Burmese Days

Also in the book

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  Maxwell

  The acting Divisional Forest Officer: a fresh-coloured blond youth of twenty-five or six, very young for the post, silent except for a smutty rhyme now and then. He is the one who fires the shot that turns the fake rebellion real.

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  Ma Kin

  U Po Kyin's wife: a thin woman of five and forty who has been the confidante of his intrigues for twenty years and tells him, without effect, that he has done very much evil in his life.

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  Ko Ba Sein

  Head clerk of the Deputy Commissioner's office and U Po Kyin's most useful instrument: an erect, narrow-shouldered man with a curiously smooth face, trusted by Mr Macgregor with most of his official secrets.

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  Mr Francis and Mr Samuel

  The two Eurasian clerks of Kyauktada, sons of an American Baptist missionary and a Roman Catholic missionary respectively. They live in the bazaar on charity, and the six-weekly church service is the great social event of their lives.

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  Flo

  Flory's black cocker spaniel. She swims in the jungle pool with him, is combed for ticks every evening, and bolts fifty yards from the dead leopard. The narration notes that she barked at every strange Burmese or Indian face and liked the smell of a European.

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  Ba Pe

  Ko S'la's younger brother, a servant in Flory's household since he was a boy — and, secretly, Ma Hla May's lover. He walks her home from the bazaar with a lantern, and helps carry his master to bed.

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  Ba Taik

  U Po Kyin's servant: undersized and pock-marked, with a timid and rather hungry expression. He is paid no wages, being a convicted thief whom a word would send to prison, and announces the morning's visitors on his fingers.

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  Hla Pe

  An apprentice clerk of eighteen who writes the libellous newspaper article and then the anonymous letters, taking a diplomatic attack of dysentery and later of bronchitis to get them done. U Po Kyin calls him a most promising boy and sees that he gets his clerkship.

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  Li Yeik

  The Chinese grocer and illicit pawnbroker of the bazaar, old and bent-kneed and wearing a pigtail, with a chinless face all cheekbones that George Orwell likens to a benevolent skull. He gives John Flory and Elizabeth Lackersteen tea, chocolates and two fans, and the visit ends in a disaster nobody intended.

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  Ma Pu and Ma Yi

  Ko S'la's two wives — the gaunt, hard-faced first and the fat, lazy 'little wife' some years younger. They quarrel every morning that Flory is in headquarters, and briefly make peace to bring him a pot of something they insist is good for cuts.

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  Mattu

  The old Hindu durwan who looks after the European church, lives in a hut of flattened kerosene tins and rings the bell in the six-foot tin steeple. He is more like a grasshopper than a human being, and once told the doctor he believed he was ten years old.

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  The Club butler

  The servant who runs the European Club at Kyauktada: a dark, stout Dravidian with liquid, yellow-irised eyes, who answers everything with "Yes, master" and retires. He is present in almost every Club scene in the novel, is kicked by one member and mocked by another for speaking English too well, and is the source, without knowing it, of the intelligence U Po Kyin's ally collects.

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  Elizabeth's mother

  Elizabeth Lackersteen's mother in England and Paris, and a different woman from Mrs Lackersteen the aunt in Kyauktada. George Orwell calls her incapable, half-baked, vapouring and self-pitying, a woman who took up Women's Suffrage, then Higher Thought, then painting, and used the scrubbing-brush to clean her palette. She died of ptomaine poisoning, and the Paris flat went with her.

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  Elizabeth's father

  A tea-broker, and less of a drunkard than his brother Tom Lackersteen, whose fortunes rose and fell and who was too optimistic to put anything aside in the good years. In the last year of the war he made money and engaged a horde of servants, including a butler. He died of influenza when Elizabeth was twenty.

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  The padre

  The clergyman who comes to Kyauktada every six weeks to hold a service: a tall man with grey hair, a refined discoloured face and pince-nez, who cannot speak a word of Karen to the Karen Christians who wait for him, or they a word of English to him. He is partway through his sermon when Ma Hla May forces her way in at the church door, and after a moment of shaking his pince-nez in distress at the doorway he gives the only order anyone manages in the scene, then brings the sermon to an end almost at once.

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  The pwe dancer

  The best dancer in the travelling pwe troupe that performs in the bazaar road, in a pale blue satin longyi that hides her feet, her face powdered so thickly that it gleams in the lamplight like a chalk mask with live eyes behind it. She throws her cigar to a man in the orchestra to begin, sings in a brassy voice, and dances with her hands twisting like snakeheads. Elizabeth Lackersteen leaves in disgust, and John Flory has to follow her.

