Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

by George Orwell

  That at least was what I read into her face. And yet how happy I was, that winter morning, as the train bore me away with the gleaming new silk tie (dark green, pale blue and black, if I remember rightly) round my neck! The world was opening before me, just a little, like a grey sky which exhibits a narrow crack of blue. A public school would be better fun than St. Cyprian's, but at bottom equally alien. In a world where the prime necessities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes, neatly-brushed hair, a charming smile, I was no good. All I had gained was a breathing-space. A little quietude, a little self-indulgence, a little respite from cramming--and then, ruin. What kind of ruin I did not know: perhaps the colonies or an office stool, perhaps prison or an early death. But first a year or two in which one could "slack off" and get the benefit of one's sins, like Doctor Faustus. I believed firmly in my evil destiny, and yet I was acutely happy. It is the advantage of being thirteen that you can not only live in the moment, but do so with full consciousness, foreseeing the future and yet not caring about it. Next term I was going to Wellington. I had also won a scholarship at Eton, but it was uncertain whether there would be a vacancy, and I was going to Wellington first. At Eton you had a room to yourself--a room which might even have a fire in it. At Wellington you had your own cubicle, and could make yourself cocoa in the evenings. The privacy of it, the grown-upness! And there would be libraries to hang about in, and summer afternoons when you could shirk games and mooch about the countryside alone, with no master driving you along. Meanwhile there were the holidays. There was the .22 rifle that I had bought the previous holidays (the Crackshot, it was called, costing twenty-two and sixpence), and Christmas was coming next week. There were also the pleasures of overeating. I thought of some particularly voluptuous cream buns which could be bought for twopence each at a shop in our town. (This was 1916, and food-rationing had not yet started.) Even the detail that my journey-money had been slightly miscalculated, leaving about a shilling over--enough for an unforeseen cup of coffee and a cake or two somewhere on the way--was enough to fill me with bliss. There was time for a bit of happiness before the future closed in upon me. But I did know that the future was dark. Failure, failure, failure--failure behind me, failure ahead of me--that was by far the deepest conviction that I carried away.

  vi.

  All this was thirty years ago and more. The question is: Does a child at school go through the same kind of experiences nowadays?

  The only honest answer, I believe, is that we do not with certainty know. Of course it is obvious that the present-day attitude towards education is enormously more humane and sensible than that of the past. The snobbishness that was an integral part of my own education would be almost unthinkable today, because the society that nourished it is dead. I recall a conversation that must have taken place about a year before I left St. Cyprian's. A Russian boy, large and fair-haired, a year older than myself, was questioning me.

  "How much a year has your father got?"

  I told him what I thought it was, adding a few hundreds to make it sound better. The Russian boy, neat in his habits, produced a pencil and a small notebook and made a calculation.

  "My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours," he announced with a sort of amused contempt.

  That was in 1915. What happened to that money a couple of years later, I wonder? And still more I wonder, do conversations of that kind happen at preparatory schools now?

  Clearly there has been a vast change of outlook, a general growth of "enlightenment," even among ordinary, unthinking middle-class people. Religious belief, for instance, has largely vanished, dragging other kinds of nonsense after it. I imagine that very few people nowadays would tell a child that if it masturbates it will end in the lunatic asylum. Beating, too, has become discredited, and has even been abandoned at many schools. Nor is the underfeeding of children looked on as a normal, almost meritorious act. No one now would openly set out to give his pupils as little food as they could do with, or tell them that it is healthy to get up from a meal as hungry as you sat down. The whole status of children has improved, partly because they have grown relatively less numerous. And the diffusion of even a little psychological knowledge has made it harder for parents and schoolteachers to indulge their aberrations in the name of discipline. Here is a case, not known to me personally, but known to someone I can vouch for, and happening within my own lifetime. A small girl, daughter of a clergyman, continued wetting her bed at an age when she should have grown out of it. In order to punish her for this dreadful deed, her father took her to a large garden party and there introduced her to the whole company as a little girl who wetted her bed: and to underline her wickedness he had previously painted her face black. I do not suggest that Flip and Sambo would actually have done a thing like this, but I doubt whether it would have much surprised them. After all, things do change. And yet--!

