England’s Sleep
by Alastair Su
I visited the Imperial War Museum today, which is now my favorite museum of all time. Following that, in order to saturate my day with the motif of war, I caught Journey’s End showing at the Duke of York Theatre. All this really made me recall Orwell’s prescient words, written in 1938:
Down here it was still the England I had known in childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wildflowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and mediate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal Weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen — all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. (George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia)
