George Orwell: A Life in Letters (28 page)

I think the climate is doing me good. I was a little unwell last week, but on the whole feel much better and am putting on a little weight. I have done quite a lot of work. We are going to take some more photographs, including some of the house, and will send them to you when developed.
¹
Look after yourself and get well soon.

With love

Eric

[XI, 509, pp. 247–8; typewritten]

1
.
See plates 9, 10 and 11.

Eileen Blair* to Mary Common*

5 December 1938

Boîte Postale 48

Marrakech

Dear Mary,

We have just got back from a Christmas shopping. It began by my bicycle having a puncture. The next stage was my arrival in Marrakech, entirely penniless, two minutes after the bank had shut. By the time Eric arrived for lunch I had scoured the town (in which we know no one) for succour and had succeeded in cashing a cheque and in collecting a retinue of guides, porters etc., all of whom had most charmingly waited for money so long that they might be said to have earned it. After lunch we began to shop and we went on for two and a half hours, surrounded by as many as twenty men and boys, all shouting and many of them weeping. If either of us tried to speak, long before we had mentioned what we were talking about everyone present cried ‘Yes, yes.
I
understand. The others don’t understand.’ We bought a lot of things in one shop because the people there will post to England—at least so they say. The things are being sent in three lots, to three key recipients who are to distribute them. You are a key recipient, and you ought to get a dish for Mrs. Hatchett, a brass tray for Mrs. Anderson, and a ‘couverture’ for yourself (and Jack). You may of course get something quite different, or nothing at all. A porter is engaged if he succeeds in laying hands on any piece of property, and as I put each thing on its appropriate pile it was instantly seized by one to four helpers and put somewhere else, or the pieces in several different places. Supposing you do get something, there may be duty to pay. I don’t think it can be more than three or four shillings and I hope it will be nothing. We have sent a few things home already without trouble (by which I mean paying money) and they should be kind at Christmas, but it is perfectly probable that they put on for Christmas a special staff to be unkind. Anyway if there is duty of course we’ll refund it when we get back or before by proxy, but meanwhile we can’t think of any better arrangement than that Peter
¹
should pay it. Peter, like all our younger friends, is having money for Christmas because we can’t get anything here for children unless we pay about thirty francs for something that Woolworth makes better. Money means 5/–. I hope that will arrive, but naturally we are doing all this much too late. We should have done it too late in any case, but in fact Eric was ill and in bed for more than a week and as soon as he was better I had an illness I’d actually started before his but had necessarily postponed. I enjoyed the illness: I had to do all the cooking as usual but I did it in a dressing-gown and firmly carried my tray back to bed. Now we are both very well, or I remember thinking that we were very well last night. This evening we are literally swaying on our feet and the menu for supper, which once included things like a mushroom sauce and a souffle, has been revised to read: Boiled eggs, bread, butter, cheese; bread, jam, cream; raw fruit. The servant goes home after lunch. He was supposed to sleep here in a kind of stable, but he prefers to cycle the five or six miles to Marrakech morning and evening. I like it much better. There is nothing for him to do in the evening except wash up the supper things, and until they were dirty he used to sit on the kitchen step, often in tears, getting up every ten minutes or so to tidy the kitchen and put away (generally in the cellar) the things I was just about to use for the cooking. It is customary, among the French as well as among the Arabs, to get up at five o’clock at the latest, and he arrives here about seven with fresh bread and milk for breakfast. It is early enough for us. We come to understand each other fairly well, though I seldom know whether he is speaking French or Arabic and often talk to him myself in English. The weather has got quite cold, which is delightful. Indeed it’s a good climate now and I think we sha’n’t die of it, which until recently seemed probable in my case and certain
in Eric’s. His illness was a sort of necessary stage in getting better; he has been worse here than I’ve ever seen him. The country is, or was anyway, almost intolerably depressing, just not desert. Now it’s better because a few things are growing, and according to the guide books by February or so the whole land will be covered with a carpet of wild flowers. We found a wild flower the other day with great excitement and as it was a kind of lilyish thing without any stalk we suppose it was the first shred of the carpet. In our own garden we have had heartrending experiences. I suppose we have sowed about twenty packets of seed and the result is a few nasturtiums, a very few marigolds and some sweet peas. They take about three or four weeks to germinate and either grow at the same pace or don’t grow higher than half an inch. But generally of course they don’t germinate. The two goats are more satisfactory now because they went right out of milk and that saves trouble. Until recently they were milked twice a day, with Mahjroub
²
holding head and hind leg, Eric milking and me responding to cries of agony while some good cows’ milk boiled over; and the total yield of the two per day was well under half a pint. The hens however have become very productive—they’ve laid ten eggs in four days. We started with twelve hens but four died immediately, so if you like you can do the sum I was thinking of doing but find too difficult. I hope all those great hens at Wallington will be ashamed. They really ought to be laying pretty well (i.e. about four each a week) now. Last Christmas we had great numbers of eggs and sent quite a lot away, with the result that all the lucky recipients got letters from the P.M.G.
³
who regretted that a parcel addressed to them had had to be destroyed because it was offensive. I must write some Christmas letters, which is why I go on typing this. I get intolerably melancholy if I have to say exactly the same thing twice, so at about the tenth or fifteenth Christmas letter I am sending people the most surprising greetings, but by the twentieth I am resigned to intolerable melancholy and wish the rest a happy Christmas. That’s what I wish you, and a bright New Year of course. And Eric, I am sure, does the same. And we both send our love.

