The Orwell Tour E-Book

Oliver Lewis

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 437

Beschreibung

A travelogue exploring the life and work of George Orwell through the places he lived, worked and wrote Following in the footsteps of his literary hero, researcher and historian Oliver Lewis set out to visit all the places to have inspired and been lived in by George Orwell. Over three years he travelled from Wigan to Catalonia, Paris to Motihari, Marrakesh to Eton, and in each location explored both how Orwell experienced the place, and how the place now remembers him as a literary icon. Beginning in Northern India, where Orwell was born in 1903, and ending in the Oxfordshire village of Sutton Courtenay, where he was laid to rest in 1950, The Orwell Tour offers an accessible and informative new biography of Orwell through the lens of place.

Leseprobe

Published in the UK in 2023

by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-78578-961-8

eBook: 978-1-78578-962-5

Text copyright © 2023 Roger Oliver Lewis

Map illustrations © 2023 Brittany Davies Illustration

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Cheltenham by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK

For my father

Contents

Introduction

Note to readers

List of Orwell’s work referenced

Motihari, State of Bihar, India

Birth (1903–4)

Henley-on-Thames, Berkshire, England

A boy standing on his head 1904–17)

Eton College, Berkshire, England

The greatest Old Etonian (1917–21)

Myanmar (Burma)

A smoking room story (1922–7)

Southwold, Suffolk, England

Church and state (1927; 1929–32)

Paris, France

A tale of two cities (1928–9)

Hayes, Middlesex, England

Schoolmaster (1932–3)

Hampstead, London, England

Booklover (1934–5)

Wallington, Hertfordshire, England

Animal farm (1936–45)

Wigan, Lancashire, England

Down and out (1936)

Catalonia, Spain

Boat to Bilbao (1936–7)

Marrakech, Morocco

Pink city (1938–9)

Fitzrovia, London, England

Bombs, and the BBC (1939–45)

Jura, Argyllshire, Scotland

An extremely un-getatable place (1945–9)

Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, England

Standing alone in every sense (1950)

Further reading

Permissions

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The concept for this book came in the way any good idea should; not planned nor by design, but out of circumstance. I can’t remember how I first came across George Orwell or his works. I have a hazy – very hazy – recollection of watching the film of Nineteen Eighty-Four aged five or six. George Orwell was my father’s favourite author. He was introduced to Orwell by his father, my grandfather, who I knew until I was 26 when he died in his 109th year. He was born in 1903, the same year as Eric Blair.

I was fortunate as a budding historian to spend many hours with my grandfather towards the end of his life. He told me so much about the history of the 20th century, especially the first half, I feel almost as if I lived through it. My real enthusiasm for Orwell, which began properly in May 2015, post-dated my grandfather’s death. It is a great regret to me that I never had the opportunity to broach Orwell with him, knowing that it probably would have led to a week’s worth of discussion. In his library, much of which was acquired in the 1930s and 1940s when he read Economic History at the London School of Economics, were copies of Animal Farm and The English People.

The first Orwell work I read was Animal Farm, when I was around thirteen. After that I probably read most of the rest of his work over the course of the next ten years. I took a nice copy of Burmese Days with me on my year out in India after I left school, reading it on an enjoyably long sleeper train journey from Mumbai to Jaipur. I sent the copy back home, but unfortunately India Post did not deliver. The Collected Essays I read during a visit to California to stay with a friend from university, and I read one essay after another in between cycling trips across the Golden Gate Bridge and road trips to Yosemite National Park and Bodega Bay. Every time I re-read Orwell’s work I am left with a re-energised perspective of it, with something new which I was not aware of on the first or second reading. Connecting with his work is to create a life-long partnership between reader and writer.

When I first set out on The Orwell Tour I had no plan for what I would do or write about. I had resigned from my monotonous job in London to commence a master’s degree in History, and planned a summer of enjoyment free from the shackles of the daily commute. I had arranged to visit Myanmar with a friend in the September, and prior to that, in the July, a week-long visit to some friends who own a small Scottish island close to the isle of Jura, where Orwell had written Nineteen Eighty-Four. My best friend from university is from Suffolk, and his parents had invited me to stay in August, close to Southwold, where Orwell and his parents lived in the late 1920s. As I was considering the summer that was approaching, it suddenly dawned on me that each of these places had close association with George Orwell. What if I visited his house in each location, and wrote about it? A quick check revealed no one had done such a journey before. I rationalised that perhaps it was time that someone did.

I was fulfilling a need somewhere within me to experience the very many places which shaped Orwell and his writing. I wanted to present them to readers who may not have had the opportunity, may indeed never have the opportunity, to undertake the journeys themselves. Place, as numerous biographers have concluded, was incredibly important to a man who delayed ‘settling down’ for as long as he could. Even then, the place of his choosing was an island in the Hebrides where he would only spend half the year, a good 48-hour journey from London in 1946.

