BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the
caption said, while the dark eyes looked
deep into Winston's own. Down at
streetlevel another poster, torn at one
corner, flapped fitfully in the wind,
alternately covering and uncovering the
single word INGSOC. In the far distance a
helicopter skimmed down between the
roofs, hovered for an instant like a
bluebottle, and darted away again with a
curving flight. It was the police patrol,
snooping into people's windows. The
patrols did not matter, however. Only the
Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the
telescreen was still babbling away about
pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth
Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received
and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound
that Winston made, above the level of a very
low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within
the field of vision which the metal plaque
commanded, he could be seen as well as
heard. There was of course no way of
knowing whether you were being watched
at any given moment. How often, or on what
system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was
even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they
could plug in your wire whenever they
wanted to. You had to live did live, from
habit that became instinct in the assumption
that every sound you made was overheard,
and, except in darkness, every movement
scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the
telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well
knew, even a back can be revealing. A
kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his
place of work, towered vast and white
above the grimy landscape. This, he thought
with a sort of vague distaste this was

Scattered about London there were just
three other buildings of similar appearance
and size. So completely did they dwarf the
surrounding architecture that from the roof
of Victory Mansions you could see all four of
them simultaneously. They were the homes
of the four Ministries between which the
entire apparatus of government was
divided. The Ministry of Truth, which
concerned itself with news, entertainment,
education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of
Peace, which concerned itself with war.
The Ministry of Love, which maintained law
and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which
was responsible for economic affairs. Their
names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax,
Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love was the really
frightening one. There were no windows in
it at all. Winston had never been inside the
Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre
of it. It was a place impossible to enter
except on official business, and then only by
penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire
entanglements, steel doors, and hidden
machine-gun nests. Even the streets
leading up to its outer barriers were roamed
by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms,
armed with jointed truncheons.

Winston turned round abruptly. He had set
his features into the expression of quiet
optimism which it was advisable to wear
when facing the telescreen. He crossed the
room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the
Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed
his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware
that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had
got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast.
He took down from the shelf a bottle of
colourless liquid with a plain white label
marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly,
oily smell, as of Chinese ricespirit. Winston
poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved

at least forty years past. He could guess,
however, that the book was much older than
that. He had seen it lying in the window of a
frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter
of the town (just what quarter he did not now
remember) and had been stricken
immediately by an overwhelming desire to
possess it. Party members were supposed
not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on
the free market', it was called), but the rule
was not strictly kept, because there were
various things, such as shoelaces and razor
blades, which it was impossible to get hold
of in any other way. He had given a quick
glance up and down the street and then had
slipped inside and bought the book for two
dollars fifty. At the time he was not
conscious of wanting it for any particular
purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in
his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it,
it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to
open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing
was illegal, since there were no longer any
laws), but if detected it was reasonably
certain that it would be punished by death,
or at least by twenty-five years in a
forcedlabour camp. Winston fitted a nib into
the penholder and sucked it to get the
grease off. The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for
signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply
because of a feeling that the beautiful
creamy paper deserved to be written on
with a real nib instead of being scratched
with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used
to writing by hand. Apart from very short
notes, it was usual to dictate everything into
the speakwrite which was of course
impossible for his present purpose. He
dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered
for just a second. A tremor had gone
through his bowels. To mark the paper was
the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he

scratch it, because if he did so it always
became inflamed. The seconds were
ticking by. He was conscious of nothing
except the blankness of the page in front of
him, the itching of the skin above his ankle,
the blaring of the music, and a slight
booziness caused by the gin.

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic,
only imperfectly aware of what he was
setting down. His small but childish
handwriting straggled up and down the
page, shedding first its capital letters and
finally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war
films. One very good one of a ship full of
refugees being bombed somewhere in the
Mediterranean. Audience much amused by
shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim
away with a helicopter after him, first you
saw him wallowing along in the water like a
porpoise, then you saw him through the
helicopters gunsights, then he was full of
holes and the sea round him turned pink and
he sank as suddenly as though the holes
had let in the water, audience shouting with
laughter when he sank. then you saw a
lifeboat full of children with a helicopter
hovering over it. there was a middle-aged
woman might have been a jewess sitting up
in the bow with a little boy about three years
old in her arms. little boy screaming with
fright and hiding his head between her
breasts as if he was trying to burrow right
into her and the woman putting her arms
round him and comforting him although she
was blue with fright herself, all the time
covering him up as much as possible as if
she thought her arms could keep the bullets
off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo
bomb in among them terrific flash and the
boat went all to matchwood. then there was
a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up
up up right up into the air a helicopter with a
camera in its nose must have followed it up

thick hair, a freckled face, and swift,
athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash,
emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League,
was wound several times round the waist of
her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out
the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had
disliked her from the very first moment of
seeing her. He knew the reason. It was
because of the atmosphere of hockey-
fields and cold baths and community hikes
and general clean-mindedness which she
managed to carry about with her. He
disliked nearly all women, and especially
the young and pretty ones. It was always the
women, and above all the young ones, who
were the most bigoted adherents of the
Party, the swallowers of slogans, the
amateur spies and nosers-out of
unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him
the impression of being more dangerous
than most. Once when they passed in the
corridor she gave him a quick sidelong
glance which seemed to pierce right into
him and for a moment had filled him with
black terror. The idea had even crossed his
mind that she might be an agent of the
Thought Police. That, it was true, was very
unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar
uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it
as well as hostility, whenever she was
anywhere near him.

The other person was a man named
O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and
holder of some post so important and
remote that Winston had only a dim idea of
its nature. A momentary hush passed over
the group of people round the chairs as they
saw the black overalls of an Inner Party
member approaching. O'Brien was a large,
burly man with a thick neck and a coarse,
humorous, brutal face. In spite of his
formidable appearance he had a certain
charm of manner. He had a trick of
resettling his spectacles on his nose which
was curiously disarming in some

haired woman gave a squeak of mingled
fear and disgust. Goldstein was the
renegade and backslider who once, long
ago (how long ago, nobody quite
remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with
Big Brother himself, and then had engaged
in counter-revolutionary activities, had been
condemned to death, and had mysteriously
escaped and disappeared. The
programmes of the Two Minutes Hate
varied from day to day, but there was none
in which Goldstein was not the principal
figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest
defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent
crimes against the Party, all treacheries,
acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations,
sprang directly out of his teaching.
Somewhere or other he was still alive and
hatching his conspiracies: perhaps
somewhere beyond the sea, under the
protection of his foreign paymasters,
perhaps even so it was occasionally
rumoured in some hiding-place in Oceania
itself.

Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He
could never see the face of Goldstein
without a painful mixture of emotions. It was
a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy
aureole of white hair and a small goatee
beard a clever face, and yet somehow
inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end
of which a pair of spectacles was perched.
It resembled the face of a sheep, and the
voice, too, had a sheep-like quality.
Goldstein was delivering his usual
venomous attack upon the doctrines of the
Party an attack so exaggerated and
perverse that a child should have been able
to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling
that other people, less level-headed than
oneself, might be taken in by it. He was
abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing

seemed to grow less. Always there were
fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him.
A day never passed when spies and
saboteurs acting under his directions were
not unmasked by the Thought Police. He
was the commander of a vast shadowy
army, an underground network of
conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of
the State. The Brotherhood, its name was
supposed to be. There were also
whispered stories of a terrible book, a
compendium of all the heresies, of which
Goldstein was the author and which
circulated clandestinely here and there. It
was a book without a title. People referred
to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one
knew of such things only through vague
rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the
book was a subject that any ordinary Party
member would mention if there was a way
of avoiding it.

In its second minute the Hate rose to a
frenzy. People were leaping up and down in
their places and shouting at the tops of their
voices in an effort to drown the maddening
bleating voice that came from the screen.
The little sandy-haired woman had turned
bright pink, and her mouth was opening and
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even
O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was
sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful
chest swelling and quivering as though he
were standing up to the assault of a wave.
The dark-haired girl behind Winston had
begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!'
and suddenly she picked up a heavy
Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the
screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and
bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found
that he was shouting with the others and
kicking his heel violently against the rung of
his chair. The horrible thing about the Two
Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged
to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was

Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her
throat at the moment of climax. Better than
before, moreover, he realized why it was
that he hated her. He hated her because she
was young and pretty and sexless, because
he wanted to go to bed with her and would
never do so, because round her sweet
supple waist, which seemed to ask you to
encircle it with your arm, there was only the
odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of
chastity.

The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of
Goldstein had become an actual sheep's
bleat, and for an instant the face changed
into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face
melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier
who seemed to be advancing, huge and
terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the
screen, so that some of the people in the
front row actually flinched backwards in
their seats. But in the same moment,
drawing a deep sigh of relief from
everybody, the hostile figure melted into the
face of Big Brother, black-haired,
blackmoustachio'd, full of power and
mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost
filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big
Brother was saying. It was merely a few
words of encouragement, the sort of words
that are uttered in the din of battle, not
distinguishable individually but restoring
confidence by the fact of being spoken.
Then the face of Big Brother faded away
again, and instead the three slogans of the
Party stood out in bold capitals:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye.
O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his
spectacles and was in the act of resettling
them on his nose with his characteristic
gesture. But there was a fraction of a
second when their eyes met, and for as long
as it took to happen Winston knew yes, he
knew! that O'Brien was thinking the same
thing as himself. An unmistakable message
had passed. It was as though their two
minds had opened and the thoughts were
flowing from one into the other through their
eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be
saying to him. 'I know precisely what you
are feeling. I know all about your contempt,
your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I
am on your side!' And then the flash of
intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face
was as inscrutable as everybody else's.

That was all, and he was already uncertain
whether it had happened. Such incidents
never had any sequel. All that they did was
to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that
others besides himself were the enemies of
the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast
underground conspiracies were true after
all perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It
was impossible, in spite of the endless
arrests and confessions and executions, to
be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply
a myth. Some days he believed in it, some
days not. There was no evidence, only
fleeting glimpses that might mean anything
or nothing: snatches of overheard
conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory
walls once, even, when two strangers met,
a small movement of the hand which had
looked as though it might be a signal of
recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely
he had imagined everything. He had gone
back to his cubicle without looking at
O'Brien again. The idea of following up
their momentary contact hardly crossed his
mind. It would have been inconceivably
dangerous even if he had known how to set

committed would still have committed, even
if he had never set pen to paper the
essential crime that contained all others in
itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.
Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be
concealed for ever. You might dodge
successfully for a while, even for years, but
sooner or later they were bound to get you.

It was always at night the arrests invariably
happened at night. The sudden jerk out of
sleep, the rough hand shaking your
shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the
ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast
majority of cases there was no trial, no
report of the arrest. People simply
disappeared, always during the night. Your
name was removed from the registers,
every record of everything you had ever
done was wiped out, your one-time
existence was denied and then forgotten.
You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized
was the usual word.

For a moment he was seized by a kind of
hysteria. He began writing in a hurried
untidy scrawl:

theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in
the back of the neck i dont care down with
big brother they always shoot you in the
back of the neck i dont care down with big
brother

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of
himself, and laid down the pen. The next
moment he started violently. There was a
knocking at the door.

Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the
futile hope that whoever it was might go
away after a single attempt. But no, the
knocking was repeated. The worst thing of
all would be to delay. His heart was
thumping like a drum, but his face, from
long habit, was probably expressionless.

