The Wretched Little Place in Devonshire

September 2016. On the second day of the new autumn term, a sixth former sets out from home. His bike is later found padlocked to a fence behind a church, his uniform stuffed into a binbag lying nearby. His letter to his parents arrives next day telling them where the bike is and promising not to be away for ‘longer than a year’. From his Kindle it is apparent that he has just read Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

Orwell is the story the Guardian runs with. The Daily Mail prefers to see behind this disappearing act the influence of The Bourne Identity. It is all over the local and national media, but disappear he successfully does, leaving behind his bank card and phone and everything else which might be used to track him. In an age of hyper-connectivity this is perhaps a form of rebellion we can expect more of.

Two months later the boy, apparently on his way home, having lived as a vagrant in several cities, is spotted by a fellow-traveller on a train leaving Exeter. The police are there to escort him home from the next stationstop, Honiton.

When your imagination is captured by some news item and you can’t quite say why, there is rarely much you can do except wait. Most often the mystery remains unsolved. A year or more had passed before, following up something quite unrelated, I realised why I’d felt such a tug from this story. The best way I can put it is like this. Suppose that the boy was not, in fact, returning home, and that there had been no fellow-passenger with a good memory for faces. Continuing from Honiton, where the police would not have been waiting, his train would have passed, a short while later, a range of derelict industrial buildings. He would have needed to keep an eye out for them – to the inattentive traveller they register as little more than a brief blur of rusting iron and mouldering brickwork before the Devon countryside resumes.

It’s a disused railway station, with outbuildings from which milk and eggs and other goods were once distributed. One of these buildings is now used for car repairs. Most of the place is tricked out in cameras and wire mesh. It is, evidently, the scene of yet another property-related waiting-game. There are evening primroses all along one of the deserted platforms while somebody awaits their opportunity. Ask at that car repairs workshop and you will be told that a developer purchased most of the site a decade or more ago but nothing has happened since. The internet says the same. The story is plausible enough, in an online sort of way. It does little justice, however, to a far stranger truth about this place.

With the rise of car ownership and foreign holidays, the number of visitors reaching the West Country by train declined in the mid-twentieth century. Seaton Junction Station, together with the short branch line that ran down to the coastal resort nearby, closed in 1966. During their century or so in service, these buildings witnessed many comings and goings. But late one August evening in 1920 there occurred here, at this provincial halt, an outwardly trivial muddle which had and has implications for us all.

Scattered through the train which drew up that night, travelling west, was a group of schoolboys returning to their families from an army cadets exercise on Salisbury Plain. They were still in uniform and one of them had to change at Seaton Junction. As he did so the boy walked along the train and called to a friend in another carriage, sitting on his own among strangers. He told this would-be solitary that he was wanted in the carriage where most of the boys were. Not wanting to seem aloof, and since the train appeared to be halting here for some time, this second boy also now reluctantly stepped out onto the platform, in order to quickly change carriages. He had just shut the door behind him when the station master, misreading the situation, gave the signal and the train began to move off.

‘You need two hands to enter a moving train,’ the boy later wrote to a friend, ‘and I, what with kit bag, belt, etc. had only one.’ Bye-laws also prohibited attempts to board a moving train – perhaps the boy, the class rebel as it happens, fumbled at a passing door and was reprimanded by the

guard. It’s the sort of detail he might well have omitted from his version of events. In any case, there was nothing for it now but to wait for the next train.

He sent a telegram to his parents, on holiday in Cornwall, letting them know he would be late. The next train took hours to arrive and only went as far as Plymouth, from where there were no further trains that night. His money, all seven and a half pence of it, presented him with a choice: eat nothing and stay at the YMCA or buy 12 buns and sleep rough.

He chose to eat and so it was that Eric Blair, aged 17, experienced his ‘first adventure as an amateur tramp’. In Plymouth later that night, on his way to ‘the corner of a field near some allotments’, still in his uniform, someone asked ‘whether I was demobilised yet’. Kept awake all night by the cold, the future George Orwell then overslept just long enough to miss the first train next morning. He is very clear, in the same letter, that this is an experiment he will not repeat.