When one immerses oneself in a project for two and more years, it is amusing how alert the senses become to the subject in question. There can be no doubt that George Orwell and ‘Orwelliana’ are a literary focal point of our age, and that his works have appeal and reference across social groups and racial or linguistic divides. I noted down every so often the situations in which I would see or overhear references to Orwell: at work, I was once sitting across from two colleagues discussing communication to other departments, when one of them said: ‘This will get the message across, without being Big Brother.’ His phrases have entered modern lexicology, frequently used to market new ideas or concepts in the media. BBC Radio Four, I noticed mid-way through my research, were exploring the lives of commuting cyclists using the hashtag ‘#FourWheelsGoodTwoWheelsBetter’, an adaptation of a slogan from Animal Farm. Best of all was one morning when I opened the Financial Times to spot each of the newspaper’s articles on the comments page separately making one or more references to Orwell. The more alert I was, the clearer it became to me that people value and respect George Orwell in a way that does not seem to be replicated with other writers. It seems to me that he speaks so truthfully and honestly that generation after generation of readers are attracted to his integrity. He communicates complicated ideas so coherently that every generation that passes is introduced to, and recognises, his genius.

The meticulous recording of observation was Orwell’s undoubted strength, putting him into a class of his own among all 20th-century writers and a close second to Dickens – whom he admired greatly – as Britain’s pre-eminent author in industrialised times. My interest in Orwell only grew as I read more of his work: I am seldom able to find anything he wrote with which I can find serious disagreement. Indeed, much of the logic he applied to so vast an array of subjects or problems remains as valid today as it was 80 or 90 years ago, which I might suggest is why his writing remains so popular.

This book is not intended to be a biography of Orwell – there is no shortage of them – nor was it ever intended to be a book at all really, since each visit was made separately, and not even in chronological order. It is not meant to be academic; there are lots of academic books on Orwell if that is what a reader is after. Instead, it is a reflection on a series of visits to those places that inspired Orwell, how they may have shaped him, and how they appear to the 21st century almost 70 years after his premature death, from tuberculosis, at the age of 46. A list of his novels, essays and journalism referenced in the text appears in the frontispiece. I hope, if only in a small way, it opens up the canon of Orwell’s work to a new generation of readers, and refreshes his life and times for those already familiar with his work.

Oliver Lewis

Montgomery, August 2022

Note to readers

Without wishing to confuse readers, there are two points of style that require explanation. The first is that George Orwell’s real name was of course ‘Eric Blair’, and he did not adopt the former consistently until well into the 1930s. I debated whether to use one or the other, or to switch half-way through, but thought it best to adopt ‘George Orwell’ or ‘Orwell’ consistently. In the earlier chapters, exploring Orwell’s childhood and teenage years, there may be occasional references to ‘Eric’ or ‘Blair’ where I thought this made sense. Where there are references to original texts – diaries, letters and such like – the original ‘Eric’ or ‘George’ has been retained.

Where possible, i.e. within Britain and Europe, I was accompanied on my travels by my springer spaniel. Confusingly, and named long before I began my three-year tryst with Orwell’s life and his work, he is also called George. I hope it is clear where I am referencing George the dog, rather than Orwell, the writer, but for the avoidance of doubt, any ‘present tense’ references to a ‘George’ will be about my springer and not George Orwell. Given the long and widespread range of travel, from among Scottish Islands to the plains of Spain, I am confident he enjoyed his participation in The Orwell Tour as much as I did.

List of Orwell’s work referenced

I have tried to incorporate into each chapter an exploration of the works associated with each place; for instance, discussing Burmese Days in the context of my visit to Myanmar. This will inevitably involve a certain degree of ‘book spoiling’ for which readers are forewarned. The below is a list of Orwell’s non-fiction books, novels, essays and journalism in the order in which they are referenced.

Animal Farm

‘The English People’

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Burmese Days

‘Shooting an Elephant’

‘A Hanging’

‘In Defence of English Cooking’

‘Reflections on Gandhi’

‘Such, Such Were the Joys’

Coming up for Air

‘My Country, Right or Left’

‘Why I Write’

A Clergyman’s Daughter

Down and Out in Paris and London

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

The Road to Wigan Pier

‘Books v. Cigarettes’

‘England Your England’

‘Boys’ Weeklies’

‘How the Poor Die’

‘Bookshop Memories’

‘Inside the Whale’

‘Charles Dickens’

‘Money and Guns’

Homage to Catalonia

‘The Moon Under Water’

‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’

‘Marrakech’

‘A Nice Cup of Tea’

Talking to India

Motihari, State of Bihar, India

Birth (1903–4)

It comes as a surprise to many that George Orwell was born in India. For the most part, the general public’s exposure to Orwell is strongly ‘English’ in cultural terms; Animal Farm an allegorical fairy tale of the Russian Revolution based on an English farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four a terrifying dystopia of a chillingly totalitarian England of the future. Both works feature in the UK school curriculum, and in the educational programmes of many other countries besides. They are two of the bestselling books in history. Animal Farm begins with the machinations of a working English farm and the full repertoire of farm animals found there – cows, sheep, pigs, horses, goats, dogs, geese. The livestock eventually rebel, overthrowing their farmer in a revolution to apparently seize control of the assets of the farm for the betterment of all animals. Nineteen Eighty-Fourexplores the experiences of a man – Winston Smith – who works in the dystopian government’s censoring department. Beginning to question his purpose in this society of total control over thought and movement, he finds himself censored and ultimately erased.

