George Orwell: A Life in Letters (46 page)

Yours

George

P.S. Before being able to send this off, ie. before getting hold of some envelopes which aren’t too plentiful here, I got your letter of March 6th and 2
Tribunes
, 2nd and 9th March. It was nice to see
Tribune
again, and it seems so fat and heavy compared with French papers.

[XVII,
2634, pp. 88–90; typewritten]

1
.
Very many war correspondents were based at the appropriately named Hotel Scribe in Paris.

2
.
Louis Levy was editor of
Libertés
.

3
.
Stefan Schimanski (d. 1950), journalist and editor (for example, of the annual
Transformation
, with Henry Treece, 1943–47). He and Treece edited
Leaves in the Storm: A Book of Diaries
(published by Lindsay Drummond, 1947). Orwell’s diaries were not included. Schimanski was killed when the plane in which he was travelling on an assignment to Korea for
Picture Post
to cover that war, exploded. (See Tom Hopkinson,
Of This Our Time
(1982), pp. 278–81.)

4
.
It was reported in the
Manchester Evening News,
8 February 1945, that a pay award of £4 per week was made by the official Resettlement Committee to a soldier who had served for five years and was returning to a civilian job – the employer had offered £1 15s. Thus the knitted suit was the equivalent in cost to three weeks of his pay.

To Roger Senhouse*

17 March
1945

Room 329

Hotel Scribe

Rue Scribe

Paris 9e

Dear Roger,

Thanks so much for your letter, and for sending the copy of
Homage to Catalonia.
I didn’t after all give it to André Malraux, who is not in Paris, but to, of all people, Jose Rovira, who was the commander of my division in Spain and whom I met at a friend’s house here.

I don’t know whether
Animal Farm
has definitely gone to press. If it has not actually been printed yet, there is one further alteration of one word that I would like to make. In Chapter VIII (I think it is VIII), when the windmill is blown up, I wrote ‘all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on their faces.’ I would like to alter it to ‘all the animals except Napoleon.’ If the book has been printed it’s not worth bothering about, but I just thought the alteration would be fair to J[oseph] S[talin], as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance.
¹

I hope Fred [Warburg]* will have a good long rest. I know how long it takes to get one’s strength back. I am trying to arrange to go to Cologne for a few days, but there keep being delays. I shall be back in England at the end of April.

Yours

George

[XVII, 2635, p. 90; typewritten]

1
.
This change was made. The source of the correction is almost certainly Orwell’s meeting in Paris with Joseph Czapski, a survivor of Starobielsk, and of the series of massacres of Polish prisoners carried out by the Russians and associated especially with that at Katyn. (See Orwell’s letter to Arthur Koestler,
5.3.46
.)

Eileen Blair* to her husband

Wednesday 21 March 1945

Greystone
¹

Carlton

Dearest your letter came this morning—the one written on the 7th after you got my first one. I was rather worried because there had been an interval of nearly a fortnight, but this one took 14 days whereas the last one came in 10 so probably that explains it. Or one may have gone astray.

I am typing in the garden. Isn’t that wonderful? I’ve only got a rug for myself and typewriter and the wind keeps blowing the paper down over the machine which is not so good for the typing but very good for me. The wind is quite cold but the sun is hot. Richard is sitting up in his pram talking to a doll. He has the top half of a pram suit on but he took off the rest some time ago and has nothing between himself and the sky below his nappies. I want him to get aired before the sun gets strong so that he’ll brown nicely. That’s my idea anyway. And he is enjoying the preliminaries anyway. I bought him a high chair—the only kind I could get. It sort of breaks in half and turns up its tail like a beetle if you want it to, and then you have a low chair attached to a little table, the whole on wheels. As a high chair it has no wheels and the usual tray effect in front of the chair. He loves it dearly and stretches out his hands to it—partly I’m afraid because what normally happens in the chair is eating. When it is being a low chair Laurence
²
takes him for rides round the nursery and down the passage—indeed Laurence wheeled the whole contraption home from the station and I found it very useful myself on the way up as a luggage trolley. I came by night in the end so that George Kopp *
³
could see me off at King’s X which was very nice, but there were no porters at all at Thornaby or Stockton—and only one at Darlington but I got him. There is no real news about Richard. He is just very well. I was sorry to be away from him for a week because he always stops feeding himself when I don’t act as waiter, but today he did pick up the spoon himself from the dish and put it in his mouth—upside down of course, but he was eating rather adhesive pudding so he got his food all right. I bought him a truck too for an appalling sum of money. I had to forget the price quickly but I think it’s important he should have one.