But rewind a bit and look closer. Why had he been sitting on his own in the train? He later recalled, of railway outings in term-time, that they ‘seemed to put a magical distance between yourself and school’. Perhaps, obliged to travel with fellow-pupils, he had sat in another carriage in order to put as much of that ‘magical distance’ between himself and school as he still could. In the letter to his friend, he identifies the boy who wanted to talk to him only as a ‘beastly oppidan’. An ‘oppidan’ was a boy whose parents, unlike Orwell’s, were paying full fees. As his choice of adjective suggests, Blair was both proud and resentful of his status as a scholarship boy. His indignation about the whole episode shows also in his description of Seaton Junction as a ‘wretched little place in Devonshire’. People still travel a long way, just as they did then, for August evenings in the Devon countryside. Then why was it so ‘wretched’ to him?

It’s frustrating to get held up on journeys but he was writing several days later and from the comfort of his family’s holiday lodgings. Perhaps there is just a hint, for this young Etonian as for his friend, that anywhere having the misfortune not to be Windsor (or somewhere nearby) can only be ‘ wretched’. You can already hear that dismissiveness he too often employed later in life when not quite at his best. Seaton Junction shall supply just that touch of bleak chic which his story demands. It

shall be not only ‘wretched’, but ‘little’, too: it shall be the backdrop, in other words, the dull ground against which Eric Blair’s adventure – and his uniformed adolescent grandomania – shall shine all the brighter.

It was only by stumbling again upon this letter that I realised why that truant’s story had kept nagging at me. As the first dated item in Volume One of the Penguin Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, it isn’t so hard to stumble upon. And its prominent position in the book is justified. Obscured as their meaning is by the teen bravado, his words still make for an excellent preface to what follows. Several preoccupations can already be discerned. There is already that tough-mindedness about money and the choices it imposes. Vagrancy and disguise. Soldiering. The life going on around us that we are schooled, from the earliest age, in filtering out. How we unlearn that schooling.

Take just one of these: he mentions being taken for a soldier. ‘Clothes are powerful things’, he would one day discover by dressing up as a tramp. But the entire continent, immediately after the First World War, was in upheaval. Vast armies were disbanded as long-standing empires crumbled. In Germany, Communist insurrections were suppressed. From Spain to Poland there was violent unrest. England was not immune. Orwell later remembered his class being asked by an English teacher (was it Aldous Huxley?) to name the ten greatest men then living. Out of sixteen pupils, fifteen included Lenin on their list. And this was Eton.

‘Those years,’ he later wrote, ‘during and just after the war, were a queer time to be at school, for England was nearer revolution than she has been since or had been for a century. Throughout almost the whole nation there was running a wave of revolutionary feeling which has since been reversed and forgotten, but which has left various deposits of sediment behind.’

He was only a couple of years too young to have fought in the trenches. Being ‘just too young’ combined and reacted with those revolutionary sediments in ways you might not expect. In typically ‘awkward’ fashion, Orwell suggests that his own later eagerness to fight in Spain drew upon something less than a hundred per cent idealistic: ‘You felt yourself a little less than a man, because you had missed [the First World War]’. He was a cadet at different schools from an early age, or ‘on and off I have been toting a rifle since I was ten,’ as he put it. He felt sure that part of what

attracted his generation to the Spanish Civil War was derived from its having just ‘missed’ the trenches.

The scene at Seaton Junction works so well as an unwitting introduction to his work because the reader can see, as the young writer could not, a decision in process of being taken, far below the surface personality and well cushioned from any awareness of what such decisions cost. The voice at this stage is still largely a function of background formation. But what he regarded, then, as an ‘adventure’ he had no intention of repeating, was, we know, nothing of the kind.

His letter about that August evening, to illustrate, was written to Steven Runciman, the future historian and one of the many school-fellows with whom Orwell later broke off contact. Down and Out in Paris and London, his book of reportage about life as a vagrant in the 1920s, is only his bestknown attempt to put this shrugging off of background into writing. It is a thoroughly mixed crowd Orwell the tramp is thrown among – Russians, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and Romanians in Paris, Africans, Indians, Lascars and Irish in London. He is ready to sympathise with people from all and every background, Jews noticeably excepted.