India is a long way from both and thus, for many, this lanky, intelligent thinker is perhaps best linked by memory to London, Big Brother or the better-known characters of Animal Farm, such as Snowball. Of course, for those better acquainted with his work, their knowledge will extend to exotic descriptions of the jungle or a bazaar from Burmese Days; or his essays ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’. Some might have a hazy memory that he was once a policeman in Burma, but the majority may be stumped when it comes to what took him there.

Orwell belonged to a now-vanished class of British society, generations of families that built their wealth and networks on the colonial relationship between Britain and India. India was obviously not the only possible destination for colonial service, but it was one in which a large cadre in British society came to specialise. The British population of India, at its greatest 160,000, was drawn largely from the upper-middle and upper classes – a group big enough to influence the English language with the introduction of words from Hindi including bungalow, pyjamas and hoity-toity.

Much of the Anglo-Indian tradition vanished when Britain withdrew from the subcontinent over a ten-year period, between India’s independence as a dominion in 1947 and Pakistan becoming a republic in 1956. The families sold their assets, returned and pursued new opportunities at home. Gradually the economic and political importance of India for Britain declined. For anyone born after 1970 it is hard to imagine this 300-year association existed at all, although it could be inferred from Britain’s well-established Indian communities.

Orwell coming from an ‘Anglo-Indian’ family, and having experienced the Raj at first hand as a police officer, had a formative effect. He resented the Blair family’s relatively low status in the hierarchy of the administration of India, which was always mid-ranking in a social group obsessed with status, and he came to loathe the values of British India. Widespread snobbery and prejudice towards Indians, coupled with exposure to the iron rod of the Raj as seen from the perspective of the policeman’s truncheon, turned him towards support for Indian independence.

Eric Arthur Blair was born in a remote region in the far north of British India on 25 June 1903. Motihari, where his father Richard was stationed as an agent in the Opium Department of the Government of India, was then in the ‘Bengal Presidency’, a huge swathe of the north-east administered from Calcutta. Close to the border with Nepal, Motihari’s primary economic value was the opium crop.

The Blairs’ involvement in this dark episode of British history might be another revelation for fans of Orwell. Reaching further back, to the late-18th and early-19th century, Orwell’s paternal great-grandfathers derived immense prosperity from the slave trade, banking with Coutts Bank, although over the decades the wealth seems to have been frittered away as estates and assets were split between siblings. On his mother’s side, the Limouzin family was Anglo-French, with very profitable business ventures in lower Burma. Orwell’s mother Ida, like his father, was thus ‘all-the-Raj’ too, and it was in a hill station in British India where they met and were married.

The closest international airport to Motihari is Kathmandu in Nepal, to which I flew to avoid a convoluted journey from an Indian city to the place of Orwell’s birth. The descent to the border with India from Kathmandu was, however, a long overnight ordeal and not one I should ever wish to repeat. The ‘deluxe’, twelve-hour bus journey was anything but. As I boarded and found my seat, I noted my window was glassless. Instead a large, flattened cardboard box had been inserted to fill the void, a welcome which immediately flattened my enthusiasm. Once I had sat down, I quickly fiddled with the overhead light panel. Easily surpassing the wretchedness of my cardboard window, a cloud of granular dust descended onto my face, my squinting eyes and perplexed face uncertain of what to do next.

There was no sleep. It was as if the passengers were coins in a tin can being rattled, thrown up and down and side to side, over a very bumpy descent along the Kathmandu valley into India. The few times I did drop off were disrupted by some dramatic moment in the raucous Bollywood film screened for the benefit of my fellow passengers. With an abrupt jolt at 4am, about a kilometre from the Indian border, all of us disembarked. Half-conscious I stumbled onto a tonga*, which wheeled slowly through the eerily un-busy streets of Birgunj, a dusty, unloved border town.

I was welcomed warmly at the Nepalese border post which, I noted after casting my eyes over the ‘Foreigner Registration’ book as I entered my details, receives three to four non-Nepalese/non-Indian nationals a month. The border itself is accessed via an enormous gate, the largest I have seen at a border anywhere. It resembles a blown-up version of the white picket fences at a British railway crossing, hung by two gigantic girders which are pulled up or down by a lever mechanism which requires two men to operate. It is the sort of quirky improvisation to be found all over the sub-continent, just one of the reasons travel there is so joyous.

In the ‘no-man’s land’ crossing the border between India and Nepal, fires were smouldering on either side of a long, whitewashed bridge. Faint shades of purple in the sky suggested the sun was waking the day, as fruit bats with wingspans the length of my arms streaked between the silhouettes of a palm tree or two. On the Indian side, I entered the small border post, relieved to be at the mercy of the Government of India’s vast bureaucracy. There is something comforting about its management of information, valued for its sake rather than as some means to another end.

The other benefit of being in India was access at long last to a railway, but I reached the station only to be told the next train to Motihari was not until 3pm and I would be better off taking a bus. The town on the Indian side of the border, Raxaul, is dusty and nondescript. As I clambered over the railway sleepers of the track leading in the direction of the bus station, I saw two dogs gnawing either end of the leg of another dog, whose now legless torso was strewn to one side of the line. I fast concluded this was a place I wanted to leave.

