For five years he dressed in khaki jodhpurs and shining black boots. Orwell had lived in Burma in the 1920s as an officer of the Imperial Police Force. And, simmering in his fevered mind, was an idea for another book: a novella entitled 'A Smoking Room Story', which would revisit Burma, a place he had not been to since his youth. He scribbled letters, composed essays, reviewed books, and corrected proofs of his soon-to-be-published novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even if he did survive, he might never be able to write again - or at least not with the same intensity he was used to. The disease had now reached a critical stage, and doctors were not hopeful of his chances of recovery. Both his lungs were clogged with lesions, and he was coughing up blood.
Any kind of writing, they said, would tire him out. The doctors at the sanatorium where Orwell was being treated had advised him to stop writing.
Piled around his sickbed were a variety of books: tomes on Stalin and on German atrocities in the Second World War, a study of English labourers in the nineteenth century, a few Thomas Hardy novels, some early Evelyn Waugh. Orwell lay tucked under an electric blanket in a small wooden chalet in the green and pleasant heart of the Cotswolds, dying of pulmonary tuberculosis. He looked at me with a brilliant flash of recognition, slapped his forehead gleefully, and said, 'You mean the prophet!'Ī year before George Orwell died in 1950, his typewriter was confiscated. 'George Orwell,' I repeated - 'the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four.' The old man's eyes suddenly lit up. I wondered if he was losing his memory but, after several failed attempts, I made one final stab. But he was elderly cataracts had turned his eyes an oystery blue, and his hands trembled as he readjusted his sarong. The man was a well-known scholar in Burma, and I knew he was familiar with Orwell. I could hear mosquitoes whining impatiently around my head, and I was about to give up.
We were sitting in the baking-hot front room of his house in a sleepy port town in Lower Burma. 'G-e-o-r-g-e O-r-w-e-l-l.' But the old Burmese man just kept shaking his head.
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