Orwell and the Toads
An extract from 'Orwell: The New Life' by D. J. Taylor, published 25 May (Constable)
One fail-safe route into Orwell’s relish of the natural world is his essay ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, first published in Tribune in April 1946. It is one of his most characteristic pieces, full of the minutest observation (a toad’s eye, he insists, is ‘like gold, or more exactly, it is like the gold-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrisoberyl’), effortlessly switching from the general to the particular, championing his subject as one of the great symbols of approaching spring and, in the end, employing more or less the whole of nature as a bulwark against the totalitarian tide. ‘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.’ There are also some bracing accounts of the animal’s mating ritual.
By this point, Orwell’s career as a student of the natural world went back nearly three and a half decades. Some of his earliest, pre-teen correspondence shows an interest in ‘beastly freaks of smelly white mice’ and asks for news of family pets. The very last letter he wrote home to his mother from St Cyprian’s in the summer of 1916 trumpets the purchase of three caterpillars named Savonarola, Paul and Barnabas, while ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ concedes that one of the few things that made his five years there tolerable was friendly Mr Sillars with his penchant for nature rambles across the Sussex Downs. One mark of this absorption is his habit of being photographed with pets or livestock – his mother’s dogs, Muriel the goat on his Hertfordshire smallholding. Another man, when complimented on how well he brought up his small son, might have felt self-conscious in remarking that he had ‘always got on well with animals’. Orwell, you suspect, regarded childcare and goat husbandry as branches of the same far from easy subject.
Where do the roots of Orwell’s fixation on the flora and fauna of early twentieth-century England lie? At a guess, on the high ground above Henley where he spent his school holidays roaming the greensward with Jacintha Buddicom. Come the early 1930s, his letters to friends are crammed with references to nature rambles, fishing trips, skylarks, hedgehogs – the difficulty here was establishing whether they were stone dead or merely hibernating – the pursuit of puss moths and birds’ nests or trips to the Suffolk heronries. Naturally, these forced marches across, as it might be, Walberswick Common or through Blythburgh Woods, a short step from his parents’ home in Southwold, are important for what they tell us about the off-duty writer and how he spent his time away from the desk. Even more important, though, are the literary uses to which they were put. To take only the most obvious manifestation of this bond, how many times does Orwell, when searching for an image, head back to nature to pronounce that the object in question was, let us say, the colour of a hedge-sparrow’s egg?
On the one hand, ‘nature’ to Orwell is a stanchion against the devitalising forces of the modern world. As ‘Some Thoughts’ puts it, in an increasingly mechanised age, where ploughed fields are being grubbed up for municipal housing and rivers being pumped full of effluent, to retain one’s childhood love of trees, fishes and butterflies makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable. George Bowling’s paean to the joys of fishing in Coming Up for Air goes so far as to locate this opposition in language itself. There is ‘a kind of peacefulness’ in the names of English coarse fish, he decides. ‘Roach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike, chub, carp, tench. They’re solid kind of names. The people who made them up hadn’t heard of machine-guns, they didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating aspirins, going to the pictures, and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp.’ A fish, on this evidence, is a kind of spiritual kitemark.
On the other hand, Orwell’s feelings about nature were inextricably bound up with his feelings for women. His friend Tosco Fyvel noted how he tended to ‘let himself go’ stylistically when the two came together, and one of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s key concepts is the idea of the Golden Country where Winston and Julia can be themselves, far away from the world of telescreens and vigilant authority. Jacintha, who saw herself in Julia, once complained that their meeting place in a dell full of bluebells related to a particular wood in Ticklerton, Shropshire, but it is more likely that the Golden Country draws on Orwell’s memory of trips around the Suffolk countryside with Eleanor and Brenda.
Or there is the vital significance to that parallel track in Orwell’s imagination in which nature and women converge on Burnham Beeches. His letters to Eleanor and Brenda positively teem with plans for assignations amid the Buckinghamshire verdure. ‘It would be nicest if we went somewhere where there are woods . . . e.g. to Burnham Beeches’ runs a note to Eleanor from June 1933. Not long before he had reminded Brenda that ‘It was so nice at Burnham Beeches, & I should love to go there again when the trees are budding.’ It is worth wondering what the women enticed to this patch of woodland thought of Orwell’s courtship locale, and whether, in the end, they might have preferred to go somewhere else. But Orwell was inexorable. What the site meant to him may perhaps be inferred from its importation to non-romantic situations. Where, after all, should Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter choose to eat her Christmas Day packed lunch than ‘in the woods near Burnham, against a great gnarled beech tree’? You suspect that Orwell had once done the same thing himself.
However impassioned Orwell’s musings about trout streams, bluebell woods and birds of prey stalking the Jura headlands, there is nothing sentimental about them. As one who had spent much of his spare time tending to animals on the Wallington smallholding or at the Barnhill farm, he could be horribly down-to-earth about the issues at stake. Feeding a gazelle in the municipal park at Marrakech, he notes that gazelles ‘are about the only animals that look good enough to eat while they are still alive, in fact one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce’. At exactly the same time he was writing letters home to his friend Jack Common, who had been left in charge of his livestock. Had Muriel’s mating gone through yet, he wondered at one stage. ‘It’s a most unedifying spectacle, by the way, if you happened to watch.’ Yet there was one species of animal beyond the rat to whom he could not extend the hand of friendship. Pigs, he informed a correspondent from Jura, were ‘disgusting brutes’. As for the specimen currently being bred up at Barnhill, ‘we cannot wait for him to go to the butcher’
Exclusive extract from Orwell: The New Life by D. J. Taylor, published 25 May (£30, Constable) | Available to pre-order here.
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