1984; by George Orwell !

Chapter 6

Winston was writing in his diary:

It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a

narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She

was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp

that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted

very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the

whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party

women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the

street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I——

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his

eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze

out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the

top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick

over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window—to

do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black

out the memory that was tormenting him.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous

system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to

translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of

a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back;

a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thir-81984

ty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case. They

were a few metres apart when the left side of the man’s face

was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened

again just as they were passing one 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 prosti-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 8

tutes 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 forcedlabour 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 quarters swarmed

with women who were ready to sell themselves. Some could

even be purchased for a bottle of gin, which the proles were

not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party was even inclined

to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which

could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did

not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless

and only involved the women of a submerged and despised

class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between

Party members. But—though this was one of the crimes

that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed

to—it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and

women from forming loyalties which it might not be able

to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all

pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.

All marriages between Party members had to be approved

by a committee appointed for the purpose, and—though

the principle was never clearly stated—permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression

of being physically attracted to one another. The only rec-84 1984

ognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the

service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on

as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an

indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from

childhood onwards. There were even organizations such

as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete

celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten

by artificial insemination (ARTSEM, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston

was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but 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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 8

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 him away with all her strength. The

rigidlty of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting

nor co-operating but SUBMITTING. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. But even then

he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed

that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it

was Katharine who refused this. They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to

happen, once a week quite regulariy, whenever it was not

impossible. She even used to remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be done that evening and

which must not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One

was ‘making a baby’, and the other was ‘our duty to the Party’ (yes, she had actually used that phrase). Quite soon he

grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed 81984

day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in the

end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they

parted.

Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again

and wrote:

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any

kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can

imagine, pulled up her skirt. I——

He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight,

with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and

in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even

at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine’s white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power

of the Party. Why did it always have to be like this? Why

could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy

scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an almost 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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 8

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 cardboard

mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly

dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open,

revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no

teeth at all.

He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:

When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty 88 1984

years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.

He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had

written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top

of his voice was as strong as ever.Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 89

Chapter 7

’

If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’

If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because

only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per

cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be

overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies,

had no way of coming together or even of identifying one

another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just

possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members

could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes.

Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice,

at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles,

if only they could somehow become conscious of their own

strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only

to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.

If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow

morning. Surely sooner 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 start-90 1984

ed! 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 stall-keeper

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:

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until

after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcrip-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 91

tion from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of

course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before

the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the

capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had

been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work

in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been

sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught

that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in

subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple

rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It

was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without

importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose

upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of

life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral

pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they

went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at

twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the

most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home

and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon

of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among

them, spreading false rumours and marking down and

eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of

becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable 91984

that the proles 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:Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 9

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 thousands of

poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to

sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve

hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips

if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale

breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty

there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were

lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to

look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They

were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the

picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in

a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer,

shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat.

This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was

allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the

world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the

land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If

anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or

they could take his job away and starve him to death. When

any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and

bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as ‘Sir’. The

chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and——

But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be

mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in

their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the 94 1984

cat-o’-nine tails, the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope’s toe. There was also something

called the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, which would probably

not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law

by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any

woman working in one of his factories.

How could you tell how much of it was lies? It MIGHT

be true that the average human 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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 9

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 bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of

fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per

cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it

was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party

claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per

thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300—

and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two

unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in

the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might

never have been any such law as the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS,

or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as

a top hat.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his

life he had possessed—AFTER the event: that was what 91984

counted—concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as

thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been—at any rate, it

was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted.

But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.

The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of

the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them

was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that

time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where,

and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the

majority had been executed after spectacular public trials

at which they made confession of their crimes. Among the

last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and

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, ab-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 9

ject 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 Cafe. 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 nearest to them. It

was not wise even to be seen in the neighbourhood of such

people. They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin

flavoured with cloves which was the speciality of the cafe.

Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most

impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous

caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame

popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even

now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The

Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner,

and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were

a rehashing of the ancient themes—slum tenements, starv-98 1984

ing children, street battles, capitalists in top hats—even on

the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their

top hats an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the past.

He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair,

his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At

one time he must have been immensely strong; now his

great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in

every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one’s

eyes, like a mountain crumbling.

It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not

now remember how he had come to be in the cafe at such

a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny music was

trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in their

corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded,

the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but

no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all,

something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they

were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed

too. There came into it—but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in

his mind Winston 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.Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 99

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 been on Eurasian soil. They

had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous

somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of

the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed im-100 1984

portant military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston’s

memory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the

whole story must be on record in countless other places as

well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.

Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that

time Winston had not imagined that the people who were

wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes

that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence;

it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone

which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if

in some way it could have been published to the world and

its significance made known.

He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what

the photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it

up with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled

it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the

telescreen.

He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back

his chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and

even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort:

but you could not control the beating of your heart, and

the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He

let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all

the while by the fear that some accident—a sudden draught

blowing across his desk, for instance—would betray him.

Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photo-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 101

graph into the 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.101984

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 past is inalterable. He might be ALONE

in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the

thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the

horror was that he might also be wrong.

He picked up the children’s history book and looked at

the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece.

The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though

some huge force were pressing down upon you—something

that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your

brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you,

almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the

Party would announce that two and two made five, and you

would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should

make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position

demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the

very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their

philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And

what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for

thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after

all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that

the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in

the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?

But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its

own accord. The face of O’Brien, not called up by any obvi-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 10

ous association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with

more certainty than before, that O’Brien was on his side.

He was writing the diary for O’Brien—TO O’Brien: it was

like an interminable letter which no one would ever read,

but which was addressed to a particular person and took its

colour from that fact.

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.104 1984

Chapter 8

F

rom 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

be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do

anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a

walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was

a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he

came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had

tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it

that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking

camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On im-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 10

pulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered

off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then

north again, losing himself among unknown streets and

hardly bothering in which direction he was going.

‘If there is hope,’ he had written in the diary, ‘it lies in

the proles.’ The words kept coming back to him, statement

of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and

east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was

walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with

battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement

and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes.

There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the

cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow

alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed

in astonishing numbers—girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and

swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls

would be like in ten years’ time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children

who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells

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 101984

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 the same instant a

man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from

a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the

sky.

‘Steamer!’ he yelled. ‘Look out, guv’nor! Bang over’ead!

Lay down quick!’

‘Steamer’ was a nickname which, for some reason, the Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 10

proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung

himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right

when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed

to possess some kind of instinct which told them several

seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although

the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar

that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light

objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found

that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.

He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of

houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke

hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which

a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a

little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and

in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he

got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the

wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.

He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid

the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the

bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the

streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It

was nearly 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, 108 1984

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 metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its

weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 109

to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable

that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining

alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their

intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned,

even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.

There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by

selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had

nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was

managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were

largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out,

the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In

the absence of any real intercommunication between one

part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.

But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling

on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable:

it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on

the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into

which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he

had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was

a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead

there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp

turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into

a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tiredlooking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered

where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and 110 1984

down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junkshop 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 middleaged 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?’Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 111

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 frequenting their pubs, but it

was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the patrols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it

was not likely that they would believe him. He pushed open

the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in

the face. As he entered the din of voices dropped to about

half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at

the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as

much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed

was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation

with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man

with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round

with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene.

‘I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man,

straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me

you ain’t got a pint mug in the ‘ole bleeding boozer?’

‘And what in hell’s name IS a pint?’ said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.

‘’Ark at ‘im! Calls ‘isself a barman and don’t know what

a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ‘alf of a quart, and there’s four

quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’

‘Never heard of ‘em,’ said the barman shortly. ‘Litre and

half litre—that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf

in front of you.’

