No More Learning

. . .

I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a
moral effort. One cannot get away from one's own subjective feelings, but at least one
can know what they are and make allowance for them.

Partisan Review, Winter 1945


As I Please - The Coming Age Of Superpowers

Tribune

2 February 1945

A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in
the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this
happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this
lunacy very much longer? " You know the answer, of course. Indeed, the difficulty
nowadays is to find anyone who thinks that there will not be another war in the fairly
near future.

Germany, I suppose, will be defeated this year, and when Germany is out of the way
Japan will not be able to stand up to the combined powers of Britain and the U. S. A. Then
there will be a peace of exhaustion, with only minor and unofficial wars raging all over
the place, and perhaps this so-called peace may last for decades. But after that, by the
way the world is actually shaping, it may well be that war will become permanent.
Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is
splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham's
Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see
more or less what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this


pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another,
though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war. Their problems,
both economic and psychological, will be a lot simpler if the doodlebugs are more or less
continually whizzing to and fro.

If these two or three super-states do establish themselves, not only will each of them be
too big to be conquered, but they will be under no necessity to trade with one another,
and in a position to prevent all contact between their nationals. Already, for a dozen years
or so, large areas of the earth have been cut off from one another, although technically at
peace.

Some months ago, in this column, I pointed out that modern scientific inventions have
tended to prevent rather than increase international communication. This brought me
several angry letters from readers, but none of them were able to show that what I had
said was false. They merely retorted that if we had Socialism, the aeroplane, the radio etc.
would not be perverted to wrong uses. Very true, but then we haven't Socialism. As it is,
the aeroplane is primarily a thing for dropping bombs and the radio primarily a thing for
whipping up nationalism. Even before the war there was enormously less contact
between the peoples of the earth than there had been thirty years earlier, and education
was perverted, history re-written and freedom of thought suppressed to an extent
undreamed of in earlier ages. And there is no sign whatever of these tendencies being
reversed.

Maybe I am pessimistic. But at any rate those are the thoughts that cross my mind (and a
lot of other people's too, I believe) every time the explosion of a V bomb booms through
the mist.


Review:

The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus

Taken together, these two books give grounds for dismay. The first of them is an
eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism, the other is an even more vehement
denunciation of it. They cover to some extent the same ground, they frequently quote the
same authorities, and they even start out with the same premise, since each of them
assumes that Western civilization depends on the sanctity of the individual. Yet each
writer is convinced that the other's policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing
is that they may both be right. . . .

Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole
queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps,
leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can
somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the
concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.


Both of these writers are aware of this, more or less; but since they can show no
practicable way of bringing it about the combined effect of their books is a depressing
one.

Observer, 9 April 1 944


As I Please - Ugly Leaders

Tribune, 7 January, 1944

Looking through the photographs of the New Year's Honours List, I am struck (as usual)
by the quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be
almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de
Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst like a tax collector
with a duodenal ulcer. But our country is not alone in this. Anyone who is a good hand
with scissors and paste could compile an excellent book entitled Our Rulers, and
consisting simply of published photographs of the great ones of the earth. The idea first
occurred to me when I saw in Picture Post some "stills" of Beaverbrook delivering a
speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for
anyone who was not doing it on purpose.

When you had got together your collection of fuerhers, actual and would-be, you would
notice that several qualities recur throughout the list. To begin with, they are all old. In
spite of the lip-service that is paid everywhere to youth, there is no such thing as a person
in a truly commanding position who is less than fifty years old. Secondly, they are nearly
all undersized. A dictator taller than five feet six inches is a very great rarity. And,
thirdly, there is this almost general and sometimes quite fantastic ugliness. The collection
would contain photographs of Streicher bursting a blood vessel, Japanese war-lords
impersonating baboons, Mussolini with his scrubby dewlap, the chinless de Gaulle, the
stumpy short-armed Churchill, Gandhi with his long sly nose and huge bat's ears, Tojo
displaying thirty-two teeth with gold in every one of them. And opposite each, to make a
contrast, there would be a photograph of an ordinary human being from the country
concerned. Opposite Hitler a young sailor from a German submarine, opposite Tojo a
Japanese peasant of the old type — and so on.


