George Orwell Diaries

Relevant Entries from Orwell’s Notebooks

In this section are entries from Orwell’s fifth Diary and a number of related entries from his Second and his Last Literary Notebooks.

It is not possible to date this timetable precisely, but it must have been written after Orwell began his course of streptomycin injections on February 19 or 20, 1948. This is therefore a convenient, rather than a precise, position to place it. (Asterisks are Orwell’s own.)

Time table at this hospital (times all approximate)

*12 midnight – injection

5.30 am – noise (people going to & fro, water being drawn, etc.) begins.

6.30 am – called, with hot water.

7 am – temperature taken

7.30 am – breakfast

*8 am – injection

8.15 am – cleaning begins (continues on & off for about 2 hours)

9 am – bed made

. . . medicine

10 am – temperature taken

10.30 am – doctors come round

11–12 noon – during this time, though of course not every day, one goes to be X-rayed, “refilled”, etc.

12 noon – lunch

2 pm – temperature taken

3 pm – tea

*4 pm – injection

6 pm – temperature taken

6.30 pm – supper

10 pm – temperature taken

lights out

NB. that the injections are a temporary feature.

Handwritten: textual variations are not listed here but can be found in Complete Works.

3.30.48: When you are acutely ill, or recovering from acute illness, your brain frankly strikes work & you are only equal to picture papers, easy crossword puzzles etc. But when it is a case of a long illness, where you are weak & without appetite but not actually feverish or in pain, you have the impression that your brain is quite normal. Your thoughts are just as active as ever, you are interested in the same things, you seem to be able to talk normally, & you can read anything that you would read at any other time. It is only when you attempt to write, even to write the simplest & stupidest newspaper article, that you realise what a deterioration has happened inside your skull. At the start it is impossible to get anything on to paper at all. Your mind turns away to any conceivable subject rather than the one you are trying to deal with, & even the physical act of writing is unbearably irksome. Then, perhaps, you begin to be able to write a little, but whatever you write, once it is set down on paper, turns out to be stupid & obvious. You have also no command of language, or rather you can think of nothing except flat, obvious expressions: a good, lively phrase never occurs to you. And even when you begin to re-acquire the habit of writing, you seem to be incapable of preserving continuity. From time to time you may strike out a fairly good sentence, but it is extraordinarily difficult to make consecutive sentences sound as though they had anything to do with one another. The reason for this is that you cannot concentrate for more than a few seconds, & therefore cannot even remember what you said a moment ago. In all this the striking thing is the contrast between the apparent normality of your mind, & its helplessness when you attempt to get anything on to paper. Your thoughts, when you think them, seem to be just like your thoughts at any other time, but as soon as they are reduced to some kind of order they always turn out to be badly-expressed platitudes.

What I would like to know is whether enough is known about the localisation of brain functions to account for this kind of thing. It would seem natural enough if the effect of illness were simply to stop you thinking, but that is not what happens. What happens is that your mind is just as active as usual, perhaps more so, but always to no purpose. You can use words, but always inappropriate words, & you can have ideas, but you cannot fit them together. If mental activity is determined, for instance, by the supply of blood to the brain, it looks as though when you are ill there is enough blood to feed the areas that produce stupid thoughts, but not the ones that produce intelligent thoughts.

This handwritten entry is taken from Orwell’s last (not his Second) Literary Notebook. Although written a year after the treatment it describes, it is placed here because Orwell started the fifty-day course of treatment with streptomycin on February 19 or 20, 1948; fifty days later would be April 8 or 9 – i.e., a few days after the description on pages 536–37 of how he had been affected mentally by his illness.

3.24.49: Before I forget them it is worth writing down the secondary symptoms produced by streptomycin when I was treated with it last year. Streptomycin was then almost a new drug & had never been used at that hospital before. The symptoms in my case were quite different from those described in the American medical journal in which we read the subject up beforehand.

