Dervla Murphy has spent much of her life travelling. As well as her many travel books she is also the author of A Place Apart: Northern Ireland, which deals with the conflict in Northern Ireland and won the 1978 Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, Race to the Finish, an account of the nuclear controversy, and Wheels Within Wheels, her autobiography.

Introduction

Starting as a schoolboy, Eric Blair quietly followed his own star. It was assumed that ‘Collegers’ (the King’s Scholars, Eton’s intellectual élite) would try for Oxford or Cambridge and probably succeed. But Eric didn’t try. His family had forced him to work hard at a dreary prep school to win an Eton scholarship, and he was not interested in further mental exertion unrelated to his private ambition. At the beginning of ‘Why I Write’ (1947), he explains that from the age of five or six he knew he would be – must be–a writer. For those lucky enough thus to identify their star in childhood, the only indispensable training is to read, widely and attentively. But English literature was not a major subject at Eton, where most boys came from backgrounds either irremediably unliterary or so literary that formally to teach them ‘English literature’ would be absurd. Many years later Eric’s tutor, Andrew Gow, declared that his by then famous pupil had done ‘absolutely no work for five years’. This was untrue; Eric had diligently apprenticed himself to those masters of English prose who most appealed to him–including, significantly, Swift, Sterne and Jack London. In The Road to Wigan Pier he tells us: ‘At the age of seventeen or eighteen… I had read and re-read the entire published works of Shaw, Wells and Galsworthy (at that time still regarded as dangerously “advanced” writers)…’ However, he was supposed to have been studying History and Classics and in his final Eton July examinations he came 138th out of 167.

The disappointed Blair family would have been unimpressed had their only son then announced his ambition; in every generation thousands of youngsters ‘want to write’ and so far Eric had shown no trace of literary talent. Anyway, what could he write about? One’s first eighteen years rarely provide either the material or the inspiration (at that stage) for saleable writing. And, having neglected to win a university scholarship, Eric had at once to earn his living. So off he went to Burma, to spend five lonely but profoundly educational years in the Indian Imperial Police. His mother’s family had been settled in Burma for generations and his father, too, had served there as a middle-ranking officer in the ‘unposh’ Opium Department of the Government of India. (Despite ‘Victorian values’, the opium trade with China had been legalised in 1860 as a British Government monopoly.)

Readers of Burmese Days will know how strongly Orwell reacted against imperialism in action. He was never sentimental or starry-eyed about the Burmese; that would have been totally out of character. But he could not accept that what he saw as Burmese racial weaknesses justified Burma’s relentless exploitation by Britain. In 1927 he resigned from the Indian Imperial Police, much to his family’s baffled exasperation. Nor were their feelings soothed by his admission that he intended to be a writer.