Looking back later on this experience, he wrote ‘I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed’. It was full immersion this convert wanted. At first, they were to him merely ‘the symbolic victims of justice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese played in Burma’. But of living conditions in northern cities at this time he was soon writing: ‘The dirt and congestion of these places is such that you cannot well imagine it unless you have tested it with your own eyes and more particularly your nose.’

This testing of things with his own eyes and nose was, of course, and remains, his trademark and chief selling point. This was a stylistic device, certainly, but also the implement with which he hoped to tunnel his way out. ‘It is in fact very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born,’ as he put it. But we can still try. His on-site analyses – of how a smart hotel works and what it really is (‘an enormous treadmill of boredom’), of the humanly and hygienically revolting conditions in which restaurant food is prepared (‘elf and safety’ didn’t come from nowhere), of how poverty complicates your life – remain as immediate as the more

recent testimony of any Daniel Blake. But then there are those moments in Down and Out at which he pulls back to try and draw wider inferences. Why, he asks at one point, do restaurants or expensive hotels have to exist at all? Why are thousands of people wasting their lives trailing from one homeless shelter to the next? Why do we accept any of this as necessary?

The years just after the First World War were, across Europe, a time for fundamental questions, even if not everyone was inclined to ask them. Doing so was liable to expose both how precarious one’s grip on social reality was and how much of the official culture was designed to keep it that way. When he writes of the London homeless that theirs was a sub-culture that had ‘got below the range of colour prejudice’, when he speculates about some of the vocabulary he encountered and its origins, the suggestion is that here are people whose culture is vivid but largely invisible. This should concern us all, as he puts it, with a very straight look at the reader, because ‘here is the world that awaits you if you are ever penniless’.

That lack of money renders people invisible is not a truth of which anybody can ‘afford’ to be ignorant. How the Poor Die is a similarly unflinching account of his experiences as a patient in the public wards of French and English hospitals. Having grown up, as we almost all now have, with the welfare state, only makes it more urgent that we ‘test our eyes and noses’ on the world it was created as a response to.

Critics are often dismissive of Orwell’s pre-famous fiction, but in fact this theme of social invisibility is nowhere better explored than in his very first novel, Burmese Days. It was from the race divide of British India that he turned to the class divisions of ‘his own’ country. But was it ever ‘his own’ exactly? Himself born in India, Orwell’s decision after leaving school to join the Imperial Police in Burma for 5 years, rather than go to university, is less surprising than it might seem. In the novel he based on his time there, Flory is a deadbeat timber merchant entering both middle age and the early stages of alcoholism in a remote hill station built around a railway terminus.

Given Orwell’s later fame, and the opportunities for Raj period detailing, it’s surprising the book has thus far escaped film treatment. Perhaps we need look no further than the central character for the reason. The centre of this community and in a sense the novel’s chief protagonist

is its Club: ‘in any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of British power, the Nirvana for which the native officials and millionaires pine in vain.’ Perhaps movie industries everywhere, whether British or Indian, are made instinctively uneasy by what he is saying here. As well they might be, for what did Orwell mean by that Club?

‘The real seat of British power’, Orwell calls it. And yet it is quite undefended. When a European injures a Burmese boy and an angry crowd gathers, its vulnerability to physical attack is obvious. The novel describes the British in their Club ‘cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets’. Of course, its authority was underwritten by military occupation, as Orwell knew better than most. Yet in his account this authority, having survived physical attack, is restored and even emerges stronger than before. From what, then, is this tenacious ‘authority’ really derived?

The Club may be a ‘spiritual citadel’ but we watch its members pass their time in ‘ scandal-mongering over cocktails’, in ‘ desolate chatter’ about gramophone records and dogs and tennis, in gin-soaked loathing of the native population: thus far, and no farther, does the Club’s ‘liberty’ extend. It has already, at the novel’s opening, induced in Flory a nearsuicidal ennui. Dimly he apprehends that it is just this dullness, this listless ‘freedom’ to do anything you like except think for yourself, which makes the Club what it is.

