---
title: "Burmese Days"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 5 of 25
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-burmese-days-fp20180520/5/
cite: "George Orwell, Burmese Days, section 5. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-burmese-days-fp20180520/5/"
---

# Burmese Days

*George Orwell*

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> _Title:_ Burmese Days
_Date of first publication:_ 1934
_Author:_ Eric Blair (as George Orwell) (1903-1950)
_Date first posted:_ May 21, 2018
_Date last updated:_ May 21, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180520

> This ebook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Cindy Beyer & the online
Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> [Cover Illustration]

> GEORGE  ORWELL

> Burmese  Days

> This desert inaccessible
               Under the shade of melancholy boughs.

> _As You Like It_

> First published in the USA by Harper & Brothers, New York 1934
           Published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1935

> Copyright 1934 by Eric Blair

> [Illustration: Map of Kyauktada]

> TRANSCRIBER NOTES

> Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

> Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.

> [The end of _Burmese Days_ by Eric Blair (as George Orwell)]

## 5. V

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-burmese-days-fp20180520/5/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-burmese-days-fp20180520/5/#p-N

[¶0] In spite of the whisky he had drunk at the Club, Flory had little sleep
that night. The pariah curs were baying the moon—it was only a quarter
full and nearly down by midnight, but the dogs slept all day in the
heat, and they had begun their moon-choruses already. One dog had taken
a dislike to Flory’s house, and had settled down to bay at it
systematically. Sitting on its bottom fifty yards from the gate, it let
out sharp, angry yelps, one to half a minute, as regularly as a clock.
It would keep this up for two or three hours, until the cocks began
crowing.

[¶1] Flory lay turning from side to side, his head aching. Some fool has said
that one cannot hate an animal; he should try a few nights in India,
when the dogs are baying the moon. In the end Flory could stand it no
longer. He got up, rummaged in the tin uniform case under his bed for a
rifle and a couple of cartridges, and went out on to the veranda.

[¶2] It was fairly light in the quarter moon. He could see the dog, and he
could see his foresight. He rested himself against the wooden pillar of
the veranda and took aim carefully; then, as he felt the hard vulcanite
butt against his bare shoulder, he flinched. The rifle had a heavy kick,
and it left a bruise when one fired it. The soft flesh of his shoulder
quailed. He lowered the rifle. He had not the nerve to fire it in cold
blood.

[¶3] It was no use trying to sleep. Flory got his jacket and some cigarettes,
and began to stroll up and down the garden path, between the ghostly
flowers. It was hot, and the mosquitoes found him out and came droning
after him. Phantoms of dogs were chasing one another on the _maidan_.
Over to the left the gravestones of the English cemetery glittered
whitish, rather sinister, and one could see the mounds near by, that
were the remains of old Chinese tombs. The hillside was said to be
haunted, and the Club _chokras_ cried when they were sent up the road at
night.

[¶4] ‘Cur, spineless cur,’ Flory was thinking to himself; without heat,
however, for he was too accustomed to the thought. ‘Sneaking, idling,
boozing, fornicating, soul-examining, self-pitying cur. All those fools
at the Club, those dull louts to whom you are so pleased to think
yourself superior—they are all better than you, every man of them. At
least they are men in their oafish way. Not cowards, not liars. Not
half-dead and rotting. But you——’

[¶5] He had reason to call himself names. There had been a nasty, dirty
affair at the Club that evening. Something quite ordinary, quite
according to precedent; but still dingy, cowardly, dishonouring.

[¶6] When Flory had arrived at the Club only Ellis and Maxwell were there.
The Lackersteens had gone to the station with the loan of Mr Macgregor’s
car, to meet their niece, who was to arrive by the night train. The
three men were playing three-handed bridge fairly amicably when
Westfield came in, his sandy face quite pink with rage, bringing a copy
of a Burmese paper called the _Burmese Patriot_. There was a libellous
article in it, attacking Mr Macgregor. The rage of Ellis and Westfield
was devilish. They were so angry that Flory had the greatest difficulty
in pretending to be angry enough to satisfy them. Ellis spent five
minutes in cursing and then, by some extraordinary process, made up his
mind that Dr Veraswami was responsible for the article. And he had
thought of a counterstroke already. They would put a notice on the
board—a notice answering and contradicting the one Mr Macgregor had
posted the day before. Ellis wrote it out immediately, in his tiny,
clear handwriting:

[¶7] ‘In view of the cowardly insult recently offered to our Deputy
Commissioner, we the undersigned wish to give it as our opinion that
this is the worst possible moment to consider the election of niggers to
this Club,’ etc. etc.

