18
PARTISAN REVIEW
to Bhamo, near the Chinese border, and with a month's visa was able to
visit nearly all the places where Orwell had lived and worked.)
One obscure source, May Hearsey's privately published memoir of
Burma,
Land of Chindits and Rubies
(1982),
gave an interesting view of
Orwell as a policeman. She provides a telling snapshot of his kindness
to a young Irish officer who had just been posted to Moulmein. When
the new man confessed that he didn't know Burmese well enough to
take on his new job, Orwell was sympathetic and advised him to trans–
fer to the River Police, where the language was not essential. Decent and
kind himself, he was very different from the typc of martinet officer he
satirized in
Burmese Days.
The journey to Orwell's house on jura-in the Inner Hebrides, off the
west coast of Scotland, where he lived in the late
1940S
and wrote
Nine–
teen Eighty-four-is
almost as difficult as getting to Burma. The train
from London to Glasgow, bus
to
the coast, boat
to
the Kintyre peninsula,
bus across Kintyre, boat to jura, and taxi from Craighouse to Ardlussa
still takes forty-eight hours. The last seven miles-along a grueling, badly
rutted cart track, full of enormous potholes-has to be negotiated on
foot. His old house, Barnhill-a cross between Wuthering Heights and
Cold Comfort Farm-is closed up and there's nothing else to see when
you finally get there. Since I went to Britain in Novcmber and December,
when jura is sometimes cut off from the mainland for weeks by stormy
seas, I abandoned the idea and based my descriptions of jura on travel
books, Orwell 's diary, and accounts of friends who visited him there.
Susan Watson, who as a young woman worked as a nanny for
Orwell's adopted son, recounted her bitter quarrels on jura with
Orwell's sister, Avril, about who would control his household. I went
to
visit David Holbrook, now a Cambridge don but in the late
1940S
a
young writer and, for a time, Susan's boyfriend. Holbrook made the
trek to visit Susan on jura, where Orwell and Avril, suspecting he was
a Communist spy, treated him as an unwelcome guest. Holbrook gave
me his unpublished novel, with an account of his visit he assured me
was based on reality. I had always felt that Orwell's decision to live on
damp and dreary jura virtually killed him. Talking to Susan, Holbrook,
David Astor (who had first told him about the island),
to
Orwell's fam–
ily, who'd spent summers there, and to two of his doctors, confirmed
this belief (this is one of my long-running quarrels with Crick).
The important questions were: why did he go there? what was it like?
why was he so reluctant
to
leave, despite the acute discomfort, the cold,
and the impossibility of getting any secretaria l help when he was work–
ing on
Nineteen Eighty-Four?
jura is still unspoiled, very much as it was
