Orwell Read Online Free PDF Page B

Orwell's ancestors and the family business. His French grandfather, Frank Limouzin, was a teak merchant in Moulmein, and his mother grew up there in luxurious surroundings. The first sawmill was built in 1833, just south of the town in Mudon, and logs were floated down from the forestry stations to the Salween River. Most of the timber was exported to India and Europe; some was used by the local shipbuilding industry.
    The Gymkhana Club and the English cemetery have both been destroyed, and no maps or tourist information were available. But traces of Orwell remain. “Shooting an Elephant” opens: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” It then describes how hehad to shoot an animal that had run wild and killed a coolie. Moulmein was, for a time, one of the main penal settlements for Indian convicts. The original jail—a collection of barracks within four walls, guarded by peons by day and soldiers at night—was replaced in 1908 by the Central Jail (now a municipal building), where Orwell worked. In his time, the police headquarters was an impressive colonial building with a covered veranda, high wooden shutters and tiled floors. Built in 1826 on a hill in Than Lwin Park, it had a fine view of the river and is still used for the same purpose. Nine friendly policemen watched me while I waited for permission to enter and photograph the view from the front entrance.
    Despite the pervasive fear of foreigners and the usual reluctance to take responsibility for them, the police chief was surprisingly generous and allowed me to inspect the building. Inside the sanctum, the office girls, taking their morning tiffin of rice and tea, stopped to stare at me and giggle. There were mountains of yellowed paper tied with rough string, ancient typewriters, uneven floorboards, curtained-off partitions and crumbling sleeping quarters in the overgrown garden. The second floor could no longer be used because the roof was leaking and the twenty-foot-high ceiling was severely damaged.
    Lyndhurst, a large two-story brown wooden villa in an unruly garden near the corner of Morten Lane and Judson Road, in the colonial quarter of town, may have been Orwell's house, I was told—or was very like the one he'd lived in. The present owner, the grandson of a Burmese district commissioner who'd bought it in 1949, invited me inside and showed me some faded photographs of his grandfather at a garden party in Buckingham Palace. Now fallen on hard times, he lived alone, served by a cook and a boy, in the damp, decrepit, Poe-esque house.
    After Moulmein, Ali and I drove south to Amherst on a full-moon holiday. The market was closed, the boys played soccer, and many people, dressed in colorful clothing, visited the pagodas. Near Mudon, I saw the largest reclining Buddha in the world. Still unfinished and weirdly impressive, the concrete monster looked—from below—like a giant gray submarine. It too will eventually be plastered with layers of gold leaf. When passing a monastery on the way back to the main road, I saw a man incongruously hitting golf balls into an empty paddy.
    At Thanbyuzayat, in a tidy park maintained by the British War Graves Commission, I saw the graves of hundreds of English, Australian, Dutch, Indian and Gurkha prisoners of war who died while building the BurmaSiam Railway for the Japanese. Some graves were of unknown soldiers, and one of the men had posthumously won the Victoria Cross. Officers had amuch better chance of survival, and most of the dead were young enlisted men. This sad and moving military cemetery recalled Kipling's story “The Gardener,” in which a grieving woman visits her lover's war grave amid a “merciless sea of black crosses.”
    Amherst, a few miles south of the war graves, was an old colonial beach resort with a Brighton-like pagoda pier extending