London, England

29 August 1942

Dear Editors,

I write this letter at a moment when it is almost certain to be overtaken and swamped by events. We are still in the same state of frozen crisis as we were three months ago. Cripps is still enigmatically in office, gradually losing credit with the Left but believed by many to be waiting his moment to leave the Government and proclaim a revolutionary policy. Such a development as there has been is definitely in a reactionary direction. Many people besides myself have noticed an all-round increase in blimpishness, a drive against giving the war an anti-Fascist colour, a general shedding of the phony radicalism of the past two years. The India business twitched the masks off many faces, including Lord Rothermere’s. This seems to violate the principle that every régime moves to the Left in moments of disaster, and vice versa, for one could hardly describe the last six months as triumphant. But something or other appears to have made the Blimps feel much more sure of themselves.

There are a few minor political happenings to record. Sir Richard Acland’s fairly radical Forward March group (a sort of Christian Socialism) has amalgamated with Priestley’s somewhat less radical 1941 Committee and the movement is calling itself Common Wealth. I believe the amalgamation happened somewhat against Acland’s will. They have now been joined by Tom Wintringham, a useful demagogue, but I don’t think these people should be taken seriously though they have won one by-election. Trotskyism has at last got itself into the news owing to the threatened prosecution of a weekly paper, the Socialist Appeal. I believe this is still running, though in danger of suppression. I managed to get hold of one copy of it – the usual stuff, but not a bad paper. The group responsible for it are said to number 500. The Rothermere press is especially active in chasing the Trotskyists. The Sunday Dispatch denounces Trotskyism in almost exactly the terms used by the Communists. The Sunday Dispatch is one of the very worst of the gutter papers (murders, chorus girls’ legs and the Union Jack) and belongs to the press which before the war outdid all others in kow-towing to Fascism, describing Hitler as late as the early months of 1939 as ‘a great gentleman’. The Daily Worker has been de-suppressed and is to reappear on 7 September. This was the necessary sequel to lifting the ban on the Communist press in India. Communist literature at the moment is chiefly concerned with urging the opening of a Second Front, but pamphlets are also issued attacking all M.P.s of whatever party who vote against the Government. The anti-Trotskyist pamphlets now being issued are barely distinguishable from those of the Spanish Civil War period, but go somewhat further in mendacity. The Indian issue makes a certain amount of stir here, but less than one would expect because all the big newspapers have conspired to misrepresent it and the Indian intellectuals in this country go out of their way to antagonize those likeliest to help them. The Vansittart controversy rumbles on in books, pamphlets, correspondence columns and the monthly reviews. ‘Independent’ candidates, some of them plain mountebanks, tour the country, fighting by-elections. Several of them have a distinct Fascist tinge. Nevertheless there is no sign of any Fascist mass movement emerging.

That seems to me the whole of the political news. It has been in my mind for some time past that you might be interested to hear something about the minor social changes occurring in this country – what one might call the mechanical results of war. The price of nearly everything is controlled, and controlled rather low, which leads to black-marketing of luxury foods, but this is perhaps less damaging to morale than the shameless profiteering that went on last time. The interesting point is whether the food restrictions are affecting public health and in what direction they are altering the national diet. A certain number of people with small fixed incomes – Old Age Pensioners are the extreme instance – are now in desperate financial straits, and the allowances paid to soldiers’ wives are wretched enough, but as a whole the purchasing power of the working class has increased. My own opinion is that on average people are better nourished than they used to be. Against this is the increase in tuberculosis, which may have a number of causes but must be due in some cases to malnutrition. But though it is difficult to be sure with no standard of comparison, I can’t help feeling that people in London have better complexions than they used, and are more active, and that one sees less grossly fat people. English working people before the war, even when very highly paid, lived on the most unwholesome diet it is possible to imagine, and the rationing necessarily forces them back to simpler food. It is strange to learn, for instance, that with an adult milk ration of three pints a week, milk consumption has actually increased since the war. The most sensational drop has been in the consumption of sugar and tea. Plenty of people in England before the war ate several pounds of sugar a week. Two ounces of tea is a miserable ration by English standards, though alleviated by the fact that small children who don’t drink tea draw their ration. The endlessly stewing teapot was one of the bases of English life in the era of the dole, and though I miss the tea myself I have no doubt we are better without it. The wheatmeal bread is also an improvement, though working people don’t as a rule like it.