[¶8] Westfield demurred to ‘niggers’. It was crossed out by a single thin
line and ‘natives’ substituted. The notice was signed ‘R. Westfield, P.
W. Ellis, C. W. Maxwell, J. Flory.’

[¶9] Ellis was so pleased with his idea that quite half of his anger
evaporated. The notice would accomplish nothing in itself, but the news
of it would travel swiftly round the town, and would reach Dr Veraswami
tomorrow. In effect, the doctor would have been publicly called a nigger
by the European community. This delighted Ellis. For the rest of the
evening he could hardly keep his eyes from the notice-board, and every
few minutes he exclaimed in glee, ‘That’ll give little fat-belly
something to think about, eh? Teach the little sod what we think of him.
That’s the way to put ’em in their place, eh?’ etc.

[¶10] Meanwhile, Flory had signed a public insult to his friend. He had done
it for the same reason as he had done a thousand such things in his
life; because he lacked the small spark of courage that was needed to
refuse. For of course he could have refused if he had chosen; and,
equally of course, refusal would have meant a row with Ellis and
Westfield. And oh, how he loathed a row! The nagging, the jeers! At the
very thought of it he flinched; he could feel his birthmark palpable on
his cheek, and something happening in his throat that made his voice go
flat and guilty. Not that! It was easier to insult his friend, knowing
that his friend must hear of it.

[¶11] Flory had been fifteen years in Burma, and in Burma one learns not to
set oneself up against public opinion. But his trouble was older than
that. It had begun in his mother’s womb, when chance put the blue
birthmark on his cheek. He thought of some of the early effects of his
birthmark. His first arrival at school, aged nine; the stares and, after
a few days, shouts of the other boys; the nickname Blueface, which
lasted until the school poet (now, Flory remembered, a critic who wrote
rather good articles in the _Nation_) came out with the couplet:

[¶12] _New-tick Flory does look rum,_
                  _Got a face like a monkey’s bum,_

[¶13] whereupon the nickname was changed to Monkey-bum. And the subsequent
years. On Saturday nights the older boys used to have what they called a
Spanish Inquisition. The favourite torture was for someone to hold you
in a very painful grip known only to a few illuminati and called Special
Togo, while someone else beat you with a conker on a piece of string.
But Flory had lived down ‘Monkey-bum’ in time. He was a liar and a good
footballer, the two things absolutely necessary for success at school.
In his last term he and another boy held the school poet in Special Togo
while the captain of the eleven gave him six with a spiked running shoe
for being caught writing a sonnet. It was a formative period.

[¶14] From that school he went to a cheap, third-rate public school. It was a
poor, spurious place. It aped the great public schools with their
traditions of High Anglicanism, cricket and Latin verses, and it had a
school song called ‘The Scrum of Life’ in which God figured as the Great
Referee. But it lacked the chief virtue of the great public schools,
their atmosphere of literary scholarship. The boys learned as nearly as
possible nothing. There was not enough caning to make them swallow the
dreary rubbish of the curriculum, and the wretched, underpaid masters
were not the kind from whom one absorbs wisdom unawares. Flory left
school a barbarous young lout. And yet even then there were, and he knew
it, certain possibilities in him; possibilities that would lead to
trouble, as likely as not. But of course he had suppressed them. A boy
does not start his career nicknamed Monkey-bum without learning his
lesson.

[¶15] He was not quite twenty when he came to Burma. His parents, good people
and devoted to him, had found him a place in a timber firm. They had had
great difficulty in getting him the job, had paid a premium they could
not afford; later, he had rewarded them by answering their letters with
careless scrawls at intervals of months. His first six months in Burma
he had spent in Rangoon, where he was supposed to be learning the office
side of his business. He had lived in a ‘chummery’ with four other
youths who devoted their entire energies to debauchery. And what
debauchery! They swilled whisky which they privately hated, they stood
round the piano bawling songs of insane filthiness and silliness, they
squandered rupees by the hundred on aged Jewish whores with the faces of
crocodiles. That too had been a formative period.

