Down There on a Visit
It is a great mistake to be too afraid of dirt. – Letter to Brenda Salkeld, July 1931
You take my tip & never sleep in Trafalgar Square. – Letter to Dennis Collings, 27 August 1931
The Adelphi wanted revisions. Given that the magazine was a quarterly, ‘The Spike’ would not appear until April 1931, twenty months after it was first submitted. Orwell must have chafed at the delay, conscious that this was the best piece of writing he had yet produced. The articles published in the Parisian newspapers were competent, but there is no hint of anything remarkable running beneath their surface. In contrast, Orwell’s account of two days spent in a casual ward is full of closely observed details: still showing the odd looseness of style and excess verbiage that characterises much of his early work, but creating its best effects out of terseness. ‘It was late afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman, lay on the grass waiting for the spike to open …’ Like many a ‘Georgian’ writer of the period, Orwell was still unable to resist the purple patch: ‘Overhead the chestnut branches were covered with blossom, and beyond that great woolly clouds floated almost motionless in a clear sky’, the opening paragraph continues. Significantly, though, luxuriance of this kind is nearly always there to be deflated by the squalor of what moves beneath. ‘Littered on the grass,’ Orwell goes on, ‘we seemed dingy, urban riff-raff.’ Favourite stylistic tics, too, are beginning to declare themselves. A bit later uneaten food in the workhouse kitchen is ‘defiled’ by the tea-leaves thrown on it. In the closing scene, when a tramp named Scotty chases after Orwell to replace some borrowed tobacco, the cigarette ends dropped into his palm are described as ‘debauched’. The figurative undertow of this kind of imagery is striking, as if the thought of ordinary things being tampered with or twisted out of their normal use revolted Orwell in an almost sexual way. Suitably reworked, ‘The Spike’ would eventually re-emerge in two of the later chapters of Down and Out. In the meantime, Orwell was quick to use the promise of future publication to establish a connection with the Adelphi and the people who ran it.
Founded by Katherine Mansfield’s consort Middleton Murry in the 1920s, the Adelphi was a characteristic small-circulation journal of its time: ‘progressive’, fascinated by what was still known as the ‘Soviet experiment’, determinedly literary while occasionally looking rather old-fashioned in some of its tastes. Orwell pokes mild fun at it in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, remarking of its alter ego, Antichrist, that it appeared to be edited by an ardent nonconformist who had transferred his allegiance from God to Marx while getting mixed up with a gang of vers libre poets along the way. The joke still manages to convey something of the odd mixture of seriousness (denial of God’s existence balanced by an uneasy awareness of the continuing significance of God to human affairs) and occasional bouts of aestheticism in which the paper specialised. At this point in its history, Murry having recently retired, the Adelphi was being jointly edited by Sir Richard Rees and Max Plowman. Rees, three years older than his new contributor, an Old Etonian, ex-diplomat and Workers’ Educational Association lecturer, was a wealthy young baronet happy to pay the magazine’s bills and subsidise some of his harder-up protégés. He features in Keep the Aspidistra Flying as ‘Ravelston’, a well-meaning patrician silently appalled by some of the grimmer manifestations of working-class culture. ‘Practically anything got printed in Antichrist if Ravelston suspected that its author was starving.’ Plowman, then in his late forties, represented a slightly older kind of progressivism. He was a dedicated pacifist scarred by his experience on the Western Front – his memoir, A Subaltern on the Somme had appeared in 1927 – who went on to become general secretary of one of the country’s chief anti-war ginger groups, the Peace Pledge Union.
Rees, who observed Orwell on and off for the best part of two decades, is a key early witness both to his personality and to what at this stage were barely decipherable political leanings, possibly the first person with whom he came into contact who both shared his background and at the same time understood the kind of literary-cum-political world in which he wanted to operate. At first Rees was not particularly impressed. His recollection of their first meeting, early in 1930 in New Oxford Street, hard by the Adelphi offices in Bloomsbury Street, was that Orwell made a ‘pleasant impression’ while seeming to be ‘rather lacking in vitality’. There was nothing outwardly remarkable about him. Looking back on his friend’s political views, Rees diagnosed a ‘Bohemian Tory’ whose time among the working classes was pointing him towards Socialism. Orwell’s own memories seem to confirm this. He became a Socialist, he later wrote, ‘more out of disgust with the oppressed and neglected life of the poorer sector of the industrial worker than out of any theoretical understanding of a planned society’. But at this stage Orwell’s attitude to Socialism, the Adelphi and presumably Rees himself was still embryonic. This, after all, was a magazine that he had used for target practice only a few years ago in Burma. Yet he clearly found Rees and Plowman congenial companions, keeping up with them (Plowman died in 1941) for the rest of his life. Through them he made a third friend, a young Tynesider named Jack Common who sold subscriptions for the magazine. Common, who later wrote Kiddar’s Luck, one of the great working-class novels of the era, quickly established Orwell’s relation to the social orbit in which his patrons moved. Initially nonplussed by the apparent ‘outsider’ status of the scruffily dressed newcomer, he rapidly detected a ‘public school presence’.
