It was hard for him because he wasn’t well a lot of the time.”ĭuring the day Orwell would shut himself upstairs and work. I remember being happy and spending time with my father. Richard said: “I did have a lot of freedom to play there. Jura is a wilderness of beaches, rugged landscape and the rising Paps. Susan didn’t stay long when Orwell’s sister Avril joined them, as the two clashed horribly over how Richard should be reared. Richard, two, arrived a couple of months later on the steamer Locheil with his nanny Susan Watson. When the war was over, Orwell escaped London to rent Barnhill, an isolated house reached only by boat or by walking the last six miles along a rugged track at the road’s end. Richard was only 10 months when his adoptive mother died and friends suggested to Orwell that he simply “unadopt” him. Orwell first holidayed on the Jura estate of his friend, David Astor, who felt it would be respite for the writer following the death of his wife Eileen, who had a heart attack. I have visions of being with him there and we had some lovely times. He said: “Jura will always be a magnetic draw to me. Richard, 70, has been back to the island many times, pulled by the memories of the father he lost to tuberculosis when he was only five. He and 22 members of the Orwell Society will travel to Barnhill, the remote farmhouse where the writer, real name Eric Blair, laboured over 1984 in an upstairs bedroom. This weekend, Richard is on the island again to mark the 65th anniversary of the renowned novel that spouted the maxim “Big Brother is watching you”. The notorious waters lie to the northern tip of Jura, the island where Orwell wrote 1984 and where he lived out his last precious years with his adopted son.
It is ironic that he will rest there, the whirlpool in which he and his famous father George Orwell almost drowned in 1947. RICHARD Blair has asked that his ashes be scattered on his boat, set alight and swept into the maelstrom of the Gulf of Corryvreckan.
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