Repairs, except what you could do for
yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote
committees which were liable to hold up
even the mending of a window-pane for
two years.

'Of course it's only because Tom isn't
home,' said Mrs Parsons vaguely.

The Parsons' flat was bigger than
Winston's, and dingy in a different way.
Everything had a battered, trampled-on
look, as though the place had just been
visited by some large violent animal.
Games impedimenta hockey-sticks,
boxing-gloves. a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out lay all over
the floor, and on the table there was a litter
of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-
books. On the walls were scarlet banners of
the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-
sized poster of Big Brother. There was the
usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to
the whole building, but it was shot through
by a sharper reek of sweat, which one knew
this at the first sniff, though it was hard to
say how was the sweat of some person not
present at the moment. In another room
someone with a comb and a piece of toilet
paper was trying to keep tune with the
military music which was still issuing from
the telescreen.

'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting
a half-apprehensive glance at the door.
'They haven't been out today. And of course
--'

She had a habit of breaking off her
sentences in the middle. The kitchen sink
was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish
water which smelt worse than ever of
cabbage. Winston knelt down and examined
the angle-joint of the pipe. He hated using
his hands, and he hated bending down,
which was always liable to start him

blast on the comb as the children charged
into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought
the spanner. Winston let out the water and
disgustedly removed the clot of human hair
that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned
his fingers as best he could in the cold water
from the tap and went back into the other
room.

'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.

A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had
popped up from behind the table and was
menacing him with a toy automatic pistol,
while his small sister, about two years
younger, made the same gesture with a
fragment of wood. Both of them were
dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and
red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of
the Spies. Winston raised his hands above
his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so
vicious was the boy's demeanour, that it
was not altogether a game.

'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a
thought-criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll
shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to
the salt mines!'

Suddenly they were both leaping round him,
shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!'
the little girl imitating her brother in every
movement. It was somehow slightly
frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs
which will soon grow up into man-eaters.
There was a sort of calculating ferocity in
the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being
very nearly big enough to do so. It was a
good job it was not a real pistol he was
holding, Winston thought.

Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from
Winston to the children, and back again. In
the better light of the living-room he noticed
with interest that there actually was dust in

wretched woman must lead a life of terror.
Another year, two years, and they would be
watching her night and day for symptoms of
unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays
were horrible. What was worst of all was that
by means of such organizations as the
Spies they were systematically turned into
ungovernable little savages, and yet this
produced in them no tendency whatever to
rebel against the discipline of the Party. On
the contrary, they adored the Party and
everything connected with it. The songs, the
processions, the banners, the hiking, the
drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of
slogans, the worship of Big Brother it was
all a sort of glorious game to them. All their
ferocity was turned outwards, against the
enemies of the State, against foreigners,
traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It
was almost normal for people over thirty to
be frightened of their own children. And with
good reason, for hardly a week passed in
which The Times did not carry a paragraph
describing how some eavesdropping little
sneak 'child hero' was the phrase generally
used had overheard some compromising
remark and denounced its parents to the
Thought Police.

The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off.
He picked up his pen half-heartedly,
wondering whether he could find something
more to write in the diary. Suddenly he
began thinking of O'Brien again.

Years ago how long was it? Seven years it
must be he had dreamed that he was
walking through a pitch-dark room. And
someone sitting to one side of him had said
as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place
where there is no darkness.' It was said
very quietly, almost casually a statement,
not a command. He had walked on without
pausing. What was curious was that at the
time, in the dream, the words had not made
much impression on him. It was only later

telescreen perhaps to celebrate the victory,
perhaps to drown the memory of the lost
chocolate crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for
thee'. You were supposed to stand to
attention. However, in his present position
he was invisible.

'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter
music. Winston walked over to the window,
keeping his back to the telescreen. The day
was still cold and clear. Somewhere far
away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull,
reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of
them a week were falling on London at
present.

Down in the street the wind flapped the torn
poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC
fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The
sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak,
doublethink, the mutability of the past. He
felt as though he were wandering in the
forests of the sea bottom, lost in a
monstrous world where he himself was the
monster. He was alone. The past was
dead, the future was unimaginable. What
certainty had he that a single human
creature now living was on his side? And
what way of knowing that the dominion of
the Party would not endure for ever? Like an
answer, the three slogans on the white face
of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his
pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the
same slogans were inscribed, and on the

To the future or to the past, to a time when
thought is free, when men are different from
one another and do not live alone to a time
when truth exists and what is done cannot
be undone:

From the age of uniformity, from the age of
solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from
the age of doublethink greetings!

He was already dead, he reflected. It
seemed to him that it was only now, when
he had begun to be able to formulate his
thoughts, that he had taken the decisive
step. The consequences of every act are
included in the act itself. He wrote:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death:
thoughtcrime IS death.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead
man it became important to stay alive as
long as possible. Two fingers of his right
hand were inkstained. It was exactly the
kind of detail that might betray you. Some
nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman,
probably: someone like the little sandy-
haired woman or the dark-haired girl from
the Fiction Department) might start
wondering why he had been writing during
the lunch interval, why he had used an
oldfashioned pen, what he had been writing
and then drop a hint in the appropriate
quarter. He went to the bathroom and
carefully scrubbed the ink away with the
gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your
skin like sandpaper and was therefore well
adapted for this purpose.

He put the diary away in the drawer. It was
quite useless to think of hiding it, but he
could at least make sure whether or not its
existence had been discovered. A hair laid
across the page-ends was too obvious.
With the tip of his finger he picked up an
identifiable grain of whitish dust and

alive, and that this was part of the
unavoidable order of things.

He could not remember what had
happened, but he knew in his dream that in
some way the lives of his mother and his
sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was
one of those dreams which, while retaining
the characteristic dream scenery, are a
continuation of one's intellectual life, and in
which one becomes aware of facts and
ideas which still seem new and valuable
after one is awake. The thing that now
suddenly struck Winston was that his
mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had
been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was
no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived,
belonged to the ancient time, to a time when
there was still privacy, love, and friendship,
and when the members of a family stood by
one another without needing to know the
reason. His mother's memory tore at his
heart because she had died loving him,
when he was too young and selfish to love
her in return, and because somehow, he did
not remember how, she had sacrificed
herself to a conception of loyalty that was
private and unalterable. Such things, he
saw, could not happen today. Today there
were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity
of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
All this he seemed to see in the large eyes
of his mother and his sister, looking up at
him through the green water, hundreds of
fathoms down and still sinking.

Suddenly he was standing on short springy
turf, on a summer evening when the slanting
rays of the sun gilded the ground. The
landscape that he was looking at recurred
so often in his dreams that he was never
fully certain whether or not he had seen it in
the real world. In his waking thoughts he
called it the Golden Country. It was an old,
rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track
wandering across it and a molehill here and

'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing
female voice. 'Thirty to forty group! Take
your places, please. Thirties to forties!'

Winston sprang to attention in front of the
telescreen, upon which the image of a
youngish woman, scrawny but muscular,
dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had
already appeared.

'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped
out. 'Take your time by me. One, two, three,
four! One, two, three, four! Come on,
comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two,
three four! One two, three, four! ...'

The pain of the coughing fit had not quite
driven out of Winston's mind the impression
made by his dream, and the rhythmic
movements of the exercise restored it
somewhat. As he mechanically shot his
arms back and forth, wearing on his face
the look of grim enjoyment which was
considered proper during the Physical
Jerks, he was struggling to think his way
backward into the dim period of his early
childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult.
Beyond the late fifties everything faded.
When there were no external records that
you could refer to, even the outline of your
own life lost its sharpness. You
remembered huge events which had quite
probably not happened, you remembered
the detail of incidents without being able to
recapture their atmosphere, and there were
long blank periods to which you could
assign nothing. Everything had been
different then. Even the names of countries,
and their shapes on the map, had been
different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not
been so called in those days: it had been
called England or Britain, though London,
he felt fairly certain, had always been called
London.

Winston could not definitely remember a

knew what it was. Someone whom the old
man loved a little granddaughter, perhaps
had been killed. Every few minutes the old
man kept repeating:

'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said
so, Ma, didn't I? That's what comes of
trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't
ought to 'ave trusted the buggers.

But which buggers they didn't ought to have
trusted Winston could not now remember.

Since about that time, war had been literally
continuous, though strictly speaking it had
not always been the same war. For several
months during his childhood there had been
confused street fighting in London itself,
some of which he remembered vividly. But
to trace out the history of the whole period,
to say who was fighting whom at any given
moment, would have been utterly
impossible, since no written record, and no
spoken word, ever made mention of any
other alignment than the existing one. At this
moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984),
Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in
alliance with Eastasia. In no public or
private utterance was it ever admitted that
the three powers had at any time been
grouped along different lines. Actually, as
Winston well knew, it was only four years
since Oceania had been at war with
Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But
that was merely a piece of furtive
knowledge which he happened to possess
because his memory was not satisfactorily
under control. Officially the change of
partners had never happened. Oceania
was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania
had always been at war with Eurasia. The
enemy of the moment always represented
absolute evil, and it followed that any past or
future agreement with him was impossible.

The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten

that democracy was impossible and that the
Party was the guardian of democracy, to
forget whatever it was necessary to forget,
then to draw it back into memory again at
the moment when it was needed, and then
promptly to forget it again: and above all, to
apply the same process to the process
itself. That was the ultimate subtlety:
consciously to induce unconsciousness,
and then, once again, to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had
just performed. Even to understand the
word 'doublethink' involved the use of
doublethink.

The instructress had called them to attention
again. 'And now let's see which of us can
touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically.
'Right over from the hips, please,
comrades. One-two! One-two! ...'

Winston loathed this exercise, which sent
shooting pains all the way from his heels to
his buttocks and often ended by bringing on
another coughing fit. The half-pleasant
quality went out of his meditations. The
past, he reflected, had not merely been
altered, it had been actually destroyed. For
how could you establish even the most
obvious fact when there existed no record
outside your own memory? He tried to
remember in what year he had first heard
mention of Big Brother. He thought it must
have been at some time in the sixties, but it
was impossible to be certain. In the Party
histories, of course, Big Brother figured as
the leader and guardian of the Revolution
since its very earliest days. His exploits had
been gradually pushed backwards in time
until already they extended into the fabulous
world of the forties and the thirties, when the
capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats
still rode through the streets of London in
great gleaming motor-cars or horse
carriages with glass sides. There was no
knowing how much of this legend was true

have the privilege of fighting in the front line,
but at least we can all keep fit. Remember
our boys on the Malabar front! And the
sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think
what they have to put up with. Now try again.
That's better, comrade, that's much better,'
she added encouragingly as Winston, with a
violent lunge, succeeded in touching his
toes with knees unbent, for the first time in
several years.

IV

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not
even the nearness of the telescreen could
prevent him from uttering when his day's
work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite
towards him, blew the dust from its
mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles.
Then he unrolled and clipped together four
small cylinders of paper which had already
flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the
right-hand side of his desk.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three
orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a
small pneumatic tube for written messages,
to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and
in the side wall, within easy reach of
Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected
by a wire grating. This last was for the
disposal of waste paper. Similar slits
existed in thousands or tens of thousands
throughout the building, not only in every
room but at short intervals in every corridor.
For some reason they were nicknamed
memory holes. When one knew that any
document was due for destruction, or even
when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying
about, it was an automatic action to lift the
flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it
in, whereupon it would be whirled away on
a current of warm air to the enormous
furnaces which were hidden somewhere in
the recesses of the building.

