George Orwell: A Life in Letters (36 page)

By the way, where is Norman?
⁷
I hope not in Egypt.

Now I must go shopping being as ever a Devoted Pig.

Having walked twelve or fourteen miles to find mother
soft
slippers
with
heels, I had to buy everyone else hcfs
⁸
in a horrible shop. Last year’s gift was identical I believe but you will have a nice stock of white hcfs for the cold days.

[
LO
, pp. 79–81; XII, 7
14A, p. 294; handwritten]

1
.
Nephrolithiasis: kidney stones; Malta Fever: undulant fever resulting in swelling of the joints and enlarged spleen. It was common in Malta, hence its name, and is an affliction especially suffered by goats.

2
.
G.P.I: General Paralysis of the Insane. Ill though Eileen certainly is, she can still be comically ironic.

3
.
Presumably Eileen (perhaps ironically) refers to superficial damage to the paintwork of the house arising from the air-raid.

4
.
St. Michael’s Hill runs south-east to north-west, alongside the University of Bristol campus.

5
.
See Bertha Mary Wardell,
16.2.37
n. 11.

6
.
Kopp worked for much of the war in or near Marseilles as ‘a sort of engineer’ and eventually reached England. He helped Eileen make the journey north from King’s Cross to Stockton-on-Tees shortly before she died under an anaesthetic.

7
.
Norman was the older brother of John Durant. (See headnote to
3.11.36
,
and
1.1.38
, n. 8.)

8
.
hcfs = handkerchiefs. The gift had to be white, easily bought even in wartime, suitable for men and women, and ordinary to the point of being unimaginative. Clothes were not rationed until 1 June 1941, when, of the 66 coupons allowed per year for an adult, one would have been required for each handkerchief.

To Z. A. Bokhari*

17 March 1941

1
8 Dorset Chambers

Chagford Street NW 1

Dear Mr Bokhari,

I am sending you a rough synopsis of four broadcasts on literary criticism,
¹
which I discussed with you a week or two back. I think they are full enough to give you an idea of whether they are the sort of thing you want, and, if they are, I can get on with the scripts. I really don’t know whether this is the sort of thing an Indian audience is interested in, but you told me to talk on the lines along which my own interest lies, and naturally I am glad of an opportunity to do that.

Yours sincerely

George Orwell

[XII, 776, pp. 451–2; typewritten]

1
.
These were broadcast on 30 April and 7,
14, and 21 May 1941; they were published in
The Listener
on 29 May, and 5, 12, and 19 June
1941 (see XII, 792, 797, 800, and 804).

Orwell’s review of General Wavell’s biography of Field Marshal Allenby had been published in
Horizon
in December 1940 and Orwell commented in his War-time Diary, 2 January 1941 that his criticism appeared when Wavell was successful in North Africa. Janus, in ‘A Spectator’s Notebook’, 21 February, remarked it was ironical that the review appeared the day Sidi Barrani fell to the British, noting particularly Orwell’s comment that Allenby was ‘perhaps . . . the best of a bad lot . . . he remains totally uninteresting—a fact which also tells one a good deal about General Wavell.’ This was followed, in
The Spectator
of 7 March 1941, by a letter from A. C. Taylor, who had noted Janus’s remarks and drew attention to another interesting coincidence: the same issue of
Horizon
had contained Orwell’s ‘The Ruling Class’, in which Orwell dismissed the bayonet as useless except for opening tins, at a time when Italian troops ‘were surrendering in thousands the moment they saw this weapon in the hands of the charging enemy’.

To
The Spectator

21 March 1941

Sir,—The letter from Mr. A. C. Taylor raises the question of the value of bayonets, and also refers back to ‘A Spectator’s Notebook’ of the previous week. Perhaps I can answer both criticisms together. Of course I was wrong about General Wavell, and Heaven knows, I am glad to have been wrong. What I said in my review of his life of Allenby was that as General Wavell held one of the key commands in the present war, it was important for outsiders to try and gauge his intellect from the only evidence then available to them,
i.e.
, the book itself. I submit that it was a dull book, about a man who may have been an able soldier but was a dull personality. Where I was wrong was in supposing that General Wavell’s literary shortcomings reflected in any way on his skill as a commander. I apologise to him, in case this should ever meet his eyes, but I doubt whether he will have been very seriously affected by anything I have said about him.

As to bayonets, Mr. Taylor states that Italian troops ‘both in Libya and Albania, were surrendering in their hundreds and thousands the moment they saw this weapon in the hands of the charging enemy.’ I suspect that the tanks, aeroplanes, &c, may also have had something to do with the Italian surrenders. One must use common sense. A weapon which will kill a man at hundreds of yards is superior to one which will only kill him at a distance of a few feet. Otherwise why have firearms at all? It is quite true that a bayonet is terrifying, but so is a tommy gun, with the added advantage that you can kill somebody with it. Certainly a soldier with a bayonet on the end of his rifle feels aggressive, but so he does with a haversack full of hand-grenades. In the last war exactly the same propaganda stories about the ‘power of the bayonet’ were current, in the German newspapers as much as in the British. There were tales of thousands of German prisoners who had received bayonet wounds, always in the hindquarters, and countless German cartoons showed British soldiers in flight with Germans prodding them, also in the hindquarters. The psycho-analysts can no doubt tell us why this fantasy of prodding your enemy in the backside appeals so deeply to sedentary civilians. But statistics published after the war was over showed that bayonet wounds accounted for about 1 per cent of total casualties. They will account for far less in this war, in which automatic weapons have grown more important.
¹

But why, in the book Mr. Taylor refers to, did I complain about the continuation of bayonet training? Because it wastes time which ought to be spent in training for things the infantryman will actually have to do, and because a mystical belief in primitive weapons is very dangerous to a nation at war. The experience of the last hundred years shows that whereas military opinion in England often becomes realistic after a defeat, in interim periods the belief always gains ground that you can somehow disregard the power of breach-loading° weapons if your morale is good enough. The majority of British commanders before 1914 ‘did not believe in’ the machine-gun. The results can be studied in the enormous cemeteries of northern France. I am not saying that morale is not important. Of course it is. But for Heaven’s sake let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that we shall defeat the German mechanised divisions with rifles and bayonets. The campaign in Flanders ought to have shown whether that is possible.

