It was 76 years ago this week that thrush-loving naturalist and novelist George Orwell died aged just 46

                                                          

Torrent of music - Song Thrush in full voice 

 

MIDWAY through  George Orwell’s famously gloomy and claustrophobic sixth novel, 1984, there comes a rare moment of joyousness and optimism. 

The protagonist Winston and his girlfriend, Julia, are sharing a moment of secluded togetherness - away from the attentions of Big Brother - when a Song Thrush alights on a bough not five metres away, then starts to "pour forth a torrent of song".  

"The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity.  

"Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song.

"It was as though the flood of music were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over Winston and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves." 

Since his boyhood in Henley-on-Thames, Orwell had always been a lover of nature, but he said that whenever he expressed his appreciation in his articles, left-wing political thinkers would regularly deride his attitude as being "bourgeois", "sentimental" or, "backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous".  

This is a view that continues to prevail among politicians today. In discussing planning policies, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, for instance, has been notably contemptuous - almost aggressive - in her utterances about the protection of bats and newts. 

In one of his pre-1984 essays, Orwell wrote: "People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already.  

"But if a man cannot enjoy the return of Spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?  

"I think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes and butterflies, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable." 

His essay concludes: "The bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they may disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it." 

To come back to the Song Thrush, during the frosty mornings of mid-January, at a time when many songbirds are still silent, they are now coming into in full and exuberant voice, confidently proclaiming their virtuosity as masterful musical soloists. 

It was this song which, as with Orwell,   also lifted the spirits of Britain's First World War Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, at a time when his eyesight had all but gone. "If birds were endeavouring to please us by song, the thrush should be the first," he wrote in The Charm of Birds. "The bird does not rank in the highest class for quality, but he certainly comes high in the second class. His is undoubtedly a major song." 

Today, there far fewer thrushes than in the first half of the last century when the author of 1984 and Lord Grey could hear them almost anywhere. But happily, despite their population decline, they are still to be heard in many gardens and parks all over Britain. The music continues. 

It was on 21 January 76 years ago that Orwell died from TB in University College Hospital in London. He was aged just 46. 

Might his last encounter with nature have been the music of a Song Thrush singing outside his window?