498
PARTISAN REVIEW
on the 17th August, and I end it on the 25th. The Russians and the British
have marched into Iran, and everyone is delighted. We have had a goodish
&ummer and the people have got some sunlight in their bones to help them
through the winter. London has not had a real air raid for nearly four
months. Parts of the East End are simply flattened out, and the City is a
mass of ruins with St. Paul's, almost untouched, standing out of it like an
enormous rock, but the less-bombed parts of London have been so com·
pletely cleaned up that you would hardly know they had ev·er been dam·
aged. Standing on the roof of this tall block of flats I live in and looking
all round, I can see no bomb damage anywhere, except for a few churches
whose spires have broken off in the middle, making them look like lizards
that have lost their tails. There is no real food shortage, but the lack of
concentrated foods (meat, bacon, cheese and eggs) causes serious under·
feeding among heavy labourers, such as miners, who have to eat their
midday meal away from home. There is a chronic scarcity of cigarettes
and local shortages of beer. Some tobacconists consider that the amount
of tobacco smoked has increased by 40 per cent since the war. Wages have
not kept up with prices, but on the other hand there is no unemployment,
so that though the individual wage is lower than it was, the family income
tends to be higher. Clothes are fairly strictly rationed, but the crowds in
the streets are not noticeably shabbier as yet. I often wonder how much
we are all deteriorating under the influence of war-how much of a shock
one would get
if
one could suddenly see the London of three years ago
side by side with this one. But it is a gradual process and we do not notice
any change. I
ca~
hardly imagine the London skies without the barrage
balloons, and should be sorry to see diem go.
Arthur Koestler, whose work 'is probably known to you, is a private
in the Pioneers. Franz Borkenau, author of
Spanish Cockpit
and
The
Communist International,
who was deported to Australia during the panic
last year, is back in England. Louis MacNeice and William Empson are
working for the BBC. Dylan Thomas is in the army. Arthur Calder-Mar·
shall has been made an officer. Tom Wintringham is once again an in·
structor in the Home Guard, after resigning for a period. Meanwhile the
Russians acknowledge seven hundred thousand casualties, and the armies
are converging on Leningrad by the same roads as they followed twenty·
two years ago. I never thought I should live to say "Good luck·to Com·
rade Stalin," but so I do.
Yours ever,
GEORGE ORWELL
P.S. I must add a word about that appalling "message" to British
writers from the Soviet novelist, Alexei Tolstoi, with the old atrocity
stories dug up from 1914, which appeared in the September
Horizon.
That
is the feature of war that frightens me, much worse than air raids. But I
hope people in the USA won't imagine that people here take that kind of
stuff seriously. Everyone I know laughs when they hear that old one about
the Germans being chained to their machine guns.
