Orwell Days

There are two popular blogs, one which has the banner "To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle" (The Daily Dish); and the other "Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear." (Harry’s Place). The quotations are of course from George Orwell, whose As I Please columns in Tribune are forerunners of the blog. He would write on politics and current affairs, but also on any other subject that struck his fancy. He would reply to the correspondents, those ancestors of the blog commenter eg to a a lady who denounced flowers as "bourgeois". And though he wrote in dangerous times, with bombs falling on London, his tone was gentler and calmer than that of today’s blogger, who is often full of invective and wrath.

Now I have been in love with Orwell’s writings ever since I picked up his essays when I was about twenty. I had read Animal Farm when I was a child and found it unbearably sad, and I had read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was a teenager and found it unbearably horrible. But I loved the essays.

When you are in love with a writer you cherish their minutest scribblings and the smallest trivia of their lives. And you go on literary pilgrimages. I have been to the Brontes’ house in Haworth and James Boswell’s decayed Auchinleck but I had not visited Orwell’s last home, Barnhill, in Jura. He described it as "an extremely un-getatable place", and it still is. Orwell lived and was dying there on and off from 1946 until 1949. He was forced to leave to go into various hospitals and sanatoria until he died in January 1950.

I live in Edinburgh, which is about 100 miles from the Isle of Jura as the crow flies. To drive there would be about 170 miles plus two ferries. Getting there by public transport is even more difficult. I mentioned I was going to do this to an old Hebridean hand, my friend H. I said I thought I would go to Oban and get the ferry from there. "But there’s only one a week", she said, and then described what the alternative was for a cyclist, including the fact that there were high hills involved.

If you look at a map of Scotland the East Coast is smooth while the West Coast has been beaten and smashed by the Atlantic and lies in fragments of islands and peninsulars and sea lochs.  The Inner and Outer Hebrides were once part of a small kingdom and were ruled by the Lord of the Isles.  Now they are controlled by a ferry company called Caledonian MacBrayne.  You must follow Calmac's pleasure, voyage at their times, be ready at their terminals before you can get about that part of the world.

I've done various cycling tours on my old tourer, with my luggage in some canvas panniers a Dutch friend had given me.  The tourer was too rusty for the bike shop to service and the panniers had rotted so much that on last year's tour they had been held together with bungees.  So now I had to buy a new bicycle (Dawes Colorado hybrid) and panniers while my flatmate lent me his tent which weighs less than a flea and would go up in nanoseconds while a force 9 gale blew at it, and a neat little stove.  He demonstrated them both to me.  He, kind man, also lent me a light sleeping bag and a blow-up mattress.  All this, plus camera and minimum clothes filled two panniers and a waterproof bag on my rack.  I would say having good light gear made this tour less taxing than others I have taken.

June had been extremely wet.  On the first Saturday of my holiday it was chucking it down in Edinburgh, so much so I did not want to leave a flat which is only slightly damp and is not that cold in summer.  I could not even be bothered to go to the shed and pack up my cycle.  But there was no help for it on the Sunday since it wasn't actually raining so I set out on the new bike, remembering what I'd forgotten (tea bags, water bottle, sun block) as I cycled along the quiet streets to the station. 

The trains from Edinburgh to Glasgow are frequent.  They only have space for two bicycles though and that had been taken by two skinny-wheeled jobs belonging to a couple of guys who sat and talked endlessly about cycle racing.  My cycle jutted out into the corridor and got me dirty looks from the Refreshment Operative pushing the trolley around.

It takes about fifty minutes to get to Glasgow Queen Street station, then five minutes to cycle to Glasgow Central Station, where I got the next suburban train to Ardrossan.  These trains have no space allocated for bicycles at all.  You hold on to your cycle in the doorway and obstruct other passengers. A three generation extended family with five children had to push past me. 

