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.
The book
At a glance
- Flory's dog
- Black cocker spaniel
- Combed for ticks every evening by Flory and Ko S'la
- Bark at Burmese and Indian strangers
- Throughout, from chapter 2 to chapter 24
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeFlo is a black cocker spaniel, and she belongs to John Flory, the English timber merchant who is the central character of Burmese Days. She is introduced in the same sentence that introduces him: he walks down to the European Club in Kyauktada in a battered hat with a bamboo stick, and the dog ambles after him.
She is with him almost everywhere in the novel, and George Orwell uses her mainly to show what Flory's life is actually like. Every evening Flory and his servant Ko S'la squat on the floor and go through her coat for ticks, picking them out from between her toes. She swims with him in the jungle pool he walks to when he wants to be out of the town. She goes with him to the bazaar, to church, on the shooting trip, and on a twenty-mile night march.
Orwell mentions in passing that Flo always barked at Burmese and Indian strangers and liked the smell of a European. He does not comment on it. A dog learns that from the household it lives in.
Flory has one close friend in the town, Dr Veraswami, and a woman he is in love with who does not want him. The dog is the only company he has that makes no demands on him at all.
How the book draws them
- What she isA black cocker spaniel with long ears that catch in the thorns when she runs through undergrowth. She once turned up a hare near the jungle path Flory walks.
- The nightly tick-pickingIt has to be done every evening. She collects the ticks by the dozen during the day, and they swell from the size of pin-heads to the size of peas. Flory and Ko S'la comb her out together, and Ko S'la crushes each tick under his big toe as it comes off.
- The poolFlory bathes in a clear green pool under a peepul tree upstream from a cattle track, and Flo flops in after him and swims round otter-like on her webbed feet. She knows the place well. When green pigeons start a bubbling noise in the branches overhead she props herself against the tree roots and growls up at birds she cannot see.
- Who she barks atStrangers who are Burmese or Indian. Orwell states it flatly, in the middle of a happy scene, and does not comment on it.
- On the shootShe retrieves, racing off with Ko S'la after the shot birds and coming back with a large imperial pigeon in her mouth. She has to be leashed and sent away with the beaters when the leopard is being tracked, because she will not keep quiet.
- The dead leopardWhen the leopard is killed everyone squats round it to stroke its belly and pull back its lips to see the teeth. Flo takes one sniff, puts her tail down and bolts fifty yards, whimpering, and cannot be brought near it again. She follows the party home a long way behind.
- In churchShe comes nosing up the aisle during the six-weekly service, finds Flory's pew and lies down under it.
- NeroThe household keeps a tame fighting cock called Nero, who walks a nervous zigzag when Flo is about. She makes a dash at him and he flies up onto Flory's shoulder.
Flory kills her. After Ma Hla May is paid by U Po Kyin to shame him publicly in the middle of the church service, and Elizabeth Lackersteen refuses to see him again, he goes home to shoot himself, and decides first that he cannot leave the dog. He calls her in. She stops at the bedroom door, backs away and whines, having understood that something is wrong, and he has to take her by the collar and throw her into the room. Then he coaxes her, calling her a good old girl, and she crawls to him flat on her belly with her head down. He shoots her at a yard's distance and then himself.
Dr Veraswami works out what has happened from the dog. When Ko S'la says his master did it on purpose, and the doctor asks how he knows it was not an accident, Ko S'la simply points at Flo's body. The doctor's instruction is to bury the dog at once, and he certifies the death as an accident so that the word suicide will not appear on Flory's tombstone.