However shrewd the first impressions of Rees, Common and others, it was above all an elusive presence. The really striking feature of Orwell’s life in the early 1930s, surrounded as he was by friends and family, the literary citadels before him waiting to be stormed, is how little we know about him and how few verifiable facts remain. His day-to-day existence, routines – even his whereabouts – are a mystery for months on end. Yet his base throughout this period, in fact until the mid-1930s, was his parents’ house in Southwold. By 1930 the Blairs had been living on the north Suffolk coast for the best part of a decade and were fixtures in the town. Richard Blair, now in his mid-seventies and known to his intimates as ‘Toby’, was a pillar of the Southwold gentlemen’s club, the Blyth (tradespeople vigorously excluded), at which he and his wife played bridge. If this makes the elder Blairs sound like the stuffiest kind of small-town conservatives, then it should also be said that their acquaintance extended into more bohemian areas. They were on friendly terms with Madame Tabois, the town’s resident French artist, whose studio lay along Ferry Road near the harbour, and from whom Ida Blair took lessons. Avril, meanwhile, had branched out on her own and become proprietress of a high-class tea-shop, the Refreshment Rooms, later rechristened the Copper Kettle, next door to the family’s rented Queen Street house. It is a mark of the paralysing snobbery of Southwold in the 1930s that even this modest commercial venture was frowned on in the town’s more exclusive circles. All the same, there are distinctions to be made. No doubt Southwold’s genteel villas of the inter-war period were simpy awash with old ladies who stuck pins into effigies of Mr Cook, the firebrand miners’ leader, and believed that if you gave the working classes baths they would keep coal in them. But the impression occasionally given in books about Orwell that the town was simply a retirement home for the upper bourgeoisie is a mistake. Although best known in the public imagination at this time as one of the sites of the Duke of York’s camp – a well-intentioned scheme conceived by the future King George VI that brought public school boys and their working-class counterparts together under canvas on the common – Southwold had its earthier side. There were substantial pockets of poverty, especially among the fishing community, and Church Street, in particular, was remembered by one former inhabitant as ‘awful’. Despite the influx of retired gentlefolk it was still a small port – coal was regularly unloaded at the harbour – as well as offering a range of commercial concerns such as the Homeknit factory on Pier Avenue and the Adnams brewery, the reek of whose malt hung over the High Street six days out of seven. Yet it was not, we can safely assume, Orwell’s kind of place. Knype Hill in A Clergyman’s Daughter is not, strictly speaking, a recreation of Southwold. Inland and dominated by a sugar-beet factory, it bears a closer resemblance to Bury St Edmunds. However, the description of the High Street, forking after a couple of hundred yards to form a small marketplace, is unmistakably drawn from the life. It is, additionally, ‘one of those sleepy, old-fashioned streets that look so intensely peaceful on a casual visit and so very different when you live in them and have an enemy or a creditor in every window’. Avril was more matter-of-fact: ‘Eric loathed Southwold’.
And yet Southwold, and some of its inhabitants, were to play a decisive part in Orwell’s life over the next few years. However much he may have disliked the place, however tense his relationship with his father, however reluctant he may have been to involve himself in its anodyne social life, there was congenial company to hand. Through his parents he came to know the Morgan family – Mrs Morgan was a widow who added to her income by supplying board and lodgings to boys studying at Mr Hope’s crammer – whose attractions included an exceptionally pretty daughter named Roma. No evidence of their relationship survives, but there is a persistent family legend that a brief engagement was contracted. Dennis Collings came back at regular intervals from his Cambridge Anthropology course. It was probably through Collings that Orwell re-encountered an attractive young woman named Eleanor Jaques (the Jaqueses had previously lived next door to the Blairs in Stradbroke Road) whose family lived at a house called Long Acre in nearby Reydon. He also spent a great deal of time with Brenda Salkeld, the daughter of a Bedfordshire clergyman who taught gym at St Felix’s, a girls’ boarding-school whose premises lay a couple of miles inland. Through these new friends, and through his family, he was introduced to older people: a Yorkshire barrister named Colin Pulleyne who lived in the town with his mother; a Mrs Carr who lived along the High Street near the house that the Blairs themselves would eventually buy; Miss Fanny Forster, later the town’s mayoress, who had literary interests and lent him books. He also seems to have mixed with the Southwold ‘gentry’ on their own terms. The town museum, for example, has a copy of Burmese Days inscribed to Tony Fox, a wealthy stockbroker who owned property near the seafront and later founded a charitable trust with the aim of refurbishing houses for the benefit of local people rather than allowing them to be turned into holiday homes.
Southwold was a small place – not more than 2,000 inhabitants – and, demarcations of status notwithstanding, its social patterns were nearly always interconnected. The Blairs’ daily help, Mrs May, also worked for the Jaqueses in Reydon. Her daughters Esmé, Marjorie and Olive worked for Avril at the Copper Kettle (‘a high class’ establishment, one of their cousins recalled, ‘very special’). However much Orwell may have wanted to distance himself from the routines of small-town social life, he could scarcely avoid being caught up in them. As a newcomer to Southwold with no visible means of support, he became an approved subject for comment, speculation and mild disapproval. He was a particular favourite with Mrs May, who noted and sympathised with his poor health (‘Poor boy, I feel so sorry for him’). The general impression conveyed by the people who remember him from this time is of a detached, rather vague figure, assumed to be sponging off his parents, legendarily untidy (‘He always seemed to be three days away from a shave’). Well wrapped up in thrice-wound scarves against the winter cold, he was known to spend long hours shut up in his bedroom or walking around the town ‘in a dream’.
No doubt this picture of a minor black sheep silently outraging his conventional family has become calcified by time. Still, there was something odd about Orwell in the context of 1930s Southwold: introverted, detached, literally vagrant. Rumours of his tramping exploits were a regular source of local gossip. However scandalised the Blairs may have been (Mrs Blair commented enigmatically on one of these disappearances that her son had ‘gone with nothing’), Mrs May was even more upset. There is a relentlessness about Orwell’s low-life fixation at this time. His letters to Brenda Salkeld are full of bantering attempts to shock. If they are to meet in London perhaps she won’t object to three days’ growth of beard? At any rate he can promise no lice, etc. etc. Orwell’s interest in social conditions and the plight of the dispossessed was quite genuine – it shines out of everything he wrote and said on the subject. At the same time there is a sense of something more fundamental moving beneath, a compulsion to immerse himself in an activity from which his more sensitive side revolted. David Astor, with whom Orwell later discussed his tramping adventures, believed that on one level he undertook them simply to try to overcome his ingrained fastidiousness, his fear of dirt and sweat, to see how far he could push himself. A piece like ‘The Spike’ offers a portrait of a man in whom limitless moral sympathy and outright physical disgust are uneasily contending. It is this tension that gives Orwell’s writing about down-and-outs and the squalor of the sevenpenny doss houses its sheen. There are private terrors here, you feel, only narrowly concealed by print. Other friends could not see the point in these excursions. Brenda Salkeld, at whose parents’ house he turned up during one of these trips, was simply exasperated. ‘All that business about being a tramp was just ludicrous. He had a home, he had a nice family …’
Other elements of the ‘nice family’ were capable of providing a refuge. Come the early spring Orwell left for an extended stay with Marjorie and family at Bramley on the outskirts of Leeds, where Humphrey Dakin had just started on a new job in the Civil Service. Dakin, unimpressed as ever, advised his brother-in-law to get a proper job rather than persevere with the chancy business of writing. He was also struck by Orwell’s reluctance to immerse himself in the atmosphere of the cheery working-class ‘local’. ‘He used to sit in a corner … looking like death.’ Here and back at Queen Street Orwell worked hard on the manuscript of what became Down and Out in Paris and London, at this point concentrated on his French adventures and entitled ‘A Scullion’s Diary’. An early version, presented in straightforward diary form, was submitted to, and rejected by, Jonathan Cape around this time. The Mays, in particular, were impressed by his dedication and also slightly alarmed by his unwillingness to leave the bedroom in which he wrote. Esmé remembered him sequestering himself in there for days on end. ‘Go and take that poor boy something up,’ Mrs May would eventually command. To the teenage girl ferrying cups of tea and snacks the son of her mother’s employer seemed an eccentric figure: ‘he never dressed up or anything’.
