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fevered mind was an idea for another book entitled ‘A Smoking Room Story’ which would re-visit
Burma.
‘A Smoking Room Story’ was planned as a novella of thirty to forty thousand words that would tell
the story of how a fresh-faced young British man was irrevocably changed after living in the humid
jungles of colonial Burma.
Orwell didn’t have a chance to make much headway on this; he died shortly after beginning, and
left behind only an outline for the tale and a short vignette written in an inky scrawl. Burmese Days
remains the only major piece of writing which charts the compelling and long-standing connection –
part reality, part fiction – between George Orwell and Burma.
Among the documents in the archive where Orwell’s papers are stored at the University of London is
a poem written on Government of Burma writing paper. The poem is an unpublished epitaph for the
main character in Burmese Days, John Flory. Orwell imagined the poem carved in the bark of a
peepul tree above the place where Flory is buried in Burma:
JOHN FLORY
BORN 1890
DIED OF DRINK 1927
Here lie the bones of poor John Flory;
His story was the old, old story.
Money, women, cards and gin
Were the four things that did him in.
He has spent sweat enough to swim in
Making love to stupid women;
He has known misery past thinking
In the dismal art of drinking.
Oh stranger, as you voyage here
And read this welcome, shed no tear;
But take the simple gift I give,
And learn from me how not to live.
EMMA LARKIN