So I was back on a bus, but this time travelling over the Bihari plains; vast expanses of dry land, well-irrigated in part but demarcated by long stretches of sun-baked soil whose appearance had the effect of making my mouth feel parched. As the sun rose, I felt more and more uncomfortable, caked in dust from head to toe and perspiring so much as to feel sticky. I was queasy, longing for a shower and sustenance in somewhere with the bright lights of Delhi or Calcutta, wondering what on earth I was doing there as the engine ground down hard over the next mud-hole the bus had driven into. More dust cascaded into the chassis. A cloud obscured anything resembling a view.

On arrival in Motihari, I found it amusing to think that the Orwell of 1930s London – cold, grey, smoggy – first opened his eyes in this backwater-of-a-backwater in the outer extremities of India. I felt as if I was at the penultimate stop on a journey to the end of the world, a last chance saloon. The streets were chaotic in the way only provincial Indian towns can be; cows in the middle of the road; pigs scoffing here and there; dogs darting about. Cars and tongas skated around as if on ice, on either side framed by a discordant medley of shops, stalls and hawkers, all of which seem to be selling the same thing: fruit or plastic chairs in garish colours, marine blue to lipstick pink.

I searched hard for a hotel. Eventually I found what looked like something dropped from a tornado which had ripped through Las Vegas and picked up a concrete, lime-green-painted monstrosity, then landed it in the middle of Bihar. It was clearly selling its services to a domestic audience since, scanning down the list of guests, as I always do when I register in a hotel, I noticed all had paid as little as 100 rupees a night. The hotel owner had pre-inserted 600 rupees by my name, discrimination I had neither the will nor the inclination to challenge.

My room was at the end of a long, open-air walkway, onto which the lime-green doors of each room opened. After un-padlocking I gained the impression the room had not been let for some time. The shutters of the windows were closed tight, daylight filtering through and striking the floor-to-ceiling mirror ahead of me. Turning the light switch, which shot out sparks in the gloom, I saw thousands of mosquitos drifting effortlessly around the room, gliding like jumbo jets set down to land. I went straight to the nearest ironmonger, bought a fire-extinguisher-sized can of mosquito killer, and sprayed the room with the desperation of a ghostbuster.

The town is split into two halves by a large tank, the sort of water lily-smothered lake found all over the subcontinent. A bridge over the tank, and the parades of shops either side of it, is the centre of business activity. Little English is spoken here, and for those who do, ‘Oorvell?’ is a hard-to-pronounce word devoid of meaning. I jumped on a tonga which inched over the bridge to the other side of the town. It dawned on me that finding the Blairs’ house would be an afternoon’s work. As we reached the end of the bridge the clock tower in the middle of the junction displayed the wrong time and beneath it, nonchalantly surveying all before it, was a kneeling buffalo.

Set down here, I went more or less person to person before finding, after working my way through fifteen-or-so bewildered Indians, a man whose eyes lit up. He enthusiastically guided my tonga-wallah*, his arms moving all over the place, in the direction of the Orwell bungalow, which he added was a kilometre distant, ‘at Gyan Babu Chowk’. As we travelled in the right direction, past chaos-filled bazaars peddling Indian sweets, spices and every shape of fruit and vegetable, I found it hard to think that Ida Blair might once have frequented them, pram-pushing, and haggling over the price of chicken.

The approach to the Blairs’ bungalow is down a bumpy lane, along which is a medley of narrow, concrete, two-storey houses and street stalls-cum-homes where, during the day, a small selection of household goods will be sold and, by night, the stalls dismantled to create beds. Appropriately for the author of Animal Farm, various corners where the road bends seem to be impromptu pig sties with pink and black pigs snuffling through the piles of filth which constitute their homes. Along the lane, which would be difficult but not impossible to drive down, goats, cows, dogs and chickens drift listlessly.

On the right, the houses disappear, and a scruffy, enclosed scrap of land comes into view. Entry to this compound is via a disproportionately grand, red-tiled gate, which, when opened, leads to the birthplace of George Orwell. This area, no more than half an acre, resembles an unkempt English railway siding: rusting bits of ancient machinery interspersed with clumps of nettles, the odd unloved flowering shrub, a pile of old bricks or two. Ahead of the visitor, 100 yards distant, is a red-and-white-painted archway, the sort that recalls the chapterhouse of some ancient abbey. Beyond this is an even bigger area of land, the main feature of which is a derelict red-brick warehouse.

This more extensive area, enclosed on all sides and about the same size as a cricket ground, is scrappier still: clumps of nettles become a forest; scraps of metal now abandoned tractors; and small buildings half fallen, vines and creepers engulfing them. The dilapidated warehouse is presumably a former storage facility for the opium crop, the entire plot having been owned by the East India Company – ownership quite possibly still residing with its successor, the Government of India. Three bungalows, two on the left and one on the right of the chapterhouse archway, provided residences for the managers of the Opium Department’s operations, the middle one of which was the Blairs’.

The sorry tale of Britain’s involvement in the opium trade is little remembered by the inheritors of the British story, but it is one that should be. Until comparatively recently – well within my grandparents’ lifetimes – the British government of India received around a fifth of its tax revenue from shipments of opium to addicts in China. Britain’s ownership of Hong Kong Island came as a result of the Opium Wars in the early 1840s, fought with China to open the country to imports of cheap, Indian-grown opium. Much of the wealth of Calcutta, ‘the city of palaces’, came from the crop.

