LEAVES FROM A NATURE NOTEBOOK: 'Orwell, his nose, my pigs, and Animal Farm'
Or, Scents and Sensitivity
Of all English writers, Orwell had the keenest schnozzle for smells, including those of the countryside. At heart, as John Sutherland notes in Orwell’s Nose (2016), Orwell was a peasant, forever making little farms wheresoever he went. (One can also make a decent case that the roots of his politics, the mixing of tradition with anti-authoritarianism and a sense of fair play, lie with the Diggers of the English Revolution, rather than cosmopolitan socialism.) In the Orwellian oeuvre, the only happinesses occur in rurality: Gordon and Rosemary’s day out on Farnham common in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Winston and Julia’s al fresco lovemaking in ‘Golden Country’ in 1984, and George Bowling’s intensely nostalgic pond-fishing memories of Lower Binfield in Coming Up for Air. I read Orwell’s Nose outside in the garden yesterday evening, by candlelight, enveloped by the lavender vapour of the night-time country garden. From over the stone wall wafted the citrus aroma of a trial row of hops ripening. I had some expectation, not unsatisfied, that a book about olfaction would benefit from being read in a strongly odorous environment. Animal Farm, when ‘smelled’ through Orwell’s proboscis is instructive. He loathed twentieth-century mechanical miasmas, but adored horses, not least because their grassy excrement was inoffensive to his perceptive nasal receptors. (As it was to the hooter of his hero, the misanthropic Jonathan Swift.) So, it is perhaps non-coincidental that Boxer the horse is the hero of Animal Farm. Conversely, Orwell detested pigs, partly because of their offensive omnivorous excrement. The villains of Animal Farm ? The swine, led by the cigar-smoking Napoleon. Orwell was simply wrong about pigs. Or, at least, free-range pigs. To reprove Orwell I walked around to the pig hut, where the ten porkers were stretched out, snoring on deep straw; I inhaled deeply from the flank of one of the pinky-perky Welsh pigs; she could have been sprinkled with talcum powder, so lovely was her scent. Well, she is called ‘Lavender’. (See the photo above of her.) From the pigs’ outdoor latrine area (pigs are prissy and precise about their ablutions, given the opportunity) came the sweet, baked apple attar of pig poo. Animals are what they eat. Our pigs largely forage, between helpings of organic cereals for breakfast and supper. I run an intentionally traditional farmyard, which is richly stinky, and would give Orwell’s nose substances for thought. Pigs, equines, chickens, geese, hay and straw, a pile of cow manure, occupy three sides, while vintage tractors, with their addictive acrid whiff of red diesel stand in the entrance. Surround smell. I confess there is one incongruous odour in this old-fashioned animal farmyard. In summer I rub Ambre Solaire SPF 30 on to the ears of the pale-skinned pigs to prevent sunburn. Scents and sensitivity, then.
***** I’m ‘on tour’ in October and November, talking about my new book, ‘England, A Natural History’. The dates and venues are below.
Must try and get along to Waterstones in Salisbury!
Is Brid Lit Festival Bridport, Dorset?