Yours faithfully.

[XII, 778, pp. 453–4; typewritten]

1
.
Orwell was proved correct; the bayonet was relatively rarely used for the purpose for which it was designed.

Eileen* to Norah Myles*

[March 1941?]

[
no salutation
]

The semi crest means that the paper was waste before it Flowered. The same is true of my time as a government servant. There is not much paper, so to sum up:

Physical condition – much improved by air raids, possibly because I now sleep several hours a night longer than ever in my life;

Mental condition – temporarily improved by air raids which were a change, degenerating again now that air raids threaten to become monotonous;

Events since the war – daily work of inconceivable dullness; weekly efforts to leave Greenwich always frustrated; monthly visits to the cottage which is still as it was only dirtier;

Future plans – imaginings of the possibility of leaving a furnished flat (‘chambers’) that we have at Baker Street
¹
& taking an unfurnished flat north of Baker Street to remain in George’s Home Guard district, with the idea that we might both live in this flat – probably to be frustrated by continued lack of five shillings to spend & increasing scarcity of undemolished flats & perhaps by our ceasing to live anywhere. But the last is unlikely because a shorter & no less accurate summing up would be

NOTHING EVER HAPPENS TO

Pig.

Please write a letter. The difficulty is that I am too profoundly depressed
²
to write a letter. I have many times half thought I could come to Bristol but it is literally years since a weekend belonged to me & George would have a haemorrhage. I suppose London is not a place to come to really but if you do ring
NATIONAL
3318. My departmental head is almost as frightened of me as he is of taking any decision on his own & I can get Time off. Meanwhile give my love to everyone. E.
³

[
LO
, pp. 81–2;
CW,
XII, 771A, p. 443; handwritten]

1
.
Although Orwell was still spending some time at Wallington, which Eileen visited monthly, and Eileen was also sometimes at her late brother’s house at Greenwich with his widow, Gwen O’Shaughnessy* (also a G.P.), they moved from Dorset Chambers (hence ‘chambers’ in this letter) to 111 Langford Court, Abbey Road, NW8 on
1 April 1941. This block is north of Baker Street. The date of this letter is not known but in Orwell’s War-time Diary for 3 March 1941 he writes that he went with Gwen to see an air-raid shelter in the crypt under Greenwich church. Orwell records in his War-time Diary for 29 May 1940 that Eileen was working in the Censorship Department in Whitehall (hence the
NATIONAL
exchange for the telephone number and work of ‘inconceivable dullness’). She later worked for the Ministry of Food where her environment was much friendlier, one of those also employed there becoming a good friend, Lettice Cooper*.

2
.
There were many reasons why Eileen should have felt depressed – the unsettled nature of where she should live, shortage of money, the war and the bombing, her own ill-health, but especially the serious effect upon her of the death of her brother Laurence during the retreat to Dunkirk. She never fully recovered from his loss.

3
.
E: This is the only occasion in her six letters to Norah that Eileen indicates her name.

To the Reverend Iorwerth Jones*

8 April 1941

111 Langford Court

Abbey Road

London NW 8

Dear Mr Jones,

Many thanks for your letter. Perhaps in one or two cases I expressed myself rather ambiguously [in
The Lion and the Unicorn
] and can make things clearer by answering some of your queries.

1. ‘The U.S.A. will need a year to mobilise its resources even if Big Business can be brought to heel.’ You comment that it is the strikers who are holding up production. That is so, of course, but I was trying to look deeper than the immediate obstruction. The sort of effort that a nation at war now needs can only be made if
both labour and capital
are conscripted. Ultimately what is needed is that labour should be as much under discipline as the armed forces. This condition practically obtains in the
USSR
and the totalitarian countries. But it is only practicable if
all
classes are disciplined alike, otherwise there is constant resentment and social friction, showing itself in strikes and sabotage. In the long run I think the hardest people to bring to heel will be the business men, who have most to lose by the passing of the present system and in some cases are consciously pro-Hitler. Beyond a certain point they will struggle against the loss of their economic freedom, and as long as they do so the causes for labour unrest will exist.

2. War aims. Of course I am in favour of declaring our war aims, though there is a danger in proclaiming any very detailed scheme for post-war reconstruction, in that Hitler, who is not troubled by any intention of keeping his promises, will make a higher bid as soon as our war-aims are declared. All I protested against in the book was the idea that propaganda
without
a display of military strength can achieve anything. Acland’s book
Unser Kampf
, which I referred to, seemed to assume that if we told the Germans we wanted a just peace they would stop fighting. The same idea is being put about, though in this case not in good faith, by the People’s Convention
¹
crowd (Pritt
²
and Co.)

3. A pro-Fascist rebellion in India. I wasn’t thinking of a rebellion primarily by Indians, I was thinking of the British community in India. A British general attempting a Fascist
coup d’état
would probably use India as his jumping-off place, as Franco used Morocco. Of course it isn’t a likelihood at this stage of the war, but one has got to think of the future. If an attempt to impose open naked Fascism upon Britain is ever made, I think coloured troops are almost certain to be used.