George Orwell, Nature and the Golden Country

by Norman Bissell

When I first began researching the life and work of George Orwell I was surprised to find that he combined searing political insights and analysis with a deep knowledge and love of nature which included just about everything – the land and sea, plants and animals. The more I read, the more I realised that he was a fairly practical, rural naturalist who yearned for the Golden Country of his childhood.

Born in India in June 1903, Eric Blair was brought up in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire and at Shiplake not far from there. He was a country boy at heart and, like many of us, his love of nature began in his childhood. He loved playing outdoors where he exercised the most important attribute any child can have — he was inquisitive about everything he came across — and learnt a lot about birds, plants and mammals in the area where he lived. In his essay Why I Write published in 1946 he said: ‘I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ – a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blakes’s ‘Tiger, Tiger’. … From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style.’

He didn’t persevere with his poetry but concentrated on writing fiction and articles instead. In the summer of 1930 he tutored some boys in Southwold and took them on long walks in the country. One of them, Richard Peters, says in Orwell Remembered (1984):

‘He was a mine of information on birds, animals, and the heroes of boys’ magazines. Yet he never made us feel that he knew our world better than we knew it ourselves. … His attitude to animals and birds was rather like his attitude to children. He was at home with them. He seemed to know everything about them and found them amusing and interesting. … He infused interest and adventure into everything we did with him just because of his own interest in it. Walking can be just a means of getting from A to B, but with him it was like a voyage with Jules Verne beneath the ocean. … A walk was a mixture of energy, adventure and matter of fact. The world we felt was just like this. And it would have been absurd not to notice all there was to see. … I can still remember the smell of wild peppermint or spearmint which formed a background to his exposition on the properties of marsh gas.’

In a recent article on the Orwell Society website, Richard Lance Keeble expressed the view that ‘the domestic diaries can be seen as some of his most important and fascinating writings.’ (Keeble, 2020) I’ve certainly found that to be the case. The first diary which has survived is Eric Blair’s hop-picking diary written between August and October 1931. More detailed than some of his later diaries, it formed the basis of an article on hop-picking published in The New Statesman and Nation in October 1931 and of a chapter in his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter which came out in 1935.

From 1936 onwards Orwell and his wife Eileen rented a dilapidated cottage known as The Stores in Wallington in Hertfordshire which had no electricity or hot water and had an outside toilet. They kept goats, geese and numerous chickens. Their first goat was called Muriel and they named their rooster Henry Ford. They also grew vegetables, strawberries and fruit bushes aa well as roses and a full range of cottage garden flowers. They reopened The Stores and attempted to be as self-sufficient as possible. Manor Farm which kept pigs was nearby. Sylvia Topp’s outstanding biography of Eileen breaks new ground in many respects, including how much she shared in the daily tasks of surviving there and the sacrifices she made in agreeing to live with Orwell in such a ramshackle house.

Feeding Muriel at Wallington

At the end of Homage To Catalonia, his blistering account of his experiences fighting in Spain and the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution by Stalinism which was published in 1938, he returns to England and writes:

‘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.’

After a spell in a sanatorium with suspected tuberculosis, he and Eileen went to Morocco in September 1938 to avoid the English winter and try to improve his health. After short stays in Tangier and Marrakesh, they rented a villa outside Marrakesh on the road to Casablanca where he wrote the novel Coming Up For Air. He kept another domestic diary which is full of detailed descriptions of the plants and animals he saw, the farming and farm implements used there and the varied cultures he came across in Morocco. Although it was a temporary stay, he bought twelve hens and two goats when he was there and faithfully recorded how many eggs they laid and how much milk they produced. Coming Up For Air contains many nostalgic descriptions of the English countryside and tells the story of how, disillusioned with his life as a salesman, its main character George Bowling goes back to his childhood haunts in Lower Binfield where the carp once swam lazily in a hidden pond and finds that it has been turned into a rubbish dump. He was seeking the Golden Country of his dreams but it no longer existed:

‘As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don’t belong to the modern world. the very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool — and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside — belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.’

