The Last Man in Europe

Hairmyres Hospital, February. In the hospital ward the lights burned all night. He had been awakened for his midnight injection: half a milligram, three times a day. The task was performed by nurses, but he suspected it was Dick directing his pain. He seldom saw him, except on his weekly rounds, but always there was the feeling he was lurking just out of sight, making all the important decisions: when he could sleep, when he should wake, when he could work – always Dick, his oppressor, his rescuer, the reminder of his mortality.

He couldn’t get back to sleep so he switched on the bedside lamp, thinking he may as well do his correspondence while Dick wasn’t around to tell him to stop; the nurses knew not to deal with him alone. He opened a letter from Warburg. Cheered that you’re writing for Astor … nothing to really consult you about … but when are you likely to be out of hospital? He could just as well have telegrammed WHERE IS MY BLOODY NOVEL? Where indeed? Orwell contemplated the manuscript – a large, unruly wad which he could see sitting on top of the wardrobe – but he knew that beginning it again right now was impossible.

He reached over with his left hand and took up the tablet of paper from the bedside table, an effort that pained him, and the new biro that Astor had brought him as a gift. Both of them he placed on the meal tray he used as a writing desk. He arranged the tablet so that it lay under the fingers of his plastered right arm, and was able to write legibly enough.

Fred,

Thanks so much for your letter. As you inferred, my beginning to do articles in the Observer is a sign of partial revival, though even that is an effort, especially as I now have my right arm in plaster. I can’t attempt any serious work while I am like this (1½ stone underweight) but I like to do a little to keep my hand in & incidentally earn some money. I’ve been definitely ill since about October, and really, I think, since the beginning of 1947. I believe that frightful winter in London started it off. I didn’t really feel well at all last year except during that hot period in the summer. Before taking to my bed I had finished the rough draft of my novel all save the last few hundred words, and if I had been well I might have finished it about May. If I’m well and out of here by June I might just finish the novel by the end of the year – I don’t know. It’s just a ghastly mess as it stands, but the idea is so good that I could not possibly abandon it.

That would have to do to keep Warburg at bay while the streptomycin was doing its magic. It seemed to be working, as he felt slightly better, although his throat was painfully sore. Dick had even told him his latest sputum sample had come up negative. Making an effort, finally, to lie flat on his back and keep movement to a minimum, he drifted off to sleep, regaining consciousness only when a blue-uniformed nurse arrived at his bedside to give him his next dose of the drug.

He woke with blood on his lips. In fact, the blood, which had been appearing for some days in tiny blisters on his lips and inside his mouth, had increased dramatically in the night and dried in his sleep, gluing his mouth shut. He found the development vaguely terrifying, as did the staff, who had never seen such a thing before. The nurse gently drizzled his lips with warm water to prise them apart. Something was going wrong. They summoned Dick.

‘It’s just a mild allergic reaction,’ the surgeon assured him, not wholly convincingly. ‘Nothing that should stop us continuing the treatment.’

‘Rather like sinking the ship to kill the rats, don’t you think?’ His voice was rasp-like, his throat now frightfully painful.

He watched as the nurse broke a fresh ampoule and drew back the plunger of a syringe. The injections had to be intramuscular, and as the needle jerked into his arm and plunged deep into his wasting flesh, he had the alarming sensation of it scraping his bone.

As the agonising procedure continued, Dick talked to him as a form of distraction. ‘Do you have any questions? You can ask me anything you like.’

‘When is my next diaphragm refill?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘When can I get out of bed?’

‘Probably not for some time yet.’

‘Can I have my typewriter back?’

‘If you keep showing improvement.’

‘How long have I got to live?’

There was a hesitation – not a long one, but long enough for him to know Dick was dissembling. The nurse flinched perceptibly, and chose that moment to withdraw the needle from his arm and place it, with its bloodied tip, in a kidney dish held by a colleague. ‘Everything depends on you,’ the doctor said. ‘You could go on for years and years, although it might be that this treatment has to be repeated once or even twice more before you are fully cured. The possibilities are dictated by several factors, none of which can be calculated with any accuracy.’

These were meaningless imprecisions, which Orwell knew to be the same thing as lies. The only conclusion he could draw was that the end might come suddenly and unexpectedly.

‘What I can say with certainty is that with reduced respiratory capacity you’re likely to be what we call “a good chronic”. No more running around the Scottish Isles.’

‘Will I be able to write, as a good chronic?’

‘Certainly.’

Being a ‘good chronic’ – what would it mean? A lie-in every morning, the Times crossword over his morning coffee, and two to three hours of gentle writing after lunch. Perhaps a short stroll around the garden, before whiling away the late afternoon drinking gin and playing chess with Rees, or Snakes and Ladders with Ricky.

