Though I haven’t read all his works, I consider myself a fan of George Orwell, who died 75 years ago today. If having a copy of 1984 on the bedside table is enough to get the UK Government’s ‘Prevent’ programme sweating, my bookcase would have them both shaken and stirred.
A personal favourite is his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air, set in the run up to the commencement of the Second World War. The novel’s protagonist, George Bowling, is a lower middle-class, middle-aged man dissatisfied with his lot in life who feels a deep anxiety about the coming global war and is simultaneously perplexed by the seeming indifference of those around him.
In response to his malaise, Bowling contrives to temporarily slip away from his wife, children and work to return to the village in which he grew up. Through Bowling’s narration, we relive his formative years, from trying to avoid working too hard in his parent’s animal feed supply shop to fishing trips (a topic which takes up a significant number of pages) to returning to the village as a First World War soldier to attend his mother’s funeral. We learn that his parents were put out of business by a larger national firm which was able to stock more products at lower prices. Bowling’s observations about what unfolded show just how prescient Orwell was. With their business failing and the First World War looming, he writes,
they lived at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and they didn’t know it. They thought it was eternity. You couldn’t blame them. That was what it felt like.
It was a race between death and bankruptcy, and, thank God, death got Father first, and Mother too.
These lines never fail to have me fighting back a tear.
Orwell did write tighter novels but, to my mind, Coming Up for Air not only has a charm all of its own, it borders on the uncanny when applied to the West, to Britain, to England and to my own life.
My father is a vicar in the Church of England (C of E), a straightforward, straight, white, small ‘c’ conservative man. When he first applied to the C of E in his early 20s, he was told to go away and get some life experience and so, as a late 30s bank manager, he reapplied and, along with his wife and three sons, uprooted his life and took a significant pay cut to go to a training college and then to rural ministry, working with up to nine parish churches at a time. He was, and is, the church’s ‘man on the ground’, helping form independent food banks in poorer parishes giving not just pasta and tins, but education places and housing, and starting Bible study groups in others. Whether parachuting teddies from the church tower, launching fruit from a homemade trebuchet (I forget the biblical significance of these particular activities but I’m sure it was profound), or running ragged between funerals, weddings and services, he does it all, without much recognition from church superiors and, on occasion, earning their outright contempt.
My own experience of parish life in rural England is, in some ways, very similar to Bowling’s own reminiscences. I remember the old men singing so loudly and distinctly it was as if they were competing in a holy musical tennis match, I remember the smell of an ancient English church on a cold winter’s day, and applying my own childish interpretations to the bits of the service which went over my head.
I fully expect the churches which filled my childhood Sundays to be closed within my lifetime, a decline which seems to be inexplicably ever accelerated with reckless abandon by leaders in the C of E.
When I first read the novel and saw the parallels between Bowling’s parents and my own it brought more than a tear to my eye. In contrast to Orwell’s characters though, my own parents are well aware that we are reaching the end of another epoch, one which the C of E may not survive. Just as with Bowling and his parents before him, the world is moving in a seemingly uncontrollable, and certainly unwelcome, direction.
We are indeed all living at the end of an epoch, and I sometimes hear variances of this sentiment applied to the West or to the nation, but I rarely hear individual people really being considered. However you cut it, the West, the union, the nation, is made up of individual family units, all experiencing this painful and unnecessary flux in different and very personal ways. Bowling’s fictional parents felt it, just as my parents, your parents, you, and I feel it now. An Englishman, when glancing at his bookcase, seeing Orwell, Lewis, Huxley and a King James Bible should not feel a pang of anxiety, as I do. This is a small example of the sustained attack on every aspect of our lives. The failure of an institution such as the C of E to stand with and support those individuals who make it work on a daily basis, and even to turn its back on everything it should stand for is a much bigger one. Both examples have deeply personal consequences which are felt many times over across our country.
There is something truly demoralising about feeling oneself not only alone in one’s own country but assailed on all sides, fighting to find people willing to listen and to convince them to recognise that we did have something special and that that something is disappearing before us, aided by our smug, uncaring, technocratic intelligentsia.
Bowling cannot go back to his childhood, and neither can we. We cannot entirely recapture what has been lost, nor should we seek to recreate a pastiche of it (see Peter Hitchens’s critique of Reform). What is clear is that we must recognise, with clear eyes, who we are, what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against. We are Christian (culturally at least), English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish, each with our own proud individual and combined histories and cultures. We are fighting against all those who seek to disinherit us or to pretend that there is no inheritance to be had; be that via mass migration, climate lies or through increasingly draconian authoritarianism. Nothing short of a cultural and economic revival will do, one which is moral, unashamed, aware of our past, proud of our identity and both ambitious for, and fiercely protective of, our future. No man is an island, but we are all islanders, and though those who wield power would have us think that the changes we are suffering through are abstract, this is personal.
The Welsh have their own word, hiraeth – a deep longing for one’s home. It’s difficult for people to long for something that they’re told was institutionally racist and yet, inexplicably, owes its very existence to those it oppressed, but it’s increasingly clear that Welsh, Scottish, Irish or English, they are. How this is reconciled with the narrative provided by our elites will define our cultural landscape in the coming years.
As ever, Orwell puts it best. As Bowling relives his childhood memories whilst walking down a street he once knew well, he writes,
Is it gone for ever? I’m not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you.
I couldn’t have put it better myself, George.
Oscar Evans is the pseudonym of an arborist who helps landowners to manage urban tree stocks.
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