Flory is by now both old and gin-soaked enough to see the banal trap his life has walked right into. His friendship with a local Indian doctor is one way he has found to defy the Club, but the doctor himself seeks Club membership for the immunity from local political chicanery which it confers. Flory’s ‘curiosity’ about Burmese culture keeps crash-landing in squalid and exploitative affairs with local girls. He sees clearly enough that he has become ‘a creature of the despotism’ that is British colonial rule.

Extricating oneself from such traps, however ‘clearly’ one sees them, is not so simple. His choice of ‘ escape route’ is the shapely but unlikely Elizabeth Lackersteen. Elizabeth is a penniless, good-looking ball-breaker. Without marriage prospects in England, she has arrived in India to catch herself a husband. She is part of what was known at the time as ‘the fishing fleet.’

Two terms at a private boarding school have equipped Elizabeth with that fine discriminating sense by which the English middle-class female sifted acceptable husband-material from the unacceptable. It is, briefly, as a big game hunter and a bringer of law and order that Flory makes his appeal to her. But his hopes are quickly undone by her discovery that he has got to know more about the ‘natural beauty of Burma’ than is entirely admirable.

But why does Elizabeth, why does the Indian doctor – why, really, does everyone outside it crave Club membership? This is the novel’s central question. The young cavalry officer for whom Elizabeth (somewhat predictably) falls has a face ‘specially constructed for ignoring unwelcome strangers’. And this ability to disappear ‘unwelcome strangers’ is crucial to that spell which the Club casts. The Club is a factory, in which the young officer is a kind of junior manager with prospects. The product is social power.

Orwell himself later claimed that writing this novel was the only way to get the Burmese landscape out of his system. ‘In all novels about the East,’ he once declared, oddly and revealingly, ‘the scenery is the real subject-matter’. To work off his doomed obsession with Elizabeth, for example, Flory plunges masochistically into the scrub-jungle by which the settlement is surrounded. As he falls foul of the Club and its social machinery, it is to the hill station’s natural surroundings that Flory turns. Listening to the global hit-tunes played at its dances, Flory reflects: ‘The dreary, depressing trash floated out among the shadow trees.’

This is not nature-as-consolation. His surroundings reflect back, as often as not, his own alienation and the isolation of all Anglo-Indians. The frangipani trees, their ‘sickly scent’ in the main square, speak to him of ‘his exile, his secret, wasted years.’ But there is the dazzling plumage, too, of the green pigeons which come to eat the peepul berries along the bazaar road. Or the whisper of a leopard moving ‘as though some creature of air were gliding through the jungle, just brushing the ground’.

He is not strong or brave enough to escape the Club, because the Club is above all a mental state – this is its secret. It is not a physical place. Hence its mysterious invulnerability. Schooling ensures early absorption of its code, long before we acquire the critical faculties to defend ourselves against it. Flory has, manifestly, still not acquired them. He eagerly reads

‘the new novels from England’. He has read his Milton and Matthew Arnold and Charles Dickens. He tries, but these are not enough. For him it is too late.

Two of the platforms have now mainly been overtaken by the English version of ‘scrub jungle’. Oak and ash, bramble and goat willow are, in their own time, very slowly tearing up the asphalt. Where passengers would have stepped off the footbridge by which Platforms 2 and 3 were reached, there are wild strawberries and tiny cranesbill flowers in summer.

The best we can make of this is the scene of yet another propertyrelated waiting game? What could we do that might be commensurate with what happened here that August evening? At the very least we could make of it a place where we await a revitalised railway network under public ownership. But what if we chose to see meaning in nature’s reclamation of the site? Are its cranesbill and nuthatches and wild strawberries merely interim nuisances soon to be dealt with? Some of the site is still owned by Network Rail. What we are treating as an inert space on some planner’s drawing board is in reality more like a kind of accidental wildlife sanctuary, and one with associations that could be saying so much.

