A History of Britain, Volume 3 (62 page)

Orwell followed, almost literally, in the footsteps of Jack London and Ada Chesterton. In Lambeth he sold his clothes for a shilling and received in their place a tramp’s kit, ‘not merely dirty and shapeless’ but covered with ‘a patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness’. It was his Franciscan moment – the disrobing of the bourgeois imperialist, the embrace of redeeming poverty. Once he felt himself dirty enough to be unrecognizable as a gent, he knew he was on his way. On the street, ‘My new clothes had put me instantly into a new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. “Thanks, mate,” he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my life …’

He spent the same night in a doss-house on the Waterloo Road, in a room reeking of ‘paregoric [opium] and foul linen’ and shared with six others. The sheets smelled horribly of old sweat. Every 20 minutes an old
man
would be taken by a fit of coughing, ‘a foul bubbling and retching, as though the man’s bowels were being churned up within him’. The morning light was not kind to the scene. Blair could see that the sheets, three weeks away from a wash, were ‘raw umber’ in colour and the washbasins covered in ‘solid, sticky filth as black as boot-blacking’. He moved from common lodging houses to spikes – which were, if anything, even more squalid. At no point did he revel in this. On the contrary, it is hard to think of another great English writer more fastidious about cleanliness, and whose nose was so doggy in its exact registration of a universe of horrible smells. But the more repulsive the experience, the more cleansed he became of imperial guilt, rather like St Catherine drinking a bowl of pus to show that nothing human was beneath her.

In one particularly diabolical place the St Francis of the spikes finally got down to basic truths:

It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes held together by dirt. The room became a press of steaming nudity; the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of the men refused the bath and washed only their ‘toe-rags’, horrid, greasy little clouts which tramps bind around their feet.

For two years Blair did the Cook’s tour of destitution, including about three months in Paris as a
plongeur
or washer-up, as well as tramping in and around London. Occasionally he might come back for a night or two to friends’ houses in London or even show up disconcertingly in Southwold, looking grimmer and gaunter than ever before. He went hop-picking with itinerant labourers, working until his hands were shredded; downed enough beer and whisky to get himself arrested, in the hope of accomplishing his heart’s desire to spend a Christmas in prison; collected tramping slang; worked out the fine hierarchies of dossing, from the Embankment benches (get there by eight) through the ‘Twopenny Hangovers’ and the fourpenny wooden boxes called ‘Coffins’ to the high luxury of shilling Rowton houses and Salvation Army lodgings. One morning, he set off with an Irish tramp called – what else? – Paddy, going south on the Old Kent Road towards Bromley. In a meadow that, from the bits of sodden newspaper, rusty cans and worn grass, he could tell was ‘a regular caravanserai of tramps’ Blair sat down beside a patch of tansies,
their
pungent aroma competing with that of the tramps, watched the two carthorse colts trot around and listened to the men talk about their itineraries: Oxford was good for ‘mooching’ (begging); Kent very tight. The gossip went from stories of suicides to shreds of history, half-remembered, half-invented – ‘The Great Rebellion’, the Corn Laws – carried around with them like the Oxo tins that held old cigarette ends.

Despite the clichés of the respectable, Orwell knew that not all, not even many, tramps were alcoholics, much less criminals. They wouldn’t even be on the move were it not for that inflexible rule forbidding more than a single night’s stay in any one spike. Tramps were the diametric opposite of the romantic cult of walking with which Britain’s modern age had begun, and which was being resurrected in the rambling movement of the 1920s and 1930s. But for the pseudo-tramps like Orwell, or Frank Jennings, the ‘Tramp’s Parson’, and still more for truly destitute memoir-writers like Terence Horsley, wounded veteran of Passchendaele and electrician who trudged from Glasgow to London and back in desperate search of casual work, walking was not an ennobling experience, nor was hop-picking a merry country holiday of beer and flirting. The itinerant life was a merciless grind and those condemned to it were worn down in body and spirit.