Orwell said he got the idea for Animal Farm when he saw a boy whipping a horse and wondered what would happen if the animals became aware of their strength and fought back. Its success as a fable is as much due to his knowledge and love of animals and farming through changing seasons as to his radical political analysis. When his friend Tosco Fyvel admired the way he looked after his son Richard, Orwell remarked: ‘Yes. You see, I’ve always been good with animals.’

My favourite Orwell essay is ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ which was published in Tribune in April 1946, the month before he went to Jura. In praise of spring he says:

‘The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road. There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.

As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.’

In my novel Barnhill I try to get inside Orwell’s head by writing some of his thoughts in the first person e.g.

‘However, I was determined to go to Barnhill that summer and to get the house in order before bringing Ricky and Susan up there. If that first year worked out, we could move there for good. Now, apart from my work and Ricky, the thing I care about most is gardening, especially vegetable gardening. And so my plan was to grow vegetable varieties which were suitable for the Hebrides and, with fish and venison to supplement our rations, to become as self-sufficient as possible. I’ve always liked Robinson Crusoe and, whilst Jura was no South Sea paradise island, it was the nearest thing I could find to one in the British Isles.’

Barnhill on Jura

He went to the remote farmhouse Barnhill on his own in May 1946 to get away from London and the treadmill of journalism which made him feel “like a sucked orange”, to bring up his son Richard in the country after Eileen died, and to write what became Nineteen Eighty-Four. That first summer he took a break from writing for several months and threw himself into gardening, — sowing lettuces, radishes, spring onions and cress — fishing, digging peat, shooting rabbits (who kept eating his vegetables), and keeping hens, geese and later pigs. His Jura diaries faithfully record all of these activities, the Argyll weather, how far on the plants like primroses, thrift, flag irises, and trees were, the gardening and other practical work he planned to do, the wildlife he came across, and how many fish he and his sister Avril caught. He went back to London in October that first year but returned on his own to Barnhill at New Year to plant some fruit trees, bushes and roses. I describe that visit in Barnhill:

‘The following day the wind dropped and, although it was cold and overcast, he managed to plant two morello cherry trees near the house, a dozen apple trees, a dozen each of red and blackcurrant bushes, a dozen gooseberry plants and rhubarb roots, and six rambling and climbing roses. He seldom shied away from hard work. The day after was sunny but cold, and the wind got up again, yet he managed to plant two dozen raspberry bushes.’

Barnhill: A Novel (Luath Press)

My account is based on his Jura diary which has a drawing of where he would plant these in front of the house. It shows an extraordinary commitment on his part to living off the land on Jura for the rest of his life. He was so taken with Jura that he gave up the leases on The Stores at Wallington and his Islington flat and intended to live at Barnhill permanently. But by 1948 he had destroyed his health in his desperate struggle to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four and spent the remaining year of his short life in hospitals in southern England. Even in that final novel with its oppressive atmosphere of a city falling apart on which flying bombs might drop at any time, there are some beautiful lyrical passages which vividly depict the English countryside and Winston Smith’s longing for his lost childhood and the Golden Country which he can barely remember. It recurred in his dreams and ‘In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.’ Later Winston and Julia escape the eyes of Big Brother by going into the countryside to make love for the first time:

‘It’s the Golden country – almost,’ he murmured.

‘The Golden Country?’

‘It’s nothing, really. A landscape I’ve seen sometimes in a dream.’

‘Look!’ whispered Julia.