Brother's speech, in such a way as to make
him predict the thing that had actually
happened. Or again, The Times of the
nineteenth of December had published the
official forecasts of the output of various
classes of consumption goods in the fourth
quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth
quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan.
Today's issue contained a statement of the
actual output, from which it appeared that
the forecasts were in every instance grossly
wrong. Winston's job was to rectify the
original figures by making them agree with
the later ones. As for the third message, it
referred to a very simple error which could
be set right in a couple of minutes. As short
a time ago as February, the Ministry of
Plenty had issued a promise (a 'categorical
pledge' were the official words) that there
would be no reduction of the chocolate
ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was
aware, the chocolate ration was to be
reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at
the end of the present week. All that was
needed was to substitute for the original
promise a warning that it would probably be
necessary to reduce the ration at some time
in April.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of
the messages, he clipped his speakwritten
corrections to the appropriate copy of The
Times and pushed them into the pneumatic
tube. Then, with a movement which was as
nearly as possible unconscious, he
crumpled up the original message and any
notes that he himself had made, and
dropped them into the memory hole to be
devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to
which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not
know in detail, but he did know in general
terms. As soon as all the corrections which
happened to be necessary in any particular
number of The Times had been assembled

right in the interests of accuracy.

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted
the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not
even forgery. It was merely the substitution
of one piece of nonsense for another. Most
of the material that you were dealing with
had no connexion with anything in the real
world, not even the kind of connexion that is
contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just
as much a fantasy in their original version as
in their rectified version. A great deal of the
time you were expected to make them up
out of your head. For example, the Ministry
of Plenty's forecast had estimated the
output of boots for the quarter at 145 million
pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-
two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting
the forecast, marked the figure down to
fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the
usual claim that the quota had been
overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions
was no nearer the truth than fiftyseven
millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no
boots had been produced at all. Likelier still,
nobody knew how many had been
produced, much less cared. All one knew
was that every quarter astronomical
numbers of boots were produced on paper,
while perhaps half the population of
Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with
every class of recorded fact, great or small.
Everything faded away into a shadow-
world in which, finally, even the date of the
year had become uncertain.

Winston glanced across the hall. In the
corresponding cubicle on the other side a
small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man
named Tillotson was working steadily
away, with a folded newspaper on his knee
and his mouth very close to the mouthpiece
of the speakwrite. He had the air of trying to
keep what he was saying a secret between
himself and the telescreen. He looked up,
and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in

whose job was simply to draw up lists of
books and periodicals which were due for
recall. There were the vast repositories
where the corrected documents were
stored, and the hidden furnaces where the
original copies were destroyed. And
somewhere or other, quite anonymous,
there were the directing brains who co-
ordinated the whole effort and laid down the
lines of policy which made it necessary that
this fragment of the past should be
preserved, that one falsified, and the other
rubbed out of existence.

And the Records Department, after all, was
itself only a single branch of the Ministry of
Truth, whose primary job was not to
reconstruct the past but to supply the
citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films,
textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays,
novels with every conceivable kind of
information, instruction, or entertainment,
from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem
to a biological treatise, and from a child's
spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.
And the Ministry had not only to supply the
multifarious needs of the party, but also to
repeat the whole operation at a lower level
for the benefit of the proletariat. There was
a whole chain of separate departments
dealing with proletarian literature, music,
drama, and entertainment generally. Here
were produced rubbishy newspapers
containing almost nothing except sport,
crime and astrology, sensational five-cent
novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed
entirely by mechanical means on a special
kind of kaleidoscope known as a
versificator. There was even a whole sub-
section Pornosec, it was called in
Newspeak engaged in producing the
lowest kind of pornography, which was sent
out in sealed packets and which no Party
member, other than those who worked on it,
was permitted to look at.

which supplied cigarettes and other
comforts to the sailors in the Floating
Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had
been singled out for special mention and
awarded a decoration, the Order of
Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.

Three months later FFCC had suddenly
been dissolved with no reasons given. One
could assume that Withers and his
associates were now in disgrace, but there
had been no report of the matter in the
Press or on the telescreen. That was to be
expected, since it was unusual for political
offenders to be put on trial or even publicly
denounced. The great purges involving
thousands of people, with public trials of
traitors and thought-criminals who made
abject confession of their crimes and were
afterwards executed, were special show-
pieces not occurring oftener than once in a
couple of years. More commonly, people
who had incurred the displeasure of the
Party simply disappeared and were never
heard of again. One never had the smallest
clue as to what had happened to them. In
some cases they might not even be dead.
Perhaps thirty people personally known to
Winston, not counting his parents, had
disappeared at one time or another.

Winston stroked his nose gently with a
paper-clip. In the cubicle across the way
Comrade Tillotson was still crouching
secretively over his speakwrite. He raised
his head for a moment: again the hostile
spectacle-flash. Winston wondered
whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged
on the same job as himself. It was perfectly
possible. So tricky a piece of work would
never be entrusted to a single person: on the
other hand, to turn it over to a committee
would be to admit openly that an act of
fabrication was taking place. Very likely as
many as a dozen people were now working

records too much. What was needed was a
piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there
sprang into his mind, ready made as it
were, the image of a certain Comrade
Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in
heroic circumstances. There were
occasions when Big Brother devoted his
Order for the Day to commemorating some
humble, rank and file Party member whose
life and death he held up as an example
worthy to be followed. Today he should
commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true
that there was no such person as Comrade
Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple
of faked photographs would soon bring him
into existence.

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled
the speakwrite towards him and began
dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a
style at once military and pedantic, and,
because of a trick of asking questions and
then promptly answering them ('What
lessons do we learn from this fact,
comrades? The lesson which is also one of
the fundamental principles of Ingsoc that,'
etc., etc.), easy to imitate.

At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had
refused all toys except a drum, a sub-
machine gun, and a model helicopter. At six
a year early, by a special relaxation of the
rules he had joined the Spies, at nine he
had been a troop leader. At eleven he had
denounced his uncle to the Thought Police
after overhearing a conversation which
appeared to him to have criminal
tendencies. At seventeen he had been a
district organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex
League. At nine teen he had designed a
hand-grenade which had been adopted by
the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first
trial, had killed thirtyone Eurasian prisoners
in one burst. At twenty-three he had
perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet
planes while flying over the Indian Ocean

underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly
forward. The room was already very full and
deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the
counter the steam of stew came pouring
forth, with a sour metallic smell which did
not quite overcome the fumes of Victory
Gin. On the far side of the room there was a
small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin
could be bought at ten cents the large nip.

'Just the man I was looking for,' said a
voice at Winston's back.

He turned round. It was his friend Syme,
who worked in the Research Department.
Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right
word. You did not have friends nowadays,
you had comrades: but there were some
comrades whose society was pleasanter
than that of others. Syme was a philologist,
a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was
one of the enormous team of experts now
engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition
of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny
creature, smaller than Winston, with dark
hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once
mournful and derisive, which seemed to
search your face closely while he was
speaking to you.

'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any
razor blades,' he said.

'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty
haste. 'I've tried all over the place. They
don't exist any longer.'

Everyone kept asking you for razor blades.
Actually he had two unused ones which he
was hoarding up. There had been a famine
of them for months past. At any given
moment there was some necessary article
which the Party shops were unable to
supply. Sometimes it was buttons,
sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes
it was shoelaces; at present it was razor

prole with the ladle.

Winston and Syme pushed their trays
beneath the grille. On to each was dumped
swiftly the regulation lunch a metal pannikin
of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a
cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory
Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

'There's a table over there, under that
telescreen,' said Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin
on the way.'

The gin was served out to them in
handleless china mugs. They threaded their
way across the crowded room and
unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped
table, on one corner of which someone had
left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that
had the appearance of vomit. Winston took
up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to
collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting
stuff down. When he had winked the tears
out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that
he was hungry. He began swallowing
spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its
general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy
pinkish stuff which was probably a
preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke
again till they had emptied their pannikins.
From the table at Winston's left, a little
behind his back, someone was talking
rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble
almost like the quacking of a duck, which
pierced the general uproar of the room.

'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said
Winston, raising his voice to overcome the
noise.

'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives.
It's fascinating.'

He had brightened up immediately at the
mention of Newspeak. He pushed his
pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in

those forms already. but in the final version
of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the
end the whole notion of goodness and
badness will be covered by only six words in
reality, only one word. Don't you see the
beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea
originally, of course,' he added as an
afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across
Winston's face at the mention of Big
Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately
detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

'You haven't a real appreciation of
Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly.
'Even when you write it you're still thinking in
Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces
that you write in The Times occasionally.
They're good enough, but they're
translations. In your heart you'd prefer to
stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness
and its useless shades of meaning. You
don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of
words. Do you know that Newspeak is the
only language in the world whose
vocabulary gets smaller every year?'

Winston did know that, of course. He
smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not
trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off
another fragment of the dark-coloured
bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

'Don't you see that the whole aim of
Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought? In the end we shall make
thoughtcrime literally impossible, because
there will be no words in which to express it.
Every concept that can ever be needed, will
be expressed by exactly one word, with its
meaning rigidly defined and all its
subsidiary meanings rubbed out and
forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition,
we're not far from that point. But the
process will still be continuing long after you

One of these days, thought Winston with
sudden deep conviction, Syme will be
vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too
clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party
does not like such people. One day he will
disappear. It is written in his face.

Winston had finished his bread and cheese.
He turned a little sideways in his chair to
drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his
left the man with the strident voice was still
talking remorselessly away. A young
woman who was perhaps his secretary,
and who was sitting with her back to
Winston, was listening to him and seemed
to be eagerly agreeing with everything that
he said. From time to time Winston caught
some such remark as 'I think you're so right,
I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful
and rather silly feminine voice. But the other
voice never stopped for an instant, even
when the girl was speaking. Winston knew
the man by sight, though he knew no more
about him than that he held some important
post in the Fiction Department. He was a
man of about thirty, with a muscular throat
and a large, mobile mouth. His head was
thrown back a little, and because of the
angle at which he was sitting, his
spectacles caught the light and presented to
Winston two blank discs instead of eyes.
What was slightly horrible, was that from the
stream of sound that poured out of his
mouth it was almost impossible to
distinguish a single word. Just once Winston
caught a phrase 'complete and final
elimination of Goldsteinism' jerked out very
rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece,
like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it
was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking.
And yet, though you could not actually hear
what the man was saying, you could not be
in any doubt about its general nature. He
might be denouncing Goldstein and
demanding sterner measures against
thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might

sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an
up-to-dateness of information, which the
ordinary Party member did not approach.
Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung
to him. He said things that would have been
better unsaid, he had read too many books,
he frequented the Chestnut Tree Café, haunt
of painters and musicians. There was no
law, not even an unwritten law, against
frequenting the Chestnut Tree Café, yet the
place was somehow ill-omened. The old,
discredited leaders of the Party had been
used to gather there before they were finally
purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, had
sometimes been seen there, years and
decades ago. Syme's fate was not difficult
to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme
grasped, even for three seconds, the nature
of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would
betray him instantly to the Thought police.
So would anybody else, for that matter: but
Syme more than most. Zeal was not
enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he
said.