It would not be hard to conceive that Britain’s gradual withdrawal from India, which began in 1919, was sparked by the end of the trade, which came as a result of a ban on opium by China’s first nationalist government formed in 1912. Richard Blair left the Opium Department in 1911, shortly before the department began to be wound down and British commercial interests redirected elsewhere. He was very much around, however, during a London-based inquiry into the trade, among whose members were the great and good. When the inquiry reported to Parliament in 1896 it decided that the moral foundations of the trade were sound, opium being socially acceptable in China in the same way alcohol was in the West.

Richard Blair must have been well aware of the controversy the trade aroused. A campaign led by Henry Wilson, a Liberal MP, led to the launch of the inquiry in the first place. With him being recently married and with a young family to support, it is hard to believe Richard Blair would have done anything but continue to serve in the Opium Department and accept the few privileges of status or income that came from his participation. Orwell, similarly, makes no reference to it, but he was ashamed enough about his family’s awkward involvement in Britain’s imperial story to write a novel about his experiences at the coal-face – Burmese Days – and enough essays on the shames of empire to fill a short book.

The Blairs’ bungalow, unlike those on either side, appeared in excellent condition. The Rotary Club of Motihari, appreciating its historical and literary significance, have paid not just for its entire restoration and maintenance, but for a large, concrete-hewn sign and even a bust, albeit one which only at a stretch resembles Orwell. The head, ‘moon-shaped’ as Orwell described it himself, is the wrong shape. Occupied for a long time by government employees and, until recently, a teacher, the house is presently empty and the interior walls whitewash-bare. What I found most surprising was its small size: four rooms in all, and another three in an outhouse resembling something like a mini stable.

As I walked towards the house, a cadre of adolescents, two of whom lived in the decrepit house next door, sulked in and around the Blairs’ home. A noticeably old lady, easily an octogenarian, sat cross-legged by the front gate. I later saw her arranging a bed in one of the rooms in the stable-like annexe in the rear yard, her eyes squinting, appearing nonplussed through her Gandhian, steel-rimmed spectacles. I learnt from one of the students, as we communicated in pidgin English, that the Orwell birthplace sees around a single visitor every month or twelve a year; an astonishingly low number of admirers, but when I recalled the way I had rattled around in the buses which brought me here, I realised why.

Plans have floated around for some time to create a museum. There would seem little point to one. Even among educated crowds in India’s metropolises, only a small percentage of people have heard of Orwell, still fewer read his work. There would not be crowds of people queuing up to visit. For visitors from outside India, the journey is so arduous as to put most people off. What is important is that the house is well-preserved, and the site looked after. I could envisage the plot becoming a public park, an ‘Orwell Park’ perhaps.

Walking back along the lane I reflected further on the contrast between the generally austere work of Orwell – Room 101 from Nineteen Eighty-Four; his essay ‘In Defence of English Cooking’, each commenting on the conditions of wartime and wartime economy – and the chaotic surrounds of his place of birth. Approaching the end of the lane, I looked ahead to the hawker-filled chowk and glanced in either direction at the junction to make sure I wasn’t moments from being mown down. In India, one develops a sort of sixth sense, discerning motion and risk-to-life at every juncture. In this trip alone my life must have flashed before my eyes twenty times or more.

From the far right, my brain told my feet to stop dead in their tracks, and my eyes blinked twice in disbelief of what was before me. Indifferently at work, in that ‘grandmotherly’ way Orwell described so well in ‘Shooting an Elephant’, was a working elephant. Its master, rested high up on the ridge of the elephant’s back, was guiding it to use its trunk to gather the stalks of sugar cane strewn over the pavement below. I observed every movement of them both intensely, fascinated by the grace of this beautiful creature as it nudged its trunk against a steel gate and, opening it, thudded off behind.

Motihari is not just famous for Orwell. On the road back to the hotel I passed a museum dedicated to Gandhi. He visited Motihari in 1923 to champion the rights of poor farmers, chained by the greedy and uncaring British Raj to the production of cash crops. Orwell felt for Gandhi, as for many other complex figures, a fascination. As a leading British intellectual, supportive of India’s independence, he had a natural interest in both Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. His essay ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, published in 1949, is an excellent overview of a man history will probably never forget.

Unusually, since most current observers place Gandhi in the saintly corner of historical public figures, Orwell was as much a critic as a fan, admitting he could never feel much of a liking for him. His best compliment was to write that Gandhi was ‘an interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive’. But Gandhi’s strange suggestion that Europe’s Jews should collectively commit suicide when confronted with the fascism of Germany lost him much of Orwell’s sympathy.

Orwell also explores how, for most of Gandhi’s time as a campaigner for independence, he was used by the British to deliver their aims. This is at odds with the popular historical narrative, promulgated by the likes of Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi, that Gandhi and the (British) government of India were sworn enemies. Orwell wrote: ‘in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence – which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever – he could be regarded as “our man”.’ Orwell added that Gandhi’s peaceful non-violence would not succeed in a country, such as Russia, where opponents ‘disappear in the middle of the night’, a not unreasonable defence of what British imperialism could tolerate. And yet, British India is not taught favourably in Indian schools. It is barely taught at all in British ones.

