country roads; in Katha, keeping chickens, goats and pigs both inside his house and out; making the occasional foray into the whorehouses on the Rangoon waterfront. But he burned with violent guilt. One minute he wanted to smash his fist into the blustering boiled-over faces of the sahibs; the next minute he wanted to do the same to the ‘yellow’, brown or black men who insisted on making his job so unbearably difficult. Most of all he hated the loss of free will that went with his job as the guardian of British law and order. As a petty tyrant he had become, unexpectedly, the slave rather than the master of the system; as impotent as the lowliest coolie.
It was when he was called on to shoot a sick elephant, which had killed a black Dravidian coolie, that this imprisonment of expectations came home to him in the most painful way. It would have been easier (if more frightening) to have taken a shot at a rampaging animal. But this elephant just stood there, peacefully throwing grass and bamboo shoots in its mouth. It was acutely obvious to Blair that there was no reason to kill the beast except that the huge crowd that had gathered expected him to:
… suddenly, I realised that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.
Blair took his shot.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every fine of his body had altered.
Horrified by the animal’s standing transformation, he fired again, and after it fell, emptied his rifle into the elephant’s throat and heart, but ‘In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that
it took him half an hour to die. … I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.’
To hate imperialism, he wrote later, you have to be part of it. From the inside it was obvious, if one were honest, that no amount of good intentions, or the actual good work that he recognized was done by doctors, nurses and forest rangers, would ever compensate for the evil of foreign domination. He often suspected that all over the decrepit, embattled empire there were men who felt the same way, but were trapped in a conspiracy of silence. Travelling on a train, one night when it was too hot to sleep, he found himself sharing a carriage with a man from the Educational Service. Without so much as exchanging names they confessed their hatred of their respective jobs ‘and then for hours, while the train slowly jolted through the pitch-black night, sitting up in our bunks with bottles of beer handy, we damned the British Empire – damned it from the inside, intelligently and intimately. It did us both good. But we had been speaking forbidden things, and in the haggard morning light when the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple.’
After five years of service, in 1927, Blair went back to Britain on leave, where ‘one sniff of English air’ convinced him he could not be part of ‘that evil despotism’ a day longer. He had been on the side of the strong against the weak; the bullies against the helpless. Never again. In 1921, his parents had moved from Henley to Southwold on the Suffolk coast – originally a fishing village, but by the 1920s so congested with retirement cottages, many of them owned by old India hands, that it was becoming known as ‘Simla by the sea’. Eric’s mother played bridge; his younger sister, Avril, ran a tea shop; his father stared at the sea. When, looking gaunt and sporting a moustache, Eric announced that he was leaving the police (and his annual £660 salary) to become, of all things, a writer, Richard Blair’s horrified disbelief and dismay can be imagined. To make matters worse, Eric decided he would return to the police the pay owed him for the period between the start of his leave and the date of his effective resignation. It had become blood money.