Something in the tone of his voice seemed
to add, 'that bloody fool'. Parsons,
Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory
Mansions, was in fact threading his way
across the room a tubby, middle-sized man
with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-
five he was already putting on rolls of fat at
neck and waistline, but his movements
were brisk and boyish. His whole
appearance was that of a little boy grown
large, so much so that although he was
wearing the regulation overalls, it was
almost impossible not to think of him as
being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt,
and red neckerchief of the Spies. In
visualizing him one saw always a picture of
dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back
from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed,
invariably revert to shorts when a community

dressingdown for it. In fact I told him I'd take
the catapult away if he does it again.

'I think he was a little upset at not going to
the execution,' said Winston.

'Ah, well what I mean to say, shows the right
spirit, doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars
they are, both of them, but talk about
keenness! All they think about is the Spies,
and the war, of course. D'you know what
that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when
her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted
way? She got two other girls to go with her,
slipped off from the hike, and spent the
whole afternoon following a strange man.
They kept on his tail for two hours, right
through the woods, and then, when they got
into Amersham, handed him over to the
patrols.'

'What did they do that for?' said Winston,
somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on
triumphantly:

'My kid made sure he was some kind of
enemy agent might have been dropped by
parachute, for instance. But here's the
point, old boy. What do you think put her on
to him in the first place? She spotted he was
wearing a funny kind of shoes said she'd
never seen anyone wearing shoes like that
before. So the chances were he was a
foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of
seven, eh?'

'What happened to the man?' said Winston.

'Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I
wouldn't be altogether surprised if --'
Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle,
and clicked his tongue for the explosion.

'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without
looking up from his strip of paper.

moment he had shut his ears to the remoter
noises and was listening to the stuff that
streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared
that there had even been demonstrations to
thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate
ration to twenty grammes a week. And only
yesterday, he reflected, it had been
announced that the ration was to be
reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it
possible that they could swallow that, after
only twenty-four hours? Yes, they
swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily,
with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless
creature at the other table swallowed it
fanatically, passionately, with a furious
desire to track down, denounce, and
vaporize anyone who should suggest that
last week the ration had been thirty
grammes. Syme, too in some more
complex way, involving doublethink, Syme
swallowed it. Was he, then, alone in the
possession of a memory?

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out
of the telescreen. As compared with last
year there was more food, more clothes,
more houses, more furniture, more
cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more
helicopters, more books, more babies
more of everything except disease, crime,
and insanity. Year by year and minute by
minute, everybody and everything was
whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had
done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon
and was dabbling in the pale-coloured
gravy that dribbled across the table,
drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern.
He meditated resentfully on the physical
texture of life. Had it always been like this?
Had food always tasted like this? He looked
round the canteen. A low-ceilinged,
crowded room, its walls grimy from the
contact of innumerable bodies; battered
metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching;
bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white

majority of people in Airstrip One were
small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious
how that beetle-like type proliferated in the
Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout
very early in life, with short legs, swift
scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable
faces with very small eyes. It was the type
that seemed to flourish best under the
dominion of the Party.

The announcement from the Ministry of
Plenty ended on another trumpet call and
gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to
vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of
figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.

'The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a
good job this year,' he said with a knowing
shake of his head. 'By the way, Smith old
boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor
blades you can let me have?'

'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been using the
same blade for six weeks myself.'

'Ah, well just thought I'd ask you, old boy.'

'Sorry,' said Winston.

The quacking voice from the next table,
temporarily silenced during the Ministry's
announcement, had started up again, as
loud as ever. For some reason Winston
suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs
Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in
the creases of her face. Within two years
those children would be denouncing her to
the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would be
vaporized. Syme would be vaporized.
Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien would
be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand,
would never be vaporized. The eyeless
creature with the quacking voice would
never be vaporized. The little beetle-like
men who scuttle so nimbly through the
labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too,

carried with it the suggestion of
abnormality, of having something to hide. In
any case, to wear an improper expression
on your face (to look incredulous when a
victory was announced, for example) was
itself a punishable offence. There was even
a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it
was called.

The girl had turned her back on him again.
Perhaps after all she was not really
following him about, perhaps it was
coincidence that she had sat so close to him
two days running. His cigarette had gone
out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of
the table. He would finish smoking it after
work, if he could keep the tobacco in it.
Quite likely the person at the next table was
a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely
he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of
Love within three days, but a cigarette end
must not be wasted. Syme had folded up
his strip of paper and stowed it away in his
pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.

'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' he said,
chuckling round the stem of his pipe, 'about
the time when those two nippers of mine set
fire to the old market-woman's skirt
because they saw her wrapping up
sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up
behind her and set fire to it with a box of
matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe.
Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard!
That's a first-rate training they give them in
the Spies nowadays better than in my day,
even. What d'you think's the latest thing
they've served them out with? Ear trumpets
for listening through keyholes! My little girl
brought one home the other night tried it out
on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she
could hear twice as much as with her ear to
the hole. Of course it's only a toy, mind you.
Still, gives 'em the right idea, eh?'

At this moment the telescreen let out a

another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid
as the clicking of a camera shutter, but
obviously habitual. He remembered thinking
at the time: That poor devil is done for. And
what was frightening was that the action
was quite possibly unconscious. The most
deadly danger of all was talking in your
sleep. There was no way of guarding
against that, so far as he could see.

He drew his breath and went on writing:

I went with her through the doorway and
across a backyard into a basement kitchen.
There was a bed against the wall, and a
lamp on the table, turned down very low.
She

His teeth were set on edge. He would have
liked to spit. Simultaneously with the woman
in the basement kitchen he thought of
Katharine, his wife. Winston was married
had been married, at any rate: probably he
still was married, so far as he knew his wife
was not dead. He seemed to breathe again
the warm stuffy odour of the basement
kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and
dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but
nevertheless alluring, because no woman
of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as doing so. Only the proles used
scent. In his mind the smell of it was
inextricably mixed up with fornication.

When he had gone with that woman it had
been his first lapse in two years or
thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes
was forbidden, of course, but it was one of
those rules that you could occasionally
nerve yourself to break. It was dangerous,
but it was not a life-and-death matter. To
be caught with a prostitute might mean five
years in a forced-labour camp: not more, if
you had committed no other offence. And it
was easy enough, provided that you could
avoid being caught in the act. The poorer

somehow it fitted in with the general
ideology of the Party. The Party was trying
to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be
killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not
know why this was so, but it seemed natural
that it should be so. And as far as the
women were concerned, the Party's efforts
were largely successful.

He thought again of Katharine. It must be
nine, ten nearly eleven years since they had
parted. It was curious how seldom he
thought of her. For days at a time he was
capable of forgetting that he had ever been
married. They had only been together for
about fifteen months. The Party did not
permit divorce, but it rather encouraged
separation in cases where there were no
children.

Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very
straight, with splendid movements. She had
a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might
have called noble until one discovered that
there was as nearly as possible nothing
behind it. Very early in her married life he
had decided though perhaps it was only that
he knew her more intimately than he knew
most people that she had without exception
the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he
had ever encountered. She had not a
thought in her head that was not a slogan,
and there was no imbecility, absolutely
none that she was not capable of
swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.
'The human sound-track' he nicknamed her
in his own mind. Yet he could have endured
living with her if it had not been for just one
thing sex.

As soon as he touched her she seemed to
wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like
embracing a jointed wooden image. And
what was strange was that even when she
was clasping him against her he had the
feeling that she was simultaneously pushing

unthinkable event. The women of the Party
were all alike. Chastity was as deep
ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By careful
early conditioning, by games and cold
water, by the rubbish that was dinned into
them at school and in the Spies and the
Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs,
slogans, and martial music, the natural
feeling had been driven out of them. His
reason told him that there must be
exceptions, but his heart did not believe it.
They were all impregnable, as the Party
intended that they should be. And what he
wanted, more even than to be loved, was to
break down that wall of virtue, even if it
were only once in his whole life. The sexual
act, successfully performed, was rebellion.
Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have
awakened Katharine, if he could have
achieved it, would have been like a
seduction, although she was his wife.

But the rest of the story had got to be written
down. He wrote:

I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the
light

After the darkness the feeble light of the
paraffin lamp had seemed very bright. For
the first time he could see the woman
properly. He had taken a step towards her
and then halted, full of lust and terror. He
was painfully conscious of the risk he had
taken in coming here. It was perfectly
possible that the patrols would catch him on
the way out: for that matter they might be
waiting outside the door at this moment. If
he went away without even doing what he
had come here to do !

It had got to be written down, it had got to be
confessed. What he had suddenly seen in
the lamplight was that the woman was old.
The paint was plastered so thick on her face
that it looked as though it might crack like a

or later it must occur to them to do it? And
yet --!

He remembered how once he had been
walking down a crowded street when a
tremendous shout of hundreds of voices
women's voices had burst from a side-
street a little way ahead. It was a great
formidable cry of anger and despair, a
deep, loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went
humming on like the reverberation of a bell.
His heart had leapt. It's started! he had
thought. A riot! The proles are breaking
loose at last! When he had reached the spot
it was to see a mob of two or three hundred
women crowding round the stalls of a street
market, with faces as tragic as though they
had been the doomed passengers on a
sinking ship. But at this moment the general
despair broke down into a multitude of
individual quarrels. It appeared that one of
the stalls had been selling tin saucepans.
They were wretched, flimsy things, but
cooking-pots of any kind were always
difficult to get. Now the supply had
unexpectedly given out. The successful
women, bumped and jostled by the rest,
were trying to make off with their
saucepans while dozens of others
clamoured round the stall, accusing the
stallkeeper of favouritism and of having
more saucepans somewhere in reserve.
There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two
bloated women, one of them with her hair
coming down, had got hold of the same
saucepan and were trying to tear it out of
one another's hands. For a moment they
were both tugging, and then the handle
came off. Winston watched them
disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment,
what almost frightening power had sounded
in that cry from only a few hundred throats!
Why was it that they could never shout like
that about anything that mattered?

He wrote:

should have strong political feelings. All that
was required of them was a primitive
patriotism which could be appealed to
whenever it was necessary to make them
accept longer working-hours or shorter
rations. And even when they became
discontented, as they sometimes did, their
discontent led nowhere, because being
without general ideas, they could only focus
it on petty specific grievances. The larger
evils invariably escaped their notice. The
great majority of proles did not even have
telescreens in their homes. Even the civil
police interfered with them very little. There
was a vast amount of criminality in London,
a whole world-within-a-world of thieves,
bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and
racketeers of every description; but since it
all happened among the proles themselves,
it was of no importance. In all questions of
morals they were allowed to follow their
ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the
Party was not imposed upon them.
Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was
permitted. For that matter, even religious
worship would have been permitted if the
proles had shown any sign of needing or
wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As
the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals
are free.'

Winston reached down and cautiously
scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun
itching again. The thing you invariably came
back to was the impossibility of knowing
what life before the Revolution had really
been like. He took out of the drawer a copy
of a children's history textbook which he
had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and
began copying a passage into the diary:

In the old days (it ran), before the glorious
Revolution, London was not the beautiful
city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty,
miserable place where hardly anybody had
enough to eat and where hundreds and

being was better off now than he had been
before the Revolution. The only evidence to
the contrary was the mute protest in your
own bones, the instinctive feeling that the
conditions you lived in were intolerable and
that at some other time they must have been
different. It struck him that the truly
characteristic thing about modern life was
not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its
bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
Life, if you looked about you, bore no
resemblance not only to the lies that
streamed out of the telescreens, but even to
the ideals that the Party was trying to
achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a
matter of slogging through dreary jobs,
fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a
worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine
tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set
up by the Party was something huge,
terrible, and glittering a world of steel and
concrete, of monstrous machines and
terrifying weapons a nation of warriors and
fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity,
all thinking the same thoughts and shouting
the same slogans, perpetually working,
fighting, triumphing, persecuting three
hundred million people all with the same
face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities
where underfed people shuffled to and fro
in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-
century houses that smelt always of
cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to
see a vision of London, vast and ruinous,
city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with
it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman
with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling
helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.