At Ardrossan you catch the ferry to Arran, which takes about an hour.  Arran is a popular place for holidays and retirement and a perfect island, about twenty miles long.  By its shores are pretty white houses with the sub-tropical gardens that you get on Scotland's west coast. The road was flowery, the clouds were moving briskly in the sky so the sun broke out now and then and the sea smelt clean and delicious. The road climbed to the moorland with white bog-cotton starring the brown grass and there was a view of craggy Goat Fell on one side and the sea on the other. (I should have photographed this but I wanted to catch the next ferry and I had packed my camera where I could least conveniently get at it).

It was fourteen miles to Lochranza where there is a summer ferry that takes you back to the mainland to Claonaig on a long peninsular.  From there was a steep cycle for five miles to get to Kennacraig where cars were lined up for the next ferry, this one the big serious trip to Port Ellen in Islay.   The crossing took about two and a half hours.  So it was early evening when I got to Islay.

There are rules in cycling.  One is to always have a good map.  I didn't for Islay (though I did for Jura, or rather the photocopy of one). There was however a campsite marked on the tiny map that I had. 

Islay is flat and boggy with a grand dramatic sky.  I cycled under this for about five miles until I realised I'd missed my way, stopped off at a hotel and was redirected to a campsite about 400 yards further up the coast but which was about four miles of a roundabout cycle by road.  However I finally made it to find a man driving cattle to a large stone farmhouse and byres, and he booked me in.  The campsite was lovely, a rolling pasture sweet with clover, by a golden and safe-looking beach.  If the temperature here was at New Zealand or Spanish levels these places would be built over with hotels.  As the weather is chancy and it is too cool for comfortable swimming or sunbathing, the beaches are quiet.  There were about eight tents or caravans on the site.  The farmhouse rented out space, offered you a shower and a kettle and a large pile of airport books to buy, and that was all.

I found myself a sheltered spot and unpacked my flatmate's tent.  There was a folding snakelike tube around some elastic which was meant to pull out and then bend to make the ridge to a dome which would then be fixed with poles and pegs made of carbon tungsten.  I crouched there with the snake ridge in my hands trying to work out how it related to the heap of nylon material.  Every time I tried to push it through anything it would be thwarted by a well-sewn seam.

It was quite late - past 10pm - and though it doesn't really get dark at midsummer in the islands it was an unhappy business for a cack-handed, all-thumbed idiot to assemble an unfamiliar tent. Aggressive groupies to human beings outdoors, West Scotland's midges came out and started nibbling all my exposed bits of skin.  I smothered myself in repellent (it smells disgusting and you taste it on your fingers) and looked around the campsite. On a nearby clover clad hillock there was a small dome tent which I thought looked like my tent was supposed to look like and emerging from it were a young bloke and woman. I went over to them and asked for help.  The chap said in a strong foreign accent that he needed to go to the toilet but would come and assist afterwards (he rubbed the bottom of his belly). He did come over and frowned over the ridge snake and the loops on the tent, sussed it out and got the roof up. I asked where he was from.  He said, Germany. Just the right person to have when faced with a technical problem.  I thanked him gratefully.

Then I stuck in the rest of the pegs and got into the tent, which was about the size of a stasis pod in a science fiction film.  I slept badly.  The sheltered spot would be the first to get touched by frost and it was very chilly as the night advanced.   After a while I realised I had to have all of my clothes on, not just half of them and then did manage to sleep.

The next day I set out to cycle north across Islay for about 20 miles under wide splendid skies, from where the curlews called.  I passed one sitting on a fence post showing me his ridiculously long slender beak.  The other birdsong you could hear beside the thin carol of the larks was the tsk! tsk! of the pretty little stonechats, who were prolific, sitting on every fence post and wall.  