[¶16] From Rangoon he had gone to a camp in the jungle, north of Mandalay,
extracting teak. The jungle life was not a bad one, in spite of the
discomfort, the loneliness, and what is almost the worst thing in Burma,
the filthy, monotonous food. He was very young then, young enough for
hero-worship, and he had friends among the men in his firm. There were
also shooting, fishing, and perhaps once in a year a hurried trip to
Rangoon—pretext, a visit to the dentist. Oh, the joy of those Rangoon
trips! The rush to Smart and Mookerdum’s bookshop for the new novels out
from England, the dinner at Anderson’s with beefsteaks and butter that
had travelled eight thousand miles on ice, the glorious drinking-bout!
He was too young to realise what this life was preparing for him. He did
not see the years stretching out ahead, lonely, eventless, corrupting.

[¶17] He acclimatised himself to Burma. His body grew attuned to the strange
rhythms of the tropical seasons. Every year from February to May the sun
glared in the sky like an angry god, then suddenly the monsoon blew
eastward, first in sharp squalls, then in a heavy ceaseless downpour
that drenched everything until neither one’s clothes, one’s bed nor even
one’s food ever seemed to be dry. It was still hot, with a stuffy,
vaporous heat. The lower jungle paths turned into morasses, and the
paddy fields were great wastes of stagnant water with a stale, mousy
smell. Books and boots were mildewed. Naked Burmans in yard-wide hats of
palm-leaf ploughed the paddy fields, driving their buffaloes through
knee-deep water. Later, the women and children planted the green
seedlings of paddy, dabbing each plant into the mud with little
three-pronged forks. Through July and August there was hardly a pause in
the rain. Then one night, high overhead, one heard a squawking of
invisible birds. The snipe were flying southward from Central Asia. The
rains tailed off, ending in October. The fields dried up, the paddy
ripened, the Burmese children played hopscotch with _gonyin_ seeds and
flew kites in the cool winds. It was the beginning of the short winter,
when Upper Burma seemed haunted by the ghost of England. Wild flowers
sprang into bloom everywhere, not quite the same as the English ones,
but very like them—honeysuckle in thick bushes, field roses smelling of
peardrops, even violets in dark places of the forest. The sun circled
low in the sky, and the nights and early mornings were bitterly cold,
with white mists that poured through the valleys like the steam of
enormous kettles. One went shooting after duck and snipe. There were
snipe in countless myriads, and wild geese in flocks that rose from the
_jeel_ with a roar like a goods train crossing an iron bridge. The
ripening paddy, breast-high and yellow, looked like wheat. The Burmans
went to their work with muffled heads and their arms clasped across
their breasts, their faces yellow and pinched with the cold. In the
morning one marched through misty, incongruous wildernesses, clearings
of drenched, almost English grass and naked trees where monkeys squatted
in the upper branches, waiting for the sun. At night, coming back to
camp through the cold lanes, one met herds of buffaloes which the boys
were driving home, with their huge horns looming through the mist like
crescents. One had three blankets on one’s bed, and game pies instead of
the eternal chicken. After dinner one sat on a log by the vast
camp-fire, drinking beer and talking about shooting. The flames danced
like red holly, casting a circle of light at the edge of which servants
and coolies squatted, too shy to intrude on the white men and yet edging
up to the fire like dogs. As one lay in bed one could hear the dew
dripping from the trees like large but gentle rain. It was a good life
while one was young and need not think about the future or the past.

[¶18] Flory was twenty-four, and due for home leave, when the War broke out.
He had dodged military service, which was easy to do and seemed natural
at the time. The civilians in Burma had a comforting theory that
‘sticking by one’s job’ (wonderful language, English! ‘Sticking
_by_’—how different from ‘sticking _to_’) was the truest patriotism;
there was even a covert hostility towards the men who threw up their
jobs in order to join the Army. In reality, Flory had dodged the War
because the East had already corrupted him, and he did not want to
exchange his whisky, his servants and his Burmese girls for the boredom
of the parade-ground and the strain of cruel marches. The War rolled on,
like a storm beyond the horizon. The hot, blowsy country, remote from
danger, had a lonely, forgotten feeling. Flory took to reading
voraciously, and learned to live in books when life was tiresome. He was
growing adult, tiring of boyish pleasures, learning to think for
himself, almost willy-nilly.

