White Man’s Burden
The life of the Anglo-Indian official is not all jam. In comfortless camps, in sweltering offices, in gloomy dak bungalows smelling of earth-oil, they earn, perhaps, the right to be a little disagreeable. – Burmese Days
Eric returned from Eton not to Henley but to the seaside town of Southwold, eighty miles out of Liverpool Street on the north Suffolk coast. It was here that Richard and Ida Blair – he now in his mid-sixties, she nearing fifty – had decided to retire. Southwold was, and is, a rather remote locale, although in those days possessing its own rail link to the Suffolk county town of Ipswich, but there were good reasons why the Blairs should think it a congenial spot in which to pass their declining years. The town was a well-known haunt of Anglo-Indians that offered, at any rate in its upper reaches, a genteel seclusion not easily come by in the Home Counties. They may even have chosen it – the initial recommendation came from the parents of one of Mrs Blair’s Notting Hill neighbours – with their son’s immediate interests in mind. Amongst other attractions – pier, sailors’ reading room, gentleman’s club – Southwold contained a ‘crammer’. To gain entry into the Indian Imperial Police Orwell would have to pass an entrance exam whose subjects included not merely the public school staples of Latin and Greek but Mathematics and Freehand Drawing. ‘Craighurst’, run by a former Dulwich College master named Philip Hope, lay on a chilly corner of the front overlooking the beach huts and the grey North Sea, a short step from the Blairs’ house in Stradbroke Road, which runs south from St James’s Green, near the town’s epicentre of High Street, church and brewery. Here, in January 1922, with the north wind rattling the windows, Eric began his new routine.
Not much is known about his life in the ten months he spent in Southwold prior to his departure for Burma. One of his enduring early friendships, with Dennis Collings, the son of a local doctor, dates from this period, although Collings, at sixteen, was a couple of years younger: their real intimacy came some years later. Eric’s Eton contemporaries were dispersing, to Oxford, Cambridge and jobs in the City. Faced with this parade of lustre and éclat – Connolly, for instance, with his Balliol scholarship – it is tempting to write Orwell off as a deracinated figure, permanently exiled to an Imperial backwater. But the Indian Imperial Police was a highly respectable, if not particularly glamorous, profession for a young man – especially one with Eric’s colonial connections. The Buddicoms, too, whatever their initial agitation about Eric ‘having his chance’, accepted it as a thoroughly reasonable choice of career. A hundred and forty miles distant, and separated by London, Eric saw less of the Buddicoms during the remainder of his time in England. A sentence from a letter he wrote to Prosper around this time passed into family history: ‘Millions of people at this crammer shoot – at least three of them.’ But he stayed at Quarry House again in April, where Jacintha – now a grown-up young lady of twenty – remembered him flailing at Prosper’s punchbag and learning to ride his friend’s motorbike. ‘I don’t mind so much about starting it,’ she recalled him complaining, ‘I want to know how to stop the damn thing.’
The minimum age for entry into the India Police was nineteen. Eric would reach this on 25 June. A testimonial was solicited from the long-suffering Crace, who – showing perhaps how few Etonians proceeded to this part of the Empire – declared himself ignorant of the procedure. ‘I do not know at all what is required for candidates for the India Police,’ he replied to the India Office authorities. ‘I send a formal certificate which is perhaps all that is necessary …’ The exam, lasting a week, began two days after Eric’s birthday. Even to an Eton slacker, the intellectual level needed was not high. The English paper, for instance, required the candidate to write a letter to a relation describing a visit to the theatre. The History paper invited him to speculate on the identity of the greatest prime minister since Pitt. Eric’s strength lay in the classical training he had so disliked at Eton. His best mark was in Latin (1,782 out of a possible 2,000) declining to 174 out of 400 in Freehand Drawing. With a pass mark set at 6,000 out of a possible 12,400 he came seventh out of the twenty-six candidates who exceeded it. In a riding test, taken early in the autumn, for which he had prepared himself with lessons at a local stables, he did less well – twenty-first out of the successful twenty-three. But he was through. Asked to state his preferred choice of posting he placed Burma first, ahead of the United Provinces, on the grounds that he had relatives in the former (notably his grandmother, still living in Moulmein) and that his father had served in the latter. Burma was not a fashionable posting, if the India Police could be said to possess such things, but the choice makes plain Eric’s immersion in his own background, and the sheer ordinariness of the destiny he had planned out – or had had planned out – for himself. He was going to be an Imperial servant in a place familiar to him from family legend, where his mother had spent much of her childhood, near to the Indian postings of his father’s entire professional career, and where he would possess a swathe of family connections. Exile it was not.
Now, there were three months to while away before he left. An odd episode brought his stay at Craighurst to an abrupt end, when he and a fellow pupil, remembered as ‘a wild young man’ who had previously been expelled from Malvern, fell foul of the Southwold borough surveyor Mr Hurst. Discovering the date of Hurst’s birthday, they sent him a dead rat together with a signed greeting. A fuss having been made, Eric and his accomplice were expelled: a futile punishment in Eric’s case as he had already sat the police exam. The only real witness to the summer of 1922, once again, is Jacintha. She was ‘sure’ that he joined the family at the Eton – Harrow match in the second week of July, and that he went on holiday with them again to Shropshire. She recalled eavesdropping on a three-way conversation between Orwell, Prosper and one of Prosper’s Harrow friends in which they discussed the ghost stories of Orwell’s ‘great hero’ M.R. James. On what terms did Eric and Jacintha part? Nearly thirty years later Orwell wrote her a letter in which he cheerily accused her of ‘abandoning’ him to Burma. The fact that Jacintha – ominously precise in most of her recollections – could not remember their last meeting suggests that neither she nor Eric was deeply moved. Jacintha was twenty-one and marriageable. Eric was nineteen and about to begin a career on the other side of the world. Each would have known that their relationship, such as it was, was destined to founder.
