George Orwell: A Life in Letters (15 page)

This is longer than I meant it to be – (that should be a long dash, but you have to move the carriage.) Write the letter, because I think it likely that I may loathe Barcelona, though I’d like to see some of the excitements that won’t happen.
⁷
I don’t know of course how long we’ll be there. Unless George gets hurt I suppose he’ll stay until the war
qua
war is over – and I will too unless I get evacuated by force or unless I have to come and look for some money. But to-day’s news suggests that the war may not last very long – I doubt whether Mussolini or even Hitler would feel enthusiastic about trying to push Franco across Catalonia, and certainly they’d need a lot more men to do it.
⁸

The dinner gong is going. Is it not touching to think that this may be the last dinner unrationed available for

Pig.

Give everyone my love – even yourself. Eric
is lecturing at Bristol,
⁹
but I think not till May. Hey Groves
¹⁰
came to the heart lecture at the College of Surgeons and then invited him to talk to you, but the date isn’t settled yet. He has some pretty pictures. I could have come with him – perhaps after all I shall come with him. If you meet Hey Groves tell him to make the date after the war is over.

Could you tell Mary
¹¹
(not urgently) that I simply hadn’t time to write separate letters to the two old Oxford Friends – which is simply true.

[
LO,
pp. 68–70;
XI, 361A,
p. 12; typewritten]

1
.
The O’Shaughnessy family home in London, SE 10.

2
.
salvo conducto:
safe conduct.

3
.
John McNair* was a Tynesider so his ‘unfortunate telephone voice’ might have been his Geordie accent, with which Eileen, who came from South Shields, would have been familiar. She was probably being comically ironic.

4
.
Leave was not given.

5
.
No such letter survives.

6
.
It is a common mistake to believe that Orwell was commissioned to go to Wigan and to write
The Road to Wigan Pier
by the Left Book Club. In fact the Club had not been formed when he left for Wigan and it was not decided by the Club to adopt the book until January 1937, well after Orwell had handed in his manuscript.

7
.
She tells her mother on 22 March, after her return from the front, ‘I’m enjoying Barcelona again’, so her worst fears were not realised though she would experience in all their pain the ‘May Events’ in Barcelona when their Communist ‘allies’ violently suppressed the
POUM
.

8
.
Orwell was shot through the throat (see note preceding
2.7.37
). Communist attacks on the
POUM
meant they had to leave surreptitiously on 23 June 1937 (with John McNair and the young Stafford Cottman).

9
.
Eric here is her brother Laurence, called Eric (from his middle name, Frederick) by his family.

10
.
Ernest William Hey Groves (1872–1944), was a distinguished surgeon specialising in reconstructive surgery of the hip; he developed the use of bone grafts.

11
.
Bertha Mary Wardell graduated with Eileen. She married Teddy (A.E.F.) Lovett, a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He was serving on HMS
Glorious
which, with her two escorting destroyers,
Ardent
and
Acasta
, was sunk off Norway on 8 June 1940, there being only 40 survivors from
Glorious
, two from
Ardent
and one from
Acasta
.