At first, though the streptomycin seemed to produce an almost immediate improvement in my health, there were no secondary symptoms, except that a sort of discoloration appeared at the base of my finger & toe nails. Then my face became noticeably redder & the skin had a tendency to flake off, & a sort of rash appeared all over my body, especially down my back. There was no itching associated with this. After abt 3 weeks I got a severe sore throat, which did not go away & was not affected by sucking penicillin lozenges. It was very painful to swallow & I had to have a special diet for some weeks. There was now ulceration with blisters in my throat & on the insides of my cheeks, & the blood kept coming up into little blisters on my lips. At night these burst & bled considerably, so that in the morning my lips were always stuck together with blood & I had to bathe them before I could open my mouth. Meanwhile my nails had disintegrated at the roots & the disintegration grew, as it were, up the nail, new nails forming beneath meanwhile. My hair began to come out, & one or two patches of quite white hair appeared at the back (previously it was only speckled with grey.)

After 50 days the streptomycin, which had been injected at the rate of 1 gramme a day, was discontinued. The lips etc. healed almost immediately & the rash went away, though not quite so promptly. My hair stopped coming out & went back to its normal colour, though I think with more grey in it than before. The old nails ended by dropping out altogether, & some months after leaving hospital I had only ragged tips, which kept splitting, to the new nails. Some of the toenails did not drop out. Even now my nails are not normal. They are much more corrugated than before, & a great deal thinner, with a constant tendency to split if I do not keep them very short.

At that time the Board of Trade would not give import permits for streptomycin, except to a few hospitals for experimental purposes. One had to get hold of it by some kind of wire-pulling. It cost £1 a gramme, plus 60% Purchase Tax.

Handwritten: textual variations are not listed here, but can be found in Complete Works.

4.18.48: How memory works, or doesn’t. Last night, as I was settling down after the lights had been turned out, I suddenly, for no apparent reason remembered something that had happened during the war. This was that at some time or other – when, I did not know, but it was evidently a good long time back – I was shown a document which was so secret that the Minister concerned, or his secretary (I think it was his secretary), apparently had orders not to let it pass out of his own hand. I therefore had to come round to his side of the desk & read it over his shoulder. It was a short pamphlet or memorandum printed on good quality white paper & bound with green silk thread. But the point is that though I remembered the scene vividly – especially the secretive way in which he held the page for me to read it, as though there were danger of some other unauthorised person getting a glimpse of it – I had no memory whatever as to what the document was.

This morning I thought it over, & was able to make some inferences. The only Minister I was in touch with during the war was Cripps, in 1942 & 1943, after his mission to India. The document must have had something to do with India or Burma, because it was in this connection (when I was working in the Indian Section at the BBC) that I occasionally saw Cripps. The person who showed me the document must have been David Owen, Cripps’s secretary. I then remembered that after reading it I made some such comment as, “I should think you would keep a thing like that secret,” which made it all the more likely that the document had something to do with India. In the afternoon I mentioned the matter to Richard Rees, & then later I remembered a little more, but in a doubtful way. I think – but I remember this much less well than I remember the style of print & paper – that the document was a memorandum on our post-war treatment of Burma, then occupied by the Japanese, saying that Burma would have to revert to “direct rule” (meaning martial law) for several years before civil government was restored. This, of course was a very different tale from what we were giving out in our propaganda. And I think (but any memory I have of this is very vague indeed) that on the strength of it I may have dropped a hint to one of the Burmese in London, warning him not to trust the British government too far.

If I did drop any such hint, this would have amounted to a breach of trust, & perhaps that was why I had preferred to forget the whole incident. But then why did I suddenly remember it again? What impresses me even more than my having remembered the scene without remembering what the document was about, is51 that it was, so to speak, quite a new memory.52 The moment the episode came back to me, I was aware that it had never crossed my mind for years past. It had suddenly popped up to the surface, after lying forgotten for – I think – quite five years .53

Handwritten while in Hairmyres Hospital

5.21.48: 9. 45 am.: The following noises now happening simultaneously. A radio. A gramophone. Vacuum cleaner running intermittently. Orderly singing intermittently. Noise of hammering from outside. Usual clatter of boots & trolleys, whistling, cries of rooks & gulls, cackling of hens in the distance, taps running, doors opening & shutting, intermittent coughing.

Immediately below on the same page is written:

Things not foreseen in youth as part of middle age.

Perpetual tired weak feeling in legs, aching knees. Stiffness amounting to pain in small of back & down loins. Discomfort in gums. Chest more or less always constricted. Feeling in the morning of being almost unable to stand up. Sensation of cold whenever the sun is not shining. Wind on the stomach (making it difficult to think). Eyes always watering.

As painful as a grapestone under a dental plate

As noisy as a mouse in a packet of macaroni

As haughty as a fishmonger