Two of the other recruits had opted and been accepted for the Burma Police. One, C.W.R. Beadon, had left in early October. The other, H.J. Jones, followed with Orwell from Liverpool on 27 October. The month-long, 8,000-mile journey via the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean left an indelible impression on Orwell’s mind. In an ‘As I Please’ column from 1947, when England languished in conditions of post-war austerity, he wrote of the luxurious environment which the SS Herefordshire offered to its first-class passengers. When not asleep or playing deck games the two recruits seemed always to be eating. The meals were ‘of that stupendous kind that steamship companies used to vie with one another in providing’. Ceylon, where the ship docked along the way, furnished a breathtaking gateway to the East. (Flory in Burmese Days remembers sailing into Colombo ‘through green glassy water, where turtles and black snakes floated basking’.) The trip brought two symbolic incidents of the kind that litter Orwell’s writings. The first took place during the voyage when Orwell noticed the SS Herefordshire’s European quartermaster, a bronzed figure for whom he had conceived an intense admiration, scurrying out of the cookhouse carrying a pie dish containing half a baked custard pudding. The spectacle of a man he admired furtively absconding with pilfered food while the first-class passengers gorged themselves a few yards away, Orwell believed, ‘taught me more than I could have learned from half-a-dozen Socialist pamphlets’. The second happened at Colombo harbour when a mob of coolies swarmed on board to deal with the luggage of those passengers who were disembarking. One, having mishandled a tin trunk, was viciously kicked on the backside by a white police sergeant, to the evident approval of the onlookers. As parables of, on the one hand, social division and, on the other, racial superiority, these are almost too neatly realised. There is no doubt that Orwell witnessed them – if nothing else, there is the sheer detail of the baked custard pudding – but at the same time you wonder if he saw them in quite the same way that they are put down on the page: the necessity to him of symbolism of this kind, and the lengths to which he would go to make symbolism work for him, are a feature of his writing.
From Colombo the ship ploughed on towards the mouth of the Irrawaddy, past the myriad factory chimneys and the tops of the riverside pagodas, to Rangoon. Here after a round of calls to, among others, His Excellency the Governor, Sir Harcourt Brace, and the Inspector-General of Police, Colonel Macdonald, he and Jones boarded the mail train on the afternoon of 28 November and made the sixteen-hour journey to Mandalay, site of the police training school. Beadon, who had arrived earlier in the month, was among the officers gathered to greet this ‘sallow-faced, tall, thin and gangling’ boy whose clothes ‘no matter how well cut, seemed to hang on him …’
Where had he come? And what lay in store? The Burma of the early 1920s was a recent annexation to the British Empire. Modern Burmese history had begun barely four decades before when on the intervention of the Secretary of State, Lord Randolph Churchill, a British Expeditionary Force led by General Sir Harry Prendergast had entered Mandalay and ordered the Burmese King Thibaw’s immediate and unconditional surrender. There was some faint precedent for this invasion. Britain had fought two previous wars against the Burmese, in 1824–6 and 1852–3, but until the late nineteenth century Upper Burma at least had retained its territorial integrity. Though the country’s internal troubles had been used as a justification, the real reasons for the Churchill fiat were commercial. Keen on the idea of cheap rice, oil and timber, businessmen in London and Calcutta had been pressing for government action since the 1860s. When it came, it did so with a vengeance. Rather than imposing direct rule, or governing by way of a protectorate – the usual means by which the Empire administered newly acquired territory – the British simply wiped out Burma’s existing institutions on the spot. The monarchy (Thibaw spent the remaining thirty years of his life in exile on the Indian coast); nobility; army; royal agencies – all these went down practically overnight before the advancing colonial tide. British and Indian troops poured over the frontier – the Burmese garrison was 40,000 strong in the early years of the twentieth century – closely followed by railway contractors and Calcutta timber merchants. By 1913 the Burmah Oil Company was extracting 200 million gallons annually, three-quarters of the country’s total output, while a handful of British firms accounted for the same percentage of teak production.
All this – the razed forests, the oil prospecting and the rice cartels – bred deep resentments. These were exacerbated by Burma’s exclusion from the general pattern of Imperial political development. The 1918 Montagu-Chelmsford report had recommended constitutional reforms in India, of which Burma had technically been a part since 1886: mysteriously, the proposals turned out to apply to India alone. Widespread unrest, fomented by the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, originally founded as a mildly pro-British social club but since metamorphosed into a hotbed of sedition, eventually produced a compromise: Burma was allowed a legislative council, three-quarters of whose members would be elected on a limited property franchise extending to about a quarter of the province’s adult male population. This made it very different from India, a centuries-old part of the Empire with carefully nurtured administrative structures and a native autocracy. Burma, which only thirty years before had possessed its own king and its own army, was effectively under martial law. Orwell arrived there at a time when serious political disturbance had only recently come to an end and the rising crime wave that had replaced it was thought to have a political basis. An official report from the 1920s, for example, noted that while village assemblies were beginning to lose their bitter anti-government tone, a contempt for authority ‘inspired by political agitation’ lay beneath the upsurge in theft and robbery. Burmese crime statistics, minutely documented by the colonial administration, give some idea of the task facing its 13,000-strong police force: 47,000 reported incidents in 1923–4, over 800 murders in the year following, a 25 per cent increase in reported crime in the year after that, ‘including several instances of horrible savagery’. The prison population hovered at 16,000. There were around seventy hangings a year.
None of this, though, quite conveys the sheer strangeness of Burma to the average European incomer. Substantial parts of it existed beyond the civilising Imperial net: the Wa hills, near the Chinese border in the north, were still unpacified in the 1930s. Wildernesses of scrub and jungle surrounded the major population centres. Here, quite literally, danger lurked. Throughout Orwell’s time in Burma the annual mortality statistics from attacks by wild animals ran into three figures. Then, at any rate to the Western eye, there was the deeply unpromising climate – scorching heat from February to May, a long monsoon reaching into September, followed by a short winter when, as Burmese Days puts it, ‘Upper Burma seemed haunted by the ghost of England’. All this made a vivid impression on visiting Englishmen and women, whose reactions varied from fascination with a hitherto unknown landscape and culture to queasiness over the primitive nature of the customs on display. An Englishwoman on a jungle tour in the 1930s was horrified by the spectacle of a girl in childbirth attended by two old women whose notion of midwifery was to put a plank on her stomach and jump on it in the hope of forcing the baby out. This gave the experience of living in Burma a queer, lop-sided feel. On the one hand it was a land of strict hierarchies and protocols – Mrs Lackersteen in Burmese Days pores over the Civil List like a duchess reading Debrett – governed by the most elemental urgings of Imperial theatre: the big event of 1922, for instance, had been the visit of the Prince of Wales. Yet behind the surface pomp lay dirt, deprivation, squalor and an infant mortality rate approaching 20 per cent. There was a tendency for European visitors to overstate the backwardness of early twentieth-century Burma, and modern Burmese historians are keen to stress the various ways in which even the pre-British state was trying to adapt itself to the modern age. All the same, from the point of view of the British administrator, the rare amenities of Burmese life tended to be imports from the West.