As I Please - War Guilt
Tribune, 31 December, 1943

Reading the discussion of "war guilt" which reverberates in the correspondence columns
of the newspapers, I note the surprise with which many people seem to discover that war
is not a crime. Hitler, it appears, has not done anything actionable. He has not raped
anybody, nor carried off any pieces of loot with his own hands, nor personally flogged
any prisoners, buried any wounded men alive, thrown any babies into the air and spitted
them on his bayonet, dipped any nuns in petrol and touched them off with church tapers


— in fact he has not done any of the things which enemy nationals are usually credited
with doing in war-time. He has merely precipitated a world war which will perhaps have
cost twenty-million lives before it ends. And there is nothing illegal in that. How could
there be, when legality implies authority and there is no authority with the power to
transcend national frontiers?

At the recent trials in Kharkov some attempt was made to fix on Hitler, Himmler and the
rest the responsibility for their subordinates' crimes, but the mere fact that this had to be
done shows that Hitlers's guilt is not self-evident. His crime, it is implied, was not to
build up an army for the purpose of aggressive war, but to instruct that army to torture its
prisoners. So far as it goes, the distinction between an atrocity and an act of war is valid.
An atrocity means an act of terrorism which has no genuine military purpose. One must
accept such distinctions if one accepts war at all, which in practice everyone does.
Nevertheless, a world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to
drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me
wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.


Revenge is Sour

Tribune

9 November, 1945

Whenever I read phrases like "war guilt trials", "punishment of war criminals" and so
forth, there comes back into my mind the memory of something I saw in a prisoner-of-
war camp in South Germany, earlier this year.

Another correspondent and myself were being show round the camp by a little Viennese
Jew who had been enlisted in the branch of the American army which deals with the
interrogation of prisoners. He was an alert, fair-haired, rather good-looking youth of
about twenty-five, and politically so much more knowledgeable than the average
American officer that it was a pleasure to be with him. The camp was on an airfield, and,
after we had been round the cages, our guide led us to a hangar where various prisoners
who were in a different category from the others were being "screened. "

Up at one end of the hangar about a dozen men were lying in a row on the concrete floor.
These, it was explained, were S. S. officers who had been segregated from the other
prisoners. Among them was a man in dingy civilian clothes who was lying with his arm
across his face and apparently asleep. He had strange and horribly deformed feet. The
two of them were quite symmetrical, but they were clubbed out into an extraordinary
globular shape which made them more like a horse's hoof than anything human. As we
approached the group, the little Jew seemed to be working himself up into a state of
excitement.


"That’s the real swine! " he said, and suddenly he lashed out with his heavy army boot and
caught the prostrate man a fearful kick right on the bulge of one of his deformed feet.

"Get up, you swine! " he shouted as the man started out of sleep, and then repeated
something of the kind in German. The prisoner scrambled to his feet and stood clumsily
to attention. With the same air of working himself up into a fury — indeed he was almost
dancing up and down as he spoke — the Jew told us the prisoner's history. He was a "real"
Nazi: his party number indicated that he had been a member since the very early days,
and he had held a post corresponding to a General in the political branch of the S. S. It
could be taken as quite certain that he had had charge of concentration camps and had
presided over tortures and hangings. In short, he represented everything that we had been
fighting against during the past five years.