As well as labouring over ‘A Scullion’s Diary’, Orwell was cutting his teeth as a reviewer on the Adelphi’s books pages. A notice in the May 1930 number of Lewis Mumford’s biography of Melville shows him laying several of the foundations for his mature critical style: arresting epigrams; positions about human behaviour shrewdly taken up. ‘Melville had a wretched life, and was generally poor and harassed, but at least he had an improvident youth behind him … He had not been bred, like so many Europeans, into respectability and despair.’ In the August number he compared Edith Sitwell’s study of Pope with Sherard Vines’s The Course of English Classicism, while in October he conducted an all-out assault on J.B. Priestley’s middlebrow bestseller, Angel Pavement. ‘One wonders incredulously whether anyone has really mistaken Mr Priestley for a master. His work has no damning faults, but neither has it a single gleam of beauty, nor any profundity of thought, nor even memorable humour.’ The novel was simply a ‘middle article’ spun out to 600 pages, spirited, conscientiously witty and exhibiting an ‘utter lack of anything intensely conveyed’. This is an interesting complaint, for it lists the qualities that the twenty-seven-year-old apprentice looked for in fiction: ‘beauty’, ‘profundity of thought’ and ‘memorable humour’, with the final stricture about the lack of anything intensely conveyed sounding uncannily like F.R. Leavis. At first sight Orwell’s hostility to Priestley looks faintly gratuitous, as the subject matter of Angel Pavement, with its pinched clerks and thwarted spinsters, would in ordinary circumstances have been very much to his taste. At the time, though, Priestley-baiting was a popular literary parlour game. Early works by Waugh, Powell and Graham Greene are full of feline disparagement of a writer whom serious people thought seriously overrated: Greene’s Stamboul Train (1932) had to be temporarily withdrawn after Priestley had detected libellous intentions in the portrait of a complacent popular novelist named ‘Mr Savory’.
By the summer of 1930 Orwell’s life in Southwold assumes a sharper focus. At some point in their walks across the common he proposed marriage to Brenda Salkeld. But Miss Salkeld turned him down, preferring friendship, and also, one suspects – judging from the contents of some of Orwell’s later letters – not wanting to be lectured about books. Some of his time was taken up across the river in Walberswick where he acted as tutor to a boy named Bryan Morgan – unconnected to the Southwold Morgans – then in his early teens, crippled by polio and rather ‘backward’. The Morgans were well-to-do (there may have been a connection through the ‘Edith Morgan’ Orwell had known in Paris), living in a house on one side of the main Walberswick Road and also owning land on the other. Migrating to this second plot to supervise Bryan, Orwell was frequently observed by a teenage girl named Dora Georges, a friend of the older Morgan children. Sixteen-year-old Dora considered the private tutor to be ‘rather an awkward customer’ who spoke in ‘jerky sentences’ and was something of a figure of fun to his employer’s family: ‘We used to make jokes about him.’ Sometimes when Orwell and Bryan were roaming in the field, Dora went across the road to chat. On one of these occasions Orwell pushed a piece of paper into her hand. This turned out to be a poem, headed ‘Ode to a Dark Lady’. Dora, who thought nothing of the writer’s ‘very gauche manner’, was unimpressed. The poem was thrown away. There is something intensely Orwellian about the scene, though: the formal expression of regard; the poem pushed silently into the hand of someone who secretly thinks the donor rather comical. Ten years later Orwell supplied an odd footnote to his time with the Morgans in a letter to Sacheverell Sitwell, apropos a review he had written of Sitwell’s Poltergeists. Out walking with Bryan on Walberswick Common they had come across a cardboard box lined with cloth and containing tiny pieces of furniture arranged to look like the contents of a doll’s house. ‘Puzzled’ by the discovery, Orwell was convinced that there was something sinister about it, that the box was meant to be found, like something out of one of M.R. James’ ghost stories.
There was a second teaching job that summer, supervising the three Peters boys, sons of a female friend of Mrs Blair’s. The eldest, Richard, later a distinguished academic, left a vivid portrait of the ‘rather strange but very nice’ young man who took them on nature rambles, talked to them about books, showed them how to catch roach in the Walberswick mill pond and conducted bomb-making experiments; one of these blew up a stretch of the family garden. For relaxation he went bathing or set up an easel on the beach. It was while out painting, one day in August, that he got into conversation with a holidaying couple walking along the beach. Francis Fierz was an executive in a steel manufacturing firm. Mabel, his wife, then in her late thirties, had literary interests and, in addition, a forceful personality which she was prepared to put at Orwell’s service. The Fierzes – Mabel in particular – took a shine to Orwell. Over the next few years he stayed repeatedly at their house in Oakwood Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb (Max Plowman lived nearby, which was a further attraction), and Mabel was to play a decisive part in getting his first book published.
Summer passed. The Fierzes went back to London. The tutoring jobs came to an end. For nearly a year there is scarcely a clue as to Orwell’s whereabouts. In late autumn he was at Queen Street, from which a couple of letters were addressed to Max Plowman asking about, and then dealing with, revisions to ‘The Spike’. Some of his time was spent in London – other letters were sent from the Fierzes – and there were certainly more tramping expeditions. There is an odd, infinitely beguiling, glimpse of him at around this time from a woman whose family lived in Limehouse in the early 1930s. With ten people residing in the ‘old, cold, inconvenient’ house, domestic help was at a premium. One day a friend who lived in the Rowton House (a superior lodgement for single men) in Whitechapel brought back one of the other occupants with a view to offering him work. It was eventually agreed that the newcomer would act as a kind of male charwoman, cleaning the house for half a crown a day plus a midday meal. Tall, thin, nicknamed Laurel on account of his faint resemblance to Oliver Hardy’s sidekick Stan, the stranger was an object of deep curiosity to the family, not least because of his educated accent, remembered as ‘plum-in-the-mouth, BBC English’. Coming back from school to find him in the house, one of the younger children was taken aback when Laurel bowed slightly, kissed her mother’s hand and remarked ‘Goodbye, Queen of the Kitchen’, adding to the girl, ‘Your mother is a fine lady and a splendid cook.’ His employer was ‘consumed with pity’, revealing that Laurel had scrubbed floors, cleaned two outside lavatories and polished up a blacklead kitchen range before having to be ordered to stop. Half a century later, coming across Orwell’s picture in a book (probably Bernard Crick’s biography), the girl was able to establish Laurel’s real identity.