Eileen Blair* to her mother, Marie O’Shaughnessy

22 March 1937

Seccion Inglesa

10 Rambla de los Estudios

Barcelona
¹

Dearest Mummy,

I enclose a ‘letter’ I began to write to you in the trenches! It ends abruptly—I think I’ve lost a sheet—& is practically illegible but you may as well have a letter written from a real fighting line, & you’ll read enough to get the essential news. I
thoroughly
enjoyed being at the front. If the doctor had been a good doctor I should have moved heaven & earth to stay (indeed before seeing the doctor I had already pushed heaven & earth a little) as a nurse—the line is still so quiet that he could well have trained me in preparation for the activity that must come. But the doctor is quite ignorant & incredibly dirty. They have a tiny hospital at Monflorite in which he dresses the villagers’ cut fingers etc. & does emergency work on any war wounds that do occur. Used dressings are thrown out of the window unless the window happens to be shut when they rebound onto the floor—& the doctor’s hands have never been known to be washed. So I decided he must have a previously trained assistant (I have one in view—a man). Eric did go to him but he says there is nothing the matter except ‘cold, over-fatigue, etc’ This of course is quite true. However, the weather is better now & of course the leave is overdue, but another section on the Huesca front made an attack the other day which had rather serious results & leave is stopped there for the moment. Bob Edwards
²
who commands the I.L.P. contingent has to be away for a couple of weeks & Eric is commanding in his absence, which will be quite fun in a way. My visit to the front ended in a suitable way because Kopp* decided I must have ‘a few more hours’ & arranged a car to leave Monflorite at 3:15 a.m. We went to bed at 10 or so & at 3 Kopp came & shouted & I got up & George
³
(I can’t remember which half of the family I write to) went to sleep again I hope. In this way he got 2 nights proper rest & seems much better. The whole visit’s unreality was accentuated by the fact that there were
no
lights, not a candle or a torch; one got up & went to bed in black dark, & on the last night I emerged in black dark & waded knee deep in mud in & out of strange buildings until I saw the faint glow from the Comité Militar where Kopp was waiting with his car.

On Tuesday we had the only bombardment of Barcelona since I came. It was quite interesting. Spanish people are normally incredibly noisy & pushing but in a° emergency they appear to go
quiet
.
Not that there was any real emergency but the bombs fell closer to the middle of the town than usual & did make enough noise to excite people fairly reasonably. There were very few casualties.

I’m enjoying Barcelona again—I wanted a change. You might send this letter on to Eric & Gwen, whom I thank for
tea
.
Three lbs of it has just come & will be much appreciated. The contingent is just running out, Bob Edwards tells me. The other message for Eric is that as usual I am writing this in the last moments before someone leaves for France & also as usual my cheque book is not here, but he will have the cheque for £10 within 2 weeks anyway & meanwhile I should be very grateful if he gave Fenner Brockway
⁴
the pesetas. (In case anything funny happened to the last letter, I asked him to buy £10 worth of pesetas & give them to Fenner Brockway to be brought out by hand. Living is very cheap here, but I spend a lot on the I.L.P. contingent as none of them have had any pay & they all need things. Also I’ve lent John
[McNair]* 500 ps. because he ran out. I guard my five English pounds, which I could exchange at a fairly decent rate,
⁵
because I must have something to use when we—whoever we may be—cross the frontier again.)

I hope everyone is well—& I hope for a letter soon to say so. Gwen wrote a long letter which was exciting—even I fall into the universal habit of yearning over England. Perhaps the same thing happens in the colonies. When a waiter lit my cigarette the other day I said he had a nice lighter & he said ‘Si, si, es bien, es
Ingles
!’ Then he handed it to me, obviously thinking I should like to caress it a little. It was a Dunhill—bought in Barcelona I expect as a matter of fact because there are plenty of Dunhill & other lighters but a shortage of spirit for them. Kopp, Eric’s commander, longed for Lea & Perrins° Worcester Sauce. I discovered this by accident & found some in Barcelona—they have Crosse & Blackwell’s pickles too but the good English marmalade is finished although the prices of these things are fantastic.

After seeing George I am pretty confident that we shall be home before the winter—& possibly much sooner of course. You might write another letter to the aunt
⁶
some time. I have
never
heard from her & neither has Eric,
⁷
which worries me rather. I think she may be very sad about living in Wallington. By the way, George is positively urgent about the gas-stove—he wanted me to write & order it at once, but I still think it would be better to wait until just before our return, particularly as I have not yet heard from Moore about the advance on the book.
⁸
Which reminds me that the reviews are better than I anticipated, as the interesting ones haven’t come through yet.

I had a bath last night—a great excitement. And I’ve had 3 superb dinners in succession. I don’t know whether I shall miss this café life. I have coffee about three times a day & drinks oftener, & although theoretically I eat in a rather grim pension at least six times a week I get headed off into one of about four places where the food is really quite good by any standards though limited of course. Every night I mean to go home early & write letters or something & every night I get home the next morning. The cafés are open till 1.30 & one starts one’s after-dinner coffee about 10. But the sherry is
undrinkable
—& I meant to bring home some little casks of it!