Meanwhile, I was studying his appearance. Quite apart from the scrubby, unfed,
unshaven look that a newly captured man generally has, he was a disgusting specimen.
But he did not look brutal or in any way frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low way,
intellectual. His pale, shifty eyes were deformed by powerful spectacles. He could have
been an unfrocked clergyman, an actor ruined by drink, or a spiritualist medium. I have
seen very similar people in London common lodging houses, and also in the Reading
Room of the British Museum. Quite obviously he was mentally unbalanced — indeed,
only doubtfully sane, though at this moment sufficiently in his right mind to be frightened
of getting another kick. And yet everything that the Jew was telling me of his history
could have been true, and probably was true! So the Nazi torturer of one's imagination,
the monstrous figure against whom one had struggled for so many years, dwindled to this
pitiful wretch, whose obvious need was not for punishment, but for some kind of
psychological treatment.

Later, there were further humiliations. Another S. S. officer, a large brawny man, was
ordered to strip to the waist and show the blood group number tattooed on his under-arm;
another was forced to explain to us how he had lied about being a member of the S. S. and
attempted to pass himself off as an ordinary soldier of the Wehrmacht. I wondered
whether the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was
exercising. I concluded that he wasn't really enjoying it, and that he was merely — like a
man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing round a picture
gallery — telling himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to
behave in the days he was helpless.

It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis.
Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his
whole family had been murdered; and after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very
tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler regime. But what this
scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea
of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such
thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless
and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire
evaporates also.



Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S. S. officers
kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and
disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman
drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, "Those are for my five sons! " It is
the kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder how much
satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years
earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot
at him was that he should be a corpse.

In so far as the big public in this country is responsible for the monstrous peace
settlement now being forced on Germany, it is because of a failure to see in advance that
punishing an enemy brings no satisfaction. We acquiesce in crimes like the expulsion of
all Germans from East Prussia — crimes which in some cases we could not prevent but
might at least have protested against — because the Germans had angered and frightened
us, and therefore we were certain that when they were down we should feel no pity for
them. We persist in these policies, or let others persist in them on our behalf, because of a
vague feeling that, having set out to punish Germany, we ought to go ahead and do it.
Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country, and even less, I
should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only the minority of sadists, who must
have their "atrocities" from one source or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-
down of war criminals and quislings. If you asked the average man what crime Goering,
Ribbentrop, and the rest are to be charged with at their trial, he cannot tell you. Somehow
the punishment of these monsters ceases to sem attractive when it becomes possible:
indeed, once under lock and key, they almost cease to be monsters.

Unfortunately, there is often a need of some concrete incident before one can discover the
real state of one's feelings. Here is another memory from Germany. A few hours after
Stuttgart was captured by the French army, a Belgian journalist and myself entered the
town, which was still in some disorder. The Belgian had been broadcasting throughout
the war for the European Service of the BBC, and, like nearly all Frenchmen or Belgians,
he had a very much tougher attitude towards "the Boche" than an Englishman or an
American would have. All the main bridges into town had been blown up, and we had to
enter by a small footbridge which the Germans had evidently mad efforts to defend. A
dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy
yellow. On his breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming
everywhere.

The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the bridge he
confided to me that this was the first time he had seen a dead man. I suppose he was
thirty five years old, and for four years he had been doing war propaganda over the radio.
For several days after this, his attitude was quite different from what it had been earlier.
He looked with disgust at the bomb-wrecked town and the humiliation the Germans were
undergoing, and even on one occasion intervened to prevent a particularly bad bit of
looting. When he left, he gave the residue of the coffee we had brought with us to the
Germans on whom we were billeted. A week earlier he would probably have been
scandalized at the idea of giving coffee to a "Boche. " But his feelings, he told me, had



undergone a change at the sight of ce pauvre mort beside the bridge: it had suddenly
brought home to him the meaning of war. And yet, if we had happened to enter the town
by another route, he might have been spared the experience of seeing one corpse out of
the — perhaps — twenty million that the war has produced.



George Orwell

A Hanging

It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting
over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of
sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by
ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of
them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round
them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a
shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for
his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were
guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and
fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and
fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about
him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while
feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and
may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the
ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.

Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant
barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily
prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with
a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. ‘For God's sake hurry up, Francis,’ he said
irritably. ‘The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren't you ready yet? ’

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his
black hand. ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’ he bubbled. ‘All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss
waiting. We shall proceed. ’

‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can't get their breakfast till this job's over. ’

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their
rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder,
as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like,
followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short
without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come goodness knows
whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks,
and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings
together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round
us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up
tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.



‘Who let that bloody brute in here? ’ said the superintendent angrily. ‘Catch it, someone! ’


A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and
gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer
picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and
came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two
warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was
several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief
through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner
marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with
that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid
neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed
themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each
shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy,
conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the
unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying,
he was alive just as we were alive.
All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery.
His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the
air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his
brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a
party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in
two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and
overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with
planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The
hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his
machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two
warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows
and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and fixed the rope
round the prisoner's neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the
gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was
a high, reiterated cry of ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! ’, not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry
for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound
with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a
flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner's face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still
persisted, over and over again: ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! ’

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The
steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! ’ never faltering



for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with
his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number — fifty,
perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone grey like bad
coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man
on the drop, and listened to his cries — each cry another second of life; the same thought was
in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift
motion with his stick. ‘Chalo! ’ he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope
was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the
gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the
yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the
gallows to inspect the prisoner's body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight
downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated, slightly.
‘He's all right,’ said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a
deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-
watch. ‘Eight minutes past eight. Well, that's all for this morning, thank God. ’

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having
misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned
cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under
the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast. They
squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets
marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An
enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to
break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing
smile: ‘Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal had
been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. — Kindly take one of my
cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees
eight annas. Classy European style. ’

Several people laughed — at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. ‘Well, sir, all hass passed off
with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished — flick! like that. It iss not always so —
oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull
the prisoner's legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable! ’


‘Wriggling about, eh? That's bad,’ said the superintendent.



‘Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss
cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to
dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear fellow,” we said,
“think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us! ” But no, he would not listen! Ach, he
wass very troublesome! ’

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent
grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You'd better all come out and have a drink,’ he said quite genially.
‘I've got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it. ’

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. ‘Pulling at his legs! ’
exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began
laughing again. At that moment Francis's anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had
a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred
yards away.