The countless testimonies of old Burma hands show something of the odd effect that the country had on the specimen English sensibility. On the most basic, visual level Orwell was both appalled and fascinated by the world he saw around him. He later claimed to have written Burmese Days simply to get the landscape out of his system: ‘In all novels about the East the scenery is the real subject matter.’ Whatever he may subsequently have thought about the colonial administrators he was, with a few dramatic exceptions, charmed by the native population. Reviewing C.V. Warren’s Burmese Interlude, many years later, he noted that like every European whose experience was not confined to the big towns the author had conceived a deep affection for the Burmese. This sympathy, he thought, was partly the result of the prevailing social conditions. Census records of the time show the presence of 200,000 ‘foreigners’, but most of these were Indians and Chinese. The percentage of Europeans was relatively small; that of European women even smaller. In between these two sectors lay an indeterminate class of ‘Eurasians’ of the kind whose appearance at the church service in Burmese Days so horrifies Elizabeth Lackersteen (‘Couldn’t something be done about them?’ etc.), mostly the product of relationships between European men and their Burmese mistresses, tolerated by native Burmans but roundly despised by the ruling class. The comparative isolation of the colonial élite again produced a situation very different to India, forcing Englishmen to associate much more closely with ‘native’ subordinates.
Orwell would have been made welcome in Burma, and not only by his fellow-recruits. The Burma Police had an excellent reputation among the European community: ‘a very good lot’, according to one colonial civil servant of the time. Their camaraderie may have helped to compensate for the disadvantages of Mandalay, remembered by Flory as ‘rather a disagreeable town’, dusty and hot and remarkable for five main products beginning with the letter ‘p’ – pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes. Like many Burmese towns of the post-Occupation period it was effectively split in two: the British fort, a mile square, with a sprawling native quarter behind. The police school was largely given over to the training of native sub-inspectors; the much smaller contingent of British assistant superintendents (ASPs) formed a discrete unit, set to take courses in Burmese, Hindustani, Law and police procedure. Orwell’s new home possessed, by all acounts, a rather rackety atmosphere. Young men recently arrived from England often found the place too much for them – one room was kept permanently empty on the grounds that its final occupant had committed suicide – and recruits were encouraged to keep their spirits up. However excellent the force’s reputation, it did not extend to sobriety. Ominously, the ramshackle collection of inebriates that populated the service’s upper levels in the 1920s were all protégés of a hard-drinking ex-training-school colonel who expected his trainees to follow his example. The preliminary training course took six months. Orwell’s proficiency in languages was remarked – by its close he was apparently capable of ‘high-flown’ conversations with the Burmese priests – but he was not thought to be clubbable. ‘Rather shy, retiring,’ remembered Roger Beadon, who was slightly surprised to find an Old Etonian here in the dust of Mandalay. Yet the ‘rather lugubrious’ figure was still capable of amusing himself. There were excursions by motorbike, for which Orwell produced an extraordinary low-slung American machine. On another occasion Orwell asked Beadon if he wanted to come on a tiger shoot. Armed with Beadon’s Luger and a shotgun borrowed from the school’s principal they drove hopefully along the jungle tracks in a bullock cart – the customary means of transport in Burma – but without finding anything. At some point, too, Orwell made the acquaintance of the famous Captain H.F. Robinson, an Indian army officer seconded to the Burma police and cashiered after a scandal involving his native mistress, whose exploits after he was dismissed from the service included converting to Buddhism, trying to start a gold-mine and surviving an attempt at suicide.
Orwell left no formal account of his four and three-quarter years in Burma. All that remain are the official records of his postings and the reminiscences of a handful of people who came across him at the time: generally unrevealing (while stressing his apparent detachment) and giving no clue as to what was going on in his mind. Early on in his stay he wrote three letters to Jacintha Buddicom. None of them survives, but Jacintha remembered the first as a lament along the lines of ‘You could never understand how awful it is if you hadn’t been here’. She replied asking why, if it were so bad, he didn’t come home. Two more letters in a similar vein followed, after which Jacintha stopped answering. Orwell was due to complete his police exams early in 1924. Before this, at the end of the preceding November, he was posted to Maymyo for a month’s service with a British regiment, the South Suffolks. According to the passage in The Road to Wigan Pier where this experience is used as a litmus test of Orwell’s class consciousness, he admired these ‘hefty, cheery youths’ five years older than himself with the medals of the Great War on their chests while remaining faintly repelled by the vision of sweaty working-class manhood that they conjured up. But he was entranced by the locale.
Maymyo was Burma’s principal hill station, on the edge of the Shan peninsula, to which the Rangoon government repaired in hot weather. The journey involved a train ride through mountains so precipitous that two engines were needed, one to pull and another to push. Many years later the startling contrast with Mandalay (‘the scorching sunlight, the dusty palms, the smells of fish and spice and garlic, the squashy tropical fruit, the swarming dark-faced human beings’) was still fresh in Orwell’s memory. Tumbling out of the train, mentally prepared for the atmosphere of the Eastern city they had left behind, visitors to Maymyo suddenly found themselves breathing air ‘that might be that of England’ in a landscape of green grass, bracken and fir trees, complete with hill women selling baskets of strawberries. The vividness of these impressions – not written down until a decade after he left Burma – are a mark of the way in which the place preyed on his mind. Burmese Days is full of striking juxtapositions of this kind, in which the familiar and the bizarre come scrambled together: blistering white heat and the thudding of the bullock carts giving way to dusty clubrooms lined with mildewed English novels and month-old copies of Punch. Maymyo even had a golf club, to which Orwell was invited by Beadon and his father. Orwell would have been familiar with the ambience – much of his boyhood holidays, after all, had been spent at the Henley club where his father officiated – but, as Beadon noted, ‘he didn’t mix very well’.