However welcome the half-crowns picked up charring in Limehouse, Orwell was still trying hard to establish himself as a literary man, putting his name forward to editors and touting for work. The letter he wrote to Max Plowman in January 1931 setting out the kind of books he liked to review was probably one among many. Orwell’s interests as outlined here include India, low-life in London, Villon, Swift, Smollett and among contemporaries ‘anything by M.P. Shiel or Somerset Maugham’. Keeping up his involvement with working-class life, he reviewed Lionel Britton’s Hunger and Love, in which a slum child’s attempts to educate himself are scuppered by the war, for the April Adelphi. Britton’s novel seemed chiefly memorable for a flaw that was to run throughout most working-class fiction of the period. Most novels, Orwell suggested – rehearsing a famous later remark – are written ‘by the well-fed, about the well-fed, for the well-fed’. Anything that broke the genteel stranglehold of middle-class writers writing about middleclass subject matter was to be welcomed, and yet it was possible to produce a valuable social document that was worthless as a novel. Orwell’s fastening on this stand-off between form and content is something more than the routine complaint of a ground-down fiction reviewer: the dilemma was one that characterised his own early work. Meanwhile, as his journalism had not yet appeared anywhere else, he was becoming known as one of the Adelphi’s regular contributors (‘A Hanging’ appeared there in August 1931). The magazine had a modest circulation, no more than a few thousand copies, but it was a start. And in the intervals of this apprentice work he completed a new version of ‘A Scullion’s Diary’, now in more or less the book’s final shape, and dispatched it once again to Cape, from whom some time in the autumn it was once again returned.
Orwell was planning his most ambitious tramping excursion to date. This was first advertised in a letter written in July to Brenda Salkeld suggesting a meeting before she departed for the school holidays. It would be fun if they could go hopping together, he innocuously proposed. ‘But I suppose your exaggerated fear of dirt would deter you.’ It was a great mistake to be too afraid of dirt, he added sententiously. Working in the Kentish hop fields over late August and September was a traditional East End way of taking a late summer holiday: Orwell, knowing that the material he picked up would make good journalistic copy, intended to observe conditions in the fields at first hand. He spent the first part of the summer in Southwold, catching a glimpse – or so he thought – of a ghost in Walberswick churchyard (a man’s figure in what might have been brown vestments seen out of the tail of one eye) before proceeding to London and the Fierzes. Then on 25 August, with fourteen shillings in hand, he spent the night in Lew Levy’s kip in the Westminster Bridge Road, followed by a two-day stint on the bum amongst the floating population of Trafalgar Square. ‘You take my tip,’ he sagely advised Dennis Collings, to whom a record of this adventure was dispatched two days later, ‘& never sleep in Trafalgar Square.’ Things were ‘tolerably comfortable’ until midnight, he reported, after which paralysing cold set in. At 4 a.m. he got hold of a pile of newspaper posters to wrap himself up in. An hour later he migrated with some of the other square-sleepers to a coffee shop in St Martin’s Lane where one could sit undisturbed over a twopenny cup of tea. Above all, Orwell was fascinated by the unwritten rules of the square. Until noon you could do anything you liked – even shave in the fountains – except sleep, in which case you would be woken by the police. From noon till nine you could sit on the benches or the pedestals of the statues but were moved on if you sat on the ground. From nine until midnight the police would wake you every five minutes, after midnight every half an hour, all ‘for no ostensible reason’.
Orwell’s anxiety to return from Kent with some form of ‘copy’ is made clear by the detailed diary he kept for the next six weeks, much of it later reproduced wholesale in A Clergyman’s Daughter. After a night in another lodging house in the Southwark Bridge Road, one of the few sevenpenny kips in London ‘and looks it’ (the beds were only five feet apart and the kitchen a cellar where the deputy sat with a tray of jam tarts a yard or so from the lavatory door), he set off for Kent with three mates picked up along the way. ‘Ginger’, the leading personality in this trio, inspired Orwell to a brief character sketch. An ex-soldier and a fairly typical petty criminal, Orwell thought, he had probably, when not in prison, broken the law every day for the previous five years. Orwell clearly rather admired Ginger – there is a more substantial portrait of him as ‘Nobby’ in A Clergyman’s Daughter – noted his proficiency at begging and his technical expertise. He was less keen on the friend brought along by the second man, ‘Young Ginger’. This was ‘a little Liverpool Jew of eighteen, a thorough guttersnipe’. All of a sudden the guillotine of class descends. Orwell approves of Ginger for his insouciance and resourcefulness; the Jewish teenager merely disgusts him. By this point around six of Orwell’s original fourteen shillings remained. Carrying their utensils – cadged tins, cutlery that had been stolen from Woolworth’s – and supplies of bread, margarine and tea, they took the twopenny tram to Bromley, brewed up on a rubbish heap and spent the night sleeping in long wet grass on the edge of a recreation ground. The morning of the next day was spent robbing an orchard. Orwell’s conscience pricked him at this but he consented to stand guard. Then, stealing and begging as they went, the three vagrants and one Old Etonian continued in the direction of Sevenoaks. A detour to the spike at Ide Hill served to split the company in half. It was then late on Saturday. The supervisor, known as the ‘tramp major’, had orders to keep men admitted in until Tuesday; the workhouse master was keen on extracting a full day’s labour from ‘casuals’ but would not allow them to work on Sunday. With their companions opting for three nights inside, Orwell and Ginger slept on the edge of a park abutting the church.