We’re no longer in the garden now. In fact Richard is in bed and has been for some time. Blackburn
⁴
came and told me all about his other jobs and how Mr. Wilson fished and Sir John once had to go to his office on August 12th but the car went with him full of guns and sandwiches and they got to the moors by 1.30. And Blackburn’s predecessor here shot himself. I think perhaps the general shooting standard was rather lower than at Sir John’s, because this man shot a wood pigeon and tried to pull it out of the bush into which it had fallen with his gun (this might be better expressed but you can guess it). Naturally the bush pulled the trigger and there was another shot in the other barrel and the ass was actually holding the barrel to his belly, so he might as well have been an air raid casualty. This convinced me not that Richard must never have a gun but that he must have one very young so that he couldn’t forget how to handle it.

Gwen rang up Harvey Evers
⁵
and they want me to go in for this operation at once. This is all a bit difficult. It is going to cost a terrible lot of money. A bed in a kind of ward costs seven guineas a week and Harvey Evers’s operation fee is forty guineas. In London I would have to pay about five guineas a week in a hospital but Gwen says the surgeon’s fee would be higher. The absurd thing is that we are too well off for really cheap rates— you’d have to make less than £500 a year. It comes as a shock to me in a way because while you were being ill I got used to paying doctors nothing. But of course it was only because Eric
⁶
was making the arrangements. I suppose your bronchoscopy would have cost about forty guineas too— and I must say it would have been cheap at the price, but what worries me is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money. On the other hand of course this thing will take a longish time to kill me if left alone and it will be costing some money the whole time. The only thing is, I think perhaps it might be possible to sell the Harefield house
⁷
if we found out how to do it. I do hope too that I can make some money when I am well—I could of course do a job but I mean really make some money from home as it were. Anyway I don’t know what I can do except go ahead and get the thing done quickly. The idea is that I should go in next week and I gather he means to operate quickly—he thinks the indications are urgent enough to offset the disadvantages of operating on a bloodless patient; indeed he is quite clear that no treatment at all can prevent me from becoming considerably more bloodless every month. So I suppose they’ll just do a blood transfusion and operate more or less at once.

While I was in London I arranged to take Evelyn’s
⁸
manuscript in to
Tribune
. I set off with it all right, broke the journey to go to the bank and was taken with a pain just like the one I had the day before coming North, only rather worse. I tried to have a drink in Selfridges’ but couldn’t and all sorts of extraordinary things then happened but after a bit I got myself into the Ministry. I simply could not do any more travelling, so Miss Sparrow
⁹
rang up Evelyn for me and they arranged between them about the transfer of the manuscript. People from
Tribune
then rang up in the
most
friendly way, offering to come and look after me, to bring me things and to
get you home
.
I was horrified. But yesterday I had a phase of thinking that it was really outrageous to spend all your money on an operation of which I know you disapprove, so Gwen rang
Tribune
to know whether they had means of communicating with you quickly and could get your ruling. They hadn’t but suggested she should ring the
Observer
, which she did and talked to Ivor Brown*. He said you were in Cologne now he thought and that letters would reach you very slowly if at all. He suggested that they would send you a message about me by cable and wireless, like their own. Gwen says he couldn’t have been nicer. But I’m not having this done. It’s quite impossible to give you the facts in this way and the whole thing is bound to sound urgent and even critical. I have arranged with Gwen however that when the thing is over she’ll ask the
Observer
to send you a message to that effect. One very good thing is that by the time you get home I’ll be convalescent, really convalescent at last and you won’t have the hospital nightmare you would so much dislike. You’d more or less have to visit me and visiting someone in a ward really is a nightmare even to me with my fancy for hospitals—particularly if they’re badly ill as I shall be at first of course. I only wish I could have had your approval as it were, but I think it’s just hysterical. Obviously I can’t just go on having a tumour or rather several rapidly growing tumours. I
have
got an uneasy feeling that after all the job might have been more cheaply done somewhere else but if you remember Miss Kenny’s fee for a cautery, which is a small job, was fifteen guineas so she’d certainly charge at least fifty for this. Gwen’s man might have done cheaper work for old sake’s sake, but he’s so very bad at the work and apparently he would have wanted me in hospital for weeks beforehand—and I’m morally sure I’d be there for weeks afterwards. Harvey Evers has a very high reputation, and George Mason
¹⁰
thinks very well of him and says Eric did the same, and I am sure that he will finish me off as quickly as anyone in England as well as doing the job properly—so he may well come cheaper in the end. I rather wish I’d talked it over with you before you went. I knew I had a ‘growth’. But I wanted you to go away peacefully anyway, and I did
not
want to see Harvey Evers before the adoption was through in case it was cancer. I thought it just possible that the judge might make some enquiry about our health as we’re old for parenthood and anyway it would have been an uneasy sort of thing to be producing oneself as an ideal parent a fortnight after being told that one couldn’t live more than six months or something.