From Mandalay, where he returned shortly before Christmas 1923, he was sent to his first posting proper: Myaungma, a frontier outpost of the Raj in the Irrawaddy delta. It was not a good first job, according to the standards of the Burma Police, with onerous duties: as headquarters assistant to the District Superintendent, the twenty-year-old Orwell was responsible for a police station with a strength of thirty to fifty men, made more exacting by the remote location. Twante, his next destination, was little better: a far-flung town in the Hathaway district, a thirty-six-hour steamer trip from Rangoon. Again the degree of responsibility ran far ahead of Orwell’s experience. As Sub-Divisional Officer, with a remit to oversee the workings of the police station while touring the local villages to gather intelligence, he was effectively in charge of the security of nearly 200,000 people. Worse, perhaps, was the scarcity of Europeans. Much of his time was spent on his own – in a memoir written by a contemporary in nearby Bassein he figures merely as ‘the police officer at Twante’ – making solitary excursions from one village headman to another. A district superintendent who met him once or twice at official conferences remembered a tall, good-looking young man, pleasant to talk to and easy of manner, in no way distinct from any of his colleagues.
Things improved at the end of 1924, when, with his two-year probationary period at a close, and newly promoted to Assistant District Superintendent (the salary was £65 a month, most of which could be saved), he was posted to Syriam. The Syriam force’s chief task was to ensure the safety of the local Burmah Oil Company refinery. The advantage of belonging to it lay in the town’s proximity to Rangoon, the Burmese capital and the only population centre for hundreds of miles capable of offering Western-style amenities. Cut in two by the railway line, up-market residential districts in one direction and the native city in the other, Rangoon offered a clutch of diversions, ranging from the exclusive Gymkhana Club to the Burra Bazaar, drenched in the smell of fruit and spices sold from the cave-like rooms huddled within its vast interior, the official Government House receptions and Smart and Mookerdum’s bookshop, which sold the latest titles sent out from England. Burmese Days, where Flory remembers ‘the joy of those Rangoon trips … the dinner at Anderson’s, with beefsteak and butter that had travelled eight thousand miles on ice, the glorious drinking bout …’, hints at Orwell’s relish of the hours he spent there. For the first time in his stay he could enjoy a proper social life, amongst a circle that included Leo Robertson, an Old Etonian businessman in his early thirties who had ‘gone native’ and married a Burmese woman, and Alfred White, an under-secretary in the government administration who had come across him at Twante. It was at Robertson’s house that he was briefly reunited with Christopher Hollis, on his way back to England after a round-the-world tour with the Oxford Union debating team. One might expect Orwell to have been reasonably forthcoming with someone he had known at school and with whom he had friends and experiences in common. On the contrary, three years out of Eton he struck Hollis merely as a diligent and conventionally minded servant of the Raj. Rangoon, too, provided the setting for an odd episode that foreshadows both a key scene in his first novel and a submerged side to his personality.
Maung Htn Aung, then a student, subsequently one of the first native Burmans to take an interest in Orwell’s work, was waiting on the platform at the Pagoda Road railway station when he noticed a tall young Englishman descending the stairs with the aim of taking a train to the Mission Road station, near the site of the Gymkhana Club. Surrounded and jostled by a throng of schoolboys – a time-honoured act of minor civil disobedience – Orwell lost his temper and hit out at the boys’ backs with the cane he carried before being pursued on to the train by a mob of undergraduates from the city’s university, where the argument continued in a compartment. Suitably recast, the station incident turned up ten years later in Burmese Days, where the timber merchant Ellis strikes a boy he imagines is mocking him. Mistreated by a quack doctor, the boy loses his sight, thereby sparking a full-scale assault on the Kyauktada club. It is a revealing episode that illustrates both the tension that underlay daily life even in so civilised a milieu as up-town Rangoon and also the violent streak that periodically bobs up in defiance of Orwell’s customarily easygoing manner. Above all, perhaps, it shows how few qualms Orwell had in resorting to the traditional stances of pukka-sahibdom when he thought the situation demanded it. His outward appropriateness to the role he had chosen for himself at this point in his life was noted by less transient observers than Hollis. During his time at Syriam he spent several days with another officer named De Vine billeted on one of the BOC refinery chemists. Installed on the veranda one night, pyjama-clad, after an evening of boozy singsongs, Orwell complained about the lack of good modern comic songs. The chemist decided, quite reasonably on the evidence, that his guest was a ‘typical public school boy’ who betrayed no literary interests. Even the mention of Aldous Huxley’s name brought no real response. All Orwell would say was that Huxley had taught at Eton during his time there and was nearly blind.
It would be easy – a bit too easy, perhaps – to characterise the Orwell who wandered through 1920s Burma as the darkest of dark horses, an intellectual fifth columnist endlessly concealing his real intentions from the people around him. And yet it is perfectly possible that there was nothing very much to conceal, that the man who lounged on bungalow verandas singing bawdy songs into the small hours of the morning was merely being true to his nature. Orwell later claimed that he spent his early twenties consciously trying not to be a writer. His manifest keenness on the off-duty routines of the Burma Police may have been a part of this attempt. Yet the testimony of his Burma colleagues suggests that, along with the conventional outlook, they detected something out of the ordinary, were left, in the last resort, with the impression that there were sides to Orwell’s character that were carefully kept under wraps. In September 1925 he was transferred to Insein, again within striking distance of Rangoon, where Roger Beadon visited him at his house. Beadon, who tried to keep his own quarters in some kind of order, was shocked by the prevailing chaos. Goats, geese, ducks and other livestock roamed through the downstairs rooms. Further evidence of eccentricity came in Orwell’s habit of attending the local churches of the Burmese Karen tribe, many of whom had been converted to Christianity by American missionaries: not, he explained, because he was religious, but because talking to the priest was more interesting than the conversation on offer at the English club.
Insein was the home of the second-largest jail in Burma. From here, in April 1926, Orwell moved on to Moulmein, again as Assistant Superintendent. Moulmein would have been a more congenial spot than some of his earlier postings. Unlike the frontier backwaters it was a decent-sized town with a substantial European population. It also contained two of his Limouzin relatives: his grandmother, known for her ‘eccentric’ (that is, native) dress sense, and his Aunt Nora, married to Henry Branson Ward, Deputy Conservator of the Forestry Department. Orwell may or may not have attended his grandmother’s celebrated bi-weekly ‘at homes’, but he certainly accompanied her to social events. An older colleague remembered meeting him at a sporting competition with two older ladies, one of whom asked his advice about ‘Eric’s’ prospects. It would be very unlikely for this lady not to have been Mrs Limouzin. There are other fragmentary glimpses of Orwell’s time in Moulmein. Maung Htn Aung, who toured the area some years later in search of eyewitness acounts, uncovered memories of a ‘skilful centre-forward’ who scored many goals for the Moulmein police team (Orwell refers in ‘Shooting an Elephant’ to playing football against nimble and not always over-scrupulous Burmans). A half-Burman woman, May Hearsey, married unusually for the time to an English police inspector, came across him at this period when her husband, who was looking for a job, turned up at nearby Martabar. They were met by ‘a tall, gaunt, young man dressed in khaki shorts and shirt and holding a police helmet in his hand’. In his capacity as the station’s second-in-command, Orwell gave Hearsey a job as a detective, and proved unexpectedly sympathetic when the new recruit worried about his unsuitability for the post, eventually helping him to get a transfer to the river police.
