![]() ![]() It was indeed the last time that we were ever to be close to each other again, apart from brief visits to his sickbed at Cranham.” "I think he realised that he would not return to Jura. “It was one of those rare and intimate periods when, with just the two of us, he may have felt it was the last he might have with me. “We chatted and he read poems and told me stories. The lesions on his lungs were already severe and his bronchial artery was slowly being eroded.Īs they were leaving the island their car suffered a puncture and Richard and Orwell stayed in the vehicle as the others got help. George Orwell's son Richard Blair (Image: 2009 David Levenson) ![]() It was decided Orwell should go to a lung specialist at the Cranham Sanitorium in Gloucestershire. He returned to Jura but was being consumed by the disease. The near-drowning aggravated Orwell’s illness and a little while later he was taken to Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride. I have been through Corryvreckan dozens of times since in my own boat.” The tide was running and we could have been dragged away and been drowned. “We scrambled to the land and were picked up by a lobster boat. “I remember being under the water but because I was on father’s knee he managed to get me. Henry rowed them to an islet but when he jumped off and pulled the dinghy in, it capsized. He was with Richard on his knee, his nephew Henry and niece Lucy when he realised he had miscalculated the tides, their outboard was swamped in the clashing waters. It was after a week camping in June 1947 that Orwell’s boat capsized. In the evenings, they would go fishing or checking their lobster pots. Richard said: “I recall my father catching a very large adder once, by putting his foot on its head and disembowelling it with a knife.” He was helped by disabled veteran Bill who had come to learn farming and who Avril later married. Richard said: “You could see how his mind worked, taking an idea and refining it and refining it.” But Orwell also spent hours in the pure Hebridean air and Richard remembers eating the fresh vegetables they grew on the farm. George Orwell clatters away at a typewriter (Image: Mondadori Collection) He either typed or he wrote in longhand and had no one to help him.”Ĭopies of the original handwritten manuscript have survived, including the cross of Orwell’s pen, as he tussled with the perfect wording. He would be clattering away on the typewriter and when writing he liked to be alone. “A tubercular lung didn’t need that but I suppose he wasn’t aware of the danger. ![]() He would sit in his room, puffing away and there was a paraffin lamp that gave off a terrible stink. ![]() It was hard for him because he wasn’t well a lot of the time.”ĭuring the day Orwell would shut himself upstairs and work. I remember being happy and spending time with my father. Richard said: “I did have a lot of freedom to play there. Jura is a wilderness of beaches, rugged landscape and the rising Paps. Susan didn’t stay long when Orwell’s sister Avril joined them, as the two clashed horribly over how Richard should be reared. Richard, two, arrived a couple of months later on the steamer Locheil with his nanny Susan Watson. When the war was over, Orwell escaped London to rent Barnhill, an isolated house reached only by boat or by walking the last six miles along a rugged track at the road’s end. Richard was only 10 months when his adoptive mother died and friends suggested to Orwell that he simply “unadopt” him. Orwell first holidayed on the Jura estate of his friend, David Astor, who felt it would be respite for the writer following the death of his wife Eileen, who had a heart attack. I have visions of being with him there and we had some lovely times. He said: “Jura will always be a magnetic draw to me. Richard, 70, has been back to the island many times, pulled by the memories of the father he lost to tuberculosis when he was only five. He and 22 members of the Orwell Society will travel to Barnhill, the remote farmhouse where the writer, real name Eric Blair, laboured over 1984 in an upstairs bedroom. This weekend, Richard is on the island again to mark the 65th anniversary of the renowned novel that spouted the maxim “Big Brother is watching you”. The notorious waters lie to the northern tip of Jura, the island where Orwell wrote 1984 and where he lived out his last precious years with his adopted son. It is ironic that he will rest there, the whirlpool in which he and his famous father George Orwell almost drowned in 1947. RICHARD Blair has asked that his ashes be scattered on his boat, set alight and swept into the maelstrom of the Gulf of Corryvreckan. ![]()
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