A History of Britain, Volume 3 (60 page)

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
Misalliance
, 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.