Finally, shortly before Christmas 1926 Orwell was transferred to Katha, to the west of Mandalay, set amidst the luxuriant landscape and vegetation which provided the backdrop to Burmese Days. ‘Kyauktada’ is characterised as a ‘fairly typical’ Upper Burman town, unchanged between the time of Marco Polo and 1910, when it offered a convenient spot for a railway terminus and a district headquarters, with an administrative network of lawcourts, hospital, school and jail burgeoning in its wake. Beyond the town the Irrawaddy ‘flowed huge and ochreous, glittering like diamonds in the patches that caught the sun; and beyond the river stretched great wastes of paddy fields, ending up in a range of blackish hills’. The European population was small: Flory in Burmese Days has exactly six white compatriots. To identify them with the collection of boozers, club-loungers and Imperial time-servers depicted in the novel is a logical step, but it ignores the fact that we know nothing of Orwell’s time in Katha other than that he caught dengue fever, a debilitating illness caused by a virus transmitted by mosquito, applied for leave on a medical certificate (he would have been entitled to leave in any case come November, having completed five years in the service) and was granted six months’ absence by the India Office Service and General Department beginning on 1 July 1927. He had just turned twenty-four.
At an age when most of the members of the Edwardian-born literary generation were setting out on their professional careers, having enjoyed three not very productive years at university (Connolly idled, Waugh and Powell both took thirds) he was emerging from half a decade’s punishing hard work on the margins – sometimes beyond the margins – of the civilised world. Asking what Orwell was ‘like’ in his early twenties, in the sense that it can be asked of writers such as Waugh and Powell, is a fruitless endeavour. Nobody knows. To take an obvious comparison – and the two men appreciated each other’s work and met later in life – Evelyn Waugh’s career as an undergraduate, failed schoolmaster and young man-about-town was monitored by half a dozen sharp-eyed young contemporaries, each with sufficient social and intellectual nous to make something of what they saw. Orwell’s observers were a handful of colleagues, none of whom showed any special interest in him because no special interest seemed warranted by either his personality or his behaviour. George Stuart, for example, who seems to have known him towards the end of his time in Burma, possibly in the Moulmein days, recalled an easygoing young man, keen on his job – to which he brought distinctive linguistic skills – who enjoyed parties and was fond of animals. Much of this rings true, especially the aptitude for languages and the love of animals, as does the memory of Orwell’s untidiness: Mrs Stuart was apparently commissioned to keep his clothes in repair. Here and there, though, come hints of the way in which he spent his free time and the things that occupied his mind. Unusually for a Burma police officer – and unlike his grandmother, whom he once disparaged for spending forty years in Burma without troubling to learn the language – he took a serious interest in Burmese culture. The rapturous accounts of the native entertainment to which Flory escorts Elizabeth Lackersteen in Burmese Days are clearly based on first-hand observation. This interest extended to native folklore and custom: discussing the possibility of legally changing his name to ‘George Orwell’ with a friend in the early 1940s, he once remarked, half seriously, that if he did this he would have to take another name to write with as the Burmese practice was that a man had one name which he used and another known only to his priest. He was keen, too, on Burmese cinema, able to reminisce, accurately, about the craze for local versions of American cowboy films that hit the country in the mid-1920s when the Rangoon screens were suddenly full of native actors wearing five-gallon hats and buckskins.
Yet, inevitably, the strongest twitch on the thread came from home. The Rangoon Gazette, standard reading for expatriates, printed a steady stream of material calculated to appeal to homesick Imperial servants. As in his teens, the popular songs of the period stuck in Orwell’s head: 1923’s big smash ‘Yes, we have no bananas’; ‘It ain’t gonna rain no more’, the hit of the following year; and ‘Show me the way to go home’. The first two of these, he later wrote, ‘went round the world like an influenza epidemic, and were sung even by primitive tribes in the remotest parts of Asia and South America’. They were sung in upper Burma: Flory hears the gramophone in the club at Kyauktada playing ‘Show me the way to go home’ as Elizabeth and his arch-rival Lieutenant Verrall dance together under the fans. And always, too, there were books: a reliable way of assuaging loneliness, a glimpse into a world beyond the jungle and the dirt-track roads. Flory, who reads rapaciously, has ‘learned to live in books when life was tiresome’. Orwell’s reading material took in both the doughtier late-Victorian iconoclasm he had enjoyed in his teens – he mentions a volume of Samuel Butler’s Notebooks, mildewed by years of Burma damp – and stock middlebrow bestsellers (he was affected ‘almost to tears’ by Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, the publishing sensation of 1924) but at the same time he was expanding his idea of what fiction could do. In Burma he came across Lawrence’s ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’. Reading the former, as the servant of an Imperial power in a country more or less under military rule, Orwell was struck not only by Lawrence’s horror of military discipline but also by his understanding of its nature. Something told Orwell that Lawrence had never been a soldier, but somehow he was able to project himself into the atmosphere of army life, the German army at that.