[¶19] He celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday in hospital, covered from head
to foot with hideous sores which were called mud-sores, but were
probably caused by whisky and bad food. They left little pits in his
skin which did not disappear for two years. Quite suddenly he had begun
to look and feel very much older. His youth was finished. Eight years of
Eastern life, fever, loneliness and intermittent drinking, had set their
mark on him.

[¶20] Since then, each year had been lonelier and more bitter than the last.
What was at the centre of all his thoughts now, and what poisoned
everything, was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of
imperialism in which he lived. For as his brain developed—you cannot
stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the
half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to
some wrong way of life—he had grasped the truth about the English and
their Empire. The Indian Empire is a despotism—benevolent, no doubt,
but still a despotism with theft as its final object. And as to the
English of the East, the _sahiblog_, Flory had come so to hate them from
living in their society, that he was quite incapable of being fair to
them. For after all, the poor devils are no worse than anybody else.
They lead unenviable lives; it is a poor bargain to spend thirty years,
ill-paid, in an alien country, and then come home with a wrecked liver
and a pineapple backside from sitting in cane chairs, to settle down as
the bore of some second-rate Club. On the other hand, the _sahiblog_ are
not to be idealised. There is a prevalent idea that the men at the
‘outposts of Empire’ are at least able and hardworking. It is a
delusion. Outside the scientific services—the Forest Department, the
Public Works Department and the like—there is no particular need for a
British official in India to do his job competently. Few of them work as
hard or as intelligently as the postmaster of a provincial town in
England. The real work of administration is done mainly by native
subordinates; and the real backbone of the despotism is not the
officials but the Army. Given the Army, the officials and the business
men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them
_are_ fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their
dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

[¶21] It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in
which every word and every thought is censored. In England it is hard
even to imagine such an atmosphere. Everyone is free in England; we sell
our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But
even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the
wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of
freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a
coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for
yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is
dictated for you by the pukka sahibs’ code.

[¶22] In the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease.
Your whole life is a life of lies. Year after year you sit in
Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to right of you, _Pink’un_ to left
of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his
theory that these bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil. You hear
your Oriental friends called ‘greasy little _babus_’, and you admit,
dutifully, that they _are_ greasy little _babus_. You see louts fresh
from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn
with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to
drown their Empire in blood. And in this there is nothing honourable,
hardly even any sincerity. For, _au fond_, what do you care if the
Indian Empire is a despotism, if Indians are bullied and exploited? You
only care because the right of free speech is denied you. You are a
creature of the despotism, a pukka sahib, tied tighter than a monk or a
savage by an unbreakable system of taboos.

[¶23] Time passed, and each year Flory found himself less at home in the world
of the sahibs, more liable to get into trouble when he talked seriously
on any subject whatever. So he had learned to live inwardly, secretly,
in books and secret thoughts that could not be uttered. Even his talks
with the doctor were a kind of talking to himself; for the doctor, good
man, understood little of what was said to him. But it is a corrupting
thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream
of life, not against it. It would be better to be the thickest-skulled
pukka sahib who ever hiccuped over ‘Forty years on’, than to live
silent, alone, consoling oneself in secret, sterile worlds.

[¶24] Flory had never been home to England. Why, he could not have explained,
though he knew well enough. In the beginning accidents had prevented
him. First there was the War, and after the War his firm were so short
of trained assistants that they would not let him go for two years more.
Then at last he had set out. He was pining for England, though he
dreaded facing it, as one dreads facing a pretty girl when one is
collarless and unshaven. When he left home he had been a boy, a
promising boy and handsome in spite of his birthmark; now, only ten
years later, he was yellow, thin, drunken, almost middle-aged in habits
and appearance. Still, he was pining for England. The ship rolled
westward over wastes of sea like rough-beaten silver, with the winter
trade wind behind her. Flory’s thin blood quickened with the good food
and the smell of the sea. And it occurred to him—a thing he had
actually forgotten in the stagnant air of Burma—that he was still young
enough to begin over again. He would live a year in civilised society,
he would find some girl who did not mind his birthmark—a civilised
girl, not a pukka memsahib—and he would marry her and endure ten,
fifteen more years of Burma. Then they would retire—he would be worth
twelve or fifteen thousands pounds on retirement, perhaps. They would
buy a cottage in the country, surround themselves with friends, books,
their children, animals. They would be free for ever of the smell of
pukka sahibdom. He would forget Burma, the horrible country that had
come near ruining him.

