Necessary Steps: A Novelist’s Walk Through Summer

July 9, 2007, 8:49 pm
Ministry of Walks

In George Orwell’s magnum opus, “1984,” Winston Smith, the initially exiguous, then rebellious, and finally cerebrally rinsed protagonist, imagines and re-imagines the manner of his death. He pictures himself, released from the dreadful torture chambers of the Ministry of Love, and walking down a sunlit corridor. There is no prickle of nape hairs to anticipate the fatal blow, as he is culled, painlessly, from behind by a high-velocity rifle bullet. It is the very essence of the hideous totalitarian regime of Oceania to encourage doublethink in its citizens, even as they’re being executed.

Grim thoughts plagued me, even though the day was far from grim. I set off from the little hamlet of Craighouse, near to the southern end of the Hebridean island of Jura, to drive the 20 miles north, to where the public road gives out, and I would have to walk the final four to the farmhouse of Barnhill. It was here, in this remote Scots fastness, that between 1948 and 1950 Eric Blair, a k a George Orwell, wrote the novel that added so many minatory neologisms – Big Brother, thought crime, Room 101 – to the English language.

The east coast of Jura.The correspondence between my own initials and those of the novel’s protagonist; the fact that Orwell and I were the same age when we both first came to Jura; our mutual preoccupation with the mechanics of political allegory; our shared habituation to black tobacco – all of these conspired to give me the deathly feelings.

Jura is one of the last remaining wildernesses in the British Isles, 140 square miles of peat bog and rocky mountain, fissured by sea lochs, dappled with lochans and inhabited by 200-odd people (some very odd) and some 5,000 red deer. The walking is pitiless – even in dry conditions, with spongy going over large tussocks. And then there are the notorious Highland midges, as well as the deer ticks, canny arachnids that like nothing better than leaping from a grass stem onto a passing human, boring through hide and gifting its possessor a dose of Lyme disease.

Still, on this breezy afternoon in summer I wouldn’t have either of these pests to deal with. The wind would keep the midges off, and there was a track to Barnhill, which would mean the Self flanks wouldn’t have to sweep through the sward. I don’t know if either ticks or midges troubled Orwell – somehow I doubt it, he was made of sterner stuff – but when he lived on the island and regularly walked the seven miles down to the nearest settlement of Ardlussa, he would carry a walking stick with which to beat back the reeds encroaching on the farm track.

Of course, Orwell had an abiding fascination with parasites. During his Parisian sojourn and his tramps through the pays bas of interwar English poverty, he never ceased to comment on the bed bugs and fleas that marched over his own fleshly terrain. Even in the trenches, on the heights above the Aragon town of Huesca during the Spanish Civil War, it was the movement of the lice that struck the writer, amidst the immobility of the warfare itself.

A rainbow at Ardlussa; the Paps of Jura in the distance.I trundled up the A846, Jura’s sole road, past the farms at Lagg and Tarbert, through coniferous plantations and over expanses of moor. The sunshine chased the showers across the broad sky, and past Ardlussa, where the road wriggled down to the shore line, perfect rainbows arced from headland to headland, while plantations of rhododendron, the quintessential Victorian colonist, splashed mauve and purple about with floral abandon. My mood lifted – a bit.

A couple of deer gates, a field full of chopper-handlebar-horned Highland cattle, and finally the blacktop stopped. I left the car and took to my heels. Back behind me, I could just make out the three conical peaks of the Paps of Jura, the signature 2,500-foot peaks that give the island its false promise of fecundity and succor. Striding up the track, I felt a distinct horripilation: would I end my days like this, striding down the sunlit corridor of my own consciousness?

In truth, there’s nothing more isolating than a solo walk in a remote place. Perhaps this was why Orwell had come to Jura? To his friend, the newspaper proprietor David Astor, whose family owned large chunks of the place, Orwell claimed the necessity of escaping from the claims of London’s tumultuous Grub Street, but not for the first time, as boot scraped over rock, splashed through puddle, I wondered whether in the reclusion of Barnhill the writer had sought the final isolations of the TB sanatorium, and then the grave. And it was worth recalling that Orwell’s alternative title for the jeremiad he was to write here was “The Last Man in Europe.”

Solo walking, whether in the wilds or the built environment, is a masculine luxury – of that I’m well aware. Women friends who walk alone tell me that they never altogether relax when they’re trekking by themselves. There’s always that faint prickling of nape hairs, the waiting for a hand to clap down on their shoulder, heralding the unwanted attentions of an abusive Big Brother.

Barnhill.The four-mile walk was uneventful. I stopped half way for a flask of tea and dark chocolate. I arrived as the sun was slanting low over the house. From above it looked almost pretty: a whitewashed ornament in its little gully of greenery and garden. The current owners, the Fletcher family, whose parents rented the house to Orwell, told me what I already understood: it all depended on the weather and the season. In winter Barnhill is another, far more austere story.

I must stress: this house is not an Orwell Museum — it’s a family home. Uninvited visitors are not welcome, although they do pitch up, despite the eight-mile round trip walk, and seem to feel they have a perfect right to poke about the place, staring in through the windows as if they’re thought police. The Fletchers told me that one Japanese academic turned up in heavy rain, having done the walk in morning dress, complete with a wing collar and bowtie.

I don’t want to taunt you with my privileged access, but what I will say is this: the juxtaposition between the lived-in, homely – if barebones — feel of the house, and its illustrious literary history profoundly moved me. And I’m not a man who’s easily moved – even when taking necessary steps. The interior is more or less unchanged since Orwell’s day (or “Blair” as the Fletchers refer to him), and in the upstairs bedroom where, isolated from his 3-year-old adoptive son because of the risk of TB infection, he clacked away on his typewriter, there was a distinct atmosphere.

Heading away from the house, as twilight fell over the island and the evening star rose in the west, I no longer felt that sense of vacuity at the back of my neck. For the four, long miles back to my car, as the landscape underwent its twice-daily shift from color to monochrome, I was accompanied by an indomitable spirit. In the timeless realm of the fictive, the walker is always proceeding along a sunlit corridor, but the rifle bullet is never fired.