Yours,

Eileen.

[XI, 510, pp. 248–50; typewritten]

1
.
Son of Mary and Jack Common.

2
.
The Orwells’ servant, Mahdjoub Mahommed. For Orwell and Mahdjoub milking a goat see
plate 10.

3
.
Postmaster-General.

To Cyril Connolly*

14 December 1938

Boîte Postale 48

Marrakech

Dear Cyril,

I see your book
¹
is out. Send me a copy, won’t you? I can’t get English books here. The
New English
[
Weekly
] were going to send it to me to review, but they haven’t done so, perhaps haven’t had a copy. I have been in this place about three months, as it is supposed to do my lungs good to spend the winter here. I have less than no belief in theories about certain climates being ‘good for’ you, on enquiry they always turn out to be a racket run by tourist agencies and local doctors, but now I am here I suppose I shall stay till about April. Morocco seems to me a beastly dull country, no forests and literally no wild animals, and the people anywhere near a big town utterly debauched by the tourist racket and their poverty combined, which turn them into a race of beggars and curio-sellers. Some time next month we are going into the Atlas for a bit, which may be more interesting. I am getting on with my novel which was listed to come out in the autumn but, owing to this bloody illness, didn’t get started till two or three months ago. Of course I shall have to rush it as I must get it done in time for the spring. It’s a pity, really, as it’s a good idea, though I don’t think you’ll like it if you see it. Everything one writes now is overshadowed by this ghastly feeling that we are rushing towards a precipice and, though we shan’t actually prevent ourselves or anyone else from going over, must put up some sort of fight. I suppose actually we have about two years before the guns begin to shoot. I am looking forward to seeing your book, I gather from the reviews that a lot of it is about Eton, and it will interest me very much to see whether the impressions you retain are anything like my own. Of course you were in every way much more of a success at school than I, and my own position was complicated and in fact dominated by the fact that I had much less money than most of the people about me, but as far as externals go we had very much the same experiences from 1
912 to 1921. And our literary development impinged at certain points, too. Do you remember one or other of us getting hold of H. G. Wells’s
Country of the Blind
about 1914, at St. Cyprian’s, and being so enthralled with it that we were constantly pinching it off each other? It’s a very vivid memory of mine, stealing along the corridor at about four o’clock on a midsummer morning into the dormitory where you slept and pinching the book from beside your bed. And do you remember at about the same time my bringing back to school a copy of Compton Mackenzie’s
Sinister Street
, which you began to read, and then that filthy old sow Mrs Wilkes found out and there was a fearful row about bringing ‘a book of that kind’ (though at the time I didn’t even know what ‘sinister’ meant) into the school. I’m always meaning one of those days to write a book about St. Cyprian’s. I’ve always held that the public schools aren’t so bad, but people are wrecked by those filthy private schools long before they get to public school age.