There is little to see at the Gandhi Museum and its dusty compound. I was its only visitor at the time, and do not think I would rush back. I remembered from previous miserable experiences during my year in the country that booking trains on Indian Railways could be complicated and time-consuming. So I determined to plan ahead and reserve tickets for my onward journey to Kathgodam, a nondescript town and railway junction from where I could begin my journey into the hills and up to Nainital, the hill station where Orwell’s parents met.

Indian railway stations, especially their booking offices, might be an introvert’s idea of hell. They are generally quite challenging to navigate, and at almost all times of day are rammed full of passengers of every size and character. Porters, in sweat-stained maroon turbans, rush around like wasps in a nest. Huge crates of cargo smother the platforms – usually wrapped in muslin, scrawled with something along the lines of ‘INDIAN RAILWAYS NORTH-EASTERN RAILWAY (NER) DISEMBARK LUCKNOW’. Piles of human excrement on the track and a couple of foot-long rats scurrying around complete the scene.

For all this, rail travel in India is magnetising. I have a lust for it which is satisfied only by getting to India and booking the nearest sleeper to some exotic-sounding city. The system, if one can master its quirks, is a marvel. The fact it works at all is a testimony to humanity’s ability to organise itself. Forty-thousand miles of track; 1.7 million employees and more passion than a thousand West End theatres combined.

The booking office was as usual filled with a mass of men and women, all slumbering along in something almost resembling a queue. Participation is only possible with a great deal of pushing and thrusting. This does not come naturally to me, complete as I am with the Englishman’s sense of personal space. However, wherever I am in the world, I seem to miraculously shred all sensibilities, shamelessly synchronising myself to the habits of my hosts.

I quickly found myself in the midst of 30 or so baying people, and fought my way to the front in the same way I would lose all grace pursuing victory in the scrum of a game of rugby at school. Knees, elbows and a great deal of sweat came from every direction. The joy that one feels when the familiar brown-and-white-coloured Indian Railways ticket is presented to the palm evokes the similar sensation of scoring a try. Most Indian Railways officials, certainly in a ticket office, will speak functional English. The booking system – another marvel given the sheer volume of trains, tickets and opportunities there are for errors – plotted my route to Kathgodam via Muzaffarpur Junction. A four-hour ‘day’ train would take me to the main line, crossing northern India, connecting Calcutta to Delhi. A sleeper would take me the rest of the way in about a day’s travel.

I don’t think anywhere can beat the romance of Indian place names, a characteristic used to great effect by Rudyard Kipling. ‘Muzaffarpur Junction’ is a name that could have come out of the pen of this greatest of all Anglo-Indian writers, and from there to Kathgodam came a slew of equally alluring place names, the type one should enjoy tracing one’s eyes over in a copy of The Times Atlas of the World: Dighwara; Gorakhpur Junction; Badshahnagar; Shahjahanpur; Rampur.

The other enjoyable aspect of sleeper travel in India is its processes. There are a myriad of classes on all long-distance trains, with ‘Two Tier Sleeper AC’ being the best value for money. A familiar envelope of clean sheets is provided by the attendant, and a bearer will quickly approach to request one’s preference for a ‘Veg’ or ‘Non-Veg’ meal, always offered on a steel tray or in a small foil box. It is invariably cheap and delicious, eaten cross-legged and with the yells of hawkers echoing through the carriage: ‘Chai Chai Chai; Coffee. Pani Pani Pani; Lamb Cutlet’, pronounced ‘Coutloot’. I have a bad habit of hanging from the doors of trains in India, dangling with one arm gripped to the handlebars of the carriage. Given the chance I would probably clamber onto the roof, but this has been illegal for decades.

Waking early, I was hanging from the exit as the sleeper arrived in the morning at Kathgodam. The air was noticeably cooler and fresher in the breaking of the day. For some reason no railway line was ever built to Nainital, unusually so since, as I was to learn, it was of immense importance during the British era: the summer capital of the enormous ‘United Provinces’, to where the colonial administrators would retreat. Shimla, the summer capital of the Raj (as ‘Simla’), and Darjeeling, the tea capital of the east, both still have train connections where a locomotive creeps up sharp curves, their engines huffing and puffing from exhaustion at their progress into the clouds.

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago the only access to Nainital was by horse-pulled carriage, a slow elevation to the town possibly preferable to the taxis of today. These race up and climb around 5,000 feet in 45 minutes. This presents not only a distinct safety risk on the road’s twists and turns (two cars having driven off the road, down into the valley, over the course of my passing) but I saw at least a dozen passengers, including one in my shared taxi, yank the window of their cars down to spray vomit in the passing breeze. I have scarcely been on a hairier car journey than that on the road to Nainital, which has enough ‘Hair Pin Bend’ signs to match the curviest roads in mountainous Switzerland. My body swayed from left to right, and regularly jerked forward as the driver slammed on the brakes to avoid yet another head-on collision. I am the first to admit I am not the best driver in the world, but I still gasped in disbelief as cars accelerated as they approached a blind corner.

The vegetation on the surrounding valley sides was alpine, the air becoming cooler the higher one climbed. Lush green trees, Christmas-tree shaped, lined either side of the road, their pine and fir needles resembling the same mellow green in the fine-feathered plume of a peacock. The valley sides became steeper, a glance from the rear window revealing a departure from the smoky plains of India behind us.