It may fairly be objected that Orwell left us a well-known, much-quoted and definitive statement on the matter of ‘ belonging’. He began writing

The Lion and the Unicorn in 1940, ‘as yellow gun-flashes are lighting the sky, the splinters… rattling on the housetops’. This would be his most thoroughgoing attempt to work out what he thought of patriotism. And the exhilaration he felt as he re-discovered its virtues is still palpable. It’s interesting that ‘the love of flowers’ is listed among his characteristically English traits. The essay’s war-time context is often mentioned, as if its significance were self-evident. But is it?

It is the lyrical passages near the start that we hear most about, but the essay’s subtitle, Socialism and the English Genius, deserves more attention

Horatio Morpurgo |The Wretched Little Place in Devonshire

than it generally gets. Because the threat of invasion is not just the backdrop here to a summoning up of national resolve. He viewed the war as a ‘race between the consolidation of Hitler’s Empire and the growth of democratic consciousness’. Only by turning the war into a revolution could it be won and ‘the English genius… set free’. ‘Revolution,’ he went on, ‘does not mean red flags and street-fighting. It means a fundamental shift in power’.

England’s ‘double-faced attitude towards the Empire’ had to end, particularly the way British rule had ‘artificially prevented the development of India’. England was still ‘the most class-ridden country under the sun’: Orwell knew better than most where to start with fixing that. ‘Reform of the education system along democratic lines’ was a necessary part of this ‘complete shift of power away from the old ruling elite’. Mechanics, chemists, popular journalists, film people – they already represented a new classless type. The war, if won, would complete this process. Rule by the competent would replace rule by the privileged.

In other words, The Lion and the Unicorn is very much of a piece with his earlier thinking. What the war had revealed, all over Europe, was the ‘utter rottenness of private capitalism’ – a case he had already been making for decades. An intelligent Socialism would use patriotism ‘instead of merely insulting it, as hitherto’. That’s a trick we’re still missing.

References to 1920 are surprisingly thick on the ground, almost as if it had some private significance for him. He dates, for example, the atrophy of Empire from that date. He also cites it as the year in which the British Communist Party was founded and English dockers, in solidarity with Russia, refused to load ships with armaments bound for those seeking to crush the Revolution there.

Orwell argued in 1947 for full British participation in a European Socialist federation. He saw in this our only plausible defence against the imperial programmes of the United States and the Soviet Union respectively. His writings would be so heavily instrumentalised by rival Cold War factions that it’s difficult, even today, to disentangle him from all of that. Patriot?

Commie? Both? How? We shall never know what Orwell would have made of the myriad posthumous uses to which his reputation was put. He was himself a baffling contradiction. Perhaps it is just that insistence, upon writing out of one’s own perplexity and no one else’s, which has left him as readable and as relevant as ever.

Some have seen, in his writings on nature, a ‘quietist’ vein, an escapism of which we should be suspicious. He too occasionally wrote as if this fascination with wilderness, wild animals and weeds were retrograde, obscurely at odds with his conscious politics. But to anyone alive to our present challenges, his keen interest in the natural world must surely seem rooted in a political intuition as prescient, if not more so, than any of those for which he is better known.

The teenager in 1920, playing down his love of the countryside to impress a classmate, could write off Seaton Junction as a ‘wretched little place in Devonshire’. At the preparatory school in Sussex which he recalled in Such, Such Were the Joys, the hawkmoth caterpillars ‘illicitly purchased for sixpence at a shop in town’, or ‘dredging the dew-ponds on the Downs for enormous newts with orange-coloured bellies’ – these tell another story.

From the schoolboy, through Flory in colonial Burma, finally to Winston Smith in Oceania. There is the strange exactness of that ‘willowherb straggling out over the ruins’ at the beginning of Nineteen Eighty-Four, or that piece of coral inside a paperweight in Mr Charrington’s junk-shop: the natural world haunts Orwell’s famous dystopia to the very end. It is there with ferocious irony in The Chestnut Tree, a hideous café where the canned music always plays and where we finally take leave of the broken, defeated Winston. But it is there above all in that tryst in a wood outside London, which is the nearest approach to liberty that Winston achieves anywhere in the novel. It’s a secluded spot to which his lover Julia leads him, having discovered it after getting lost on a community hike. To Winston its landscape is one he instantly recognises, from a dream linked somehow to a lost memory of his disappeared mother and to Shakespeare.