Different visions, though, began to enter his night-time thoughts. The gentle, natural dreams of his past had been replaced by hallucinatory affairs that took place in some indefinable moment in the future. In these, he had been made right again and was writing the novel out in his mind, with incredible lucidity. So real had it seemed that he could almost remember it word-for-word when he woke, but could never raise the energy to write it all down. Later he saw that his thoughts had been nothing but the useless expenditure of mental energy. It was only when some pleasant but impossible element added itself into his dreams – being reunited with an older, greyer, thicker-set Eileen, or watching Ricky take his own son fishing in the Golden Country – that his mind realised it was fantasising. He would awake to find an ampoule of the drug next to its syringe in the metal kidney dish sitting coldly beside him.

Each morning he found that the small blisters in his mouth and on his lips had spread even further down his throat, some becoming painful ulcers that prevented him from eating normal food. Annoyingly, his fingernails had become brittle, splitting on the slightest impact and making it difficult to write, even though Dick had removed his arm from the plaster cast. They were letting him smoke, which Dick thought helped him cough the phlegm out of his airways.

This morning, unusually, Dick had come to supervise the nurse giving his injection. It had become a tricky business. His withered muscles needed careful selecting before the needle could be inserted, and it seemed not a square inch of him had been left un-jabbed. Dick asked Orwell to hold out his palm, and must have been considering injecting him there, when he seemed to reach a decision. ‘I think the strepto’s done its job.’

‘Do you think I’m cured?’

Dick turned to the patient, his manner becoming less severe; friendly, even. ‘Well, we’ve given the bacilli a decent knock, that’s for sure. The rest is up to nature.’ He guessed the next question. ‘I think you can begin to write again, but start gently. Finishing your novel is as good a goal as any. Having something to occupy you in your recovery may do you good.’

Orwell smiled.

‘By the way,’ Dick said. ‘We’ve got a bit of the drug left over. Do you mind if we give it to some younger patients? They’re the wives of three of my colleagues – young mothers.’

‘Go ahead.’

He tried to fill the following days with writing, but it was useless. It was as if his treatment had induced a deterioration inside his skull, making the act of inventing prose irksome. Maybe it was another lingering side effect of the drug. His mind seemed normal but revealed its helplessness whenever he tried to put anything down on paper; whatever he attempted to write came out sounding stupid and obvious, despite the good ideas behind it. Even when he could pound out a decent sentence, stringing more than two or three together seemed impossible.

The pumping of nitrogen into his diaphragm continued, but not as often; it was interesting what one found normal after a while. The secret to making it bearable was acceptance – an act of self-deception that convinced you that you could endure it. It was rather like drifting with a current instead of swimming against it in some self-defeating gesture of defiance.

A few days later he resolved to try again. The pen felt fat and clumsy in his fingers, the ends of which had become soft and spongy because of his deteriorated nails. People underestimated the importance of fingernails, he thought; perhaps that was why torturers always pulled them out. He didn’t know quite where to begin, and instead of purposeful work found that after half an hour all he had done was jot down in large capitals some random slogans from the book that had come into his head:

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

Underneath it:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then beneath that:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

And after that:

WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE; WHO CONTROLS THE PRESENT CONTROLS THE PAST

It occurred to him that he was good at slogans, remembering SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS. He could have had a decent career in advertising, rattling the spoon in a swill bucket for a good salary and a nice house in the suburbs – the choice Gordon and Rosemary had made in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. If he had, he figured, there would have been no Wigan, no Spain and possibly no illness … But the very thought filled him with the urge to rebel. He started scribbling compulsively, almost unthinkingly –

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

– hoping that something else would come into his mind, but nothing did. He calmed down and tried to begin again.

Reading it over, he saw that large chunks of the book were little more than notes; the scenes seemed like disparate episodes, political ideas, rather than parts of a coherent story. The torture scenes, the concluding chapter in the Chestnut Tree Café, even Goldstein’s Testament – they were all terribly underdone. Clearly, he had made a hash of it. Even should he live, how could he ever make it as good as he wanted, given how addled his mind was? If only he hadn’t got sick, how much better it would have been.

He put down the typescript, picked up his writing tablet and jotted down a note to Rees, his literary executor, instructing him to destroy the novel should anything happen to him before he could complete it. He sank back onto the bed and lit another cigarette, which induced an immediate coughing fit.