He reached down and scratched his ankle
again. Day and night the telescreens
bruised your ears with statistics proving that
people today had more food, more clothes,
better houses, better recreations that they
lived longer, worked shorter hours, were

Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that
these three had been arrested. As often
happened, they had vanished for a year or
more, so that one did not know whether they
were alive or dead, and then had suddenly
been brought forth to incriminate
themselves in the usual way. They had
confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at
that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia),
embezzlement of public funds, the murder
of various trusted Party members, intrigues
against the leadership of Big Brother which
had started long before the Revolution
happened, and acts of sabotage causing
the death of hundreds of thousands of
people. After confessing to these things
they had been pardoned, reinstated in the
Party, and given posts which were in fact
sinecures but which sounded important. All
three had written long, abject articles in The
Times, analysing the reasons for their
defection and promising to make amends.

Some time after their release Winston had
actually seen all three of them in the
Chestnut Tree Café. He remembered the
sort of terrified fascination with which he
had watched them out of the corner of his
eye. They were men far older than himself,
relics of the ancient world, almost the last
great figures left over from the heroic days
of the Party. The glamour of the
underground struggle and the civil war still
faintly clung to them. He had the feeling,
though already at that time facts and dates
were growing blurry, that he had known their
names years earlier than he had known that
of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws,
enemies, untouchables, doomed with
absolute certainty to extinction within a year
or two. No one who had once fallen into the
hands of the Thought Police ever escaped
in the end. They were corpses waiting to be
sent back to the grave.

There was no one at any of the tables

called it a yellow note. And then a voice from
the telescreen was singing:


Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

The three men never stirred. But when
Winston glanced again at Rutherford's
ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full
of tears. And for the first time he noticed,
with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not
knowing at what he shuddered, that both
Aaronson and Rutherford had broken
noses.

A little later all three were re-arrested. It
appeared that they had engaged in fresh
conspiracies from the very moment of their
release. At their second trial they confessed
to all their old crimes over again, with a
whole string of new ones. They were
executed, and their fate was recorded in the
Party histories, a warning to posterity.
About five years after this, in 1973, Winston
was unrolling a wad of documents which
had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube
on to his desk when he came on a fragment
of paper which had evidently been slipped
in among the others and then forgotten. The
instant he had flattened it out he saw its
significance. It was a half-page torn out of
The Times of about ten years earlier the top
half of the page, so that it included the date
and it contained a photograph of the
delegates at some Party function in New
York. Prominent in the middle of the group
were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
There was no mistaking them, in any case
their names were in the caption at the
bottom.

The point was that at both trials all three men
had confessed that on that date they had

memory hole, along with some other waste
papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it
would have crumbled into ashes.

That was ten eleven years ago. Today,
probably, he would have kept that
photograph. It was curious that the fact of
having held it in his fingers seemed to him to
make a difference even now, when the
photograph itself, as well as the event it
recorded, was only memory. Was the
Party's hold upon the past less strong, he
wondered, because a piece of evidence
which existed no longer had once existed?

But today, supposing that it could be
somehow resurrected from its ashes, the
photograph might not even be evidence.
Already, at the time when he made his
discovery, Oceania was no longer at war
with Eurasia, and it must have been to the
agents of Eastasia that the three dead men
had betrayed their country. Since then there
had been other changes two, three, he
could not remember how many. Very likely
the confessions had been rewritten and
rewritten until the original facts and dates no
longer had the smallest significance. The
past not only changed, but changed
continuously. What most afflicted him with
the sense of nightmare was that he had
never clearly understood why the huge
imposture was undertaken. The immediate
advantages of falsifying the past were
obvious, but the ultimate motive was
mysterious. He took up his pen again and
wrote:

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

He wondered, as he had many times
wondered before, whether he himself was
a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a
minority of one. At one time it had been a
sign of madness to believe that the earth
goes round the sun; today, to believe that

The Party told you to reject the evidence of
your eyes and ears. It was their final, most
essential command. His heart sank as he
thought of the enormous power arrayed
against him, the ease with which any Party
intellectual would overthrow him in debate,
the subtle arguments which he would not be
able to understand, much less answer. And
yet he was in the right! They were wrong
and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and
the true had got to be defended. Truisms
are true, hold on to that! The solid world
exists, its laws do not change. Stones are
hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall
towards the earth's centre. With the feeling
that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also
that he was setting forth an important
axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus
two make four. If that is granted, all else
follows.

VIII

From somewhere at the bottom of a
passage the smell of roasting coffee real
coffee, not Victory Coffee came floating out
into the street. Winston paused involuntarily.
For perhaps two seconds he was back in
the half-forgotten world of his childhood.
Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the
smell as abruptly as though it had been a
sound.

He had walked several kilometres over
pavements, and his varicose ulcer was
throbbing. This was the second time in three
weeks that he had missed an evening at the
Community Centre: a rash act, since you
could be certain that the number of your
attendances at the Centre was carefully
checked. In principle a Party member had
no spare time, and was never alone except
in bed. It was assumed that when he was
not working, eating, or sleeping he would

from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the
windows in the street were broken and
boarded up. Most of the people paid no
attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a
sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous
women with brick-red forearms folded
across thelr aprons were talking outside a
doorway. Winston caught scraps of
conversation as he approached.

'"Yes," I says to 'er, "that's all very well," I
says. "But if you'd of been in my place you'd
of done the same as what I done. It's easy to
criticize," I says, "but you ain't got the same
problems as what I got."'

'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's
jest where it is.'

The strident voices stopped abruptly. The
women studied him in hostile silence as he
went past. But it was not hostility, exactly;
merely a kind of wariness, a momentary
stiffening, as at the passing of some
unfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the
Party could not be a common sight in a
street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be
seen in such places, unless you had definite
business there. The patrols might stop you if
you happened to run into them. 'May I see
your papers, comrade? What are you doing
here? What time did you leave work? Is this
your usual way home?' and so on and so
forth. Not that there was any rule against
walking home by an unusual route: but it
was enough to draw attention to you if the
Thought Police heard about it.

Suddenly the whole street was in
commotion. There were yells of warning
from all sides. People were shooting into
the doorways like rabbits. A young woman
leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of
Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a
puddle, whipped her apron round it, and
leapt back again, all in one movement. At

twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which
the proles frequented ('pubs', they called
them) were choked with customers. From
their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening
and shutting, there came forth a smell of
urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle
formed by a projecting house-front three
men were standing very close together, the
middle one of them holding a folded-up
newspaper which the other two were
studying over his shoulder. Even before he
was near enough to make out the
expression on their faces, Winston could
see absorption in every line of their bodies.
It was obviously some serious piece of
news that they were reading. He was a few
paces away from them when suddenly the
group broke up and two of the men were in
violent altercation. For a moment they
seemed almost on the point of blows.

'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say?
I tell you no number ending in seven ain't
won for over fourteen months!'

'Yes, it 'as, then!'

'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of
'em for over two years wrote down on a
piece of paper. I takes 'em down reg'lar as
the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in
seven --'

'Yes, a seven 'as won! I could pretty near tell
you the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it
ended in. It were in February second week
in February.'

'February your grandmother! I got it all down
in black and white. An' I tell you, no number -
-'

'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.

They were talking about the Lottery. Winston
looked back when he had gone thirty

junk-shop where he had bought the blank
book which was now his diary. And in a
small stationer's shop not far away he had
bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.

He paused for a moment at the top of the
steps. On the opposite side of the alley
there was a dingy little pub whose windows
appeared to be frosted over but in reality
were merely coated with dust. A very old
man, bent but active, with white
moustaches that bristled forward like those
of a prawn, pushed open the swing door
and went in. As Winston stood watching, it
occurred to him that the old man, who must
be eighty at the least, had already been
middle-aged when the Revolution
happened. He and a few others like him
were the last links that now existed with the
vanished world of capitalism. In the Party
itself there were not many people left whose
ideas had been formed before the
Revolution. The older generation had mostly
been wiped out in the great purges of the
fifties and sixties, and the few who survived
had long ago been terrified into complete
intellectual surrender. If there was any one
still alive who could give you a truthful
account of conditions in the early part of the
century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly
the passage from the history book that he
had copied into his diary came back into
Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took
hold of him. He would go into the pub, he
would scrape acquaintance with that old
man and question him. He would say to him:
'Tell me about your life when you were a
boy. What was it like in those days? Were
things better than they are now, or were they
worse?'

Hurriedly, lest he should have time to
become frightened, he descended the
steps and crossed the narrow street. It was
madness of course. As usual, there was no
definite rule against talking to proles and

a glance at the other customers.

There was a shout of laughter, and the
uneasiness caused by Winston's entry
seemed to disappear. The old man's
whitestubbled face had flushed pink. He
turned away, muttering to himself, and
bumped into Winston. Winston caught him
gently by the arm.

'May I offer you a drink?' he said.

'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening
his shoulders again. He appeared not to
have noticed Winston's blue overalls. 'Pint!'
he added aggressively to the barman. 'Pint
of wallop.'

The barman swished two half-litres of dark-
brown beer into thick glasses which he had
rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer
was the only drink you could get in prole
pubs. The proles were supposed not to
drink gin, though in practice they could get
hold of it easily enough. The game of darts
was in full swing again, and the knot of men
at the bar had begun talking about lottery
tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten
for a moment. There was a deal table under
the window where he and the old man could
talk without fear of being overheard. It was
horribly dangerous, but at any rate there
was no telescreen in the room, a point he
had made sure of as soon as he came in.

''E could 'a drawed me off a pint,'
grumbled the old man as he settled down
behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It
don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It
starts my bladder running. Let alone the
price.'

'You must have seen great changes since
you were a young man,' said Winston
tentatively.

there were a very few people, only a few
thousands the capitalists, they were called
who were rich and powerful. They owned
everything that there was to own. They lived
in great gorgeous houses with thirty
servants, they rode about in motor-cars and
four-horse carriages, they drank
champagne, they wore top hats --'

The old man brightened suddenly.

'Top 'ats!' he said. 'Funny you should
mention 'em. The same thing come into my
'ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was jest
thinking, I ain't seen a top 'at in years. Gorn
right out, they 'ave. The last time I wore one
was at my sister-in-law's funeral. And that
was well, I couldn't give you the date, but it
must'a been fifty years ago. Of course it
was only 'ired for the occasion, you
understand.'

'It isn't very important about the top hats,'
said Winston patiently. 'The point is, these
capitalists they and a few lawyers and
priests and so forth who lived on them were
the lords of the earth. Everything existed for
their benefit. You the ordinary people, the
workers were their slaves. They could do
what they liked with you. They could ship you
off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep
with your daughters if they chose. They
could order you to be flogged with
something called a cat-o'-nine tails. You
had to take your cap off when you passed
them. Every capitalist went about with a
gang of lackeys who --'

The old man brightened again.

