241 Pizza

Blair thinks the real reason for his father’s exile probably contained a grain of each of these motives. But it mustn’t be forgotten, he adds, that for a figure so commonly seen as dour and sour, Orwell harboured a strong romantic streak, a restless penchant for adventurism. Jura joined the ranks of colonial Burma, civil war Spain, the coal mines of Wigan and the kitchens of Paris as the locales in which the writer tested the limits of human tolerance.

“It started as a holiday with the Astors, who have an estate on Jura,” says Blair, “and my father liked it so much he decided to live there. I don’t think he ever fully worked out why he was there. But he had the germ of this novel in his head. He wanted to get started and Jura would allow him to get away from distraction. Of course, the problem then became the distraction of learning how to run a household. The winter of 1947 was a cracker, desperately bad, and the hardships perhaps became trickier than he’d anticipated. One wonders if he fully appreciated the practicalities of living there. Even if he had, I doubt it would have made much difference. For some reason, my father loved privation — he liked to get into the role a bit.”

The surviving accounts of life at Barnhill, by various friends who did manage the epic journey, depict a spartan Corinthian cabal, with Avril managing the house and vegetable patches, Richard being cared for by his nanny, Susan Watson, the farmland being tended by Orwell’s brother-in-law, Bill Dunn, and Orwell occasionally sleeping in a tent in the garden to clear his lungs, with each day soundtracked by the ceaseless clatter of his typewriter as Nineteen Eighty-Four neared completion in his work room above the kitchen.

Even today, the ceiling above his work desk is stained with the yellow residue of his mammoth Black Shag habit. His claw-footed bathtub remains, too. There is a framed photograph of Orwell on the mantelpiece and the rusting hulk of his hay rick lies at the bottom of the garden, separated by a pebbly strand from the lapping Sound of Jura. Otherwise, the house’s interior has been rejigged and remodelled several times since Orwell’s day, a consequence of its current role as a holiday home, for rent at £500 a week.

Michael Shelden’s authorised biography of Orwell, published in 1991, features an image that seems to encapsulate what most imagine life at Barnhill must have been like: a visitor coming down the hill to find Orwell blasting a duck with a shotgun. It says everything about the brutality of life amid nature, combined with the comic overkill common among displaced townies.

That curious, crepuscular tone ran throughout life at Barnhill. Watson, the nanny, was disabled with cerebral palsy, and there was quasi-maternal friction between her and Avril. The widowed Orwell had attended Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride and been diagnosed officially with tuberculosis. Orwell’s wife, his mother and his elder sister, Marjorie, had each died recently. There was no telephone at Barnhill, and postal deliveries came only twice a week. The old house’s battle against the elements was as perpetual as Eurasia’s war with Oceania in the nightmarish novel Orwell was writing. The constant typewriter abuse competed for supremacy with Orwell’s hacking tubercular coughs. He dreaded passing the disease on to his son, necessitating an agonising degree of physical estrangement. It’s hardly surprising, then, that a quorum of visitors each recalled Barnhill’s strong, pervasive atmosphere of glumness.

But not Blair. “I remember Barnhill as a perfectly happy place in which to have grown up. Even though my father was not feeling well a lot of the time, I still think it’s unfair to describe Barnhill as glum. It was a fairly jolly existence, by and large. We did things together. We would go out on boats. We’d go fishing in the evenings. We’d check the lobster pots. So, I’d draw the line long before I got to ‘glum’.”

He does, though, recall splitting his head open when he fell off a chair onto a china jug as Orwell made him a toy at his workbench: “The near-drowning in Corryvreckan stands out fairly sharply, obviously,” he recalls.

“On another occasion, I found an old pipe in the garden and, after lunch, I crawled behind his chair. It had its back to the fireplace and, picking out his cigarette ends, I filled this wretched pipe with them and tried to get a light off him, which he handed down to me without so much as a by-your-leave. He didn’t say anything. I asked for a light and the light appeared. I eventually got the pipe going, with the inevitable consequence, obviously.”

The sole document of his father’s that Blair retains is his own adoption certificate. Orwell was desperate, perhaps manically so, to emphasise his connection with his longed-for son. He burnt out the section of the certificate containing the name of Richard's birth parents, Robinson, with a lit cigarette end. It was his symbolic confirmation that the boy was his — a literal baptism of fire. Orwell refused to countenance that Richard was not fully, biologically, his own; so the sojourn on Jura (Orwell had mentioned to friends the possibility of staying permanently) was to be a crucible of their luckless, sporadic relationship.

It didn’t work out that way in the long run, of course. In the longer run, we can’t help wondering what Orwell would make of the news that Blair has recently been researching his birth parents, partly from curiosity, partly to keep his sons informed about any latent health issues. We can almost hear the furious, ghostly clacking of Orwell’s trusty Remington, the indignation of the genius who prized fatherhood above all.

“Orwell isn’t my father,” says Blair. “Eric Blair was my father. But Mr Orwell has been good to us. He gave me the fascinating privilege of managing his estate. He gave my sons their inheritance. He gave my family Jura. The difference is that when we see the place now, it’s usually from the boat, with a gin and tonic.”

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