May. How many days had he been at the hospital? One hundred and twenty? One hundred and fifty perhaps. And how long since they had finished the painful injections of streptomycin? Twenty or thirty days, he thought. His throat and mouth had cleared and the keenness of his mind was slowly returning. They had even given him back his typewriter, although using it was still beyond him; but, his fingernails having partially grown back and the dexterity having returned to his fingers, he could manipulate a pen sufficiently well to complete whole pages. He felt his physical and mental recovery was almost complete.

Lying propped up in bed, pen and manuscript in hand, he heard a familiar heavy tramp of feet in the corridor. Dick entered, followed by a white-coated male attendant who was wheeling an unusually high-backed bath chair. ‘Get up, Mr Blair,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s time to see if we’ve really cured you.’

Once he was sitting upright, Dick bent down to him. ‘How’s your throat feeling?’

‘Completely healed, I think. No soreness at all.’

Dick produced a small wooden paddle and a tiny medical torch, and held down Orwell’s tongue while he peered down his throat. ‘Say ah.’

He did so, feebly.

‘Yes, looks back to normal.’ Dick nodded to the assistant. ‘Theatre,’ he said.

The room was white-tiled, like the one in which he had his refills, but smaller; it was a place, he figured, for messy procedures not possible in a normal hospital room. The nature of the chair now became apparent. A nurse produced a leather cap attached to a strap, which clamped his head tight to the high headrest at an angle that left him looking at the ceiling. ‘We have to keep your head entirely still, Mr Blair,’ she said, seeing a look of terror emerging on his face.

‘We just need to get a steady look,’ Dick added. ‘And keep your air passages open.’

The nurse put a wide bit between his teeth to stop him from closing his jaws. Unable to swivel his head, he could only see as much as his peripheral vision would allow. It was similar to how they arranged him for his refills, but as he was not lying on an operating table, it seemed somehow more chilling. Out of the corner of his right eye he could see Dick fiddling with a polished metal instrument about two feet long. It had an eyepiece at one end and a lens at the other; it looked like a cross between a microscope and a cattle prod. He quickly grasped its purpose: they were going to insert it down his throat and look inside his lungs. He had never in his life – not even in Spain when caught unexpectedly that morning by the sun rising in no-man’s-land – felt so hopeless and so exposed.

The attendant held his head tightly from behind, while the nurse stood by with a large swab and another of the hated kidney dishes – he always associated the evil objects with pain. ‘In case you need to vomit,’ she said.

‘Open,’ said Dick.

The simple act of opening his mouth at this angle forced him to gag. It was a horror of horrors. Until then he had submitted to every treatment they had forced upon him, but now he had to struggle against his own body. As the probe entered his mouth and began sliding down his throat, he began screaming inside, a sort of silent rage against everything that had brought him to this point: the obtuseness that had seen him go out tramping, the curiosity that led him to those unsanitary lodging houses in the north, the ambition that sent him to the freezing dugouts of the Catalonian front line. He would go back, undo it all, betray the causes they had served, anything, anything, just to escape this horror and be cured.

He could feel the cold metal against the insides of his throat, and rivulets of sweat running down from the now slimy leather cap and dripping from his jaw. Slowly, the probe was now drawn upwards, but the relief he felt at its emergence was crushed straight away by the feeling of it descending into his other lung. Would it never end?

When the probe finally emerged to be wiped on a towel, Dick turned to him again. ‘Not perfect, Mr Blair, but the lesions seem to be healing. With luck you may indeed be cured.’

June. He was lying awake, listening to the general hum of the hospital. Simultaneously he could hear the following: the blaring of a radio, the tinkling of a gramophone, a vacuum cleaner, an orderly singing, someone hammering, the usual clatter of boots and trolleys, running taps, people coughing and the opening and shutting of doors. Outside were the cries of rooks and the cackling of hens. In the same way a song could conjure up ancient memories, the noises of the hospital reminded him of those photographs in the Times of Yagoda, Rykoff and Bukharin. It stimulated an urge to write.

His life had become like this: an alternating round of drifting sleep followed by periods of lucidity in which he was able to rework the novel decisively, filling the margins with changes, sometimes adding whole new pages. He would wake in the middle of the night and happily read or work, then find himself sleeping half the day under the full glare of sunlight – something he was capable of doing for the first time in his life.

This morning, although wide awake, he found it impossible to concentrate. He needed a wash and a shave, and had had enough of the disgusting bedpan; he resolved to get up and use a proper bathroom, which the doctor had finally given him permission to do. He hadn’t been out of his room for weeks, his greatest exertion being to sit in the bedside chair and read the newspapers. Pyjamas were still rationed after all these years, and the ones he had on, which had been endlessly patched by Avril, now sported a variety of buttons; the pants were held up by an ill-matching length of cord. Carefully he bent down to put on his well-worn slippers, and noticed the slowness and stiffness of his movements.