  The question is not whether boys are still buckled into Eton collars on Sunday, or told that babies are dug up under gooseberry bushes. That kind of thing is at an end, admittedly. The real question is whether it is still normal for a schoolchild to live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the very great difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is the fact that we were once children ourselves, and many people appear to forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely. Think for instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by sending a child back to school with clothes of the wrong pattern, and refusing to see that this matters! Over things of this kind a child will sometimes utter a protest, but a great deal of the time its attitude is one of simple concealment. Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. Even the affection that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a cause of misunderstandings. One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return. Looking back on my childhood, after the infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever felt love for any mature person except my mother, and even her I did not trust, in the sense that shyness made me conceal most of my real feelings from her. Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for people who were young. Towards people who were old--and remember that "old" to a child means over thirty, or even over twenty-five--I could feel reverence, respect, admiration or compunction, but I seemed cut off from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up with physical distaste. People are too ready to forget the child's physical shrinking from the adult. The enormous size of grown-ups, their ungainly, rigid bodies, their coarse, wrinkled skins, their great relaxed eyelids, their yellow teeth, and the whiffs of musty clothes and beer and sweat and tobacco that disengage from them at every movement! Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below. Besides, being fresh and unmarked itself, the child has impossibly high standards in the matter of skin and teeth and complexion. But the greatest barrier of all is the child's misconception about age. A child can hardly envisage life beyond thirty, and in judging people's ages it will make fantastic mistakes. It will think that a person of twenty-five is forty, that a person of forty is sixty-five, and so on. Thus, when I fell in love with Elsie I took her to be grown-up. I met her again, when I was thirteen and she, I think, must have been twenty-three; she now seemed to me a middle-aged woman, somewhat past her best. And the child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive
without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. The schoolmaster who imagines that he is loved and trusted by his boys is in fact mimicked and laughed at behind his back. An adult who does not seem dangerous nearly always seems ridiculous.

  I base these generalisations on what I can recall of my own childhood outlook. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child's mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realise how incredibly distorted is the child's vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would St. Cyprian's appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it was in 1915 ? What should I think of Sambo and Flip, those terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would no more be frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse. Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas--though of this I am not certain--I imagine they must have been somewhat younger than I am now. And how would Cliffy Burton appear, with his blacksmith's arms and his red, jeering face? Merely a scruffy little boy, barely distinguishable from hundreds of other scruffy little boys. The two sets of facts can lie side by side in my mind, because those happen to be my own memories. But it would be very difficult for me to see with the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the imagination which might lead me completely astray. The child and the adult live in different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain that school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many children as dreadful an experience as it used to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the snobbery and the misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have been seen that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of proportion or probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no importance. It is not enough to say that I was "silly" and "ought to have known better." Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer. Of course my own case had its individual variations, but essentially it was that of countless other boys. The weakness of the child is that it starts with a blank sheet. It neither understands nor questions the society in which it lives, and because of its credulity other people can work upon it, infecting it with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible laws. It may be that everything that happened to me at St. Cyprian's could happen in the most "enlightened" school, though perhaps in subtler forms. Of one thing, however, I do feel fairly sure, and that is that boarding schools are worse than day schools. A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand. And I think the characteristic faults of the English upper and middle classes may be partly due to the practice, general until recently, of sending children away from home as young as nine, eight or even seven.

  I have never been back to St. Cyprian's. Reunions, old boys' dinners and such-like leave me something more than cold, even when my memories are friendly. I have never even been down to Eton, where I was relatively happy, though I did once pass through it in 1933 and noted with interest that nothing seemed to have changed, except that the shops now sold radios. As for St. Cyprian's, for years I loathed its very name so deeply that I could not view it with enough detachment to see the significance of the things that happened to me there. In a way, it is only within the last decade that I have really thought over my schooldays, vividly though their memory has always haunted me. Nowadays, I believe, it would make very little impression on me to see the place again, if it still exists. (I remember hearing a rumour some years ago that it had been burnt down.) If I had to pass through Eastbourne I would not make a detour to avoid the school: and if I happened to pass the school itself I might even stop for a moment by the low brick wall, with the steep bank running down from it, and look across the flat playing field at the ugly building with the square of asphalt in front of it. And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!

  * * *

  NOTES

  The Spike

  1. "And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon"; Cleopatra's response to Antony's death, Antony and Cleopatra, 4.15.67-68.a

  Clink

  1. Clink is a cant word for a prison, from the Clink, one-time prison in the London borough of Southwark dating from the sixteenth century.

  2. Lord Kylsant (1863-1937), a Conservative MP, Chairman of the Royal Mail Steam Package Company, and with large shipbuilding interests, was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment in 1931 for circulating a false prospectus. His personal guilt was never entirely established in the public mind.

