ORWELL AT WALLINGTON
Lin Bensley pays a visit to the quiet village in Hertfordshire where the famous author lived and was inspired to write.
I Nthe spring of 1936, desperate to immerse themselves in country life, George Orwell and Eileen O’Shaughnessy (his wife in all but name), took the lease on a vacant 16th-century tin-roofed cottage called The Stores in Wallington, an isolated village in East Hertfordshire.
On Kits Lane in the heart of the parish, the cottage consisted of two bedrooms separated by a wide landing that led, via a twisting staircase, to two cramped rooms downstairs. There was a low-ceilinged kitchen furnished with a tiny pantry, a Primus stove for cooking and a stone sink that was regularly prone to blocking.
The back door from the kitchen led into a garden, with an outside toilet that was inclined to back up if cheap toilet paper was used. Orwell always recommended using Jeyes, which could be bought for 6d a roll.
“The difference in price is negligible, and on the other hand a choked cesspool is misery.”
As the name implied, the cottage was once the village shop. Having stood derelict for over a year, however, both garden and cottage were in a somewhat forlorn state. Oil lamps were used for lighting as there was no electricity, and water was supplied by an outside tap. There was a fireplace in the sitting-room/diner which, though furnished with a hob, smoked incessantly and was rarely employed.
With a leaky roof, ill-fitting windows, rising damp (it was also inclined
to flood) and no practical source of heat, the house was often as cold in the middle of June as in the depths of winter.
None of these shortcomings appeared to bother the couple who seemingly relished the Bohemian lifestyle they had undertaken.
“It is a good place to be quiet if you don’t mind the primitiveness,” Orwell once remarked. Several of their literary associates failed to see the attraction though, as writer Lettice Cooper commented.
“Nothing in it worked. The sink would be blocked. The Primus stove wouldn’t work. The lavatory plug wouldn’t pull. The stairs were very dark because there were never any bulbs in the lights, and they’d put piles of books on the staircase at odd places, so there were lots of traps, and the place was rather dusty.
“But,” she conceded, “it was a nice cottage in a lovely part of the country.”
Orwell’s brother-in-law, Humphrey Dakin, was more forthright.
“That comic place where the post office was and what he called his farm, with a few moth-eaten hens wandering about on it.” Another even less forgiving visitor thought it “monastic poverty”.
Orwell soon tackled the garden, removing tin cans, old boots (a dozen pairs!) and beds of nettles. He laid out a vegetable patch and planted several fruit trees and a few gooseberry bushes, as well as a few hardwood trees – including a yew.
“The planting of a tree . . . is a gift you make to posterity, at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your actions, good or evil.” He also planted lobelias, dahlias and several roses, including a sweet-scented Albertine rambler with delicate pink blooms.
They acquired a considerable menagerie of domestic animals: a scruffy French poodle named Marx, some ducks, geese, chickens, and a rooster called Henry Ford. They also kept a sandy-coloured cat (the house was frequently overrun by mice) and a goat Orwell named Muriel, after an aunt.
He kept a diary in which he collected cooking and preserving recipes, and jotted down household hints. He also kept notes on goat husbandry, and
meticulously recorded egg production and vegetable yields. Useful tips included how to apply wood ash to the onion bed; the correct way to skin and cook a rabbit; how to make apple jelly (Cox’s Orange Pippins were his favourite eaters) and how to store and use compost.
“Cold tea is a good fertiliser for geraniums,” he recommended.
To relax, he liked nothing better than a spot of coarse fishing (he most probably fished the pond by the church) or taking Marx on rambles around the village – when the dog was not gnawing chair legs or eating rugs. As a keen and competent naturalist, Orwell would often record the weather and list the flora and fauna he observed.
The village itself consisted of no more than a hundred inhabitants, several of whom upheld the local legend that “people live as long as they please”. Orwell was generally well-liked, even if his educated accent and Etonian manner meant he was never truly assimilated into a community where most called him Mr Blair (no-one being aware of his pen name), and the publican of the Plough next door always addressed him as “sir”.
Orwell and Eileen soon became keen on the idea of reopening the shop, which had previously failed due to lack of custom as most villagers preferred to catch the bus that ran twice weekly into the nearby town of Baldock, while the more elderly members of the parish made use of the mobile shops that served the area.
But the pair were convinced it had potential. After seeking permission from their landlord, they springcleaned the shop, put up a few rickety shelves, installed a bacon slicer, bought a set of scales and began selling “mainly groceries, no perishables at first, and stamps and sweets”. Their stock included penny candy, biscuits, tea, string, rice and flour, and Orwell even began to consider buying a cooler to stock butter and similar products.
It was not long before they were making 30 shillings a week – more than enough to cover the rent – with children their most regular customers.
Two months after arriving in Wallington, they were married at the 14th-century church of St Mary. Though neither held any religious convictions, Orwell maintained an allegiance to Anglicanism he could never quite forsake.
During the course of the service, Eileen broke with convention and omitted the word “obey” from her marriage vows. A “prim and pretty” twenty-nine-year-old, she had sacrificed much for George, including her own literary career – though she retained her fiercely independent streak.
The couple had by now settled into an agreeable domestic routine. For the most part, Eileen looked after the shop and busied herself with housework while Orwell tended the garden and livestock, and cultivated his everincreasing literary duties.
At Wallington he wrote Inside The Whale (a collection of nine essays); The Road To Wigan Pier and Homage To Catalonia. He had been musing upon the theme of Animal Farm for six years or so, and his ideas began to further take shape after he returned from fighting in the Spanish Civil
War.
One day, when walking through the village, he witnessed an episode that provided the catalyst for the story.
“I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn.
“It struck me that, if only such animals became aware of their strength, we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”
He now began assembling material for Animal Farm, and decided to set the novel in Wallington. Less than 100 yards down the road stood Manor Farm, with an array of outbuildings clustered around the plank-boarded Great Barn that would become the focal point for most of the principal scenes.
With the outbreak of war and a continuing decline in Orwell’s health, the couple left the village in 1940. They returned only occasionally, until Orwell finally gave up the lease in 1947, following Eileen’s tragic death from heart failure during a routine operation; she was only 39.
Had he lived long enough, it is not inconceivable that he would have written of his rural adventures with that candour that befitted his unflinching commitment to truth.
Orwell was content with his spartan existence. He liked nothing better than to keep the company of solitude, and repeatedly cited his dislike of “big towns, noise, the motor car, the radio, tinned food, central heating and modern furniture.”
After leaving Wallington, he could have lived in relative comfort, but instead opted for the privations of a life upon the Isle of Jura, where he might have settled permanently but for his failing health.
Orwell ever sought the sanctity of “Little England”; far from the encumbering yoke of an impending Big Brother society.