[¶25] When he reached Colombo he found a cable waiting for him. Three men in
his firm had died suddenly of blackwater fever. The firm were sorry, but
would he please return to Rangoon at once? He should have his leave at
the earliest possible opportunity.

[¶26] Flory boarded the next boat for Rangoon, cursing his luck, and took the
train back to his headquarters. He was not at Kyauktada then, but at
another Upper Burma town. All the servants were waiting for him on the
platform. He had handed them over _en bloc_ to his successor, who had
died. It was so queer to see their familiar faces again! Only ten days
ago he had been speeding for England, almost thinking himself in England
already; and now back in the old stale scene, with the naked black
coolies squabbling over the luggage and a Burman shouting at his
bullocks down the road.

[¶27] The servants came crowding round him, a ring of kindly brown faces,
offering presents. Ko S’la had brought a _sambhur_ skin, the Indians
some sweetmeats and a garland of marigolds, Ba Pe, a young boy then, a
squirrel in a wicker cage. There were bullock-carts waiting for the
luggage. Flory walked up to the house, looking ridiculous with the big
garland dangling from his neck. The light of the cold-weather evening
was yellow and kind. At the gate an old Indian, the colour of earth, was
cropping grass with a tiny sickle. The wives of the cook and the _mali_
were kneeling in front of the servants’ quarters, grinding curry paste
on the stone slab.

[¶28] Something turned over in Flory’s heart. It was one of those moments when
one becomes conscious of a vast change and deterioration in one’s life.
For he had realised, suddenly, that in his heart he was glad to be
coming back. This country which he hated was now his native country, his
home. He had lived here ten years, and every particle of his body was
compounded of Burmese soil. Scenes like these—the sallow evening light,
the old Indian cropping grass, the creak of the cartwheels, the
streaming egrets—were more native to him than England. He had sent deep
roots, perhaps his deepest, into a foreign country.

[¶29] Since then he had not even applied for home leave. His father had died,
then his mother, and his sisters, disagreeable horse-faced women whom he
had never liked, had married and he had almost lost touch with them. He
had no tie with Europe now, except the tie of books. For he had realised
that merely to go back to England was no remedy for loneliness; he had
grasped the special nature of the hell that is reserved for
Anglo-Indians. Ah, those poor prosing old wrecks in Bath and Cheltenham!
Those tomb-like boarding-houses with Anglo-Indians littered about in all
stages of decomposition, all talking and talking about what happened in
Boggleywalah in ’88! Poor devils, they know what it means to have left
one’s heart in an alien and hated country. There was, he saw clearly,
only one way out. To find someone who would share his life in Burma—but
really share it, share his inner, secret life, carry away from Burma the
same memories as he carried. Someone who would love Burma as he loved it
and hate it as he hated it. Who would help him to live with nothing
hidden, nothing unexpressed. Someone who understood him: a friend, that
was what it came down to.

[¶30] A friend. Or a wife? The quite impossible she. Someone like Mrs
Lackersteen, for instance? Some damned memsahib, yellow and thin,
scandalmongering over cocktails, making _kit-kit_ with the servants,
living twenty years in the country without learning a word of the
language. Not one of those, please God.

[¶31] Flory leaned over the gate. The moon was vanishing behind the dark wall
of the jungle, but the dogs were still howling. Some lines from Gilbert
came into his mind, a vulgar silly jingle but appropriate—something
about ‘discoursing on your complicated state of mind’. Gilbert was a
gifted little skunk. Did all his trouble, then, simply boil down to
that? Just complicated, unmanly whinings; poor-little-rich-girl stuff?
Was he no more than a loafer using his idleness to invent imaginary
woes? A spiritual Mrs Wititterly? A Hamlet without poetry? Perhaps. And
if so, did that make it any more bearable? It is not the less bitter
because it is perhaps one’s own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting,
in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that
somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.

[¶32] Oh well, God save us from self-pity! Flory went back to the veranda,
took up the rifle, and, wincing slightly, let drive at the pariah dog.
There was an echoing roar, and the bullet buried itself in the _maidan_,
wide of the mark. A mulberry-coloured bruise sprang out on Flory’s
shoulder. The dog gave a yell of fright, took to its heels, and then,
sitting down fifty yards further away, once more began rhythmically
baying.