George Orwell: A Life in Letters (3 page)

Initials such as
ILP
, sometimes appear with and sometimes without stops after each letter, e.g.,
ILP
and I.L.P.
Orwell’s practice is followed. Many are defined when used. Those that are not but which might be unfamiliar to some readers are:

It is difficult to give precise equivalents of value with today’s prices because individual items vary considerably. However, a rough approximation can be gained if prices in the 1930s are multiplied by forty; by thirty-five during the war; and by thirty between then and Orwell’s death. In pre-decimal coinage there were 12 pence to a shilling and twenty shillings to £1 – so 240 pence to a £. Sixpence in old coinage = 2½p; one shilling (12 pennies) = 5p; 10 shillings (10/-) = 50p. For the Orwells’ time in Morocco it might be convenient to refer to R.L. Bidwell’s
Currency Conversion Tables
(1970). He records the French franc as being 165 to the £ (39.8 to the $) in March 1938. In January 1939 he gives 176.5 to the £ (39.8 to the $). Thus, the Orwells’ rent for their cottage – 7s 6d per week – is approximately £1.50 for four weeks in 1930s equivalences and, say, £60 per month at current values. The rent for the villa in Morocco was 550 francs per month, approximately £3.25 then but, say, £130 at today’s values.

Grateful thanks are due to The Orwell Estate, in particular Richard Blair and Bill Hamilton, and to Gill Furlong, Archivist, and Steven Wright, UCL Special Collections Library, for enabling these letters to be published. I am indebted to my grandson, Tom, for much technical support. The Orwell Estate and the publishers expressed thanks to copyrights holders of letters published in the
Complete Works
and
The Lost Orwell
and that gratitude is renewed here. Thanks are also due to those who have allowed letters not previously published, or for which the originals have changed hands, to be reproduced. I am immensely grateful to Myra Jones for her careful proofreading (once again) and to Briony Everroad of Harvill Secker for her courtesy and her splendid support.

Peter Davison

An asterisk after a correspondent’s name indicates that that person

will be found in the Biographical Notes. Cross references to

other letters are emphasised in bold.

From Pupil to Teacher

to Author

1911–1933

Orwell left Eton in December 1921. He had applied to join the Indian Imperial Police and was coached for the competitive entrance examination. The results were published on 23 November 1922. He had come seventh of twenty-nine successful applicants obtaining 8,464 marks out of a possible 12,400, the pass mark being 6,000. His strongest subjects were Latin, Greek, and English. He just passed the horse-riding test and scored 174 out of 400 for Freehand Drawing (so he had advanced from the little drawings with which he embellished his letters to his mother from St Cyprian’s).

He arrived in Burma on 27 November 1922. He learned Hindi, Burmese, and Shaw Karen and could converse in fluent ‘very high-flown Burmese’ with Burmese priests. He served in a number of stations and he did see a hanging and did shoot an elephant, about both of which he wrote important essays. For shooting the elephant (which had killed a coolie) he was despatched by an angry commanding officer to Katha on 23 December 1926, the basis for Kyauktada of
Burmese Days.

He left Burma on 12 July 1927 to take the six months’ leave he was due. Whilst on leave he resigned from the Police. He had evidently saved a fair amount of his pay and went to Paris where he attempted to earn a living as a writer. He did have six articles published in Paris in French and one that was published in England, but he failed to get short stories or a novel accepted and they were all destroyed. When he ran out of money he worked for a few weeks as a kitchen hand in a luxury hotel, either the Crillon or the Lotti. For a short while he was a patient in the Cochin Hospital with ‘une grippe’, an experience about which he also wrote.

Orwell returned to England and, using the family home in Southwold as a base, made forays tramping and hop-picking. He began to get articles accepted (for very little money) and from April 1932 to July 1933 taught boys aged ten to sixteen at The Hawthornes, a private school in Hayes, Middlesex. He did not return for the autumn term at The Hawthorns, which had, in any case, run into financial difficulties, but went to teach at Frays College, a private school for boys and girls, in Uxbridge, Middlesex; it is illustrated in Thompson, p. 40. On 9 January 1933 Victor Gollancz published
Down and Out in Paris and London
.

From
Orwell’s letter to his mother, 15 October 1911

To Ida Blair*

2 December 1911

St Cyprian’s School

Eastbourne

My dear Mother, I hope you are alright,

It was Mrs: Wilkes
¹
birthday yesterday, we had aufel fun after tea and played games all over the house. We all went for a walk to Beachy-Head.

I am third in Arithmatick.

‘Its’ very dull today, and dosent look as if its going to be very warm.

Thank you for your letter.

It is getting very near the end of term, there are only eighteen days more.

On Saturday evening we have dncing, and I am going to say a piece of poetry, some of the boys sing.

Give my love to Father and Avril. Is Togo alright, We had the Oxford and Cambridge Matches yesterday. Cambridge won in the first and third, and the second did not have a Match. I am very glad Colonel Hall
²
has given me some stamps, he said he wold last year but I thought he had forgotten. Its a beastly wet day today all rain and cold.