On Sunday morning they passed through Sevenoaks into the heart of Kent. Government inspectors were at large in the county enforcing the recent legislation introduced by the Labour government to the effect that all hop-pickers should have accommodation. However, there were ways of circumventing the new laws. An old Irishwoman they fell in with near Maidstone advised them that she had got a job on one of the farms merely by claiming that she had lodgings nearby: in fact she was sleeping clandestinely in a tool-shed. Once again Orwell’s conscience had a bad moment when Ginger and the Irishwoman used him as a front while they palmed cigarettes and apples from under the nose of a local shopkeeper. The three of them spent the night in a half-built house. On the next day, 1 September, with money running low, they failed to get taken on at Chalmers’ Farm. When they were ‘tapping’ a gentleman picnicker, the man became so friendly that Orwell forgot to put on his faux-cockney accent and was courteously presented with a shilling. A lift from a lorry driver took them to the spike at West Malling where, next morning, they secured jobs at Blest’s farm and were immediately sent out into the fields. The financial situation was now becoming desperate. With only threepence left in his pocket Orwell wrote back to Southwold asking for ten shillings to be sent care of the nearest post office. It came two days later. Not for the first time, Orwell noted the innate generosity of the working-class families clustered round the hop-bines. He and Ginger would have had practically nothing to eat had the other pickers not fed them.
The next seventeen days, or rather fifteen, as no work was done on a Sunday, were spent picking hops. Orwell’s account of the culture of the hop-field shows his customary eye for detail. The pay was twopence a bushel, and it was theoretically possible to earn thirty shillings a week, although in practice he doubted that anyone made half this, as the rules were expressly designed to exploit the fact that most of the workers regarded their employment as a paying holiday. Orwell identified three more or less distinct groups of pickers: East Enders down from Whitechapel and Bow; gypsies and itinerant agricultural labourers; and a sprinkling of tramps. He was struck by the kindness of a coster and his wife who befriended him and repeatedly gave him food. ‘They were the kind of people who are generally drunk on Saturday nights and who tack a “fucking” on to every noun, yet I have never seen anything that exceeded their kindness and delicacy.’ It seems clear, though, from various hints in the diary, that many of the hop-pickers regarded Orwell as a special case, an exotic migrant from beyond the narrow world of the hop-field and the East End. When it became too much of a chore to keep up the cockney accent, people noticed, as so often, that he talked ‘different’, and yet far from despising him as an outsider or, worse, a fifth columnist, were still more friendly. They seemed to think it particularly dreadful to have ‘come down in the world’, which could be the only plausible explanation for Orwell’s presence on the farm.
The routines of the hoppers’ camp were carefully set down three years later in A Clergyman’s Daughter: a breakfast of bacon, bread and tea in the chilly dawn, the mile-and-a-half walk to the fields, ten or eleven hours’ work tearing off hops from bines dragged down (‘huge, tapering strands of foliage, like the plaits of Rapunzel’s hair’) across the picking bins. Rain was an occupational hazard. ‘We are slopping about here in the most appalling seas of slush, unable to work & with no occupation but trying to start fires from wet wood,’ he reported to Dennis Collings two days after his arrival at Blest’s. ‘Still it is rather fun for a short while, & I shall at any rate be able to make a saleable newspaper article.’ Several of the minor characters from A Clergyman’s Daughter were already wandering through his field of vision: Deafie, the self-absorbed exhibitionist tramp; Barret, a travelling agricultural labourer who reminisced gluttonously about food. Towards the middle of the month the nights began to turn colder. The hop-picking season was nearly over. For Dorothy in the novel this is a serious problem: she has nowhere to go. For Orwell it represented the end of an interesting experiment. He was paid off on 19 September. Several pickers who were illiterate brought Orwell and other ‘scholards’ their tally books to be reckoned up. Arriving at the local rail station to catch the hop-pickers’ train back to London, Ginger having cheated a tobacconist’s assistant out of fourpence in farewell to Kent, they came upon Deafie sitting on the grass with a newspaper over his unfastened trousers periodically exposing himself to passing women and children. Orwell confessed himself ‘surprised’ at the spectacle, while noting that there was scarcely a tramp alive without some sexual aberration. Weaving across the county to pick up other bands of pickers from stations along the line dense with late summer foliage, the train took five hours to reach London. At London Bridge Deafie stood them a pint, before Orwell and Ginger went off to a kip in nearby Tooley Street. The two of them had operated a joint tally book. Orwell calculated that they had made twenty-six shillings each, reduced to sixteen after deducting the train fares.
The Tooley Street kip was cheap, only sevenpence a night, ‘probably the best sevenpenny one in London’, Orwell, now a connoisseur of such premises, decided. His fellow-lodgers, unfortunately, were a ‘pretty low lot’, mostly unskilled Irish labourers and out of work at that. He was keen to write up his hop-picking diary, a task largely accomplished in Bermondsey Public Library, but on several mornings he and Ginger went in search of work at Billingsgate fish market. Helping a porter push his barrow ‘up the hill’ paid twopence a time and the competition was fierce: Orwell reckoned that he never made more than eighteen pence out of the dawn-to-midday shift. There is a nice symbolism, not of Orwell’s making, about his presence here – in Billingsgate in late September 1931, for it coincided with the financial crisis going on a quarter of a mile away in the heart of the City which ultimately led to the government taking the decision to go off the Gold Standard to protect the pound. This retreat came to be seen as definitive proof of the nation’s post-war economic insecurity: as one contemporary observer put it, the end of parity between gold and sterling was ‘for most Britons born before 1910 … the biggest shock that we had known or were to know’. On Friday, 18 September, despite the herculean efforts of the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, to shore up sterling, the bank had lost nearly £19 million. On Monday the 21st, a few hours after Orwell and Ginger left for work, the Stock Exchange closed for the day in response to the mounting panic.
By now the diary was written up. Tooley Street was beginning to get on his nerves. It was noisy, hot, without privacy, and as ever he was revolted by the dirt. Orwell’s almost forensic accounts of the cheap lodging houses in which he stayed show the horror they must have aroused in him. The Tooley Street kitchen smelt permanently of fish, and the sinks were blocked with rotting fish guts which stank horribly. The dormitory, too, was a perpetual din of coughing and spitting. Again Orwell wrote to Southwold for money and upgraded his accommodation to the area of the Blairs’ old London haunts – a room at Windsor Street near the Harrow Road. From here, a day or so later, he sent the hop-picking diary (presumably only in manuscript at this point, though it was later typed) to Collings, with a request that it should also be shown to Colin Pulleyne and to Eleanor Jaques ‘if she would like to see it’. This is the first reference to Eleanor in Orwell’s letters. There were to be many more.
