George Orwell, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ (The New Republic, 1946)

It is surprising how few writers know how to finish a sentence well. George Orwell’s sentences usually end quite firmly, with something quite definite, usually a concrete noun. It is why we pay attention to him, and why his sentences ring so well. The sentence above runs like this:

‘There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent’.

The sentence before that brought us into London’s Euston Road:

‘and I have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road’.

And the one before the one above ends with,

‘the vivid green of an elder on a blitzed building site.’

a blitzed building site

(on the)

Euston Road

(where)

none of them pays a halfpenny of rent

(the birds)

Orwell’s subject is birds, but his wider subject is nature that occupies London rent free. Good writers know how to create vivid pictures, pictures framed by concrete nouns from which one can spring — depart - move - from one sentence to the next like a series of well curated paintings in a gallery. Orwell’s style, so pellucid and sure, reminds us that writing is readable when it arrives at something quite definite: building sites, roads, rent. And so we trek towards an idea - of London in the spring - before we arrive, in the next paragraph back at ‘it’. ‘It’ of course is an object but ‘it’ is as yet undefined because ‘it’ is spring — and it is still arriving — as Orwell puts is, as a kind of “miracle”.