Islay looks prosperous with people employed by tourism and distilleries, which you can visit if you wish.  Laphroiag is my favourite whisky with its smoky taste and I like Bowmore too, but the day was fine and I have a working whisky knowledge i.e, that you pour it into a glass and then transfer it from the glass via your mouth down your throat.  (Orwell noted that in his time all the whisky was exported to America and that drink was hard to come by.  The industry has boomed since then).  So after cycling along the brown moorland I did stop at the little town of Bowmore, but only for sun block, as I had got burned the day before and from there went along the coast and back inland to Port Askaig.

This port was evidently being redeveloped and a fine big road with a cycle lane dropped down to the small terminal. I looked at this steep drop glumly as I would have to climb it in a few days.  The ferry here is council run, Calmac evidently not finding this route economic.  It was early afternoon, and I waited for about an hour in the sun until the ferry came and did the 10 minute crossing to Jura, which has no direct link to the mainland.

Jura immediately seemed like a different, quieter world.  Its population is about 200.  The road from the ferry was single-track and a notice asked cyclists to allow traffic to pass.  This means, for the cyclist, that you are constantly stopping, so if you are going upwards you lose the small but significant momentum you have gained and may end up having to walk the last part of the hill and if you are going downwards the acceleration that you have built up is wasted. You may slip into a passing place and the internal combuster may be able to get by you before you have lost all the speed but normally you will have to come to a halt and then start again.  However, the road was not busy and I did the fairly strenuous eight miles on mountainous Jura to arrive at the only village in the island, Craighouse.  It has a hotel, a post office shop and a distillery.  The hotel has a grassy space below it, half of which is for football and half for tents.  It is right beside the sea and a delightful camping spot, for which they charged a donation.  They had showers and toilets you could use, but no kettle to boil water. 

It was a hot afternoon.  I was tired after the cycling. Another rule of a cycling holiday that I had broken is that every couple of hours you stop pedalling and do something else - visit a castle or other monument or even climb a hill so you don't arrive as I did, wasted, dozy from last night's lack of sleep and wanting to spend this bright sunny afternoon snoozing on a blow up mattress under a tree reading a light novel I had picked up at the last campsite, then finally dropping off.  Then waking up sufficiently to go to the friendly, low-key hotel and drink shandy and eat langoustines and the inevitable chips. They had locally produced pamphlets for sale including one called Jura and George Orwell by Gordon Wright, which I read.  After that I returned to my tent and fell asleep again.

I was now about 23 miles short of Orwell's house Barnhill, at the northern tip of Jura, and Corryveckus, a famous whirlpool was a few miles further on.   I figured I should go there as a day trip carrying minimum gear.  50 odd hilly miles is a reasonable cycle to do in a day without a load.  So the next morning I pushed muesli down- you treat your body as a machine to be refuelled when you cycle or possibly as a horse to be plied with oats.  I got out my flatmate's expensive stove and tried to get it to work so I could brew some tea - failed - looked round for a handy German and there wasn't one - so settled for a drink of water and then took off. 

It was a cloudy day. The ride from Craighouse started with white houses straggling by the sea and the plants - cabbages trees, fuschia - that do so well in the mild, wet climate.   Fox gloves and cow parsley brightened the road.  There was a smell of strong essence of sea, distilled as the barley is in whisky, to a wonderful headiness.  Then was the climb to the moorland, a glimpse of some red deer, the crags and peaks above.  The wind was not totally full of aggro but it was in my face.  And stupidly I had left my map behind so could not calculate how far I had to go.  The road was very quiet. This made me a little nervous of bikes breaking down, being unable to find help etc as my phone was out of the reach of any mast.  But I climbed on, up very steep hills, cowering in a ditch when I was passed by a rubbish truck that took up all the road, and finally got to Ardlussa, one of the estates on Jura.

Ardluss had a large house with stables and a set of antlers over the front door and I imagine that the estate makes its money during the stalking season.  The road here went through woods, and its gradient was about thirty degrees so I had to walk up one or two of the hills. Ardlussa had been Barnhill's nearest neighbour, about six miles away, and I remembered the name so saw that I was getting near to my destination.