He seems to have spent the time in Windsor Street working. The letter to Collings mentions short stories intended for a forthcoming magazine named Modern Youth (‘a poisonous name for a poisonous paper’). Later in the month, having procured an introduction from Richard Rees, he boldly addressed T.S. Eliot at the offices of Faber & Faber, proposing to translate a French low-life novel Jacques Roberti’s A la Belle de Nuit. Orwell’s early letters to editors and publishers were always diffident. Listing his qualifications for undertaking the work he would say only that he was used to mixing in the kind of French society depicted in the novel and that he knew French slang better than the majority of Englishmen. Eliot asked to see the novel but as might have been expected, given the obscurity of the author and the even greater obscurity of the potential translator, nothing came of the project. For amusement Orwell read copiously – a letter to Brenda Salkeld from around this time offers an extensive reading list – and walked round Kensal Green cemetery, the resting place of many a Victorian literary man, inspecting the gravestones. Modern Youth, meanwhile, had postponed publication: it had failed to meet its printers’ bills. Orwell left Windsor Street shortly before Christmas, having tried one final but ultimately fruitless low-life adventure – an attempt to get himself arrested for drunkenness. Picked up by the police in the Mile End Road on a Saturday he was kept in the cells over the weekend, fined six shillings on the Monday morning and confined for the rest of the day owing to his inability to pay. Never one to squander promising material, Orwell swiftly wrote the episode up for the Adelphi and later cannibalised it for Gordon’s spectacular Soho drinking bout in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
Some time in the latter part of the year, from an address in Sussex, he wrote his first letter to a man who was to play an important part in his career. Leonard Moore, a partner in the literary agency of Christy & Moore, was an acquaintance of Francis Fierz: Orwell seems to have been pushed into writing to him by Mabel. What Moore made of the letter, which was diffident to the point of self-effacement, is anyone’s guess. Orwell doubts that he has anything in hand that would be of the smallest interest, but is sending two short stories which Moore might be able to use. The manuscript of ‘A Scullion’s Diary’, meanwhile, had been sent to Faber, Orwell naturally being keen to exploit his faint connection with Eliot. There were also two more stories which he was trying to retrieve from Modern Youth’s printers, who in default of payment had impounded the magazine’s copy. All this was hardly calculated to whet Moore’s appetite, but he read the stories. The verdict was unfavourable. Writing from the Fierzes’ early in January Orwell replied gloomily that he knew they were no good, but should Faber show an interest in ‘A Scullion’s Diary’ he would put the business in Moore’s hands. Prompted by an enquiring letter in mid-February, Faber rejected it. Orwell bestowed the manuscript upon Mabel Fierz, telling her to throw it away but to keep the paperclips.
Happily, Mrs Fierz was made of sterner stuff. Having read the book she took it to Moore’s office in the Strand and prevailed upon him to read it too, following this up with an exhortatory letter. A further letter to Moore from Orwell, sent in late April after the agent had expressed an interest in representing him, restated the book’s history: an early attempt sent to Cape in mid-1930; a revised version submitted in summer 1931; Eliot’s verdict of interesting but too short. If by any chance it was to be accepted, Orwell instructed, could he please make sure that it was published anonymously ‘as I am not proud of it’. So why try to get it published in the first place? Orwell’s early letters to Moore are riven by an almost spectacular blockheadedness over the nature of publishing and the requirements of the people who worked in it. Over the next few years his agent was to become habituated to a stream of amateurish suggestions, requests for translation work, apparent bewilderment over the most straightforward publishing processes. Here in this first instalment Orwell mentions a long poem he is working on describing a day out in London ‘which may be finished by the end of this term’. Then a sudden shaft of realism strikes him. ‘I should not think there is any money for anybody in this kind of thing’. There was not. Neither was he likely to get much joy out of Chatto & Windus with a proposal to translate one of Zola’s novels. It says something for Moore’s patience, and his genuine interest in Orwell’s work, that he was prepared to put up with this naivety. At the same time it reveals Orwell’s great uncertainty at this point in his fledgling career over the kind of writer he wanted to be. Social reportage; novels; translation work; ‘long’ poems (a genre even then fading into antiquity) – all these at one time or another in the early 1930s seem to have suited his conception of the literary path he wanted to follow. The London poem occupied him on and off for years, surfacing finally as ‘London Pleasures’, the great futile pursuit of Gordon Comstock’s leisure hours in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
The reference to ‘term’ indicates another shift in the pattern of Orwell’s erratic early 1930s life. By this time, like many another struggling writer of the inter-war era, he had passed into the murky landscapes of low-grade private education. How he came by the job at the Hawthorns High School for Boys in Hayes on the west London fringe is unknown: quite probably he applied to one of the city’s numerous scholastic agencies. For an Old Etonian, taught – however much he may have disliked the experience – by one of the great classical scholars of the age, the Hawthorns must have seemed something of a comedown. There were fewer than twenty boys, drawn from the sons of the local petit bourgeoisie, their parents too proud to make use of council schools, and only one other master. Orwell found himself quartered in two rooms on the ground floor of a nearby house inhabited by the school’s proprietor, an employee of the local HMV factory named Eunson, and his family. Fetched up in a nondescript part of west London, in a job he had been forced to take for financial reasons, he was acutely miserable. A midsummer letter to Eleanor refers to ‘the above foul place’ – in other words, the address written at the top of the paper – and describes Hayes as ‘one of the most godforsaken places I have ever struck’ (its atmosphere is faithfully reproduced in the penultimate section of A Clergyman’s Daughter). Orwell’s friendship with Eleanor had not yet progressed very far; though the letter was written nearly two months into the school term she is clearly not expected to know of his whereabouts. The Hawthorns’ pupils remembered their teacher as strict in the classroom, but less buttoned up outside it, prepared to offer lessons in oil painting and taking one protégé on an excursion to the local marsh to trap marsh gas in jars. The same boy remembered being unable to sit down for a week after being caned by the ‘rather harsh’ Mr Blair, although such was the rapport between master and pupil, he bore no grudge. There was also a school play, ‘King Charles II’ – this, too, made its way into A Clergyman’s Daughter – an elaborate affair involving complex sets and costume design.