'Lackeys!' he said. 'Now there's a word I
ain't 'eard since ever so long. Lackeys!
That reg'lar takes me back, that does. I
recollect oh, donkey's years ago I used to
sometimes go to 'Yde Park of a Sunday
afternoon to 'ear the blokes making

'One of 'em pushed me once,' said the old
man. 'I recollect it as if it was yesterday. It
was Boat Race night terribly rowdy they
used to get on Boat Race night and I bumps
into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Quite a gent, 'e was dress shirt, top 'at,
black overcoat. 'E was kind of zig-zagging
across the pavement, and I bumps into 'im
accidental-like. 'E says, "Why can't you look
where you're going?" 'e says. I say, "Ju
think you've bought the bleeding
pavement?" 'E says, "I'll twist your bloody
'ead off if you get fresh with me." I says,
"You're drunk. I'll give you in charge in 'alf a
minute," I says. An' if you'll believe me, 'e
puts 'is 'and on my chest and gives me a
shove as pretty near sent me under the
wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them
days, and I was going to 'ave fetched 'im
one, only --'

A sense of helplessness took hold of
Winston. The old man's memory was
nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One
could question him all day without getting
any real information. The party histories
might still be true, after a fashion: they might
even be completely true. He made a last
attempt.

'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he
said. 'What I'm trying to say is this. You have
been alive a very long time; you lived half
your life before the Revolution. In 1925, for
instance, you were already grown up. Would
you say from what you can remember, that
life in 1925 was better than it is now, or
worse? If you could choose, would you
prefer to live then or now?'

The old man looked meditatively at the darts
board. He finished up his beer, more slowly
than before. When he spoke it was with a
tolerant philosophical air, as though the
beer had mellowed him.

never again could exist, any standard
against which it could be tested.

At this moment his train of thought stopped
abruptly. He halted and looked up. He was
in a narrow street, with a few dark little
shops, interspersed among dwelling-
houses. Immediately above his head there
hung three discoloured metal balls which
looked as if they had once been gilded. He
seemed to know the place. Of course! He
was standing outside the junk-shop where
he had bought the diary.

A twinge of fear went through him. It had
been a sufficiently rash act to buy the book
in the beginning, and he had sworn never to
come near the place again. And yet the
instant that he allowed his thoughts to
wander, his feet had brought him back here
of their own accord. It was precisely against
suicidal impulses of this kind that he had
hoped to guard himself by opening the
diary. At the same time he noticed that
although it was nearly twenty-one hours the
shop was still open. With the feeling that he
would be less conspicuous inside than
hanging about on the pavement, he stepped
through the doorway. If questioned, he
could plausibly say that he was trying to buy
razor blades.

The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil
lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly
smell. He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail
and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose,
and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles.
His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows
were bushy and still black. His spectacles,
his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact
that he was wearing an aged jacket of
black velvet, gave him a vague air of
intellectuality, as though he had been some
kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician.
His voice was soft, as though faded, and
his accent less debased than that of the

lamplight, and he picked it up.

It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one
side, flat on the other, making almost a
hemisphere. There was a peculiar
softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour
and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it,
magnified by the curved surface, there was
a strange, pink, convoluted object that
recalled a rose or a sea anemone.

'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated.

'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It
must have come from the Indian Ocean.
They used to kind of embed it in the glass.
That wasn't made less than a hundred years
ago. More, by the look of it.'

'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.

'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other
appreciatively. 'But there's not many that'd
say so nowadays.' He coughed. 'Now, if it
so happened that you wanted to buy it,
that'd cost you four dollars. I can remember
when a thing like that would have fetched
eight pounds, and eight pounds was well, I
can't work it out, but it was a lot of money.
But who cares about genuine antiques
nowadays even the few that's left?'

Winston immediately paid over the four
dollars and slid the coveted thing into his
pocket. What appealed to him about it was
not so much its beauty as the air it seemed
to possess of belonging to an age quite
different from the present one. The soft,
rainwatery glass was not like any glass that
he had ever seen. The thing was doubly
attractive because of its apparent
uselessness, though he could guess that it
must once have been intended as a
paperweight. It was very heavy in his
pocket, but fortunately it did not make much
of a bulge. It was a queer thing, even a

impossible notion, to be abandoned as
soon as thought of; but the room had
awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort
of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that
he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a
room like this, in an arm-chair beside an
open fire with your feet in the fender and a
kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly
secure, with nobody watching you, no voice
pursuing you, no sound except the singing
of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the
clock.

'There's no telescreen!' he could not help
murmuring.

'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of
those things. Too expensive. And I never
seemed to feel the need of it, somehow.
Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner
there. Though of course you'd have to put
new hinges on it if you wanted to use the
flaps.'

There was a small bookcase in the other
corner, and Winston had already gravitated
towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish.
The hunting-down and destruction of books
had been done with the same thoroughness
in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It
was very unlikely that there existed
anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book
printed earlier than 1960. The old man, still
carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a
picture in a rosewood frame which hung on
the other side of the fireplace, opposite the
bed.

'Now, if you happen to be interested in old
prints at all --' he began delicately.

Winston came across to examine the
picture. It was a steel engraving of an oval
building with rectangular windows, and a
small tower in front. There was a railing
running round the building, and at the rear

The centuries of capitalism were held to
have produced nothing of any value. One
could not learn history from architecture any
more than one could learn it from books.
Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the
names of streets anything that might throw
light upon the past had been systematically
altered.

'I never knew it had been a church,' he said.

'There's a lot of them left, really,' said the
old man, 'though they've been put to other
uses. Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah! I've
got it!


"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St
Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of
St Martin's "

there, now, that's as far as I can get.

A farthing, that was a small copper coin,
looked something like a cent.'

'Where was St Martin's?' said Winston.

'St Martin's? That's still standing. It's in
Victory Square, alongside the picture
gallery. A building with a kind of a triangular
porch and pillars in front, and a big flight of
steps.'

Winston knew the place well. It was a
museum used for propaganda displays of
various kinds scale models of rocket
bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork
tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and
the like.

'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be
called,' supplemented the old man, 'though
I don't recollect any fields anywhere in those
parts.'

beautiful rubbish. He would buy the
engraving of St Clement Danes, take it out
of its frame, and carry it home concealed
under the jacket of his overalls. He would
drag the rest of that poem out of Mr
Charrington's memory. Even the lunatic
project of renting the room upstairs flashed
momentarily through his mind again. For
perhaps five seconds exaltation made him
careless, and he stepped out on to the
pavement without so much as a preliminary
glance through the window. He had even
started humming to an improvised tune


Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St
Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice
and his bowels to water. A figure in blue
overalls was coming down the pavement,
not ten metres away. It was the girl from the
Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair.
The light was failing, but there was no
difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him
straight in the face, then walked quickly on
as though she had not seen him.

For a few seconds Winston was too
paralysed to move. Then he turned to the
right and walked heavily away, not noticing
for the moment that he was going in the
wrong direction. At any rate, one question
was settled. There was no doubting any
longer that the girl was spying on him. She
must have followed him here, because it
was not credible that by pure chance she
should have happened to be walking on the
same evening up the same obscure
backstreet, kilometres distant from any
quarter where Party members lived. It was
too great a coincidence. Whether she was
really an agent of the Thought Police, or
simply an amateur spy actuated by
officiousness, hardly mattered. It was

down, and took the diary out of the drawer.
But he did not open it at once. From the
telescreen a brassy female voice was
squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at
the marbled cover of the book, trying
without success to shut the voice out of his
consciousness.

It was at night that they came for you, always
at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself
before they got you. Undoubtedly some
people did so. Many of the disappearances
were actually suicides. But it needed
desperate courage to kill yourself in a world
where firearms, or any quick and certain
poison, were completely unprocurable. He
thought with a kind of astonishment of the
biological uselessness of pain and fear, the
treachery of the human body which always
freezes into inertia at exactly the moment
when a special effort is needed. He might
have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he
had acted quickly enough: but precisely
because of the extremity of his danger he
had lost the power to act. It struck him that in
moments of crisis one is never fighting
against an external enemy, but always
against one's own body. Even now, in spite
of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made
consecutive thought impossible. And it is
the same, he perceived, in all seemingly
heroic or tragic situations. On the
battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a
sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting
for are always forgotten, because the body
swells up until it fills the universe, and even
when you are not paralysed by fright or
screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-
moment struggle against hunger or cold or
sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or
an aching tooth.

He opened the diary. It was important to
write something down. The woman on the
telescreen had started a new song. Her
voice seemed to stick into his brain like

hidden beneath the dark moustache? Like a
leaden knell the words came back at him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Chapter Two

It was the middle of the morning, and
Winston had left the cubicle to go to the
lavatory.

A solitary figure was coming towards him
from the other end of the long, brightly-lit
corridor. It was the girl with dark hair. Four
days had gone past since the evening when
he had run into her outside the junk-shop.
As she came nearer he saw that her right
arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a
distance because it was of the same colour
as her overalls. Probably she had crushed
her hand while swinging round one of the
big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of
novels were 'roughed in'. It was a common
accident in the Fiction Department.

They were perhaps four metres apart when
the girl stumbled and fell almost flat on her
face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of
her. She must have fallen right on the
injured arm. Winston stopped short. The girl
had risen to her knees. Her face had turned
a milky yellow colour against which her
mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes
were fixed on his, with an appealing
expression that looked more like fear than
pain.

A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart.

door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it
with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of
paper folded into a square.

While he stood at the urinal he managed,
with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded.
Obviously there must be a message of
some kind written on it. For a moment he
was tempted to take it into one of the water-
closets and read it at once. But that would
be shocking folly, as he well knew. There
was no place where you could be more
certain that the telescreens were watched
continuously.

He went back to his cubicle, sat down,
threw the fragment of paper casually among
the other papers on the desk, put on his
spectacles and hitched the speakwrite
towards him. 'five minutes,' he told himself,
'five minutes at the very least!' His heart
bumped in his breast with frightening
loudness. Fortunately the piece of work he
was engaged on was mere routine, the
rectification of a long list of figures, not
needing close attention.

Whatever was written on the paper, it must
have some kind of political meaning. So far
as he could see there were two
possibilities. One, much the more likely,
was that the girl was an agent of the
Thought Police, just as he had feared. He
did not know why the Thought Police should
choose to deliver their messages in such a
fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons.
The thing that was written on the paper
might be a threat, a summons, an order to
commit suicide, a trap of some description.
But there was another, wilder possibility
that kept raising its head, though he tried
vainly to suppress it. This was, that the
message did not come from the Thought
Police at all, but from some kind of
underground organization. Perhaps the
Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the

preparations for Hate Week. He was
particularly enthusiastic about a papier-
mâché model of Big Brother's head, two
metres wide, which was being made for the
occasion by his daughter's troop of Spies.
The irritating thing was that in the racket of
voices Winston could hardly hear what
Parsons was saying, and was constantly
having to ask for some fatuous remark to be
repeated. Just once he caught a glimpse of
the girl, at a table with two other girls at the
far end of the room. She appeared not to
have seen him, and he did not look in that
direction again.