Give Maud
⁹
my love & tell her I’ll write some time. And give anyone else my love but I shan’t be writing to them. (This letter is to the 3 O’Shaughnesseys
¹⁰
who are thus ‘you’ not ‘they’.) It is a dull letter again I think. I shall do this life better justice in conversation—or I hope so.

Much love

Eileen

[XI, 363, pp. 13–15; handwritten]

1
.
Offices of the
POUM
journal
The Spanish Revolution
.

2
.
Robert Edwards (1905–90), unsuccessful Independent Labour Party parliamentary candidate in 1935, was a Labour and Co-operative
MP
from 1955 to 1987. In January 1937 he was Captain of the
ILP
contingent in Spain, linked to the
POUM
. He left Spain at the end of March to attend the ILP conference at Glasgow. In 1926 and 1934 he led delegations to the Soviet Union meeting Trotsky, Stalin and Molotov; was General Secretary of the Chemical Workers’ Union,
1947–71; National Officer, Transport and General Workers’ Union, 1971–76; and member of the European Parliament, 1977–79. (See
Orwell Remembered
, pp. 146–48, and especially Shelden, pp.
264–65, which demolishes Edwards’s accusation that Orwell went to Spain solely to find material for a book.)

3
.
Eileen started to write ‘Eric’ but overwrote ‘George.’

4
.
Fenner Brockway (1888–1988; Lord Brockway, 1964) was General Secretary of the ILP,
1928, 1933–39, and its representative in Spain for a time. A devoted worker for many causes, particularly peace, he resigned from the ILP in 1946 and rejoined the Labour Party, which he represented in Parliament, 1950–64.

5
.
In a footnote to
Homage to Catalonia
(p. 151), Orwell gives the purchasing value of the peseta as ‘about fourpence’ in pre-metric currency; 500 pesetas would be about £8 6s 8d – say £320 at today’s values.

6
.
Orwell’s aunt Nellie Limouzin, then living at The Stores, Wallington, the Orwells’ cottage.

7
.
Eileen must here mean her husband.

8
.
The Road to Wigan Pier
.

9
.
Possibly an aunt of Eileen’s whose second name was Maud.

10
.
Eileen’s mother, her brother, ‘Eric’ and his wife Gwen.

To Eileen Blair*

[5? April 1937]

[Hospital, Monflorite]

Dearest,

You really are a wonderful wife. When I saw the cigars my heart melted away. They will solve all tobacco problems for a long time to come. McNair* tells me you are all right for money, as you can borrow & then repay when B[ob] E[dwards]
brings some pesetas, but don’t go beggaring yourself, & above all don’t go short of food, tobacco etc. I hate to hear of your having a cold & feeling run down. Don’t let them overwork you either, & don’t worry about me, as I am much better & expect to go back to the lines tomorrow or the day after. Mercifully the poisoning in my hand didn’t spread, & it is now almost well, tho’ of course the wound is still open. I can use it fairly well & intend to have a shave today, for the first time in about 5 days. The weather is much better, real spring most of the time, & the look of the earth makes me think of our garden at home & wonder whether the wallflowers are coming out & whether old Hatchett
¹
is sowing the potatoes. Yes, Pollitt’s review
²
was pretty bad, tho’ of course good as publicity. I suppose he must have heard I was serving in the
POUM
militia.
I don’t pay much attention to the
Sunday Times
reviews
³
as G[ollancz] advertises so much there that they daren’t down his books, but the
Observer
was an improvement on last time. I told McNair that when I came on leave I would do the
New Leader
an article, as they wanted one, but it will be such a come-down after B.E’s that I don’t expect they’ll print it. I’m afraid it is not much use expecting leave before about the 20
^th
April. This is rather annoying in my own case as it comes about through my having exchanged from one unit to another—a lot of the men I came to the front with are now going on leave. If they suggested that I should go on leave earlier I don’t think I would say no, but they are not likely to & I am not going to press them. There are also some indications—I don’t know how much one can rely on these—that they expect an action hereabouts, & I am not going on leave just before that comes off if I can help it. Everyone has been very good to me while I have been in hospital, visiting me every day etc. I think now that the weather is getting better I can stick out another month without getting ill, & then what a rest we will have, & go fishing too if it is in any way possible.