Sequestered in west London with only limited opportunities for escape, Orwell took an unexpected turn in his writing. Looking at the letters and reviews from this time, it is impossible not to be struck by their interest – occasionally bantering, but nonetheless sincere – in religion; an interest, more to the point, that proceeded from a detailed knowledge of religious paraphernalia and a profound awareness of the issues that lay at stake. It would be wrong, perhaps, to talk about Orwell’s religious ‘side’: he once assured David Astor that the test of a person’s honesty was whether he or she believed in life after death, the implication being that anyone who did hold this belief was being dishonest. And yet, from a very early stage in his career, Orwell was obsessed by the problem of what might be called displaced religious sensibility. The greatest challenge facing both the state and the individual, he believed, was to recognise and put to positive use the intense human emotions that until fairly recently had been channelled into religious observance. Human beings had lost their souls, runs the argument of half a dozen of his essays, without finding anything to put in their place. When they did find something – this was a danger that became sharply apparent as the 1930s progressed – it was likely to be a form of totalitarian autocracy interested only in manipulating the past and ignoring the future. Significantly, in the same conversation with Astor, Orwell suggested that the proof of a person’s moral feeling rested on whether they cared what happened after their death.
At this stage Orwell’s views on personal morality in the absence of God lay in the future, but his interest in the question of spiritual belief was quite unfeigned. It is sharply apparent, for example, in a review for the New English Weekly of a book lent to him by the Roman Catholic Mrs Carr, his parents’ friend from Southwold: Karl Adam’s The Spirit of Catholicism. As well as airing his familiarity with contemporary religious politics, Orwell, though not uncritical, winds up on a respectful note: ‘Very few people, apart from Catholics themselves, seem to have grasped that the church is to be taken seriously.’ For a brief moment controversy raised its head. The great Catholic apologist Father Martindale, who knew Mrs Carr – it is possible that she also lent Orwell his The Roman Faith, referred to in the review – wrote to her saying that he would like to meet this young controversialist with a view to correcting various of his religious errors. This was the great age of the Catholic revival. Its luminaries – Monsignor Knox and Father D’Arcy – were well known to newspaper readers and high-life conversions were much in vogue. The kind of questions that Orwell discusses in the piece on Karl Adam were receiving an airing in every pulpit and serious newspaper in the country. It is easy enough to smile at the idea of Orwell as a potential Catholic convert – presumably the reason for Mrs Carr’s zeal – yet to the literary man of the 1930s Catholicism could seem a highly seductive refuge. Gordon in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, who tells Ravelston that the only choice for a civilised man in the twentieth century is between Catholicism and Bolshevism, is overstating his case, but it was a choice that plenty of civilised twentieth-century men, literary men especially, were prepared to make.
Half out of loneliness, half out of genuine interest, possibly in the hope of impressing Eleanor Jaques (remembered by her daughter as ‘a very spiritual woman’), Orwell made a friend of the curate, a young man slightly older than himself named Ernest Parker, and attended the local Anglican church in Hayes. The church was ritualistic and ‘high’ and he had some difficulty in following its exacting protocols, but he was enthusiastic enough to volunteer to paint one of the church idols, an image of the Virgin Mary. He was trying to make it look as much like an illustration in La Vie Parisienne as possible, he told Eleanor. He would take Communion, too, he suggested, only he felt the bread would stick in his throat. Orwell’s precise motives for sitting through Anglo-Catholic church services are unfathomable. Why, having taken the trouble to attend, could he not bring himself to take part in the Church’s most important rite? He liked Ernest Parker, the curate (‘a very good fellow’). Surely enjoying his company while secretly mocking the world of which he was a part would have constituted an act of betrayal? Was the satirical tone of his remarks to Eleanor merely a way of distancing himself from a series of inner confusions and affiliations that he could not yet rationalise? Whatever the explanation, he was keen to cultivate Eleanor as an audience, diffidently suggesting a rendezvous, wondering if she might like to procure some puss moth eggs for the boys’ nature study, noting that he wasn’t yet sure whether he would be in Southwold over the summer but wanted to get on with his novel. A Saturday meeting fell through when he received her letter too late to change his arrangements. Further incentive to press on with the manuscript of Burmese Days, parts of which were now at least four years old, came towards the end of June when Moore reported that the firm of Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish ‘A Scullion’s Diary’, subject to worries over libel and certain inflammatory passages. At £40, the advance was on the low side (exactly the office boy’s annual salary that Sambo had threatened him with all those years ago) but Orwell had every reason to be pleased. Though only in his infancy as a publisher – the firm had been founded as recently as 1928 – Gollancz was young, go-ahead, progressive in spirit and publicity-conscious. A young author signing his first contract in the early 1930s could have done a great deal worse. At the end of the month Orwell visited Gollancz at his office in Henrietta Street and received the list of proposed alterations, mostly to do with bad language and conspicuous names, but involving a rewrite of Charlie’s account of his brothel visit. As for the title, which Gollancz disliked, Orwell at this stage favoured ‘The Lady Poverty’ or ‘Lady Poverty’ after the poem by Alice Meynell.
Term ended. Despite his previous indecision, Orwell went back to Southwold. There were good reasons for this, both domestic and emotional. After years of living in rented accommodation, and benefiting from a legacy from one of Ida’s relatives, Mr and Mrs Blair had found the money (probably no more than a few hundred pounds, as it was sold for £1,100 two years after Ida’s death) to buy their own home. Montague House, at the lower end of the High Street, purchased from the great-aunt of Orwell’s tailor Mr Denny, was a decent-sized dwelling, opening on to the street but with relatively spacious rooms. As their parents were away visiting Marjorie and her husband in the north of England, Orwell and Avril had the place to themselves while they attempted to make it habitable. Avril remembered the supply of light bulbs being limited to two, taken with them as they moved from room to room. There was also a reawakening of the spirit of the ‘chemical experiments’ Orwell had undertaken with Prosper Buddicom. Unfortunately the attempt to distil rum from a kettle full of black treacle and boiling water through a length of rubber tube produced only a quantity of pure alcohol that tasted of rubber.
