‘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.’

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE COMMON TOAD, George Orwell, 1946

 

Democratic socialist, polemicist;

novelist, poet, writer of social

and economic commentary;

Old Etonian, ex-Superintendent

of the Indian Imperial Police,

veteran of the Spanish Civil War;

Sergeant Eric Blair (aka George Orwell)

commanded a Home Guard platoon in London.

 

The platoon – which was known locally

as the ‘Foreign Legion’ because so many

of its members were refugees from

persecution in Nazi Germany

and Tzarist Russia – was one of twelve hundred

volunteer groups of part-timers mustered

nationally to delay and to frustrate

a German invasion long enough

for full-time troops to arrive and deploy.

 

Orwell, rejected from active service

because of his lungs – he would die from TB

ten years later – thought the Home Guard a

peculiarly British institution.

More than two million men being ordered

to keep an Enfield 303 rifle

and ammunition at home suggested

a complacent, almost feudal state of mind.

 

The author of ‘1984’, ‘The Road

to Wigan Pier’ and ‘Decline of the English

Murder’ had a flat in Langford Court,

Abbey Road – some thirty years too soon

to hear the Beatles sing, ‘Love is all you need.’

From the roof of his building he could observe

the fires of the Blitz in the Thames’ docks

and their adjoining terraced streets – and stray bombs

falling quite near him on Lords’ Cricket Ground

and London Zoo in The Regent’s Park,

one of many public spaces owned

by the Crown. History does not record

his being aware that a zebra

and a wild ass and its foal had escaped

during a raid. They were caught in Camden Town,

not very far from the edge of the parkland.

If he had known he might perhaps have made it

some sort of metaphor.