Shuffling out of his room, he made the short distance to the bathroom, pushed the swing-door open with moderate difficulty and entered the space, which was cooler for its tiled floor and profusion of metal and porcelain fittings. The cubicle he wanted, which offered greater privacy, was at the end. Making his way towards it, he noticed that someone else was in the room, and moving towards him slowly. He then realised he had left on his new reading glasses, and after a few moments registered that he was in fact approaching a full-length mirror.

He stopped and removed the spectacles. The image ahead frightened him, for it was almost unrecognisable as himself. A once tall figure, now bowed and stooping, stood shakily and looked directly at him through watery eyes, scanning him up and down. There was sweat on the man’s forehead, from which skin was flaking off. A streak of obscenely grey hair ran across the top of his scalp. He had never had more than the odd grey hair before – neither for that matter had Eileen – and he raised his hand to touch it. Could it be his own? It certainly hadn’t been there a few weeks before. He tugged gently and was shocked when a tuft of it came out easily in his hand, like a ball of fluff plucked from the surface of an old blanket; disgusted, he dropped it and watched it waft to the floor.

He looked back to the mirror. From his gaunt face, scarred around the mouth from the recent blistering, protruded the only part of him that had been improved: his teeth. Perhaps the most horrible thing of all was the emaciation of his body, parts of which poked through his thin pyjamas at sharp angles, making him look like one of those anatomy class skeletons they had once dressed in the master’s gown and mortar at school. He could make out that his knees were wider than his thighs, and, further up, that his stomach – now pumped up after his recent refill – protruded well beyond the caved-in barrel of his chest. It struck him that, in his prime, he could have snapped this new version of himself in two with little effort.

Here, then, stood the body of what looked like a sixty-year-old man suffering from some malignant disease. He found it hard to believe that this scarecrow was having the same thoughts that were now running through his own mind. He was just a month or two shy of his forty-fifth birthday. How long he had left to live he didn’t know, but he knew now with certainty that time was running out.

He returned to bed and threw himself into amending the typescript. As with any book, it was only when you were well through it that you knew what it was really about. There was so much he had yet to get clear in his mind. For whom was he writing it? The future, certainly; he’d known that from the start. But whose future? He turned to the page where Winston started his diary.

April 4th, 1980.

He now felt unsure about the date. Too far into the future and it would be science fiction, like Wells’ stories, and of literary interest only; too close to today and it would be dismissed as propaganda. It wasn’t so simple, this business of communicating with the future; a possible future, as opposed to a fantastic one, had to be pitched carefully.

He had originally planned for Winston, who had been born in 1940 – the year of the battle of Airstrip One and the seizure of power by Ingsoc – to be thirty-nine or forty years old at the novel’s opening. It was the age he had been when he conceived of it – the age at which one was still young enough to have hope for the future, but realistic enough to accept that one’s fate was already largely settled. But now 1980 seemed too close. It was just thirty-two years into the future, and he could remember that far back – when he was still at Eton – as if it were yesterday. It wasn’t far enough.

He roused himself, sat up straighter, picked up the biro and changed it:

April 4th, 1982.

That sounded better. But no sooner had he written the new date than a sense of complete helplessness overcame him. The date meant nothing. He had lost his train of thought. Perhaps the treatment hadn’t just tired him out but had made something happen inside his head; sometimes it felt like there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.

Defeated, he looked at the framed picture of his son in Islington, taken when the boy was just two years old. For some months now they had stopped Richard from seeing him, as a precautionary measure, and before that he’d had to push the boy away when he tried to climb on the bed and show him his toys, including the children’s typewriter he had got for Christmas.

What sort of life, he wondered, could the boy look forward to? Certainly a better life than those living under Stalin’s gaze could ever expect. Britain may have ended the war more measured and regimented than before, but there were no torture cellars, no rubber truncheons, no goose-stepping political armies stamping on people’s faces, no June purges, no holding camps full of desperate, fearful refugees, no mass graves. In Britain, basic freedoms seemed safe for now, but their survival had been a close-run thing. How long, he wondered, could they last?

He looked at Richard’s photograph again. Would the boy, who like Winston Smith was born in 1944, know what freedom meant when he too turned forty? Would Richard’s generation know how their parents had taken a passably human world and turned it into a nightmare? Would they recognise the danger signs if ever they returned?

Orwell picked up the biro again. His mind hovered for a moment around the doubtful date on the page, before he scratched over it:

April 4th, 1984.