When not spring cleaning, Orwell worked late into the night on Burmese Days: the children of the grocer who lived on the other side of the street remembered hearing the noise of his typewriter clacking on into the darkness. But he had another quarry in view. A letter to Eleanor from mid-August shows a sharp rise in the emotional temperature. ‘Dearest Eleanor’ is enjoined not to forget Tuesday’s meeting (2.15 p.m. by Smith’s bookstall) and ‘as you love me, do not change your mind’. Though there are earlier letters to Brenda Salkeld, this is the first of his relationships to unfold on the page, so to speak, and raises the whole question of the young Orwell’s attitude to, and pursuit of, women. There is a distinct, though unspecific, memory among elderly residents of Southwold that he had the reputation of a convinced, though gauche and often unsuccessful, ladies’ man. Certainly his relationship with Mabel Fierz looks as if it went beyond the roles of patroness and protégé at one point, and there is a letter in the Orwell archive in which she refers to him as her ‘lover’. With Eleanor the situation was complicated by the presence of Dennis Collings, yet their closeness in the summer of 1932 – presumably Dennis was elsewhere – is beyond doubt. Immensely fond of Eleanor, Orwell could also be proprietorial (he complained bitterly when she had her hair permed without consulting him) and downright whimsical, suggesting that she might like to help with his research for a New Statesman article on common lodging houses by visiting a women’s doss house. Two letters from the autumn shed some light on what took place in those summer walks along the River Blyth. In one Orwell recalls ‘that day in the wood along past Blythburgh Lodge – you remember, where the deep beds of moss were – I shall always remember that, & your nice white body in the dark green moss’. Orwell’s novels reveal a fondness for plein air frolics: they probably had their origin here. The other, written in mid-October, strikes a more plaintive note. ‘It was so nice of you to say that you looked back to your days with me with pleasure. I hope you will let me make love to you again sometime, but if you don’t it doesn’t matter. I shall always be grateful to you for your kindness to me.’ By this time, as far as can be deduced, Eleanor seems to have decided that the future lay with Dennis. This would have been a rather public choice: much of Southwold was in on the dilemma. Esmé May recalled that the rivalry was common knowledge, and that Orwell was ‘not pleased, although he wouldn’t say anything about it’. Years later Eleanor’s daughter remembered her mother saying that she hadn’t married Orwell ‘because he was either too cynical or too sardonic’ and that, however fond of him she was, ‘she always knew she would marry Dennis’.
Whatever his romantic disappointments, he was keeping up a bustling work-rate. ‘Clink’ appeared in the August number of the Adelphi (the manuscript of this was lent to the Pulleyns but Orwell advised Eleanor, commissioned to retrieve it, not to show it to her parents; presumably the same went for Richard and Ida Blair), shortly to be followed by a back-scratching review of Ruth Pitter’s Persephone in Hades – the Adelphi was now publishing monthly – and the New Statesman lodging-house piece. Back in Hayes, however, the days resumed their habitual dreary cast. The rough draft of Burmese Days depressed him horribly, he told Brenda Salkeld. He was still keeping up his interest in religious matters, going to church where he beheld the original of Miss Mayfill in A Clergyman’s Daughter (‘a moribund hag who stinks of mothballs & gin, & has to be more or less carried to & from the altar at communion’). He would have to communicate himself soon, he thought, or the curate would think his absence from the altar rail strange. It seemed rather mean to go to Holy Communion when one didn’t believe, he explained, but ‘I have passed myself off for pious & there is nothing for it but to keep up the deception.’ This is an odd declaration. If Orwell was, as he puts it, shamming piety then why was he also reading Belief in God by Bishop Gore (‘seemingly quite sound in doctrine’), who had confirmed him at Eton, and taking in the Church Times?
He was keen to see Eleanor again, confiding that Dennis had invited him to Cambridge for half-term but that there were two or three people there that he was anxious not to meet. Meanwhile the publication date of what had now been formally titled Down and Out in Paris and London was set for early January. On receipt of the proofs, in mid-November, Orwell wrote a wonderfully obtuse letter to Moore. There were two sets. Which one should he correct? One for the reader’s objections and the other misprints? For safety’s sake he had begun to do both. He was serious, too, about the pseudonym. Would ‘X’ be suitable? he wondered. Moore could have told him instantly that it would not. ‘The reason I ask is if this book doesn’t flop as I anticipate, it might be better to have a pseudonym I could also use for my next one.’
The question of why and how it was that late in 1932 ‘Eric Blair’ became ‘George Orwell’ (by no means a clear-cut division, as Orwell continued to sign journalism under his real name for the next two years) has exercised literary historians for half a century. The temptation is to suppose that it represented some cataclysmic change of personality, motive and resolve, and yet the explanation is almost certainly more prosaic. Orwell wanted to publish Down and Out under an assumed name largely because he wished to spare his parents’ blushes over its relatively seedy subject matter. Additionally, he had always disliked the prim Victorian connotations of his Christian name, with its nod to Dean Farrar’s pious children’s book Eric, or Little by Little. Some time between 15 and 19 November – the dates of the two relevant letters to Moore – he devised a list of aliases: Kenneth Miles, George Orwell and H. Lewis Allways. There was also mention of ‘P.S. Burton’, a name he had occasionally used while tramping. Of these, Orwell was his favourite. Eleanor Jaques remembered him coming back from Ipswich, through which the River Orwell ran, and announcing ‘I’m going to call myself George Orwell, because it’s a good round English name.’ Richard Rees, alternatively, remembered the question of names awakening Orwell’s pronounced superstitious side. If your name appeared in print, he claimed – Rees assumed he was being serious – it might allow an enemy to get hold of it and ‘work some kind of magic on it’. Whatever the precise nature of the stimulus, some time in late November Gollancz’s compositors were instructed to place the name ‘George Orwell’ on the title page. ‘Kenneth Miles’ and ‘H. Lewis Allways’ became footnotes to literary history.
He did manage a date with Eleanor in London on the last Saturday of November, when they met up outside the Old Vic. Another plaintive note survives from four days later proposing a Sunday trip to the country and noting that no mention had been made of further sexual opportunities. Nothing could be accomplished if Dennis were in Southwold, of course, but otherwise? ‘You mustn’t if you don’t want to, but I hope you will.’ However much Eleanor may now have been keeping him at arm’s length, their relationship was still intimate. There is a possibility that she was working temporarily in London at this point – a letter of 17 December wonders whether she is selling any stockings and asks when she is ‘going down’ (i.e. returning to Southwold). A proposed walk in the country fell through but they met on 21 December outside the National Gallery and travelled back to Suffolk together two days later. Arriving at Montague House for Christmas Orwell was greeted by a stack of advance copies of Down and Out. What, he wondered naïvely to Moore, did ‘a recommendation of the Book Society’ on the cover mean? Five days later he journeyed to the Salkelds’ family home in Bedfordshire to present Brenda with her copy. The process had taken five years since his return from Burma, but it was done. He was a writer.