Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer

No review can better describe this book than that of George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Orwell wrote the following in his diary, November, 1944: Everyone has a list of books which he is 'always meaning to read', and now and again one gets round to reading one of them. One that I recently crossed off my list was George Bourne's Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer...It is a true story, Bettesworth, the man it is about, was not quite an ordinary labourer. He had been a farm worker, but had become a jobbing gardener, and his relation with George Bourne was that of servant and master. Nevertheless there is some remarkable detail in it, and it gives a true picture of the cruel, sordid end with which a lifetime of heavy work on the land is often rewarded. The book was written more than thirty years ago, but things have not changed fundamentally. Immediately before the war, in my own village in Hertfordshire, two old men were ending their days in much the same bare misery as George Bourne describes.