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Two of his greatest essays were to be wrenched from the five years he spent there. A Hanging (1931) records both the execution of a Hindu man and the writer's revulsion at the event: "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." Shooting an Elephant (1936) portrays "the dirty work of Empire at close quarters." A rampaging elephant in Moulmein has killed a native, and the people expect the policeman to do something: "Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys."
He returned to England after five years and resigned his commission. "He had changed," his friend Jacintha recalls. "He seemed more aloof, an unhappy sort of stranger. Whatever happened to him in Burma must have embittered him very much." Blair described the feeling he brought home as "an intolerable sense of guilt." He had been a petty tyrant in the service of what he saw as a vast system of exploitation. He could recognize in the flogged Burmese troublemakers a likeness to himself as a schoolboy, whipped and cowed by the same imperious forces. A childhood conviction had been confirmed: his place was with the oppressed.
Over the next ten years, he undertook the quixotic journey that would make him famous, under a new name and an altered identity. The first step was to tell his appalled parents that he wanted to be a writer; the next was to become one. That proved harder. He took a cheap room in London and spent hours each day at his typewriter, tapping out the kind of story that began "Inside the park, the crocuses were out . . ." At night, he began "tramping," haunting the slums, occasionally taking a bed in lodginghouses for the destitute, hoping that his Etonian accent would not give him away: "What I profoundly wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether."
Bohemianism did not attract him. He went to Paris in the late 1920s and found it "invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sightseers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population . . ." He took a job as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel, a member of the working population 13 hours a day.