The road eventually stopped winding, flattened out and with greater frequency houses passed on each side. Clothing flapped on washing lines tied between the balconies on squat, two-storey, galleried apartment blocks. People began filling the road in the way they seem to do in any Indian town, large or small. The entry to Nainital on this side of the town is unimpressive, cars slowing down through a street market that surrounds the town’s bus station, but the view soon opens up to reveal the tal, or lake.

Nainital’s location was first recorded by a Mr P. Barron in 1839. He described it as: ‘by far the best I have witnessed in the course of a 1,500 miles trek in the Himalayas’. It is still hard not to be charmed by the location, a deep, turquoise-coloured, pearl-shaped lake, bounded on either side by steep, tree-clad hillsides. The town, like most in India, has sprawled in the years since independence, with the country’s population growth but, for the time being at least, Nainital still possesses a sense of calm and a mostly intact heritage architecture. This combination produces the sensation of a time-warp, a place where the clocks seem to have stopped. Some Indians say Nainital and the other hill stations in India are an alien feature of their country. A novelty for many, these towns cling to the hills as living ghosts of the Raj, like a Dowager Duchess graces some vast country house: still elegant, straining to maintain dignity past prime, but the property of another age, and longing to be returned there.

The architecture of the Raj was a mixture of grandiose statements of power – Edwin Lutyens’ Viceroy’s Palace in New Delhi (in-fact New Delhi in its entirety), or Victoria Memorial in Calcutta and, more commonly, cheaply-constructed buildings erected hastily, usually single storey and roofed with corrugated iron. The latter are especially prevalent in the hill stations, possessing a fragility to match the tea-time dresses and gin-and-tonic-filled highball glasses which were once so familiar a presence in them.

These Alpine-style chalets pepper the hillsides but are now interspersed with concrete houses or other buildings. Nainital is popular with Delhiites – anything British in India usually claims status-value for wealthy Indians – and some have second homes there. In a world of supply and demand, the valley sides of Nainital supply the land and the demand creates itself. By and large, the newer buildings blend sympathetically with the old, and much better than in other hill stations, such as modern-day Shimla.

The lake, which of course cannot be built on, has not changed at all since the end of the Raj. Indian oarsmen scull their beige-painted rowing boats every hour of the waking day, and its shores are occupied by a handsome promenade enclosed by floral-patterned wrought-iron fencing. The Edwardians who developed Nainital at the beginning of the 20th century matched the designs of the town’s benches with the railings, making it feel as if one has arrived in an English seaside town.

The road running along the lake on the town side (the other side of the valley is steeper and undeveloped) is lined by sizeable four-to-five-storey hotels, typically clinging precariously to the valley side with clumsy extensions to their rear. My hotel – The Elgin – was cavernous. My bedroom, 300 feet above the lake and thus reached only by an arduous stair climb, looked out across the lake and valley to provide a splendid perspective on the town, as if flying above it. Unfortunately for a hotel in the Himalayan foothills, there was no central heating, and hot water rarely. I thought that if I felt cold in its rooms, then Indian visitors must feel as if they have travelled to the North Pole.

The hillsides surrounding the town are so steep that they have a curious effect on light in the valley, making Nainital appear twilight-ish hours before the sun is due to set. The crests of the valley are straight and sharp, such that when the sun sets, the town, as one faces north, appears like the stage of a theatre. It is as if God were shining a torch down from on high, visitors awaiting an actor to appear ‘stage left’. From the tops of the valley, reached via a hard vertical climb or, more conveniently, a cable car, the Himalayan peaks in all their ascendant glory can be viewed.

My objective in searching for the link to the Blairs was to explore the main Anglican church in the town. St John’s in the Wilderness is as wonderful and evocative a name for a place of worship as one is likely to find anywhere. There are two in India and one in England, near Plymouth in Devon. Having read virtually every book and article about Orwell there is, I had realised there is confusion about this church, and I intended to clarify things for myself. It became apparent to me that some of Orwell’s biographers have not always made the effort to visit significant places linked to his life, and confusion reigns. One expert on Orwell wrote that Eric Blair was christened at ‘St John in the Wilderness, Motihari’, and another that his parents met and were married at St John in the Wilderness ‘in the north-west of India’, which of course would today mean Pakistan. There is no Anglican church at Motihari – the town was too small to sustain one – and thus I wondered whether Orwell was taken by his parents to be christened at the place of their marriage.

St John in the Wilderness church was so named because it was, at the time of its founding in the 1840s, on the flat top of one of the lower hills that are a feature of the head of the valley. Then, the nearest buildings were a mile and more away, on the shore of the lake, but the town grew so much during the Raj that buildings gradually filled the space in between. Several Alpine-style chalet hotels form the ‘in-fill’, one of them wholly derelict and eerie in the sunset. Just across from the church, an enormous Victorian pile, resembling the sort of municipal building one might find in a market town in Derbyshire, now serves as the High Court of the state of Uttarakhand Pradesh.

