My father, George Orwell
Richard Blair didn’t have the smoothest start in life, says Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. At three weeks old, he was adopted; and nine months later, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died aged 39. Fortunately, his father Eric – better known as George Orwell – was, by the standards of the time, a doting, hands-on dad. He and Eileen had wanted children but were infertile; and Orwell wasn’t about to give up his only child. “My father was devoted to me,” says Richard. “Absolutely devoted.” Already suffering from the tuberculosis that was to kill him, the writer took Richard to live on the Isle of Jura in Scotland, with a nanny and his own younger sister, Avril. There were no other children there and Orwell was often…