‘I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ‘a drawed 111984

me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ‘ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.’

‘When you were a young man we were all living in the

treetops,’ said the barman, with 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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11

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.

The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the darts board

to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as

though it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.

‘The beer was better,’ he said finally. ‘And cheaper! When

I was a young man, mild beer—wallop we used to call it—

was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.’

‘Which war was that?’ said Winston.

‘It’s all wars,’ said the old man vaguely. He took up his

glass, and his shoulders straightened again. ‘’Ere’s wishing

you the very best of ‘ealth!’

In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s apple made

a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer

vanished. Winston went to the bar and came back with two

more half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten

his prejudice against drinking a full litre.

‘You are very much older than I am,’ said Winston. ‘You

must have been a grown man before I was born. You can

remember what it was like in the old days, before the Revolution. People of my age don’t really know anything about

those times. We can only read about them in books, and

what it says in the books may not be true. I should like your

opinion on that. The history books say that life before the

Revolution was completely different from what it is now.

There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty 114 1984

worse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, the

great mass of the people never had enough to eat from birth

to death. Half of them hadn’t even boots on their feet. They

worked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they

slept ten in a room. And at the same time 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-inlaw’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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11

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

speeches. Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians—all sorts there was. And there was one bloke—well, I

couldn’t give you ‘is name, but a real powerful speaker ‘e

was. ‘E didn’t ‘alf give it ‘em! ‘Lackeys!’ ‘e says, ‘lackeys of

the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!’ Parasites—

that was another of them. And ‘yenas—’e definitely called

‘em ‘yenas. Of course ‘e was referring to the Labour Party,

you understand.’

Winston had the feeling that they were talking at crosspurposes.

‘What I really wanted to know was this,’ he said. ‘Do you

feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those

days? Are you treated more like a human being? In the old

days, the rich people, the people at the top——’

‘The ‘Ouse of Lords,’ put in the old man reminiscently.

‘The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is,

were these people able to treat you as an inferior, simply

because they were rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for

instance, that you had to call them ‘Sir’ and take off your

cap when you passed them?’

The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off

about a quarter of his beer before answering.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They liked you to touch your cap to ‘em. 111984

It showed respect, like. I didn’t agree with it, myself, but I

done it often enough. Had to, as you might say.’

‘And was it usual—I’m only quoting what I’ve read in history books—was it usual for these people and their servants

to push you off the pavement into the gutter?’

‘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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11

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.

‘I know what you expect me to say,’ he said. ‘You expect

me to say as I’d sooner be young again. Most people’d say

they’d sooner be young, if you arst’ ‘em. You got your ‘ealth

and strength when you’re young. When you get to my time

of life you ain’t never well. I suffer something wicked from

my feet, and my bladder’s jest terrible. Six and seven times

a night it ‘as me out of bed. On the other ‘and, there’s great

advantages in being a old man. You ain’t got the same worries. No truck with women, and that’s a great thing. I ain’t

‘ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you’d credit it. Nor

wanted to, what’s more.’

Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use

going on. He was about to buy some more beer when the old

man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. The extra half-litre was

already working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two

gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet

carried him out into the street again. Within twenty years

at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question,

‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would

have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect

it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered sur-118 1984

vivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing

one age with another. They remembered a million useless

things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the

swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but

all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision.

They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not

large ones. And when memory failed and written records

were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party

to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be

accepted, because there did not exist, and 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, Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 119

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

majority of proles.

‘I recognized you on the pavement,’ he said immediately.

‘You’re the gentleman that bought the young lady’s keepsake

album. That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was. Creamlaid, it used to be called. There’s been no paper like that

made for—oh, I dare say fifty years.’ He peered at Winston

over the top of his spectacles. ‘Is there anything special I

can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?’

‘I was passing,’ said Winston vaguely. ‘I just looked in. I

don’t want anything in particular.’

‘It’s just as well,’ said the other, ‘because I don’t suppose

I could have satisfied you.’ He made an apologetic gesture

with his softpalmed hand. ‘You see how it is; an empty shop,

you might say. Between you and me, the antique trade’s just

about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock either.