  3. His lodgings at 2 Windsor Street, Paddington, near St. Mary's Hospital. The house has been demolished.

  My Country Right or Left

  1. The title of the essay adopts Stephen Decatur's "Toast Given at Norfolk" (Virginia, 1816), "My country, right or wrong."

  2. The slogan dates from 1909.

  3. On August 23,1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed, in the persons of Ribbentrop and Molotov, a nonaggression pact in Moscow, completely reversing the balance of relationships in Europe. A secret protocol provided for the partition of Poland between the signatories. Hitler was informed of the signing of an Anglo-Polish agreement at 4:30 p.m. on August 25 and three hours later cancelled an order given at 3 :00 p.m. for his troops to invade Poland. The invasion was postponed until September 1, 1939.

  Wartime Diary

  1. There were at this time three London evening papers: Star, Evening News, and Evening Standard.

  2. British Expeditionary Force, the troops in France at the time of that country's fall to the Germans.

  3. Eileen Blair, Orwell's wife.

  4. Alfred Duff Cooper (1890-1954; Viscount Norwich, 1952) was a Conservative politician, diplomat, and author.

  5. A Socialist weekly to which Orwell contributed many reviews and essays.

  6. The Communist Party's daily newspaper in Britain.

  7. The journal of the British Union of Fascists.

  8. In May, Max Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook (1879-1964), the Canadian newspaper proprietor, had been made minister of aircraft production by Churchill.

  9. Dr. Franz Borkenau (1900-1957), Austrian sociologist and political "writer, born in Vienna, was from 1921 to 1929 a member of the German Communist Party. For his conversations with Orwell at the time of Dunkirk, see above and Orwell's Wartime Diary, 65, 6.6.40.

  10. Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was with Orwell at St. Cyprian's and Eton. They met again in 1935, and were associated in a number of literary activities, particularly Horizon, which Connolly edited.

  11. Unidentified.

  12. "Eric," abbreviated from his second name, was the name by which Eileen Blair's much-loved brother, Laurence Frederick O'Shaughnessy, was known. He was a distinguished chest and heart surgeon, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps at the outbreak of war, and was killed tending the wounded on the beaches of Dunkirk.

  13. Eamon de Valera (1882-1975), Irish political leader, was at this time prime minister of the Irish Free State.

  14. A popular Sunday newspaper.

  15. Margot Asquith (1864-1945) was the widow of Herbert Henry Asquith, Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who was prime minister 1906-1916.

  16. These figures were, in fact, correct. Although most of their equipment was lost, 198,000 British and 140,000 mainly French and Belgian soldiers were evacuated. Of the forty-one naval vessels involved, six were sunk and nineteen damaged. About 220,000 service
men were evacuated from ports in Normandy and Brittany.

  17. "Suppressed" implies censorship; such posters were forbidden simply to conserve raw materials and economize on imports, thereby saving shipping space.

  18. Sir Stafford Cripps (1889-1952), lawyer and labour politician, was ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1940-1942, and minister of aircraft production, 1942-1945.

  19. Orwell eventually did so, in "As I Please," 42, Tribune, September 15, 1944.

  20. Local Defence Volunteers, later the Home Guard. Orwell joined on June 12 what became C Company, 5th County of London Battalion, and was soon promoted to sergeant, with ten men to instruct. He took his duties very seriously.

  21. Marylebone Cricket Club, the body that then controlled national and international cricket.

  22. A working-class constituency in the East End of London.

  23. George Lansbury (1859-1940), leader of the Labour Party, 1931-1935, was a pacifist and resigned as leader on that issue.

  24. Juan Negrin (1889-1956) was Socialist prime minister of the Republic of Spain, September 1936--March 1938. He fled to France where he died in exile.

  25. Milton, Paradise Lost, iv, 110.

  26. Orwell had signed the contract for publication of Coming Up for Air just three days before war broke out; the book remained unpublished by Albatross.

  27. Victor William (Peter) Watson (1908-1956), a rich young man who, after much travel, decided, about 1939, to devote his life to the arts, was cofounder with his friend Cyril Connolly of the magazine Horizon, which he financed and also provided all the material for the art section. He was always an admirer of Orwell's writing.

  28. The Hon. Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914-1948), fourth daughter of the second Lord Redesdale, was, from 1934, when she first met Hitler, his admirer. In January 1940 she was brought back to England from Germany suffering from bullet wounds in the head. Thereafter she lived in retirement.