When
Down and Out in Paris and London
appeared in 1933, the name on the book jacket was not Eric Blair but ‘George Orwell’. Other names had been considered, such as ‘H. Lewis Allways’. But since the Orwell is a river in Suffolk, not far from Southwold, it is likely that Blair, who in any case loved the countryside with a fierce passion, wanted to identify with the physical nature of England. Somewhere at the back of his mind, surely, was not just Jack London but William Wordsworth, who too sought communion with the authentic England through solitary walks and encounters with the broken and the poor. So Orwell’s non-fiction books would almost all be journeys, for which there was, by the early 1930s, a huge publishing vogue. But no one was ever going to mistake his journeys for those of the writer who had driven the ‘journeying’ fashion: H.V. Morton.

Morton’s
In Search of England
was published in 1927, the year Orwell changed his garments and his life. Its premise, announced in its very first sentence, was that it was the record of a ‘motor car journey round England’. Since the distribution of cars between regions (27 per 1000 in Cambridgeshire, 5 per 1000 in County Durham) was extremely uneven, this meant, in effect, the motorized grandee inspecting the biking and Shanks’s pony classes. Instead of the writer seeing the country on foot – bound in toe-rags and gaping boots – he would see it through the
windscreen
of his motor. He would drive about England (Britain, in fact, since volumes on Scotland (1929), Ireland (1930) and Wales (1932) followed), warning about the infestation of the countryside by the vulgarity of the town, in between filling up his tank with cheap petrol, courtesy of Anglo-Persian or Burmah.

His book is a threnody for the English Promised Land; Vaughan Williams in a Lagonda: ‘I sped on into a green tunnel of a lane with England before me and the keen air was like wine to me and the green of the young leaves was like music.’ There are moments when the unbearable perfection of the countryside sends Morton into a religious rapture when he tries, and fails, to be the Ruskin of the motoring classes: ‘The low clouds were indigo blue and stormy, the high a soft apricot pink colour. The west was burning with gold light and the edges of the dark clouds were etched with thin lines of fire. The pageant moved, changed … the river against the sun was a sheet of dull silver on which a jet black duck moved noiselessly, a swan silhouetted as if cut in black paper, swam with his neck beneath the water, a wind came fretting the river blowing a handful of pale blossoms into the grass.’ Pity, really, about that duck.

Although he is ‘In Search of England’ he makes sure to look for it (with one brief exception) only where there are no factories or polluted industrial canals, much less spikes and sevenpenny kips. The kind of places Morton favours are invariably cathedral towns (Canterbury, Lincoln, Norwich, York, Ely, Exeter) or market towns, best of all cathedral towns that are also market towns, like Wells (‘How can I describe to you the whisper of the water that runs in gutters, musically tinkling past the steps of old houses?’). There his soul is eased by cosy pubs, where pewter ‘glimmered like moonlight on still water’ and the taps run with ‘mahogany brew’. The best places of all are those that are mossy with memory; where ghosts drift through the ruins. At Beaulieu Abbey he meets a Miss Cheshire who actually lives above the ruined monks’ dormitory ‘alone with seven hundred years’. At Winchester he sees ‘down a long tunnel of time, the Kings of Wessex riding through a country that was not yet England’. In fact he is constantly seeing and hearing things as if all England had been turned into an open-air Madame Tussaud’s. Mile after mile, in between the moments of seraphic illumination in the fields, or rather on lay-bys near fields, Morton gives this nostalgia everything he has.

But of course there is a worm in the bud: the disagreeable 20th century. Two sets of barbarians are massing to despoil paradise: Yanks and yobbos. In Morton’s pages, alternately quivering with bucolic ecstasy or wrinkle-nosed with distaste, Americans are constantly ruining the scenery with their vulgar, garish presence. In Clovelly in Devon, Morton wants to
put
his fingers in his ears lest he hear another Alabama college girl exclaim how everything is ‘too cute for words’. Morton’s parody Yanks speak a bizarre language, a sort of fractured, badly heard movie-speak overstuffed with ‘gees’ and ‘sures’. He insists, unconvincingly, that ‘no-one respects the average American traveller more than I do’, and says it just as ardently as his contemporaries protested that some of their best friends were Jews. But wait! There is hope for these loud, comical primitives, and that hope is called History. The ghosts of King Edgar and Henry VIII and the original Pilgrims (not yet American), summoned by the spirits of the place, stun the Americans into awestruck appreciation for All that Past and force them to confess that, although they affect to despise it, they are really in love with Tradition.

