George Orwell
SUCH , SUCH WEIE THE JOYS
I
Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but
after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into the
routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now aged
eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown
out of at least. four years earlier.
Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken
for granted. It is a normal reaction
in
children who have been re–
moved from their homes to a strange place. In those days, however,
it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on
purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating. For my part
I did not need to be told it was a crime. Night after night I prayed,
with a fervor never previously attained in my prayers, "Please God,
do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please God, do not let me wet my
bed !", but it made remarkably little difference. Some nights the
thing happened, others not. There was no volition about it, no
consciousness. You did not properly speaking
do
the deed: you
merely woke up in the morning and found that the sheets were
wringing wet.
Mter the second or third offense I was warned that I should
be beaten next time, but I received the warning in a curiously
roundabout way. One afternoon, as we were filing out from tea,
Mrs. Simpson, the headmaster's wife, was sitting at the head of one
of the tables, chatting with a lady of whom I know nothing, except
that she was on an afternoon's visit to the school. She was an in–
timidating, masculine-looking person wearing a riding habit, or
something that I took to be a riding habit. I was just leaving the
room when Mrs. Simpson called me back, as though to introduce me
to the visitor.
1. This is the first publication of a manuscript found among O rwell's papers
after his death .