War and consequent abandonment of imports tend to reduce us to the natural diet of these islands, that is, oatmeal, herrings, milk, potatoes, green vegetables and apples, which is healthy if rather dull. I am not certain how much of our own food we are now producing, but it would be of the order of 60 or 70 per cent. Six million extra acres have been ploughed in England since the war, and nine million in Great Britain as a whole. After the war Britain must necessarily become more of an agricultural country, because, however the war ends, many markets will have disappeared owing to industrialization in India, Australia, etc. In that case we shall have to return to a diet resembling that of our ancestors, and perhaps these war years are not a bad preparation. The fact that, owing to evacuation, hundreds of thousands of town-born children are now growing up in the country may help to make the return to an agricultural way of life easier.

The clothes rationing is now beginning to take effect in a general shabbiness. I had expected it to accentuate class differences, because it is a thoroughly undemocratic measure, hardly affecting well-to-do people who have large stocks of clothes already. Also, the rationing only regulates the number of garments you can buy and has nothing to do with the price, so that you give up the same number of coupons for a hundred-guinea mink coat and a thirty-shilling waterproof. However, it now seems rather ‘the thing’ for people not in uniform to look shabby. Evening dress has practically disappeared so far as men are concerned. Corduroy trousers and, in women, bare legs are on the increase. There hasn’t yet been what one could call a revolutionary change in clothing, but there may be one owing to the sheer necessity of cutting down wastage of cloth. The Board of Trade tinkers with the problem by, for example, suppressing the turn-ups of trouser ends, but is already contemplating putting everyone into battledress. The quality of cloth is deteriorating, though less than I had expected. Cosmetics are becoming scarce. Cigarettes have lost their cellophane and greaseproof wrappings and are sold in cheap paper packets or loose. Writing paper gets more and more like toilet paper while toilet paper resembles sheet tin. Crockery is somewhat scarce and a hideous white ‘utility’ hardware, the sort of thing you would expect to see in prison, is being produced. All articles which are not controlled, for instance furniture, linen, clocks, tools, rocket to fantastic prices. Now that the basic petrol ration has stopped private cars are very much rarer on the roads. In the country many people are taking to pony-traps again. In London there are no conveyances, except very occasional taxis, after midnight. It is becoming a common practice when you dine at anybody else’s house to sleep there. What with the air raids and firewatching people are so used to sleeping out of their beds that they can kip down anywhere. The fuel shortage hasn’t yet made itself felt, but it is going to do so about January. For long past the coal owners have been successfully sabotaging the attempts to introduce fuel rationing, and it is considered that this winter we shall be twenty-five million tons of coal short. Buildings everywhere are growing very shabby, not only from air-raid damage but from lack of repairs. Plaster peeling off, windows patched with linen or cardboard, empty shops in every street. Regency London is becoming almost ruinous. The beautiful but flimsy houses, no longer lived in, are falling to pieces with damp and neglect. On the other hand the parks are improved out of recognition by the removal of the railings for scrap iron. As a rule these have gone from the gardens in the squares as well, but in places the rich and powerful manage to cling to their railings and keep the populace out. Generally speaking, where there is money, there are railings.

