I had a bath last night – a great excitement. And I’ve had 3 superb dinners in succession. I don’t know whether I shall miss this café life. I have coffee about three times a day & drinks oftener, & although theoretically I eat in a rather grim pension at least six times a week I get headed off into one of about four places where the food is really quite good by any standards though limited of course. Every night I mean to go home early & write letters or something & every night I get home the next morning. The cafés are open till 1.30 & one starts one’s after-dinner coffee about 10. But the sherry is undrinkable – & I meant to bring home some little casks of it!

Give Maud¹² my love & tell her I’ll write some time. And give anyone else my love but I shan’t be writing to them. (This letter is to the 3 O’Shaughnesseys,¹³ who are thus ‘you’ not ‘they’.) It is a dull letter again I think. I shall do this life better justice in conversation – or I hope so.

Much love
Eileen

1. Offices of the POUM journal, The Spanish Revolution. See 360.

2. Robert Edwards (1906–), unsuccessful ILP parliamentary candidate in 1935, was a Labour and Co-operative MP from 1955 to 1987. In January 1937 he was Captain of the ILP contingent in Spain, linked to the POUM. He left Spain at the end of March to attend the ILP conference at Glasgow, but was unable to return because of the government ban on British nationals’ participation in the Spanish Civil War. In 1926 and 1934 he led delegations to the Soviet Union; was General Secretary of the Chemical Workers’ Union, 1947–71; National Officer, Transport and General Workers’ Union, 1971–6; and Member of the European Parliament, 1977–9. See Orwell Remembered, 146–8, and especially Shelden, 264–5, which convincingly demolishes Edwards’s accusation that Orwell went to Spain solely to find material for a book.

3. George(s) Kopp (1902–51), Russian by birth, Belgian by nationality, was Orwell’s commander in Spain. He was a civil engineer but also something of an impostor. After World War II he farmed in Scotland and in 1944 married Doreen Hunton, Eileen’s sister-in-law, Gwen O’Shaughnessy’s half-sister. He died in Marseilles. Although Orwell and Kopp remained friends, their relationship cooled in the late 1940s. Doreen Kopp wrote to Ian Angus, 29 April 1967, that when Orwell joined her husband’s company, ‘he was very intrigued to find one Englishman who described himself as a “grocer”. He was anxious to meet an English grocer wishing to fight in Spain! It was of course very typical of George as he always wanted to be taken for a working man.’

4. Eileen started to write ‘Eric’ but overwrote ‘George’. Her brother, Dr Laurence Frederick O’Shaughnessy, a distinguished thoracic surgeon, was called Eric (a shortening of his second name). His wife, Gwen, was also a doctor.

5. Fenner Brockway (1888–1988; Lord Brockway, 1964) was General Secretary of the ILP, 1928, 1933–9, and its representative in Spain for a time. A devoted worker for many causes, particularly peace, he resigned from the ILP in 1946 and rejoined the Labour Party, which he represented in Parliament, 1950–64.