In the weeks before my holiday I had been inspired by the programme Springwatch, which showed eagles nesting in Islay.  I had hoped to spot an eagle myself. As the road deteriorated, with lush grass growing in the middle strip, I caught the telltale signs of an eagle in the wild - a parked car and three people scanning the skies with binoculars.    Two eagles were dropping and rising behind a wooded ridge above us.  I was very excited of course and got out my telephoto lens and like the people in the car, snapped away, and like them, got nothing but pictures of a white sky.  And if I had got something it would have been the two shallow oval scribbles that does as a drawing for a distant flying bird.  But they were eagles.  And I had seen them.  (Sea eagles or golden eagles? a bubble-pricking friend asked me later.  They were eagles! I tell you.  I'm not Bill Oddie in Springwatch with a team of cameramen and a year's budget for surveillance.)

I said goodbye to the eagle-spotters and went on through a gate where red cows were grazing.  It was the last few miles before Barnhill.  Orwell had had problems there with transport according to the pamphlet:-  "Eric [Orwell] spent many hours sitting beside the road tinkering with the engine [of a motorbike] and hoping that someone would appear who had more mechanical knowledge than he had.. . . He often carried a scythe on the back of his motor bike with which to cut the rushes which grew rapidly in the middle of the road."  As indeed they did and it was a track by now rather than a road.  That is, there were two lines of crushed rock sandwiching a line of vegetation.  It would be an easy walk.  It would be passable in a jeep. The bicycle was the worst means of transport.  On that kind of surface you don't ride, you hold on and steer from one slightly less rough bit of path to the other.  You dodge the bigger stones and puddles. It jars on your arms and after about three miles of it I looked at what seemed to be an endless road under an overcast sky and thought why the hell did I want to continue.  I had been cycling for over 4 hours with a couple of short rests and I was whacked.

And what the hell was a man with dodgy lungs doing coming here?  According to the pamphlet, quoting from Orwell's neighbour at Ardlussa:- "From the time he came Eric was a sick man suffering from Tuberculosis.  As he grew worse it was arranged that a specialist should be called from Glasgow to see him as he was too ill to travel.  This was in December 1947.  Richard Rees brought him down from Barnhill and he stayed in our house for about a week. The specialist arrived and after examining Eric told us on no account to let him go back up the rough road to Barnhill.  There was a danger that he might have a severe haemorrhage which could prove fatal."

I could see how.  On a motorbike or in a truck you would be bounced about like a kid on an inflatable castle.  I was on the point of giving up. I was really tired by then and I had a 23 mile return journey, but I told myself I was far healthier and better fed than Orwell and hadn't smoked shag rollies all my life.  I could draw deep complacent breaths with the strong lungs of a cyclist and non-smoker.  I had no excuse and made myself go to the next point and then looking down could see Barnhill, a plain, substantial-looking, beautifully situated white house, which I recognised immediately from pictures.  I took some photos and descended the track. 

There is no plaque or any commemoration there.  The place is private and someone's four wheel drive was in a shed so I didn't start stalking round the garden but sat by the side of the track and ate a sandwich and slapped at the midges.  A sign pointed to Corryveckus, the famous whirlpool where Orwell was nearly drowned and which some scholars think may have been the original of Scylla and Charybdis that nearly destroyed Odyesseus (a long way from Ithaca and Troy had he come if he had got there).  It was three miles away.  Half walking and half cycling, this would be a couple of extra hours.  It was getting on to 2pm.  So far the journey had taken me about 5 hours.  It would take about the same time to get back.  I was too knackered to want to add another a couple of hours to it even if it meant missing the second biggest whirlpool in the world. And, a frightening thought, I did not want to arrive back after they had stopped serving dinner at the hotel, especially considering that I couldn't get the stove to work and make up the emergency supply of cous-cous.  So I left Corryveckus unseen, turned back the way I had come and toiled along the track. 

