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inheriting the earth, and the tone of latter-day Soviet propaganda ob–
viously contradicts this. In any case, English people usually react in the
end against too-blatant propaganda. A good illustration of this is Gen–
eral Montgomery, idolized a year or two ago and now thoroughly un–
popular because over-publicized.*
I don't think I have any more news. You will be interested to hear
that several American soldiers have rung me up, introducing themselves
as readers of
PR.
These are still the only contacts I have made with
American soldiers. The troops and the public, other than girls, are still
very stand-offish. I notice that Negroes do not seem to pick up girls so
easily as the whites, though everyone says they like the Negroes better.
A little while back a young American soldier had rung up and I asked
him to stay the night at our flat. He was quite interested and said it was
the first time he had been inside an English home. I said, "How. long
have you been in this country?" and he said, "two months." He went on
to tell me that the previous day a girl had come up to him on the pave–
ment .and seized hold of his penis with the words, "Rullo Yank!" Yet he
had not seen the interior of an ordinary English home. This makes me
sad. Even at their best English people are not very hospitable to strang–
ers, but I would like the Americans to know that the cold welcome they
have had in this country is partly due to the fact that the rations are
not easy to stretch and that after years of war people are ashamed of
the shabby interiors of their houses, while the films have taught them
to believe or half-believe that every American lives in a palace with a
chromium-plated cocktail bar.
I am going to send two copies of this, one air mail and one sea mail,
hoping that the latter may get there a bit sooner. The time that lette-.s
take to cross the Atlantic nowadays has made some people wonder whe–
ther the air mail travels in balloons.
GEORGE ORWELL
*
Here is a sample of the kind of story now told about Montgomery.
General Eisenhower is having lunch with the King. "How do you get on with
Montgomery?" asks the King. "Very well," replies Eisenhower, "except that I
have a kind of feeling that he's after my job." "Oh," says the King, "I was
afraid he was after mine."
·
Other similar stories are told of Eisenhower or Montgomery interchangeably.
For example:
Three doctors who had just died arrived at the gates of Heaven. The first
two, a physician and a surgeon, were refused admittance. The third described
himself as a psychiatrist. "Come in!" said St. Peter immediately. "We should
like your professional advice. God has been behaving in a very peculiar way
lately. He thinks He's General Eisenhower (or Montgomery)."