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  The headman of the fishing village

  A skinny old gentleman in a magenta paso with a mole on his cheek from which four yard-long grey hairs sprout, who receives John Flory and Elizabeth Lackersteen at the fishing village up the creek where the shooting party lands. He walks ahead of them crouched like an upside-down letter L, cuffs children out of the way, and produces a teapot, a bunch of very long green bananas and six coal-black cheroots. His corrugated iron roof is the pride of his life; he abandoned building a pagoda to pay for it.

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  Ma Sein Galay

  The prostitute Ko S'la engages for ten rupees, on his own responsibility, and installs by John Flory's bed on the night Flory drinks three-quarters of a bottle of whisky and has to be carried in unconscious. Flory wakes at midnight with a splitting head to find her fanning him with a wicker fan; she fetches him soda water and puts a wet compress round his forehead. She sells paddy baskets in the bazaar near Li Yeik's shop, is good-tempered about the whole arrangement, and asks whether she should take her clothes off now.

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  The young beater

  The boy who goes up a creeper after a shot pigeon as easily as a ladder and puts the bird limp and warm into Elizabeth Lackersteen's hand, then leads her and John Flory through a labyrinth of game-tracks after the leopard. He says nothing at all for most of it: he puts a finger to his lips for silence, pushes Elizabeth into cover and pinches her elbow when he hears the animal coming, close enough that she can smell the coconut oil in his hair. When the wounded leopard crashes towards them through the undergrowth, he and the other Burman are the two shouting "Shoot! Shoot!" as they run for the nearest climbable trees.

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  The old hunter

  The headman of the beaters on the shooting expedition: a stringy but active old man with grey hair and dark blue tattoo patterns on his thighs, who pours a bottle of cloudy liquid on the ground as a sacrifice before the drive, explains the plan in a cracked voice, and points with his dah to show John Flory and Elizabeth Lackersteen where to stand.

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  Sammy

  John Flory's cook, caught peeping round a corner at Elizabeth Lackersteen with enormous curiosity and pretending to rearrange his pagri when spotted. He has had many masters, tells the story of one who used to have him held down and beaten, and explains that memsahibs are the real danger because they keep a little red book for the bazaar money. He collapses in a semi-genuine fit to avoid the night march and has to be revived with gin.

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  The fat Sub-inspector

  The police officer George Orwell shows interrogating a suspected ring-thief at the station, turning on the man and roaring in an enormous voice that he stole the ring, then bellowing at him to turn round, on an inspiration. Westfield calls him Maung Ba. Orwell later wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier that this was the scene an American missionary walked in on while he was serving in the Burma police.

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  The blinded schoolboy

  One of a group of schoolboys who jeer at Ellis in the road. He answers a question with three words, and Ellis lashes his cane across the boy's eyes. He recoils screaming that he is blinded, and a Burmese doctor's poultice, applied afterwards, finishes the job. His injury is what brings the crowd to the Club, and the Europeans close ranks around Ellis rather than give him up.

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  The Military Police subahdar

  A Rajput, very fat and moustachioed, found in the middle of the riot with his pagri gone and the sweat rolling off his bald crown, throttling a rioter. Asked why his men have not fired, he answers that he has had no order, then blows piercing blasts on his whistle and tells John Flory that the sahib will give the order. Flory does, and disperses the crowd without a shot.

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  The Lackersteens' butler

  The tall, stork-like Mohammedan butler in white suit and pagri who waits at the Lackersteens' table. He speaks English well, which is why he is the only person in the room who understands both what Elizabeth Lackersteen has just said about Ma Hla May and what it means. His long body stiffens, and he squints down at her with his white eyeballs.

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  The Paris bank manager

  Elizabeth Lackersteen's employer during the Paris year, when she taught English to his family: a man of fifty with a fat worn face and a bald dark-yellow crown that George Orwell compares to an ostrich's egg. His campaign advanced by stages — behind the knee on the fourth day, above it on the fifth — and her evenings went in keeping his hand away from her.

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  Macdougall

  A Glasgow electrician sacked from the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company for drunkenness, now scraping a living out of a garage in Mandalay. He is the single European member of the second-rate club Dr Veraswami joins after he is demoted and transferred there, and the only white man left for the doctor to talk to. He is interested in whisky and magnetos and nothing else, and the doctor tries almost every night to engage him in what he still calls cultured conversation.