I walked to the church from my hotel and noticed how the bustle of the waterfront – tourists bartering for a boat trip across the lake; the car drivers incessantly pressing their horns – soon died down. I saw troops of grey langurs, an almost uncannily human-looking species of monkey, jostling in the shrub-filled verges of the road. They move quickly but are carefree in the presence of humans. I think that they must see us being so characteristically similar to them in appearance that they co-exist happily. Mothers carry their young endearingly – the baby monkeys gripping their mothers’ undercarriages like the heads of a thistle grip the fur coat of a dog. Their faces elevated to the sun, they seem not the least concerned by their carriers swinging nonchalantly from branch to branch.

St John’s church is large and, from the outside, appears unloved. The brickwork in the tower is covered with epiphytes, and in every window, each half-boarded to protect it from intruders, panes of glass were missing. I was told by various Indians standing by that the church had been locked for some time, because the people who worship there only use it in the summer months, and no one knew where the key was. Only in India! After endless toing and froing, I pinned down the Anglo-Indian rector Mark Walsh who, in possession of a set of keys, agreed to give me a guided tour.

Reverend Walsh explained that there is no congregation at St John’s and that the town’s Anglican community, who worship at the church in the vicinity of the old Governor’s Residence on the other side of the town, do their best to keep it well-maintained. On the inside the church is much better cared for – recently whitewashed, the floors swept clean and its mahogany chairs polished. Easily as big as a substantial English church, it is funny to think that a church of this scale was once necessary for a British community then numbering well over a thousand.

Likewise, it is strange to think that the George Orwell story began here, on a forested hilltop rise in a now forgotten hill station of British India. On 15 June 1897, Richard and Ida Blair walked down the spacious aisle at St John’s, Ida’s sister Blanche following as bridesmaid. I enquired whether there was a repository of records anywhere, the sort of thing that might end up being dumped in a rectory attic. I intended to search the baptismal and marriage records, but I was told there were none. Later I was able to confirm that Orwell was baptised at a missionary centre in Motihari, and not at St John’s. Somewhere, I am confident, there will be piles of ledgers recording the church’s marriages. India tends never to throw anything out.

It is surprising to see that many features of life in this Indian hill station have not changed since the end of British India. The churches are still open and hold services in English; there is a Freemason’s Hall, and billiards rooms; a sailing association; and a Victorian lending library. Nainital remains famous for its schools – ‘Sherwood College’; ‘St Mary’s Convent’; ‘St Joseph’s’. The billiards rooms are dimly lit, as they should be, and filled with green baize-topped billiards tables, which seem not to have been moved an inch since they were bought and installed by the British, who built the lakeside wooden structures that house them. In an adjacent building there was a room with rows of rickety little folding tables. I felt as if I was in an English village hall, waiting for a game of bridge to begin.

The lending library – Nainital Municipal Library – inhabits a quaint wooden structure that has been constructed on stilts extending out into the lake. It is no exaggeration to suggest that next-to-nothing has changed in the library since 1947, so it came as a surprise to find that it is still open – for an hour in the morning and three in the afternoon – every day. Inside the smell was musty, like a bookshop left to go to seed.

Every soft-cloth volume I took down from the library’s dust-laden cabinets felt damp, as if at the last juncture before mould is set to grow. None of the books in English I cast my eyes over had been issued since the early 1950s. The titles were the usual sort of selection one might find in a Victorian gentleman’s library: Thackeray, Hardy and Kipling. I reflected that there must be hundreds of libraries like this all over India. Extant, as real as everything else in today’s India, but so very un-Indian.

I couldn’t resist a visit to the town where the George Orwell story began without visiting a bookshop, to see whether it might stock some works written by him. Pradeep Tewari, the affable owner of R Narain and Co (Est. 1929), a bookshop a short stroll from the library, and also overlooking the lake, led me to a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four. On clutching it, I asked: ‘Did you know his parents met and were married here?’ He answered with an inquisitive frown that he did not, followed quickly by: ‘And so for all these years I have sold his books here, and did not know.’

* A two-wheeled, cycle- or horse-pulled rickshaw.

* The owner/operator of a tonga, ‘wallah’ meaning someone employed or trading something.

Henley-on-Thames, Berkshire, England

A boy standing on his head (1904–17)

From northern India to Oxfordshire is a transition that would have been more remarkable in 1904 than in the 2010s, but it remains a feast of contrast nevertheless. I have concluded that the appeal of the subcontinent to Britons – visually, culinary or other – is to be found in their opposites in conduct and taste. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister after independence, once described the English in India as ‘rivers of ice’, so divorced were they from the culture they had joined. The move from Indian summers to soggy England must have been a curiosity for the young Blair children. Aged just one, Orwell will not have remembered anything. Yet his family’s Anglo-Indian heritage was a formative force in the development of his character.

Shiplake is a village on the west side of Henley, where the Blairs lived in one of four or more homes in the area over a fifteen-year period. Keeping track of the family’s movements is not easy, but one house in Shiplake and two more on the ‘Shiplake-side’ of Henley were leased by them for certain. Debate surrounds the succession of homes they had just after Ida Blair returned from India soon after Orwell was born. It is a testimony to their shabby-chic ‘poverty’ that they moved around so much, a family unable to afford a permanent home but just about affluent enough to fund the rent for a succession of reasonably large and comfortable houses. Richard Blair remained in India until retirement in 1911. He returned to England just once, on leave, in 1907.