Ye'd Be Nane The Waur O' A Good Hingin'

I think I was about 13 when I first read George Orwell's account of "A Hanging". It was a true narrative of the young Orwell (still Eric Blair) as colonial policeman in Burma, assisting at the execution of a native. The man's crime? Orwell never tells us. He deliberately never tells us, because it doesn't matter. This piece of writing very probably fixed my lifelong attitude towards capital punishment. In this extract, a typically Orwellian wrinkle (in relation to the puddle) drives home the point of the whole piece. It shook the 13 year old me to the core - and it still does "It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working, bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming, all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned, reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone, one mind less, one world less. "