It would be easy enough, on the strength of his forays into native culture and the hours spent reading books in dak bungalows, to mark Orwell down as a closet highbrow, quietly despising – as does Flory – the culture represented by the imported copies of Blackwood’s Magazine (to which Mr Macgregor in Burmese Days makes bland contributions) and pining for solitude and the life of the mind. This would be a mistake. Flory is an older man in his thirties who has had the time to grow bitter and aloof, whereas Orwell, still in his early twenties, seems to have enjoyed some of the conventional social diversions of Burma. One characteristic of Flory’s that he may have shared is an interest in Burmese women. Traditionally, bachelor police officers and civil servants in far-flung towns where the number of European women could be counted on the fingers of one hand kept native mistresses. Orwell remarked on this habit to friends, without ever revealing whether he kept one himself. Roger Beadon noted that ‘I never saw him with a woman’, which proves nothing. A mistress would have been kept out of the way, although one suspects that her existence would have been common knowledge. Beadon’s visit to Orwell’s house at Insein turned up only livestock. Flory contributes some atmospheric memories of the Eurasian girl Rosa McFee that he seduced in Mandalay in 1913, while Harold Acton, who did not meet Orwell until twenty years later, claims to have listened to some lubricious recollections of Burmese women. None of this, though, is conclusive. Neither is Leo Robertson’s suggestion, made to Hollis, that his friend enjoyed prowling the waterfront brothels of Rangoon’s red light district. Here and there, on the other hand, come hints that in depicting the relationship between Flory and his native mistress Ma Hla May Orwell knew what he was talking about. Among his unpublished papers, and written either while he was living in Burma or shortly afterwards, are two poems about sleeping with Burmese women. ‘A mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coco-nut oil and the jasmine in her hair floated from her,’ runs Burmese Days’ account of Ma Hla May’s distinctive smell as she sets about her preliminary manoeuvres. ‘It was a scent that always made his teeth tingle.’ The forensic detail suggests that Orwell had known at least one Burmese woman fairly intimately.
And now he was going home. His motives are unclear. He had not, at this stage, resigned from the service, and the leave he was about to take had been procured through a medical certificate. Yet the illness seems not to have been mentioned to his family back in England. The statements Orwell later made about his decision to leave his job with the Burma Police are quite as emphatic as his estimates of St Cyprian’s or Eton. He gave up his job, he told the compilers of Twentieth Century Authors in 1940, ‘partly because the climate had ruined my health, partly because I already had a vague idea of writing books, but mostly because I could not go on any longer serving an imperialism which I had come to regard as very largely a racket’. As with his statements about St Cyprian’s and Eton, one wonders how much of this resolute conviction was retrospective, initial inklings confirmed and solidified by time. Was he right about his health? In a 1923 training school group photograph he still looks reasonably fresh-faced, but most of the contemporary accounts of his time in Burma describe him as ‘thin’ and ‘gaunt’. Stuart noted his weak chest, which the moist Burma climate could hardly have helped. Then there is Orwell’s professional anti-Imperialism, the idea that even during the later stages of his police career he was a kind of agitator manqué silently incubating seditious thoughts as he questioned suspects or wheedled intelligence out of village elders. The sections in The Road to Wigan Pier that deal with his time in Burma are full of symbolic moments – the overnight train journey to Mandalay spent damning the Empire with a member of the education service, ending in the ‘haggard morning light’ when the two men parted ‘as guiltily as any adulterous couple’, the American missionary who, watching one of Orwell’s Burmese subordinates bullying a suspect, remarked, ‘I wouldn’t want your job’. These are vivid passages that give an impression of having grown out of years of brooding. But however firmly Orwell’s anti-Imperialist convictions may have taken root at this time, they were well hidden from his colleagues. Naturally, no serving officer in an Imperial force would go out of his way to draw attention to unorthodox views, but the people who knew Orwell in Burma regarded his opinions as absolutely standard for the milieu. Stuart never thought him anti-establishment. Marrison, the BOC chemist, considered him a perfectly representative type. Hollis, an observer who had, additionally, known Orwell in another world, found no trace of liberal opinions. ‘He was at pains to be the imperial policeman, emphasising that these theories of no punishment and no beatings were all very well at public schools but they did not work with the Burmese …’ Granted, Orwell had a well-developed talent for irony, along with a near-unfathomable reserve, but with Hollis, surely, he would have unbent a little and revealed something of his true feelings?
Going back to the specific circumstances of his departure, he seems to have left when he did primarily because of illness – it wanted only a few months, after all, to the statutory leave that would have followed his five years’ service. This is not to discount various rumours put about by colleagues. Beadon, for instance, thought that his departure was brought about by a bullying district superintendent. The officer asked for advice by Mrs Limouzin remembered suggesting that if Orwell was unhappy in his job he should get out while he still had time to start a fresh career.
The probability is that in mid-1927, ill, longing for England and doubting the value of what he was doing, Orwell had no clear idea of his future direction. It took the months that followed to develop these feelings to the point where they could be publicly expressed. Two years later, in an article for a French newspaper, he would write that ‘if we are correct, it is true that the British are robbing and pilfering Burma quite shamefully’. Flory claims that ‘the British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English – or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen’. There follows an informed analysis of Imperial depredations on the teak, rice and oil industries, and the suppression of other native trades such as muslin manufacture and shipbuilding in order to squeeze out competition. At the centre of Flory’s thoughts, and ‘poisoning everything’, is ‘the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of Imperialism in which he lived’. The mature Orwell was prepared to draw distinctions, between principled men and time-servers, between the civil administration and the commercial interest, under whose ‘sloth and greed’ the Far Eastern promise of the Empire had rotted. Moreover his attitude to Burma and its people was always realistic. He had no illusions about the prospect of Burmese ‘democracy’. Burma was a small, agricultural country, he wrote in 1942, and talk of independence was nonsense, ‘in the sense that it will never be independent’. In a world of international power politics, satellite status was about the best an ex-colony could hope for.
But this is advancing Orwell’s view of world affairs deep into the 1940s. From the angle of 1927, there is a suspicion that, as in earlier parts of his life, attitudes that were inchoate at the time of departure took a certain amount of time to harden into something tangible. Inevitably, they find their fullest expression in his creative work. This falls into three distinct categories: some early poems and a fragmentary try-out for Burmese Days; the novel itself, first published in 1934 but worked on for some years before this; and two of his finest sketches, ‘A Hanging’, published in the Adelphi in August 1931, and ‘Shooting an Elephant’, which appeared in John Lehmann’s New Writing five years later. Most of the poems have a recognisable tone: gloomy, self-pitying, intensely romantic in their anti-romanticism (‘… I do not care what comes/When I am gone, though kings or peoples rot,/Though life itself grow cold; I do not care/Though all the streams & all the sea ran blood.’) ‘The Lesser Evil’, one of the poems about sleeping with Burmese women, has perhaps some faint interest in that it sets up an opposition between the spiritual – a church where old maids caterwaul ‘A dismal tale of thorns and blood’ – and the secular (visits to ‘the house of sin’) that was to preoccupy him in the future. The rest is doom, gloom and futility, culminating in a terrible poem entitled ‘When the Franks Have Lost Their Sway’ which talks about empires being torn asunder and finally demands of the reader:
Is it not dreadful thus to contemplate
These mighty ills that will beset the world
When we are dead & won’t be bothered with them?