One periodical reminder that things have changed in England since the war is the arrival of American magazines, with their enormous bulk, sleek paper and riot of brilliantly-coloured adverts urging you to spend your money on trash. English adverts of before the war were no doubt less colourful and enterprising than the American ones, but their mental atmosphere was similar, and the sight of a full-page ad on shiny paper gives one the sensation of stepping back into 1939. Periodicals probably give up to advertisements as great a proportion of their dwindled bulk as before, but the total amount of advertisement is far smaller and the government ads constantly gain on the commercial ones. Everywhere there are enormous hoardings standing empty. In the Tube stations you can see an interesting evolutionary process at work, the commercial ads growing smaller and smaller (some of them only about 1 ft by 2 ft) and the official ones steadily replacing them. This, however, only reflects the dwindling of internal trade and does not point to any deep change of outlook. An extraordinary feature of the time is advertisements for products which no longer exist. To give just one example: the word IRON in large letters, with underneath it an impressive picture of a tank, and underneath that a little essay on the importance of collecting scrap iron for salvage; at the bottom, in tiny print, a reminder that after the war Iron Jelloids will be on sale as before. This throws a sort of sidelight on the strange fact, recently reported by the Mass Observers and confirmed by my own limited experience, that many factory-workers are actually afraid of the war ending, because they foresee a prompt return to the old conditions, with three million unemployed, etc. The idea that whatever happens old-style capitalism is doomed and we are in much more danger of forced labour than of unemployment, hasn’t reached the masses except as a vague notion that ‘things will be different’. The advertisements that seem to have been least changed by the war are those for theatres and patent medicines. Certain drugs are unobtainable, but the British have lost none of their old enthusiasm for medicine-taking, and the consumption of aspirin, phenacetin, etc. has no doubt increased. All pubs without exception sell aspirins, and various new proprietary drugs have appeared. One is named Blitz, the lightning pick-me-up.

Once again I may have seemed to talk to you about very trivial things, but these minor changes in our habits, all tending towards a more equal way of life and a lessened reliance on imported luxuries, could have their importance in the difficult transition period which must occur if Britain becomes a Socialist country. We are growing gradually used to conditions that would once have seemed intolerable and getting to have less of the consumer mentality which both Socialists and capitalists did their best to inculcate in times of peace. Since the introduction of Socialism is almost certain to mean a drop in the standard of living during the first few years, perhaps this is just as well. But of course the changes in our food and clothes have no meaning unless there is a structural change as well. For many of the same processes occurred during the last war as are occurring now. Then too food was short and money plentiful, agriculture revived, women in vast numbers moved into industry, trade-union membership swelled, government interference with private life increased, and the class system was shaken up because of the need for great numbers of officers. But there had been no real shift of power and in 1919 we went back to ‘normal’ with startling speed. I cannot believe that the same thing will happen this time, but I cannot say either that I see concrete evidence that it won’t happen. At present the only insurance against it seems to me to lie in what one might call the mechanics of the situation. Old-style capitalism can’t win the war, and the events of the past three years suggest that we can’t develop a native version of Fascism. Therefore, now as two years ago, one can predict the future in the form of an ‘either – or’: either we introduce Socialism, or we lose the war. The strange, perhaps disquieting, fact is that it was as easy to make this prophecy in 1940 as it is now, and yet the essential situation has barely altered. We have been two years on the burning deck and somehow the magazine never explodes.

There are now many American soldiers in the streets. They wear on their faces a look of settled discontent. I don’t know how far this may be the normal expression of the American countenance, as against the English countenance, which is mild, vague and rather worried. In the Home Guard we have orders to be punctilious about saluting the officers, which I’m afraid I don’t do and which they don’t seem to expect. I believe some of the provincial towns have been almost taken over by the American troops. There is already a lot of jealousy, and sooner or later something will have to be done about the differences in pay. An American private gets five times as much as an English one, which has its effect on the girls. Also, working-class girls probably find it rather thrilling to hear the accent they are so used to in the movies emerging from a living face. I don’t think the foreign troops here can complain about the way the women have treated them. The Poles have already done their bit towards solving our birth-rate problem.

Yours ever

George Orwell