COLLECTED ESSAYS


BY: GEORGE ORWELL
CATEGORY: LITERATURE - ESSAYS


Collected Essays


by


George Orwell


eBooks@Adelaide

2004


Table of Contents


1. The Spike (1931)

2. A hanging (1931)

3. Bookshop memories (1936)

4. Shooting an elephant (1936)

5. Down the mine (1937) (from “The Road to Wigan Pier”)

6. North and south (1937) (from “The Road to Wigan Pier”)

7. Spilling the Spanish beans (1937)

8. Marrakech (1939)

9. Boys’ weeklies and Frank Richards’s reply (1940)

10. Charles Dickens ( 1940)

11. Charles Reade (1940)

12. Inside the whale ( 1940)

13. The art of Donald Mcgill (1941)

14. The lion and the unicorn: Socialism and the English genius (1941)


15. Wells, Hitler and the world state (1941)

16. Looking back on the Spanish war (1942)

17. Rudyard Kipling (1942)

18. Mark Twain — the licensed jester (1943)

19. Poetry and the microphone (1943)

20. WB Yeats (1943)

21. Arthur Koestler ( 1944)

22. Benefit of clergy: Some notes on Salvador Dali (1944)

23. Raffles and Miss Blandish ( 1944)

24. Antisemitism in Britain (1945)

25. Freedom of the park (1945)

26. Future of a ruined Germany (1945)

27. Good bad books ( 1945)

28. In defence of P. G. Wodehouse (1945)

29. Nonsense poetry (1945)

30. Notes on nationalism ( 1945)

31. Revenge is sour (1945)

32. The sporting spirit (1945)

33. You and the atomic bomb (1945)

34. A good word for the Vicar of Bray (1946)

35. A nice cup of tea (1946)

36. Books vs. Cigarettes (1946)

37. Confessions of a book reviewer ( 1946)

38. Decline of the English murder (1946)

39. How the poor die (1946)

40. James Burnham and the managerial revolution (1946)

41. Pleasure spots ( 1946)

42. Politics and the English language (1946)

43. Politics vs. Literature: An examination of Gulliver’s Travels (1946)

44. Riding down from Bangor (1946)

45. Some thoughts on the common toad (1946)

46. The prevention of literature (1946)

47. Why I write (1946)


48. Lear, Tolstoy and the fool ( 1947)

49. Such, such were the joys (1947)

50. Writers and Leviathan (1948)

51. Reflections on Gandhi (1949)


THE SPIKE (1931)

It was late-afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman, lay on the green
waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk much. We just sprawled about
exhaustedly, with home-made cigarettes sticking out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the
chestnut branches were covered with blossom, and beyond that great woolly clouds
floated almost motionless in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban
riff-raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.

What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil, everyone
agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable dog. You couldn’t call
your soul your own when he was about, and many a tramp had he kicked out in the
middle of the night for giving a back answer. When you came to be searched, he fair held
you upside down and shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was hell to pay,
and if you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.

I had eightpence on me. ‘For the love of Christ, mate,’ the old hands advised me, ‘don’t
you take it in. You’d get seven days for going into the spike with eightpence! ’

So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a lump of flint.
Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for it is forbidden to take these
into nearly all spikes, and one is supposed to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in
our socks, except for the twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the
tobacco in their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with contraband
until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephantiasis. But it is an
unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp Majors do not search below the knee, and in
the end only one man was caught. This was Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard
accent sired by cockney out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at
the wrong moment, and was impounded.


At six, the gates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate entered our names
and other particulars in the register and took our bundles away from us. The woman was
sent off to the workhouse, and we others into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly,
limewashed place, consisting only of a bathroom and dining-room and about a hundred
narrow stone cells. The terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us into the
bathroom to be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty who gave
the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping-pond, shoving them this way and
that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when he came to myself he looked hard at me,
and said:

‘You are a gentleman? ’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

He gave me another long look. ‘Well, that’s bloody bad luck, guv’nor,’ he said, ‘that’s
bloody bad luck, that is. ’ And thereafter he took it into his head to treat me with
compassion, even with a kind of respect.

It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were
exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the
layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes, held
together by dirt. The room became a press of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the
tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of the men
refused the bath, and washed only their ‘toe-rags’, the horrid, greasy little clouts which
tramps bind round their feet. Each of us had three minutes in which to bathe himself. Six
greasy, slippery roller towels had to serve for the lot of us.

When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and we were dressed in
the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like nightshirts, reaching to the middle of the
thigh. Then we were sent into the diningroom, where supper was set out on the deal
tables. It was the invariable spike meal, always the same, whether breakfast, dinner or
supper — half a pound of bread, a bit of margarine, and a pint of so-called tea. It took us
five minutes to gulp down the cheap, noxious food. Then the Tramp Major served us with
three cotton blankets each, and drove us off to our cells for the night. The doors were



locked on the outside a little before seven in the evening, and would stay locked for the
next twelve hours.

The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting apparatus except a tiny barred
window high up in the wall, and a spyhole in the door. There were no bugs, and we had
bedsteads and straw palliasses, rare luxuries both. In many spikes one sleeps on a wooden
shelf, and in some on the bare floor, with a rolled-up coat for pillow. With a cell to
myself, and a bed, I was hoping for a sound night’s rest. But I did not get it, for there is
always something wrong in the spike, and the peculiar shortcoming here, as I discovered
immediately, was the cold. May had begun, and in honour of the season — a little sacrifice
to the gods of spring, perhaps — the authorities had cut off the steam from the hot pipes.