Do not these future woes transcend our own?
Dreadful is perhaps putting it mildly. The dry-runs for Burmese Days, on the other hand, include an extract from Flory’s ‘autobiography’, which relates it more closely to Orwell’s own early life. Although thirteen years older than his creator, here Flory has a father who served in the Indian Civil Service and a brace of sisters, though both are older than him. Of his relationship with his father he suggests that ‘they might have been called friends. The reticence that lies between all blood relatives held us apart, & then I had scarcely seen him till I was thirteen years old.’
‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ would make a good introduction for anyone who had never read Orwell and wanted to know what the fuss was about. The first sketch describes the execution of a native prisoner in a Burmese jail; the second takes in the shooting of a rogue elephant which has killed a man, carried out in front of a huge crowd of expectant Burmans, and eventually undertaken, the reader is given to understand, because the writer fears losing face. Each, ultimately, is about the futility, and the moral consequences, of taking a life. In a sense, though, the precise circumstances don’t matter. In the end the emotional kick of the writing is more important than the autobiographical roots. If Orwell did witness an execution during his time in Burma – and such attendances were not part of the police routine – then a likely spot was Insein, owing to the size of its jail. Certainly the detail of ‘A Hanging’ is highly convincing: the look on the face of the condemned man, the way in which he skips to one side to avoid a puddle on his way to the block. We know, too, that Orwell was familiar with the procedures of Burmese executions: he notes elsewhere the difficulty of procuring executioners, a job that was usually done by convicts themselves. And yet one of the signature marks of Orwell’s early writing is its use of models, well-known literary templates which the tyro writer could adapt to his own design. Without in any way plagiarising it, ‘A Hanging’ belongs to the same tradition of anti-capital-punishment literature as Thackeray’s ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’: there is the same bitter attention to detail, the same sharp focus on the figure of the victim, the same valedictory widening of the gaze, so that the personal turns universal.
Ambiguity also hangs over ‘Shooting an Elephant’ – full of intent, densely realised description, but incapable of being fixed to a particular date or locale, and referred to only once, and that indirectly, elsewhere in Orwell’s writings. (Elizabeth in Burmese Days is ‘quite thrilled’ when Flory describes ‘the murder of an elephant he had perpetrated some years earlier’.) George Stuart claimed to have been at the club in Moulmein when the message about the rogue elephant came through, prompting Orwell to borrow a rifle and set out in pursuit, but this memory of the episode may not have been wholly accurate. He also maintains that the transfer to Katha was a punishment for destroying something of value (the sketch records only an argument between the Europeans as to whether Orwell had done the right thing) handed out by the Chief of the Police Service, Colonel Wellbourne. Certainly Wellbourne, an unwitting bigamist (he married his third wife before the second had been legally disposed of), thought to possess ‘no great charm’ by an associate, would have been capable of this. Another of Orwell’s contemporaries thought that he remembered a report of the incident in the Rangoon Gazette, and indeed there is such a report, dated 22 March 1926. However, the protagonist was not Orwell but Major E.C. Kenny, subdivisional officer at Yamethin, who shot an elephant that had killed a man five miles east of the Tatkon township ‘to the delight of the villagers’. Far from being upbraided, Kenny was subsequently promoted Deputy Commissioner.
‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ are figurative snapshots, no more than a few pages long. The most complete statement of Orwell’s view of Burma is found in Burmese Days. Re-read nearly seventy years after its first publication, Burmese Days is an odd book: an ‘Eastern’ novel built on a conventional foundation – the obvious influence is Somerset Maugham – but decked with the most fantastic figurative garnishes. Flory, its chief character, is a disillusioned teak merchant in his thirties, unmarried (though he has a Burmese mistress, Ma Hla May), bored with the handful of local Europeans with whom he is forced to associate, and finding civilised conversation – and an audience for his harangues about the Raj – only in the company of an Indian hospital doctor, Veraswami. To make matters worse, Flory is disfigured by a hideous birthmark. The arrival in Kyauktada of Elizabeth, the twenty-year-old niece of hard-drinking Mr Lackersteen, gives Flory unexpected hope, only for him to be mercilessly cut out by an aristocratic army officer, Lieutenant Verrall. Meanwhile, Kyauktada generally is subject to the machinations of an unscrupulous native magnate, U Po Kyin, who is cheerfully blackmailing and bullying himself to prominence. Having seen off Verrall and covered himself in glory by performing heroically in a failed uprising, Flory is thrown over by Elizabeth when U Po Kyin bribes the now discarded Ma Hla May to make a public scene in, of all places, the Kyauktada church. Flory shoots himself.
All this is accompanied by some pattern dissections of the iniquities of British rule and devastating portraits of the whisky-sodden wrecks and amateur humorists who infest the club, and yet the most striking thing about the novel is the extravagance of its language: a riot of rococo imagery that gets dangerously out of hand. This is apparent even in the preliminary description of U Po Kyin breakfasting on the veranda of his bungalow, where his servant’s face recalls ‘a coffee blancmange’, while U Po Kyin himself dresses in a pink paso which glitters in the sun ‘like a satin praline’. Later, in the gardens of the European club, a native servant moves through the jungle of flowers ‘like some large nectar-sucking bird’. Subsequently, in the space of two pages, a lizard clings to the wall of Flory’s house ‘like a heraldic dragon’, light rains down ‘like glistening white oil’ and the noise of doves produces ‘a sleepy sound, but with the sleepiness of chloroform rather than a lullaby’. Towards the end of the book the figurative touches would not disgrace a Beardsleyera aesthete. Camp-fire flames dance ‘like red holly’, U Po Kyin’s betel-stained teeth gleam in the lamplight ‘like red tin-foil’, Flory and Elizabeth’s canoes move through the water ‘like long curved needles threading through embroidery’. Finally, the language loses all relation to the things it is trying to describe. The moon rises out of a cloud-bank ‘like a sick woman creeping out of bed’, and storms chase each other across the sky likes squads of cavalry. This is a testimony to the impact of Burma on Orwell’s imagination, but it is also the mark of a ‘modernist’ if faintly old-fashioned aesthetic sensibility – like something out of an 1890s poem by Richard Le Gallienne – which would take nearly a decade to subdue.