The wind was helping me this time and after a short shower the sun came out.   I successfully got through a herd of cows with attendant bull (he was with his harem so not tetchy) and found the return journey much less hard work.  The brown moorland shone golden in the sun, the clouds lifted, I got up the hills with reasonable ease and flew down them and got back to my tent at about 6.30pm, before in fact they served dinner.  I downed two shandies, tried to soak them up with a meal but after swallowing that pretty much crashed out at about 8pm.

So I had got to Barnhill.  And the fact that I had not got to Corryveckus was something of a disappointment but a reason to come back again. This place is paradisial.

The pamphlet described Orwell as a "tall, gaunt and sad-looking man" and widowed and unwell he had reason to be sad.  He told his neighbours at Ardlussa "that he was anxious to have enough strength left to finish the book he was writing.  He felt it had an important message" and so he "spent many hours in bed in the room above the kitchen with his typewriter on his knees working on the final draft of his manuscript.  The sound of his urgent typing to complete the work could be heard constantly in the kitchen below."  And that does strike a tragic note - the dying writer spending his last breath in a remote, comfortless house trying to get out his warning about tyranny, the warping of language and the consequent death of truth and history.  That is the theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

Yet his letters show Orwell still observing, still loving the natural world, the summer weather and the hay-making and noticing how the deer were a nuisance since fencing them out was expensive. He liked fishing and gardening, the clean beaches and the swimming seals. Friends came to stay.  Barnhill was full of growing life after London and its bombs.  Land was cleared for vegetables, farming attempted. His young son, Richard Blair, was running about, full of beans, with a bent towards farming and machinery. His sister Avril came to live there as his housekeeper.  At forty-one she must have seemed destined for childless spinsterhood but she struck up a relationship with the young man who was working on the farm, they eventually married and after Orwell's death they adopted his son.  His earlier hostility to the "curious cult of Scotland" which he knew at a distance as a rich man's playground for deer-stalking and fishing was replaced with interest in the crofters and sympathy with their hard lives and he began to speak with approval of Scottish nationalism.

But of course he died a quarter century before he should have, at the height of his powers. 

It rained in the night, a sad pattering on the tent and it was still raining the next morning.  I hung on for a while but it did not stop so I put on my new waterproof trousers and old jacket and set out.  The trousers worked fine, and kept me dry without making me sweat.  The old jacket was falling apart and my arms were damp with self-produced moisture.  I cycled through the rain - not heavy, but persistent for an hour or two.  Back to the ferry, the short crossing and a stop for a pot of tea and shortbread in the silent hotel by the port.  Then up the steep climb from Port Askaig which I was delighted to find I could get up without stopping and then on the road but this time I had a proper diversion, going to see a heap of stones by a loch, once headquarters of the Lords of the Isles. The loch was full of reeds and lilies and you could imagine the Gaels in plaid and with braided hair (this costume imagined from illustrations in kids' my encyclopaedias) sing-songing to each other by the metallic grey water and smacking at the midges. 

Lunch at Bowmore, sitting in a café very luxuriously reading a newspaper rather than pulling out bread and cheese by the side of the road.  Then back on the road again.

The Gael ghosts then took battle formation as spirits of the wind and cloud and fought me all the way back along the straight A road.  They were forcing their way north, I south and it was hard work combating them.  I struggled on and eventually I found a short-cut on farm tracks to the road to the campsite and now I was with the wind which pushed me along as I felt the first rain drops on my neck.  I put my head down and went at full speed to the farmhouse but the downpour did not materialise.  After booking in again I found a spot for my tent right above the beach.  The rest of the afternoon was sunny and breezy and I wandered on the sand then sat in front of the tent, looked west and watched the sun set and thought I should come back to the islands every year.