I am very sorry to hear we had those beastly freaks of smelly white mice back. I hope these arnt smelly one. if they arnt I shall like them.

From your loveing son,

E.A.Blair.

[X, 8, p. 10; handwritten with original spelling and errors]

1
.
Mrs Vaughan Wilkes, wife of the headmaster and owner of St Cyprian’s.

2
.
Colonel Hall was a neighbour of the Blairs at Shiplake.

To Steven Runciman*

[?] August 1920

Grove Terrace

Polperro RSO
¹

Cornwall

My dear Runciman,

I have a little spare time, and I feel I
must
tell you about my first adventure as an amateur tramp. Like most tramps I was driven to it. When I got to a wretched little place in Devonshire, — Seaton Junction, Mynors,
²
who had to change there, came to my carriage & said that a beastly Oppidan who had been perpetually plaguing me to travel in the same compartment as him was asking for me. As I was among strangers, I got out to go to him whereupon the train started off. You need two hands to enter a moving train, & I, what with kit-bag, belt etc had only one. To be brief, I was left behind. I despatched a telegram to say I would be late (it arrived next day), & about 2½ hours later got a train: at Plymouth, North Rd, I found there were no more trains to Looe that night. It was too late to telephone, as the post offices were shut. I then made a consultation of my financial position. I had enough for my remaining fare & 7½d over. I could therefore either sleep at the Y.M.C.A. place, price 6d, & starve, or have something to eat but nowhere to sleep. I chose the latter, I put my kit-bag in the cloak-room & got 12 buns for 6d: half-past-nine found me sneaking into some farmer’s field, — there were a few fields wedged in among rows of slummy houses. In that light I of course looked like a soldier strolling round, — on my way I had been asked whether I was demobilized yet, & I finally came to anchor in the corner of a field near some allotments. I then began to remember that people frequently got fourteen days for sleeping in somebody else’s field & ‘having no visible means of support’, particularly as every dog in the neighbourhood barked if I ever so much as moved. The corner had a large tree for shelter, & bushes for concealment, but it was unendurably cold; I had no covering, my cap was my pillow, I lay ‘with my martial cloak (rolled cape) around me’.
³
I only dozed & shivered till about 1 oc, when I readjusted my puttees, & managed to sleep long enough to miss the first train, at 4.20. by about an hour, & to have to wait till 7.45 for another. My teeth were still chattering when I awoke. When I got to Looe I was forced to walk 4 miles in the hot sun; I am very proud of this adventure, but I would not repeat it.

Yours sincerely,

E. A. Blair.

[X, 56, pp. 76–7; handwritten]

1
.
Railway Sorting Office, which acted as poste restante. Polperro had no station. The nearest was at Looe, three miles to the east. The Blair family spent most of its summer holidays in Cornwall at either Looe or Polperro. On this particular journey Orwell was returning from an Eton Officers’ Training Corps exercise and was therefore in uniform.

2
.
Roger Mynors (1903–1989; knighted 1963) was a member of Orwell’s Election. He and Orwell produced the school journal, Election Times. He was a leading classical scholar; he became a Fellow of Balliol in 1926 and later a Professor at Cambridge and Oxford. He married Lavinia, daughter of Cyril Allington, Headmaster of Eton in his and Orwell’s time.

3
.
From stanza 3 of ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’ by Charles Wolfe, a poem parodied by Orwell at Eton in College Days (X, p. 69).

Extract from letter to Cyril Connolly*

Easter 1921

The original and the complete text of this letter are lost. What survives does so because Cyril Connolly quoted part of Orwell’s letter when writing to Terence Beddard at Easter 1921; Connolly copied out this section for the Orwell Archive in June 1967.

Another version, with interspersed ironic comments by Connolly, exists at Tulsa University, and that is given in Michael Shelden’s biography of Orwell (pp. 75–76). In a note added to the copy made for the Archive, Connolly explained that this extract was part of a letter to Beddard which Connolly printed in
Enemies of Promise
(1938), pp. 256–59. Beddard was dead by the time Connolly made this copy. It is impossible to be sure how reliable is Connolly’s copy. Beddard was a King’s Scholar in the Election before Orwell’s; he left Eton exactly a year before Orwell and was no longer there when Connolly wrote to him. Christopher Eastwood is described by Connolly in his notes as ‘an attractive boy with a good voice & rather a pri
g
’
.
¹
He went on: ‘The point of the letter is that Eastwood, being in my election, was bound to see much more of me than of Blair, in the election above us.’ E. A. Carö
e
²
was in Blair’s Election, and Redcliffe-Mau
d
³
two Elections below Connolly’s. For something of the background to this letter, see chapters 20 and 21 of
Enemies of Promise
. Michael Shelden remarks that it would be unwise to assume that Orwell’s ‘adolescent affections for other boys ever reached an advanced stage of sexual contact. He may well have been as chaste in his relationships with boys as he was in his relationship with Jacintha. As his letter to Connolly reveals, he was awkward in romantic matters and was slow to assert himself.’