ORWELL'S TRAIN JOURNEY

I

George Orwell

Early in 1938 George Orwell travelled back to London from Spain, where he had been fighting for the Republican cause. As he travelled back to the capital he made the following observations:-

‘And then England--southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in

my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen--all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.’[1]

It is extraordinary how much of this still holds true today. There are of course obvious changes, the industrial towns are now shadows of their former selves, now more likely locations for call centres than steel mills. Gone are the great shining horses, the barges on the Thames and the bowler hats, but much else that he describes can still be observed today.

I think Orwell was indeed later surprised how much remained unchanged despite the blitz, though I think this probably made him more depressed; what would it take to wake the working classes out of their slumber?

He would be astonished to see how cosmopolitan London has become today, with people from all races, religions and regions of the world living more or less happily side by side. This would I think definitely have pleased him, though, and although he could never be described as a feminist, I do think he would be disturbed by the sight of women wearing burkas on the streets of London. The freedom with which the sexes interact with one another would also have greatly pleased him, though the change in attitudes to homosexuality might not. Orwell was always hostile to homosexuality in general and effeminacy in particular.

That so much else would be recognisable to him over 70 yrs later would surely astonish him, the royal weddings, the cricket, the red buses and blue policemen and of course the sleep, the deep sleep of the mass of ‘ordinary’ people who are seeing once again the gains they made since the war being rolled back, as once again they are governed by old Etonians.

II

The collapse of the Soviet Union would not I think have surprised him that much, for, to use Marxist terminology, he always saw clearly that its internal contradictions doomed it to failure. He would I think have been more surprised at the manner of its demise and in the durability of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. The Americanisation of British culture would have surprised him least of all since he had already written about and identified this trend as early as 1946.[2] His hostility to America, or more precisely American culture, was a commonplace among the middle classes in England at the time, born of a mix of snobbishness, inferiority complex, and genuine concern for the cultural vibrancy of England. It represents proof, if proof is required, that Orwell was not immune to the distorting effect of prejudices of his class.

One thing Orwell, always with a keen nose for the totalitarian and fascist mindset, would have instantly recognised is the fascist nature of Islamism and the smelly orthodoxy of the fellow travelling pseudo left of the Stop the War movement. The hatred of all things ‘western’ and their masochistic deference toward the suicide bombers, be-headers and jihad warriors, of this crowd would be familiar to him; he would have seen it all before, amongst the squalid apologists for Stalin. Familiar too would be the language of obfuscation, convoluted apologia and of course ‘newspeak.’

He would be appalled, if not surprised, to see torture defended as a legitimate tactic. Drone strikes would strike him as being a sinister development, though he might argue that in the context of war the less indiscriminate the weapons the better.[3]

He would be delighted to see the living standards of working people so much improved, though that the gap between rich and poor were as wide now as in the 1920’s and the behaviour of corporations like Starbucks and Amazon, and of course the banks, might have confirmed his opinion that capitalism as a system of organising the affairs of humankind had no long term future.

III

Of course it extraordinary presumptuous to imagine what Orwell would make of England in 2013; in truth of course I don’t know, nobody can. Had he lived longer he might, as the right have always so enthusiastically affirmed, switched his allegiance in the malignant atmosphere of the cold war years.[4] But I think this unlikely, as Orwell was always a warrior against privilege and inequality. Though toward the end of his life his primary enemy was Totalitarianism,[5] he never lost sight of an enemy closer to home. His very last diary entry written in 1949 is again worth quoting in full. Its tone I think gives the lie to any notion that Orwell was on the verge of putting on carpet slippers and writing complacent editorials for the Daily Telegraph.

Cranham, 17 April 1949

Curious effect, here in the sanatorium, on Easter Sunday, when the people in this (the most expensive) block of “chalets” mostly have visitors, of hearing large numbers of upper-class English voices. I have been almost out of the sound of them for two years, hearing them at most one or two at a time, my ears growing more & more used to working-class or lower-middle class Scottish voices. In the hospital at Hairmyres, for instance, I literally never heard a “cultivated” accent except when I had a visitor. It is as though I were hearing these voices for the first time. And what voices! A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness & richness combined with a fundamental ill-will—people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful. No wonder everyone hates us so.

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[1] Homage to Catalonia.

[2] See The Decline of the English Murder, Tribune February 1946

[3] This is of course highly debatable, state sanctioned execution, even in the context of war, being a truly ugly phenomenon. Though is it worse than carpet bombing? I think Orwell would conclude not.

[4] He would I think have been disgusted by McCarthyism, and the anti communist witch hunts. Though might have pointed out that there were in fact witches in this case. He certainly would not have compared, as some foolish people have done, the situation in the US to the Stalinist  regime in the Soviet Union.

[5] He wrote to the United Auto Workers in the US protesting that Animal Farm was not, as it was being presented  in the US as an attack on socialism, declaring himself always to have fought for democratic socialism, whilst fighting against totalitarianism. 

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