Reader CUFA Southwold Song

I was just reading Coming Up For Air in bed and decided, as I often do, to Google some place or other from his books. This time it was Lower Binfield as I've just got to that lovely bit where he decided to kid Hilda and go back to his childhood home. I came to Orwell Today and your own contribution. I'll go back to your Homage to Orwell tomorrow as it's getting late, I want to read a bit more and I've got a busy day tomorrow.

Below is a link to my own homage to Orwell, a song on Youtube. I hope you like it and don't find this too intrusive.

Southwold Morning (George Orwell) Tribute
lyrics by Peter Cordwell
sung by Dave Marshall

His name was Eric Blair
But the likeness stops right there
His word was one that every one could trust
His mind was different class
On the future and the past
His legacy will never turn to dust
His legacy will never turn to dust

Eric Blair went to Eton
Never knew where he was beaten
He always took the brave man's point of view
He looked into the future
And saw all of the torture
George Orwell this song is just for you
George Orwell this song is just for you

While others watched out
He went down and out
He lived with tramps in a place they call the Spike
He never was embarrassed
In London or in Paris
His gift to tell the world what it was like
He told the world just what it was like

1936 he left his London digs
For a coal face a million miles from here
With miners on their knees
He saw, hunger, death, disease
To lead him on the road to Wigan Pier
That set him on The Road to Wigan Pier

He fought on a foreign shore
In the Spanish Civil War
Fighting for his faith in the common man
In the dirt and vicious stink
He still found time to think
And he wrote it down for us to understand
He wrote it down for us to understand

Well you've all read Animal Farm
About the pigs who mean you harm
Their greatest skill to twist the truth to lies
They lead their comrades on
Until comradeship is gone
You can only weep when you hear how Boxer dies
You can only weep when you hear how Boxer dies

As readers cried for more
He wrote 1984
The book that gave the world its clearest warning
While Marxists said "because"
He told how it was
How I wish I could meet him on a Southwold morning
Oh I'd love to meet him on a Southwold morning

Thanks a million for sending your musical tribute to George Orwell - it's absolutely wonderful. I love the music and the words which, I hope you don't mind, I've transcribed while listening to the song a few times. I hope I haven't misinterpreted any of your English accent!

I must admit that as I was listening I was imagining I was Orwell and I was very touched by your sentiments. Your words express so truly how much Orwell is loved and appreciated by so many of us here in the world of "1984" and it is soothing to the soul to hear him being paid homage to.

You don't say so but I assume you live in Southwold - which could be one of the reasons you are so attuned (besides your name having Orwell in it) to the great man, the "crystal spirit".

I've never been to that East Anglia part of England where Southwold is but want to go some day and walk some of the places Orwell walked, including along the beach with his girlfriend of the time, Brenda Salkeld. She was a clergyman's daughter from Bedfordshire (near my grandfather's ancestral home near the village of Orwell) who was teaching in Southwold when Orwell lived there with his parents after quiting Burma and in between his down and out days in Paris and London. Brenda was who Orwell had partially in mind for Dorothy Hare, the heroine in A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER (much of which was written in Southwold) and is set in a Suffolk village like Southwold. Much of it is autobiographical of Orwell's time in Southwold (and his own teaching career in the town south of London).

The picture at the very top of the page is an 1822 painting of Southwold harbour which I came across in a newspaper last month. And below that are photos of Orwell on the beach at Southwold in 1934 with friends (and their dogs).

Thank you so much for including my contribution on your website. I will send it to Dave Marshall, the singer and musician in our little partnership. Actually I'm not from Southwold but a working class Londoner (a very young 60) from a place called Catford (in Lewisham), SE London. I'm a journalist. We have other possible Orwell songs - 'Down the Mine' and 'Grouchy Marxist'.

I look plusmuch forward to future Orwell songs of your great writing and Dave's great strumming and singing. The names DOWN THE MINE and GROUCHO MARXIST are catchy as no doubt the tunes will be too.

It is lovely to be in touch with another lover of Orwell, the "Crystal Spirit", a term Orwell coined in his poem about the Spanish Civil War and which was later applied to describe him. See ORWELL'S CRYSTAL SPIRIT POEM and THE PASSING TRAVELLER