Given the identification of Kyauktada with Katha, the temptation is to mark Burmese Days instantly down as a roman-à-clef, and to assume that the principal Europeans – Mr Macgregor, the Assistant District Commissioner, Ellis the spiteful timber merchant, Westfield, Maxwell and the Lackersteens – are thinly disguised representations of real people. The manuscript of the novel so alarmed Victor Gollancz that he initially declined to publish it for fear of libel. When Gollancz did finally feel able to proceed, Orwell was ordered to consult the official directories of the time to ensure that the names of ‘Macgregor’, ‘Westfield’, ‘Maxwell’ and ‘Lackersteen’ were not those of serving Anglo-Indian officials. Orwell reported that he had looked through the 1929 Burma Civil List – earlier volumes were apparently unobtainable – and found nothing. This is correct. And yet Orwell’s covering up of his tracks in the cast list for Burmese Days is not quite conclusive. Several of the characters’ names, for example, are simply lifted from back numbers of the Rangoon Gazette. On 14 September 1923 a Mr J.C.J. Macgregor, a well-known timber merchant, was reported as returning to Liverpool from Rangoon, while on 19 October in the same year a Mr Lackersteen arrived in Rangoon; ‘B.J. Ellis’ left Liverpool on the same day. There was a real U Po Kyin, a native Burman at the Mandalay training school (he appears in the 1923 photograph) and an Indian doctor who served at Katha whose name has the same suffix as Dr Veraswami. But there is another plausible candidate for Mr Macgregor, the bumbling but essentially good-natured ADC. Had Orwell looked through the 1929 Burma military directory he would have emerged with the name of Colonel F.H. McGregor, commander of the Rangoon Third Field Brigade. A shipping merchant who doubled up as an army officer – joint roles of this kind were common in inter-war Burma – McGregor was at one point stationed in Syriam during Orwell’s time in Burma and additionally lived in a Rangoon suburb. He was a well-known personality, and it is inconceivable that Orwell could have spent five years in the country without coming across him in some capacity. Photographs of the Colonel (born in 1880) show a bulky, bespectacled character, oddly reminiscent of Orwell’s portrait of the chief bore of the Kyauktada club: ‘a large, heavy man, rather past forty, with a kindly, puggy face, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. His bulky shoulders, and a trick he had of thrusting his head forward, reminded one curiously of a tortoise.’
Orwell left Burma in late July. He never went back. Flory, plotting his retirement in England, imagines that he ‘would forget Burma, the horrible country that had come near ruining him’. But Burma haunted Orwell’s imagination, both as a practical demonstration of Imperial wrongdoing and as a more elemental sensory tug. Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter, for instance, on her knees by the Suffolk roadside smelling a bunch of fennel, imagines suddenly ‘Scent of spice-drenched islands in the warm foam of eastern seas.’ For the rest of his life Burma offered an instant point of comparison for the landscapes Orwell encountered. At home, the north of England caravan colonies of The Road to Wigan Pier reminded him of the ‘filthy kennels’ of the Burmese coolies. Abroad, Morocco found him adducing endless parallels between the ethnic peoples, agricultural arrangements and colonial society. There is even a hint of the anthropomorphism of Animal Farm in his early review of a Pearl S. Buck novel, The Good Earth, in which he laments the fate of the Burmese rickshaw pullers, ‘men running between shafts, like horses’. For the next twenty years the spectre of Burma rose continually in Orwell’s mental life, in fragments of memory – the strange boy met in Rangoon who, questioned as to his origins, replied that he was a Joo – and personal connection. As late as 1949 he was trying to use David Astor’s influence to find his old friend Leo Robertson a job. At the very end of his life his thoughts returned to the experiences of a quarter-century before. ‘A Smoking Room Story’, the rough plan for a novel sketched out not long before his death, features a character named ‘Curly Johnson’ (‘a tallish, shapely youth, moving with a grace of which he is not conscious’). Johnson, sent home from Burma by his firm, combines a dislike of the American and English businessmen on the ship with social insecurity: he is wary of the bright young people who swarm aboard at Colombo. There is also mention of a Burmese woman, Ma Yi (his mistress), and the ‘dust and squalor of his house, the worn gramophone records, the piled up whiskey bottles …’
What had been the impact of Burma on the personality of this reserved and apparently unremarkable young man? He had arrived there immature and impressionable. He left it older in both body and spirit, and, temperamentally, split in half. Reflecting ten years later on an environment that had simultaneously jogged both the conservative and the anarchic sides of his mind, he gave this unresolved tension a violently dramatic focus. Half of him, The Road to Wigan Pier maintains, thought that Imperialism was a racket; the other half wanted nothing better than to plunge a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Burma, it might be said, established one of the central oppositions in Orwell’s life and writings: the conflict between his commitment to fair play and liberal principles and a latent authoritarianism constantly breaking out in complaints about grinning yellow faces. Occasionally this took on a symbolic focus. On the one hand Orwell subscribed to the free-thinking, left-leaning Adelphi, a magazine in which some of his earliest journalism appeared, while he was in Burma. On the other, he was quite capable of nailing copies to a tree and taking pot-shots at them when their brand of idealistic left-wing politics became too irksome to be borne. As a Burma police officer whose working life was spent dealing with the practical consequences of Imperialism, Orwell was constantly annoyed by the sheer gaucherie of most anti-Imperial polemic. What sickened him about left-wing people, he once told his friend Jack Common, was their ignorance of how life had to be lived 8,000 miles away from Britain. ‘I was always struck by that when I was in Burma and used to read anti-imperialist stuff’. Now he was on his way back: a month’s sea voyage would see him home. The inter-war years were the great era of the literary man’s voyage by sea: Evelyn Waugh sightseeing around the Mediterranean on the trip that produced his travel book Labels, his older brother Alec on the Messageries Maritimes boat to Tahiti, Mr and Mrs Huxley following Orwell’s own earlier route up the Irrawaddy. For the tall, gaunt twenty-four-year-old scribbling his way through the pile of government paper filched from some police headquarters in Upper Burma, as the liner moved on slowly through the Indian Ocean, much sterner realities lay ahead.