A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to put forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together fascinated…’

As his health deteriorated, Orwell thought more and more about his childhood, the repressive prep school he went to, and his love of the countryside. The Golden Country represented his dream of what life could be like for everyone. Even when he was dying in a London hospital he sent for his fishing rod from Barnhill since he hoped to fish in Switzerland where he was to recuperate in a sanatorium. But he died of a massive lung haemorrhage before he could go there. The Golden Country is the dream of Winston Smith, but it’s also the dream of George Orwell who longed for the lost rural childhood he’d experienced in Edwardian England as Eric Blair. It is also the dream of our earliest experiences of the natural world that many of us long for since we have lost the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feel of our childhood and we desperately want to find them again.

The books in his possession when he died included The Naturalist on the River Amazon by H.W. Bates, Fishes of Britain’s Rivers and Lakes by J.R.Norman, British Shells by F.M. Duncan, Poisonous Fungi by J Ramsbottom, Plain Vegetable Growing by G.E Whitehead, Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species, and Henry Thoreau’s Walden. It’s interesting that there were no books about birds amongst them and there is a dearth of books about nature in general. His thoughts on Thoreau’s Walden about the American writer’s retreat to a cabin in the Concord woods would have been fascinating, but, as far as I know, he didn’t write about it.

His last three novels can be seen as expressing his deep concerns that industrial society and technological ‘progress’ were destroying the rural way of life of Edwardian England that he valued so much and depicting his desire to live in the Golden Country of his childhood. Perhaps in a way similar to J.R.R. Tolkien’s portrayal of the way the forces of evil were gathering to destroy the Shire in The Hobbit (1937) and in The Lord of the Rings which came out in 1954-1955. In a sense both writers were continuing and extending the critique by the English Romantic poets and D. H. Lawrence of industrialisation and its damaging effects on nature and people.

Orwell’s abiding interest in and expression of the natural world deserves to be better known. In a perceptive essay ‘Beyond the Common Toad: The Animal in Orwell’ in George Orwell Studies (2017), Charlie Salter says, ‘While Orwell is conventionally defined by his political insights, and the depiction of dystopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is the tension between nature’s beauty and the modern world of dictatorship, bureaucracy and warfare that more consistently defines Orwell.’

On further reflection, it is perhaps really not that surprising that he combined sharp insights into political developments and how the world was changing with a close interest in all things natural and the varied ways in which humans relate to the natural world. Both require a mind that takes a clear-eyed view of the world and sees what’s ‘in front of your nose’. I’ve been involved in geopoetics for many years as a way of perceiving the Earth with heightened awareness, by being open to what’s around you, using all your senses and knowledge to take it all in, and expressing it creatively. A keen interest in all things and the ability to observe them closely and express them creatively is just as applicable to politics as it is to the bird life, the Atlantic weather systems and the rugged terrain of Jura or elsewhere. Orwell demonstrates that truth in his life and work.

‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ provides some splendid examples of how his appreciation of natural phenomena and heightened political awareness can illuminate each other.

‘At any rate, Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’

References

Bissell, Norman (2019) Barnhill, Edinburgh: Luath Press

Coppard, Audrey and Crick, Bernard (1984) Orwell Remembered, London: Ariel Books BBC

Keeble, Richard Lance (2020) ‘Seeing What is in Front of One’s Nose’, London: www.orwellsociety.com

Orwell, George (2010) Diaries, London: Penguin

Orwell, George (2000) ‘, London, Penguin

Orwell, George (1970) Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 4, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin

Orwell, George (2000) The Complete Novels, London, Penguin

Orwell, George (1970) ‘Why I Write’, Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin

Salter, Charlie (2017) ‘Beyond the Common Toad: The Animal in Orwell’, Keeble, Richard Lance and Newsinger, John (eds), George Orwell Studies, Bury St Edmunds: Abramis Academic

Topp, Sylvia (2020) Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, London: Unbound

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Norman Bissell is a member of the Orwell Society and the author of Barnhill a novel and the poetry collection Slate, Sea and Sky, both published by Luath Press. He is the director of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics and lead editor of its journal Stravaig www.geopoetics.org.uk. His poems, reviews and articles have been widely published..