Please give all the best to your wife. I hope I’ll see you when I get back.

Yours

Eric Blair

P.S. [
handwritten]
I suppose the Quintin Hogg
²
who won the Oxford election was the little squirt who was a fag when I left school.

[XI, 512, pp. 253–4; typewritten]

1
.
Enemies of Promise
.
Although primarily concerned with aspects of life that work against the creative writer, it also describes life at St Cyprian’s (called St Wulfric’s) and Eton. Connolly was at both schools with Orwell, who is quite frequently mentioned. Orwell and Christopher Isherwood are described ‘as the ablest exponents of the colloquial style among the young writers’. Mrs Wilkes was the headmaster’s wife.

2
.
Quintin Hogg (1907–2
001; 2nd Viscount Hailsham; peerage disclaimed for life, 1963; created life peer, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone, 1970; PC, 1956; KG, 1988; CH, 1974), lawyer, Conservative Party politician, and writer, had entered Eton shortly after Orwell. He was elected to the House of Commons for Oxford City in 1
938. Edward Hulton’s
Picture Post
reported that Hogg’s platform was ‘Unity: solid behind Chamberlain.’

Eileen* to Norah Myles*

14–17 Dec 1938

Boîte Postale 48

Marrakech

[
no salutation
]

I know my dear girl will receive a New Year Gift just as gladly as she would have done a Xmas Present. Whether she will guess what to do with it afterwards I do not know. They say it’s to put money in & indeed if one does that it sits erect in an appealing way. But that’s just as you like dear. Only I would like to hope that it will be full of money all through 1939 & that you will have other riches too, the better kind.

The news is that I feel very happy now. So far as I can judge the happiness is the direct result of yesterday’s news, which was a) that Mr Blair is dying of cancer, b) that Gwen’s baby Laurence
¹
had to be taken to Great Ormond Street (he is 4½ weeks old, or 5), c) that George Kopp* proposes to come & stay with us in Morocco (he has no money & we had heard the day before by cable that he was out of jail & Spain;
²
Eric’s reaction to the cable was that George must stay with us & his reaction to George’s letter announcing his arrival is that he must
not
stay with us, but I think the solution may be that George won’t find anyone to lend him the necessary money). Eric however is better. I protested a lot about coming here at the beginning of September & I like to be right but I did feel too right. The weather was practically intolerable. I had a temperature of 102 before I’d been in the place twenty-four hours & Eric, without any actual crisis, lost 9lbs in the first month & coughed all day & particularly all night so that we didn’t get thirty minutes’ consecutive rest until November. He has put on about five of the pounds again now & doesn’t cough much (though still more than in England) so I think he may not be much worse at the end of the
winter abroad than he was at the beginning. I expect his life has been shortened by another year or two but all the totalitarians make that irrelevant. One reason for my unwillingness to come when we did was that I’d made all the arrangements to come to Bristol, bringing Marx the poodle (who is wintering with Eric’s sister there) but staying with you. Of course you hadn’t heard but you know how pleased you would have been. We were hurled out of the country largely because Eric defied brother Eric to the extent of going to see his father who was already ill though cancer hadn’t been thought of. Brother Eric was unable to think of any more lies about the disease (they’d kept him in Preston Hall on a firm and constantly repeated diagnosis of phthisis for two months after they knew he hadn’t got it & I discovered in the end that on the very first X-rays the best opinions were against even a provisional diagnosis of phthisis) so turned his attention to Morocco. Of course we were silly to come but I found it impossible to refuse & Eric felt that he was under an obligation though he constantly & justly complains that by a quite deliberate campaign of lying he is in debt for the first time in his life
³
& has wasted practically a year out of the very few in which he can expect to function. However, now that we’re hardened to the general frightfulness of the country we’re quite enjoying it & Eric is writing a book that pleases both of us very much.
⁴
And in a way I have forgiven Brother Eric who can’t help being a Nature’s Fascist & indeed is upset by this fact which he realises.
⁵