‘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.
By David Selzer