The afternoon was more bearable.
Immediately after lunch there arrived a
delicate, difficult piece of work which would
take several hours and necessitated putting
everything else aside. It consisted in
falsifying a series of production reports of
two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the
Inner Party, who was now under a cloud.
This was the kind of thing that Winston was
good at, and for more than two hours he
succeeded in shutting the girl out of his mind
altogether. Then the memory of her face
came back, and with it a raging, intolerable
desire to be alone. Until he could be alone it
was impossible to think this new
development out. Tonight was one of his
nights at the Community Centre. He wolfed
another tasteless meal in the canteen,
hurried off to the Centre, took part in the
solemn foolery of a 'discussion group',
played two games of table tennis,
swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat
for half an hour through a lecture entitled
'Ingsoc in relation to chess'. His soul
writhed with boredom, but for once he had
had no impulse to shirk his evening at the
Centre. At the sight of the words I love you
the desire to stay alive had welled up in him,
and the taking of minor risks suddenly
seemed stupid. It was not till twenty-three

pretext for going there. If he had known
where she lived, and at what time she left
work, he could have contrived to meet her
somewhere on her way home; but to try to
follow her home was not safe, because it
would mean loitering about outside the
Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As
for sending a letter through the mails, it was
out of the question. By a routine that was not
even secret, all letters were opened in
transit. Actually, few people ever wrote
letters. For the messages that it was
occasionally necessary to send, there were
printed postcards with long lists of phrases,
and you struck out the ones that were
inapplicable. In any case he did not know
the girl's name, let alone her address.
Finally he decided that the safest place was
the canteen. If he could get her at a table by
herself, somewhere in the middle of the
room, not too near the telescreens, and with
a sufficient buzz of conversation all round if
these conditions endured for, say, thirty
seconds, it might be possible to exchange a
few words.

For a week after this, life was like a restless
dream. On the next day she did not appear
in the canteen until he was leaving it, the
whistle having already blown. Presumably
she had been changed on to a later shift.
They passed each other without a glance.
On the day after that she was in the canteen
at the usual time, but with three other girls
and immediately under a telescreen. Then
for three dreadful days she did not appear
at all. His whole mind and body seemed to
be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a
sort of transparency, which made every
movement, every sound, every contact,
every word that he had to speak or listen to,
an agony. Even in sleep he could not
altogether escape from her image. He did
not touch the diary during those days. If
there was any relief, it was in his work, in
which he could sometimes forget himself

But she must have seen him coming
towards her, and perhaps she would take
the hint. Next day he took care to arrive
early. Surely enough, she was at a table in
about the same place, and again alone. The
person immediately ahead of him in the
queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-
like man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious
eyes. As Winston turned away from the
counter with his tray, he saw that the little
man was making straight for the girl's table.
His hopes sank again. There was a vacant
place at a table further away, but something
in the little man's appearance suggested
that he would be sufficiently attentive to his
own comfort to choose the emptiest table.
With ice at his heart Winston followed. It was
no use unless he could get the girl alone. At
this moment there was a tremendous crash.
The little man was sprawling on all fours, his
tray had gone flying, two streams of soup
and coffee were flowing across the floor.
He started to his feet with a malignant
glance at Winston, whom he evidently
suspected of having tripped him up. But it
was all right. Five seconds later, with a
thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the
girl's table.

He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray
and promptly began eating. It was all-
important to speak at once, before anyone
else came, but now a terrible fear had taken
possession of him. A week had gone by
since she had first approached him. She
would have changed her mind, she must
have changed her mind! It was impossible
that this affair should end successfully; such
things did not happen in real life. He might
have flinched altogether from speaking if at
this moment he had not seen Ampleforth,
the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply
round the room with a tray, looking for a
place to sit down. In his vague way
Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and
would certainly sit down at his table if he

base of the enormous fluted column, at the
top of which Big Brother's statue gazed
southward towards the skies where he had
vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the
Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few
years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In
the street in front of it there was a statue of a
man on horseback which was supposed to
represent Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes
past the hour the girl had still not appeared.
Again the terrible fear seized upon Winston.
She was not coming, she had changed her
mind! He walked slowly up to the north side
of the square and got a sort of pale-
coloured pleasure from identifying St
Martin's Church, whose bells, when it had
bells, had chimed 'You owe me three
farthings.' Then he saw the girl standing at
the base of the monument, reading or
pretending to read a poster which ran
spirally up the column. It was not safe to go
near her until some more people had
accumulated. There were telescreens all
round the pediment. But at this moment
there was a din of shouting and a zoom of
heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left.
Suddenly everyone seemed to be running
across the square. The girl nipped nimbly
round the lions at the base of the monument
and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As
he ran, he gathered from some shouted
remarks that a convoy of Eurasian
prisoners was passing.

Already a dense mass of people was
blocking the south side of the square.
Winston, at normal times the kind of person
who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind
of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed
his way forward into the heart of the crowd.
Soon he was within arm's length of the girl,
but the way was blocked by an enormous
prole and an almost equally enormous
woman, presumably his wife, who seemed
to form an impenetrable wall of flesh.
Winston wriggled himself sideways, and

With a sort of military precision that
astonished him, she outlined the route that
he was to follow. A half-hour railway
journey; turn left outside the station; two
kilometres along the road: a gate with the
top bar missing; a path across a field; a
grass-grown lane; a track between bushes;
a dead tree with moss on it. It was as though
she had a map inside her head. 'Can you
remember all that?' she murmured finally.

'Yes.'

'You turn left, then right, then left again. And
the gate's got no top bar.'

'Yes. What time?'

'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get
there by another way. Are you sure you
remember everything?'

'Yes.'

'Then get away from me as quick as you
can.'

She need not have told him that. But for the
moment they could not extricate themselves
from the crowd. The trucks were still filing
post, the people still insatiably gaping. At
the start there had been a few boos and
hisses, but it came only from the Party
members among the crowd, and had soon
stopped. The prevailing emotion was
simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from
Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of
strange animal. One literally never saw them
except in the guise of prisoners, and even
as prisoners one never got more than a
momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one
know what became of them, apart from the
few who were hanged as war-criminals: te
others simply vanished, presumably into
forced-labour camps. The round Mogol
faces had given way to faces of a more

He was a bit early. There had been no
difficulties about the journey, and the girl
was so evidently experienced that he was
less frightened than he would normally have
been. Presumably she could be trusted to
find a safe place. In general you could not
assume that you were much safer in the
country than in London. There were no
telescreens, of course, but there was
always the danger of concealed
microphones by which your voice might be
picked up and recognized; besides, it was
not easy to make a journey by yourself
without attracting attention. For distances of
less than 100 kilometres it was not necessary
to get your passport endorsed, but
sometimes there were patrols hanging
about the railway stations, who examined
the papers of any Party member they found
there and asked awkward questions.
However, no patrols had appeared, and on
the walk from the station he had made sure
by cautious backward glances that he was
not being followed. The train was full of
proles, in holiday mood because of the
summery weather. The wooden-seated
carriage in which he travelled was filled to
overflowing by a single enormous family.
ranging from a toothless great-
grandmother to a month-old baby, going
out to spend an afternoon with 'in-laws' in
the country, and, as they freely explained to
Winston, to get hold of a little blackmarket
butter.

The lane widened, and in a minute he came
to the footpath she had told him of, a mere
cattle-track which plunged between the
bushes. He had no watch, but it could not be
fifteen yet. The bluebells were so thick
underfoot that it was impossible not to tread
on them. He knelt down and began picking
some partly to pass the time away, but also
from a vague idea that he would like to have
a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl when
they met. He had got together a big bunch

nearer to her.

'I didn't want to say anything in the lane,'
she went on, 'in case there's a mike hidden
there. I don't suppose there is, but there
could be. There's always the chance of one
of those swine recognizing your voice.
We're all right here.'

He still had not the courage to approach her.
'We're all right here?' he repeated stupidly.

'Yes. Look at the trees.' They were small
ashes, which at some time had been cut
down and had sprouted up again into a
forest of poles, none of them thicker than
one's wrist. 'There's nothing big enough to
hide a mike in. Besides, I've been here
before.'

They were only making conversation. He
had managed to move closer to her now.
She stood before him very upright, with a
smile on her face that looked faintly ironical,
as though she were wondering why he was
so slow to act. The bluebells had cascaded
on to the ground. They seemed to have
fallen of their own accord. He took her hand.

'Would you believe,' he said, 'that till this
moment I didn't know what colour your eyes
were?' They were brown, he noted, a rather
light shade of brown, with dark lashes.
'Now that you've seen what I'm really like,
can you still bear to look at me?'

'Yes, easily.'

'I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that
I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've
got five false teeth.'

'I couldn't care less,' said the girl.

The next moment, it was hard to say by
whose act, she was in his his arms. At the

smashing your head in with a cobblestone.
If you really want to know, I imagined that
you had something to do with the Thought
Police.'

The girl laughed delightedly, evidently
taking this as a tribute to the excellence of
her disguise.

'Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly
think that?'

'Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your
general appearance merely because you're
young and fresh and healthy, you
understand I thought that probably --'

'You thought I was a good Party member.
Pure in word and deed. Banners,
processions, slogans, games, community
hikes all that stuff. And you thought that if I
had a quarter of a chance I'd denounce you
as a thought-criminal and get you killed
off?'

'Yes, something of that kind. A great many
young girls are like that, you know.'

'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said,
ripping off the scarlet sash of the Junior
Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a
bough. Then, as though touching her waist
had reminded her of something, she felt in
the pocket of her overalls and produced a
small slab of chocolate. She broke it in half
and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even
before he had taken it he knew by the smell
that it was very unusual chocolate. It was
dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver
paper. Chocolate normally was dullbrown
crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one
could describe it, like the smoke of a
rubbish fire. But at some time or another he
had tasted chocolate like the piece she had
given him. The first whiff of its scent had
stirred up some memory which he could not

language. Party members were supposed
not to swear, and Winston himself very
seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate. Julia,
however, seemed unable to mention the
Party, and especially the Inner Party,
without using the kind of words that you saw
chalked up in dripping alley-ways. He did
not dislike it. It was merely one symptom of
her revolt against the Party and all its ways,
and somehow it seemed natural and
healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that
smells bad hay. They had left the clearing
and were wandering again through the
chequered shade, with their arms round
each other's waists whenever it was wide
enough to walk two abreast. He noticed
how much softer her waist seemed to feel
now that the sash was gone. They did not
speak above a whisper. Outside the
clearing, Julia said, it was better to go
quietly. Presently they had reached the
edge of the little wood. She stopped him.

'Don't go out into the open. There might be
someone watching. We're all right if we
keep behind the boughs.'

They were standing in the shade of hazel
bushes. The sunlight, filtering through
innumerable leaves, was still hot on their
faces. Winston looked out into the field
beyond, and underwent a curious, slow
shock of recognition. He knew it by sight. An
old, closebitten pasture, with a footpath
wandering across it and a molehill here and
there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite
side the boughs of the elm trees swayed
just perceptibly in the breeze, and their
leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like
women's hair. Surely somewhere nearby,
but out of sight, there must be a stream with
green pools where dace were swimming?

'Isn't there a stream somewhere near
here?' he whispered.

was listening intently listening to that. But by
degrees the flood of music drove all
speculations out of his mind. It was as
though it were a kind of liquid stuff that
poured all over him and got mixed up with
the sunlight that filtered through the leaves.
He stopped thinking and merely felt. The
girl's waist in the bend of his arm was soft
and warm. He pulled her round so that they
were breast to breast; her body seemed to
melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it
was all as yielding as water. Their mouths
clung together; it was quite different from
the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier.
When they moved their faces apart again
both of them sighed deeply. The bird took
fright and fled with a clatter of wings.