Everything about this scene is charged with a meaning no longer quite accessible to him. A thrush sings and as he wonders whether such a place might be bugged another kind of question occurs: ‘For whom, for what was that bird singing?... What made it sit at the edge of the wood and pour

its music into nothingness?’ Together with the lovemaking, it restores to him the freedom and sanity which an infernal technology would rob him of. That birdsong is the accompaniment to Winston’s irrevocable break with the telescreen and Newspeak.

Something like this is there in book after book. Coming Up for Air is, as he later admitted, largely a pretext for its wonderful account of fishing for carp. To the author of The Road to Wigan Pier, snobbishness is a ‘bindweed’ that must be persistently rooted out. From his notes for the same book: ‘A jagged stone skimming across ice makes exactly the same sound as a redshank whistling.’ The famous description of that woman, glimpsed from a train trying to clear a blocked pipe at the back of her slum dwelling, is immediately followed by an account of the behaviour of rooks in spring. His love for ‘the surface of the earth’ is prominently placed in Why I Write.

It isn’t only the earth: in Down and Out there is Bozo, the astronomertramp: ‘Now and again I go out at night and watch for meteors. The stars are a free show: it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.’ In his Thoughts on

the Common Toad, wildlife watching is pressed into service as an ideal hobby and cultural leveller for post-war Britain: ‘The point is that the pleasures of spring are there for everybody, and cost nothing,’ he wrote in that essay, in 1946, a year after the Dower Report had brought Britain’s first national parks a step nearer.

It may not be a subject he often foregrounds actively, but he repeatedly turns to the natural world when trying at once to face the worst about the modern human condition and carry on his search for meaning in it. Perhaps such writing dates from a time when that natural world felt more reliably there than it does for us today. Then might that not be a part of what we recall, today, at Seaton Junction? Might its current state not be raising just such questions in the mind of any curious passer-by? The site’s story and its obscurity, its location well away from the glare of publicity, these might all be part of what it has to tell us. Drive up to Seaton Junction today, or speed past it in a train, and everything about it invites the traveller to waste not a moment’s thought upon it. I

merely point out that what began here with a bored, lost schoolboy was that long process by which George Orwell clarified his relationship to the Club, to the place he had been assigned in the social order at home and in the Empire abroad. From here he set out on the path that led to awareness of himself as ‘a creature of the despotism’.

This impulse was, manifestly, one Orwell hardly understood at the time. But are we ever much more than beginners in the matter of unlearning all that has been foisted upon us? If he insisted upon class as a, perhaps as the, central fact of English life, did he ever quite erase that ‘Tory growl’ from the back of his voice? Not everybody thinks so. Some habits of thought and feeling died hard but his Notes on Nationalism (1945), for example, do show how far he had by then left behind the anti-Semitic mutterings of his youth.

He was aware of his own contradictions, of his limits as a writer and thinker. But be that as it may, the faltering steps he first took at a little railway station in Devon would one day lead him to his justly celebrated ‘power of facing unpleasant facts’, whether uncovered in himself or in the world around him. To know oneself today as a ‘creature of the despotism’ requires, of course, a fresh effort. I would read both the Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter, for example, as efforts of this kind.

We can, surely, take courage from his example. May spores of what began here on that long-ago evening be carried on the wind, to alight and take root in the lives of young people, whether thousands of miles away or in a neighbouring village. In a way, better far these Keep Out signs and forbidding cameras than some sober plaque. Why falsify any of this with something officially sanctioned? Which of us has mastered the art of relating to that time and place where we received the first faint shock?

Yet the memory of them persists. It never quite gives up on us. All that unpromising schoolboy felt, in August 1920, was the inconvenience. He laughed it off in a letter to a friend and soon forgot all about it, or thought he had. Only with hindsight can we say: this is where the waking process began. This disused station by a country road, where the wired-off scrub jungle is erupting through asphalt, marks the spot.