George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 7 February 1947Recently I have been
looking through Mr Peter Hunots Man About the House, published a month or two
back by the Pilot Press. Books telling you how to do household repairs are fairly
numerous, but I think this is about the best I have seen. The author gathered his
experience the hard way by taking over a nearly derelict house and making it habitable
with his own hands. He thus concentrates on the sort of difficulties that do actually
arise in real life, and does not, like the author of another book in my possession, tell
you how to mend Venetian blinds while ignoring electrical fittings. I looked up all the
domestic calamities that I have had to deal with during the past year, and found all of
them mentioned, except mice, which perhaps hardly come under the heading of decorations
and repairs. The book is also simply written and well illustrated, and takes account of
the difficulty nowadays of getting hold of tools and materials.
But I still think that there is room for a very large,
comprehensive book of this type, a sort of dictionary or encyclopaedia with every
conceivable household job tabulated under alphabetical headings. You would then be able to
look up Tap, how to stop a dripping, or Floorboards, causes of squeaking in,
with the same certainty of getting the right answer as when you look up madeira cake or
Welsh rarebit in Mrs Beetons cookery book. The time was when the amateur handyman,
with his tack hammer and his pocketful of rawl-plugs, was looked on as a mere eccentric, a
joke to his friends and a nuisance to his women-folk. Nowadays, however, you either do
your repairs yourself or they dont get done, and most of us are still remarkably
helpless. How many people even know how to replace a broken sash-cord, for instance?
As Mr Hunot points out, much of the tinkering that now goes on
would be unnecessary, or would be much easier, if our houses were sensibly built. Even so
simple a precaution as putting fuse boxes in get-at-able places would save a lot of
nuisance, and the miserable business of putting up shelves could be greatly simplified
without any extra materials or radical change in methods. I hear rumours that the new
houses now being built will have the pipes so placed that they will not freeze, but surely
this cannot be true. There will be a snag somewhere, and the annual freeze-up will happen
as usual. Burst water-pipes are a part of the English winter, no less than muffins or
roasted chestnuts, and doubtless Shakespeare
would have mentioned them in the song at the end of Loves Labours Lost,
if there had been water-pipes in those days.
It
is too early to cheer, but I must say that up to date the phenomena of the freeze-up have
been less unpleasant than those of 1940. On that occasion the village where I lived was
not only so completely snowed up that for a week or more it was impossible to get out of
it, or for any food vans to get in, but every tap and pump in the village froze so hard
that for several days we had no water except melted snow. The disagreeable thing about
this is that snow is always dirty, except just after it has fallen. I have noticed this
even in the high peaks of the Atlas mountains, miles from human habitation. The
everlasting snow which looks so virginal, is in fact distinctly grimy when you get close
to it.
About
the time when Sir Stafford Cripps
came back from India, I heard it remarked that the Cripps offer had not been extended to
Burma because the Burmese would have accepted it. I dont know whether any such
calculation really entered into the minds of Churchill and the rest. It
is perfectly possible: at any rate, I think that responsible Burmese politicians would
have accepted such an offer, although at that moment Burma was in process of being overrun
by the Japanese. I also believe that an offer of Dominion status would have been gladly
accepted if we had made it in 1944 and had named a definite date. As it is, the suspicions
of the Burmese have been well roused, and it will probably end by our simply getting out
of Burma on the terms least advantageous to both countries.
If that happens, I should like to think that the position of the
racial minorities could be safeguarded by something better than promises. They number ten
to twenty per cent of the population, and they present several different kinds of problem.
The biggest group, the Karens,
are a racial enclave living largely within Burma proper. The Kachins and other frontier
tribes are a good deal more backward and more different from the Burmese in customs and
appearance. They have never been under Burmese rule indeed, their territories were
only very sketchily occupied even by the British. In the past they were well able to
maintain their independence, but probably would not be able to do so in the face of modern
weapons. The other big group, the Shans, who are racially akin to the Siamese, enjoyed
some faint traces of autonomy under British rule. The minority who are in the most
difficult position of all are the Indians. There were over a million of them in Burma
before the war. Two hundred thousand of them fled to India at the time of the Japanese
invasion an act which demonstrated better than any words could have done their real
position in the country.
I remember twenty years ago a Karen remarking to me, I hope
the British will stay in Burma for two hundred years. Why?
Because we do not wish to be ruled by Burmese. Even at the time it struck me
that sooner or later it would become a problem. The fact is that the question of
minorities is literally insoluble so long as nationalism remains a real force. The desire
of some of the peoples of Burma for autonomy is genuine, but it cannot be satisfied in any
secure way unless the sovereignty of Burma as a whole is interfered with. The same problem
comes up in a hundred other places. Ought the Sudan to be independent of Egypt? Ought
Ulster to be independent of Eire? Ought Eire to be independent of Britain? And so on.
Whenever A is oppressing B, it is clear to people of goodwill that B ought to be
independent, but then it always turns out that there is another group, C, which is anxious
to be independent of B. The question is always how large must a minority be before
it deserves autonomy. At best, each case can only be treated on its merits in a rough and
ready way: in practice, no one is consistent in his thinking on this subject, and the
minorities which win the most sympathy are those that have the best means of publicity.
Who is there who champions equally the Jews, the Balts, the Indonesians, the expelled
Germans, the Sudanese, the Indian Untouchables
and the South African Kaffirs? Sympathy for one group almost invariably entails
callousness towards another.
When H. G. Wellss
The Island of Doctor Moreau was reprinted in the Penguin Library, I looked to see
whether the slips and misprints which I remembered in earlier editions had been repeated
in it. Sure enough, they were still there. One of them is a particularly stupid misprint,
of a kind to make most writers squirm. In 1941 I pointed this out to H. G. Wells, and
asked him why he did not remove it. It had persisted through edition after edition ever
since 1896. Rather to my surprise, he said that he remembered the misprint, but could not
be bothered to do anything about it. He no longer took the faintest interest in his early
books: they had been written so long ago that he no longer felt them to be part of
himself. I have never been quite sure whether to admire this attitude or not. It is
magnificent to be so free from literary vanity. And yet, what writer of Wellss
gifts, if he had had any power of self-criticism or regard for his own reputation. would
have poured out in fifty years a total of ninety-five books, quite two thirds of which
have already ceased to be readable? |