The next day was midsummer's day, the longest day, and the day I needed to get home, as I was going to the Outsider Festival.  I studied timetables for Calmac's commands and saw that the ferry left Port Ellen at 9.45, I could connect to the ferry that left for Lochranza at 1.30 and that left ample time for the ferry from Arran at 6pm. 

The ferry was crowded with holiday makers. At about 12.15 I was pushing up a steep, airless hill from Kennacraig to Croiag on a still, brilliant day.  On the long, slow up, I would mutter the song, "It's a long long road, With many a waaanding turn. . Oh he aint heavy, he's ma brother."  This little rise, yes, you are in your lowest gear but you don't have to walk as yet.  Then it's slightly less steep - you can change up one gear.  Then a little momentum.  And all the while the stonechats bicker and the fox-gloves are blaring at you in full magenta while you sweat past in the haze.  Then you crest the hill and go into the alternative cyclist's universe, downwards at full pelt.  You change from He Aint Heavy to Springsteen - "Tramps like us, baby we were born to run, da da da dummm dum."   I yelled this at the top of my lungs as I careered down the steep fall, and the internal combusters pulled over for me and let me pass. 

So it was after 1pm and I sat at the edge of the sea looking across at a very blue island of Arran thinking there are no more beautiful places in the world.  

The small ferry arrived and took us back to Lochranza.  I had nearly four hours in which to catch the Arran ferry and so it was going to be a slow ride, with plenty of photo stops.  The road out of Lochranza was another long and steep hill, the afternoon heat had been turned up and I had to stop at one point as the sun and thirst got to me and I toiled upwards until I was standing across from the rugged outline of Goat Fell.  It was vibrantly hot and the road was sticky black.

After that climb it was an easy ride back down the fertile lower slopes, through the pretty town of Corrie where I took photos of swans and a seal lay on a rock about half his own size, and then along wooded Arran at sea level, stopping off at the cheese shop to buy goodies and looking towards the pier noting that the Calmac ferry had arrived rather early. 

By the time I got to the terminal the ferry had left.   I read the timetable and realised that I had been looking at Ardrossan instead of Brodick. The ferry I wanted had been due to leave at 4.40pm not 6pm, and the next one (the last) was not until 7.20pm. This was infuriating.  So I swore at myself for a while then when I'd bought some fudge as a present for my work and was sitting at a café by the pier I realised that if I had thought I was catching a 4.40pm ferry I would have raced all the way, not stopped for the photos or the cheese and would have enjoyed the journey a lot less.  And as it is the journey that matters on a cycling holiday I hadn't lost much except for one hour twenty minutes of time at home that I had thought I had.  So I cheered up, the ferry arrived and I cycled into the car deck among other cyclists who had come for a day trip to Arran and were in high spirits, boasting how burned they were and what beautiful weather they had had.  And as we approached the mainland the rain started falling in monsoon sheets as it had been falling all through the month of June. It rained all the way to Glasgow.  I cycled from Glasgow Central to Glasgow Queen Street to see the Edinburgh train pulling out.  But it was only half an hour to the next, so I got back at 11pm.I thanked my flatmate for the loan of his gear, presented him with cheese and he said it had been raining all week.  The garden had grown a foot. I had struck lucky with the weather in the islands. 

So it had been something of a pilgrimage in as much as it was a slow journey to a revered destination, but a few Chaucerian companions enlivening the trail with dirty stories would have been pleasant.  After those five solitary days I was pent up with speech and was impossibly garrulous at the Outsider Festival, where it chucked down with rain for the whole weekend.

Comments

[Armin]

Nice read, at least you made it to Barnhill. I've haven't been that far up yet, let alone to the whirlpool. Something still on my to do list.

I think we were on Islay at the same time, I was there from the 16th to the 30th of June.

[Rosie]

Thanks. I'll definitely be back to see the rest of Islay. And weather permitting, I might even visit a distillery. Not a taste of whisky passed my lips on hols tho' I drink it often enough at home. But if you're cycling you drink low proof by the pint rather than high proof by the dram.