Not much hope, however, for the domestic enemies of the idyll, the ‘charabanc parties from large manufacturing towns’ – the Jacks and the Beryls, the Dougs and the Maureens. The countryside, alas, is in no condition to resist this coachborne invasion of the unwashed and the ill-mannered. ‘An old order is being taxed out of existence’, an avalanche of sales, and ‘the impossibility of growing corn because of the expense of labour and foreign competition’. (The Council for the Preservation of Rural England, founded in 1926, would make that lament its battle cry.) For someone so devoted to the countryside, Morton makes no mention of the pitiful plight of agricultural workers, their average wage, when they could find work, cut from 42 shillings a week to 30; or to the countless farms abandoned, the barns allowed to fall down; to the untended hedgerows bolting, thickening and turning into copses; to the fields shaggy with weeds. At least mass unemployment might have the inadvertent benefit of keeping These People in their own noisome little alleys and hovels, to stand around waiting for the dole. Morton can’t quite escape the industrial enemy, though. His route takes him between Manchester and Liverpool – ‘to the right there was an ominous grey haze in the sky which meant Manchester’. For a moment in the Black Country he is ‘thrilled’ by the smokestacks – but on closer inspection is not. In Lancashire he sees the only Englishmen he knows who squat like Arabs – coal miners with whippets. And then he sees ‘a signpost marked “Wigan”. Who could resist a glimpse of Wigan?’

Just a glimpse, of course. As a sampler Morton goes over the tired music-hall joke that is ‘Wigan Pier’, ‘sufficient to make an audience howl with laughter’. Its Roman name, Coccium, has him doubled up. But it turns out that Wigan is not quite the hell-hole he had been led to believe (and confesses he was eager to record). He sees half-timbered mock-Tudor buildings, which lead him to believe that in 20 years or so Wigan
might
be a perfectly fine-looking place (for a manufacturing town). The case for a kindly view is clinched when he discovers that the area had been staunchly royalist in the Civil War. Not just a coalfield, then, by God. To his own astonishment, Morton admits he ‘would not mind spending a holiday in Wigan – a short one’.

Nine years later, in January 1936, George Orwell travelled to Wigan, stayed for two months and found it altogether less of a giggle. He recorded canal paths ‘a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the “flashes” – pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. … It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water.’

Orwell had had a modest success with
Down and Out in Paris and London
(perhaps 3000 copies sold in the UK), but he realized, paradoxically, that in writing about the outcasts of England he had documented a tiny population – tens of thousands – rather than the millions of the industrial working class in the Midlands and the north whom the depression had turned into the real
misérables
of Ramsay MacDonald’s and Stanley Baldwin’s Britain. Baldwin, who liked to present himself as a plain-as-a-pikestaff solid sort with (like Cobbett and Lord Emsworth) a passion for pigs, wrote his own sub-Housman lyric verse ‘On England’, featuring the usual obligatory plough and team coming over the hill. But this was precisely the period when, if farmers (together with their labourers, now no more than 5 per cent of the working population) were going to survive, they would be riding tractors and combine harvesters. And the hill was going to be planted out, not with spears of golden English wheat, but with sugar-beet, one of the few surefire moneymakers of the 1930s.

Morton had expressed his horror that cornfields had become coalfields. Travelling through Northumberland, he liked to pretend it had never happened, that the industrial towns were ‘mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England’.

On the other hand, socialist writers like J.B. Priestley, whose
English Journey
of 1933 was another antidote to Morton’s rustic sentimentalism, and who himself came from the wool-manufacturing town of Bradford, were prepared to stare the disaster of industrial England in the face and certainly call it ‘real’. In fact, for much of England industrial work had been the
only
reality and, for all the apparent grimness of the factory floors and terraced streets, not such a bad thing either. It was the white and shiny, tile and glass ‘new’ factories of London’s Great West Road, from
which
Priestley set out on his journey by the miracle of coach comfort, that he couldn’t quite see as places that could manufacture anything. It was ‘bending iron and riveting steel to steel’ that were ‘the real thing’, man’s work.