Winston put his lips against her ear. 'Now,'
he whispered.

'Not here,' she whispered back. 'Come
back to the hide-out. It's safer.'

Quickly, with an occasional crackle of
twigs, they threaded their way back to the
clearing. When they were once inside the
ring of saplings she turned and faced him.
They were both breathing fast. but the smile
had reappeared round the corners of her
mouth. She stood looking at him for an
instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls.
And, yes! it was almost as in his dream.
Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she
had torn her clothes off, and when she flung
them aside it was with that same
magnificent gesture by which a whole
civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her
body gleamed white in the sun. But for a
moment he did not look at her body; his
eyes were anchored by the freckled face
with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down
before her and took her hands in his

'Have you done this before?'

animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated
desire: that was the force that would tear the
Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon
the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This
time there was no difficulty. Presently the
rising and falling of their breasts slowed to
normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant
helplessness they fell apart. The sun
seemed to have grown hotter. They were
both sleepy. He reached out for the
discarded overalls and pulled them partly
over her. Almost immediately they fell
asleep and slept for about half an hour.

Winston woke first. He sat up and watched
the freckled face, still peacefully asleep,
pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for
her mouth, you could not call her beautiful.
There was a line or two round the eyes, if
you looked closely. The short dark hair was
extraordinarily thick and soft. It occurred to
him that he still did not know her surname or
where she lived.

The young, strong body, now helpless in
sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting
feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he
had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush
was singing, had not quite come back. He
pulled the overalls aside and studied her
smooth white flank. In the old days, he
thought, a man looked at a girl's body and
saw that it was desirable, and that was the
end of the story. But you could not have pure
love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was
pure, because everything was mixed up
with fear and hatred. Their embrace had
been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a
blow struck against the Party. It was a
political act.

III

'We can come here once again,' said Julia.
'It's generally safe to use any hide-out
twice. But not for another month or two, of

She flung herself into his arms, kissed him
almost violently, and a moment later pushed
her way through the saplings and
disappeared into the wood with very little
noise. Even now he had not found out her
surname or her address. However, it made
no difference, for it was inconceivable that
they could ever meet indoors or exchange
any kind of written communication.

As it happened, they never went back to the
clearing in the wood. During the month of
May there was only one further occasion on
which they actually succeeded in making
love. That was in another hiding-place
known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church
in an almost-deserted stretch of country
where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty
years earlier. It was a good hiding-place
when once you got there, but the getting
there was very dangerous. For the rest they
could meet only in the streets, in a different
place every evening and never for more
than half an hour at a time. In the street it
was usually possible to talk, after a fashion.
As they drifted down the crowded
pavements, not quite abreast and never
looking at one another, they carried on a
curious, intermittent conversation which
flicked on and off like the beams of a
lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by
the approach of a Party uniform or the
proximity of a telescreen, then taken up
again minutes later in the middle of a
sentence, then abruptly cut short as they
parted at the agreed spot, then continued
almost without introduction on the following
day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this
kind of conversation, which she called
'talking by instalments'. She was also
surprisingly adept at speaking without
moving her lips. Just once in almost a month
of nightly meetings they managed to
exchange a kiss. They were passing in
silence down a side-street (Julia would
never speak when they were away from the

When they met in the church tower the gaps
in their fragmentary conversation were filled
up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the
little square chamber above the bells was
hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly
of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on
the dusty, twig-littered floor, one or other of
them getting up from time to time to cast a
glance through the arrowslits and make
sure that no one was coming.

Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in
a hostel with thirty other girls ('Always in the
stink of women! How I hate women!' she
said parenthetically), and she worked, as
he had guessed, on the novel-writing
machines in the Fiction Department. She
enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly
in running and servicing a powerful but tricky
electric motor. She was 'not clever', but
was fond of using her hands and felt at
home with machinery. She could describe
the whole process of composing a novel,
from the general directive issued by the
Planning Committee down to the final
touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she
was not interested in the finished product.
She 'didn't much care for reading,' she
said. Books were just a commodity that had
to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

She had no memories of anything before
the early sixties and the only person she had
ever known who talked frequently of the
days before the Revolution was a
grandfather who had disappeared when
she was eight. At school she had been
captain of the hockey team and had won the
gymnastics trophy two years running. She
had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a
branch secretary in the Youth League
before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League.
She had always borne an excellent
character. She had even (an infallibIe mark
of good reputation) been picked out to work
in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction

that 'they' should want to rob you of your
pleasures as that you should want to avoid
being caught. She hated the Party, and said
so in the crudest words, but she made no
general criticism of it. Except where it
touched upon her own life she had no
interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that
she never used Newspeak words except
the ones that had passed into everyday use.
She had never heard of the Brotherhood,
and refused to believe in its existence. Any
kind of organized revolt against the Party,
which was bound to be a failure, struck her
as stupid. The clever thing was to break the
rules and stay alive all the same. He
wondered vaguely how many others like her
there might be in the younger generation
people who had grown up in the world of the
Revolution, knowing nothing else,
accepting the Party as something
unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling
against its authority but simply evading it, as
a rabbit dodges a dog.

They did not discuss the possibility of
getting married. It was too remote to be
worth thinking about. No imaginable
committee would ever sanction such a
marriage even if Katharine, Winston's wife,
could somehow have been got rid of. It was
hopeless even as a daydream.

'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.

'She was do you know the Newspeak word
goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox,
incapable of thinking a bad thought?'

'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the
kind of person, right enough.'

He began telling her the story of his married
life, but curiousIy enough she appeared to
know the essential parts of it already. She
described to him, almost as though she had
seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's

don't give a damn for anything. They can't
bear you to feel like that. They want you to
be bursting with energy all the time. All this
marching up and down and cheering and
waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour. If
you're happy inside yourself, why should
you get excited about Big Brother and the
Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes
Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'

That was very true, he thought. There was a
direct intimate connexion between chastity
and political orthodoxy. For how could the
fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity
which the Party needed in its members be
kept at the right pitch, except by bottling
down some powerful instinct and using it as
a driving force? The sex impulse was
dangerous to the Party, and the Party had
turned it to account. They had played a
similar trick with the instinct of parenthood.
The family could not actually be abolished,
and, indeed, people were encouraged to
be fond of their children, in almost the old-
fashioned way. The children, on the other
hand, were systematically turned against
their parents and taught to spy on them and
report their deviations. The family had
become in effect an extension of the
Thought Police. It was a device by means of
which everyone could be surrounded night
and day by informers who knew him
intimately.

Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine.
Katharine would unquestionably have
denounced him to the Thought Police if she
had not happened to be too stupid to detect
the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what
really recalled her to him at this moment was
the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had
brought the sweat out on his forehead. He
began telling Julia of something that had
happened, or rather had failed to happen,
on another sweltering summer afternoon,
eleven years ago.

'Why didn't you give her a good shove?'
said Julia. 'I would have.'

'Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd
been the same person then as I am now. Or
perhaps I would I'm not certain.'

'Are you sorry you didn't?'

'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'

They were sitting side by side on the dusty
floor. He pulled her closer against him. Her
head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant
smell of her hair conquering the pigeon
dung. She was very young, he thought, she
still expected something from life, she did
not understand that to push an inconvenient
person over a cliff solves nothing.

'Actually it would have made no difference,'
he said.

'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'

'Only because I prefer a positive to a
negative. In this game that we're playing,
we can't win. Some kinds of failure are
better than other kinds, that's all.'

He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of
dissent. She always contradicted him when
he said anything of this kind. She would not
accept it as a law of nature that the
individual is always defeated. In a way she
realized that she herself was doomed, that
sooner or later the Thought Police would
catch her and kill her, but with another part
of her mind she believed that it was
somehow possible to construct a secret
world in which you could live as you chose.
All you needed was luck and cunning and
boldness. She did not understand that there
was no such thing as happiness, that the
only victory lay in the far future, long after
you were dead, that from the moment of

Winston looked round the shabby little room
above Mr Charrington's shop. Beside the
window the enormous bed was made up,
with ragged blankets and a coverless
bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the
twelve-hour face was ticking away on the
mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg
table, the glass paperweight which he had
bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of
the half-darkness.

In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a
saucepan, and two cups, provided by Mr
Charrington. Winston lit the burner and set a
pan of water to boil. He had brought an
envelope full of Victory Coffee and some
saccharine tablets. The clock's hands said
seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen-twenty
really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty.

Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious,
gratuitous, suicidal folly. Of all the crimes
that a Party member could commit, this one
was the least possible to conceal. Actually
the idea had first floated into his head in the
form of a vision, of the glass paperweight
mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table.
As he had foreseen, Mr Charrington had
made no difficulty about letting the room. He
was obviously glad of the few dollars that it
would bring him. Nor did he seem shocked
or become offensively knowing when it was
made clear that Winston wanted the room
for the purpose of a love-affair. Instead he
looked into the middle distance and spoke
in generalities, with so delicate an air as to
give the impression that he had become
partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a very
valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place
where they could be alone occasionally.
And when they had such a place, it was only
common courtesy in anyone else who knew
of it to keep his knowledge to himself. He
even, seeming almost to fade out of
existence as he did so, added that there
were two entries to the house, one of them

hiding-place that was truly their own,
indoors and near at hand, had been too
much for both of them. For some time after
their visit to the church belfry it had been
impossible to arrange meetings. Working
hours had been drastically increased in
anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than
a month distant, but the enormous, complex
preparations that it entailed were throwing
extra work on to everybody. Finally both of
them managed to secure a free afternoon
on the same day. They had agreed to go
back to the clearing in the wood. On the
evening beforehand they met briefly in the
street. As usual, Winston hardly looked at
Julia as they drifted towards one another in
the crowd, but from the short glance he
gave her it seemed to him that she was
paler than usual.

'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she
judged it safe to speak. 'Tomorrow, I
mean.'

'What?'

'Tomorrow afternoon. I can't come.'

'Why not?'

'Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this
time.'

For a moment he was violently angry.
During the month that he had known her the
nature of his desire for her had changed. At
the beginning there had been little true
sensuality in it. Their first love-making had
been simply an act of the will. But after the
second time it was different. The smell of
her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling
of her skin seemed to have got inside him,
or into the air all round him. She had
become a physical necessity, something
that he not only wanted but felt that he had a
right to. When she said that she could not

she disengaged herself rather hurriedly,
partly because she was still holding the tool-
bag.

'Half a second,' she said. 'Just let me show
you what I've brought. Did you bring some
of that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you
would. You can chuck it away again,
because we shan't be needing it. Look
here.'

She fell on her knees, threw open the bag,
and tumbled out some spanners and a
screwdriver that filled the top part of it.
Underneath were a number of neat paper
packets. The first packet that she passed to
Winston had a strange and yet vaguely
familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind
of heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded
wherever you touched it.

'It isn't sugar?' he said.

'Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And
here's a loaf of bread proper white bread,
not our bloody stuff and a little pot of jam.
And here's a tin of milk but look! This is the
one I'm really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of
sacking round it, because --'

But she did not need to tell him why she had
wrapped it up. The smell was already filling
the room, a rich hot smell which seemed
like an emanation from his early childhood,
but which one did occasionally meet with
even now, blowing down a passage-way
before a door slammed, or diffusing itself
mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for
an instant and then lost again.

'It's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.'

'It's Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo
here, she said.

'How did you manage to get hold of all