You may never get this letter but of course it’s urgent about the house in the country. Inez [Holden]* thinks we might do something together with her cottage near Andover. It’s quite big (6 rooms and kitchen) but it has disadvantages. The 25/– a week rent which she considers nominal I think big considering there is no sanitation whatever and only one tap, no electricity or gas, and expensive travelling to London. She and Hugh [Slater]*
(incidentally they are more or less parting company at present but they might join up again I think) hire furniture for another 25/– a week which wouldn’t be necessary if we were there, and it might be possible a) to get a long lease for a lower rent and b) to have modern conveniences installed. I am now so confident of being strong in a few months that I’m not actually frightened as I should have been of living a primitive life again (after all when you were ill soon after we were married I did clean out the whole of Wallington’s sanitation and that was worse than emptying a bucket) but it does waste a lot of time. So we can consider that. Then George Kopp* has a clever idea. Apparently people constantly advertise in the
Times
wanting to exchange a house in the country for a flat in London. Most of these, probably all, would want something grander than N.1, but we might advertise ourselves—asking for correspondingly humble country accommodation. In the next few months people who have been living in the country for the war will be wanting somewhere in London and we might do well like that. Meanwhile there is a letter from the Ardlussa factor enclosing the contractor’s estimate for repairing Barnhill
¹¹
—which is £200. I found to my distress that George was not forwarding letters to you, although I gave him the address by telephone the day I got it, because he had not heard from you. I opened one from the Borough and found it was to say that the electricity supply would be cut off as soon as the man could get in to do it. I paid that bill and decided I’d better look at the rest of the mail. There was nothing else quite so urgent except perhaps a letter from the
BBC
Schools about your two broadcasts for them. They want the scripts as soon as possible! There’s also a contract. I didn’t send anything on at once because I thought you might be moving and in view of Ivor Brown’s news of you I’m not sending them now, but I’ve written to say that you are abroad but expected home next month. The broadcasts aren’t till June after all. If you don’t come next month I’ll have to think again, but there may be a firmer address to write to. I can do nothing with this except send it to the Hotel Scribe and hope they’ll forward it. To get back to Barnhill. I’m going to write to the factor to say that you’re away and I’m ill and will he wait till you get back. He’s very apologetic about having kept us waiting and I’m sure they won’t let the house to anyone else. I think this £200 can be very much reduced, but the house is quite grand—5 bedrooms, bathroom, W.C., H & C and all, large sitting room, kitchen, various pantries, dairies etc. and a whole village of ‘buildings’—in fact just what we want to live in twelve months of the year. But we needn’t have all this papered and painted. I put my hopes on Mrs. Fletcher.
¹²
The only thing that bothers me is that if it’s thought worth while to spend £2
00 on repairs the kind of rent they have in mind must be much higher than our £25–£30, let alone David’s £5. Incidentally I had a letter from David [Astor]* who just missed you in Paris.