Furniture, china, glass it’s all been broken up by degrees.

And of course the metal stuff’s mostly been melted down. I 10 1984

haven’t seen a brass candlestick in years.’

The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably

full, but there was almost nothing in it of the slightest value. The floorspace was very restricted, because all round

the walls were stacked innumerable dusty picture-frames.

In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out

chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches

that did not even pretend to be in going order, and other

miscellaneous rubbish. Only on a small table in the corner

was there a litter of odds and ends—lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like—which looked as though

they might include something interesting. As Winston

wandered towards the table his eye was caught by a round,

smooth thing that gleamed softly in 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, Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11

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 compromising thing,

for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old,

and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely

suspect. The old man had grown noticeably more cheerful

after receiving the four dollars. Winston realized that he

would have accepted three or even two.

‘There’s another room upstairs that you might care to

take a look at,’ he said. ‘There’s not much in it. Just a few

pieces. We’ll do with a light if we’re going upstairs.’

He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way

slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage,

into a room which did not give on the street but looked out

on a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney-pots. Winston

noticed that the furniture was still arranged as though the 11984

room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep,

slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking away

on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying

nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bed with

the mattress still on it.

‘We lived here till my wife died,’ said the old man half

apologetically. ‘I’m selling the furniture off by little and

little. Now that’s a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it

would be if you could get the bugs out of it. But I dare say

you’d find it a little bit cumbersome.’

He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the

whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked

curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston’s

mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room

for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a

wild, 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 armchair 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. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1

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 end there was

what appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for some

moments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the statue.

‘The frame’s fixed to the wall,’ said the old man, ‘but I

could unscrew it for you, I dare say.’

‘I know that building,’ said Winston finally. ‘It’s a ruin

now. It’s in the middle of the street outside the Palace of

Justice.’

‘That’s right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in—

oh, many years ago. It was a church at one time, St Clement

Danes, its name was.’ He smiled apologetically, as though

conscious of saying something slightly ridiculous, and add-14 1984

ed: ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s!’

‘What’s that?’ said Winston.

‘Oh—‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s.’

That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes

on I don’t remember, but I do know it ended up, ‘Here comes

a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop

off your head.’ It was a kind of a dance. They held out their

arms for you to pass under, and when they came to ‘Here

comes a chopper to chop off your head’ they brought their

arms down and caught you. It was just names of churches.

All the London churches were in it—all the principal ones,

that is.’

Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church

belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of a

London building. Anything large and impressive, if it was

reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed

as having been built since the Revolution, while anything

that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim

period called the Middle Ages. 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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1

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.’

Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an

even more incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry home, unless it were taken

out of its frame. But he lingered for some minutes more,

talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not

Weeks—as one might have gathered from the inscription

over the shop-front—but Charrington. Mr Charrington, it

seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that time he had

been intending to alter the name over the window, but had

never quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that

they were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston’s head. Oranges and lemons say the

bells of St Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the

bells of St Martin’s! It was curious, but when you said it to 11984

yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the

bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other,

disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as

he could remember he had never in real life heard church

bells ringing.

He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the

stairs alone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of the door. He had

already made up his mind that after a suitable interval—a

month, say—he would take the risk of visiting the shop

again. It was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an

evening at the Centre. The serious piece of folly had been to

come back here in the first place, after buying the diary and

without knowing whether the proprietor of the shop could

be trusted. However——!

Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would

buy further scraps of 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——Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1

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 enough

that she was watching him. Probably she had seen him go

into the pub as well.

It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket

banged against his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away. The worst thing was the

pain in his belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling

that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon. But

there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this.

Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.

The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood 18 1984

for several seconds wondering vaguely what to do, then

turned round and began to retrace his steps. As he turned

it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him three

minutes ago and that by running he could probably catch

up with her. He could keep on her track till they were in

some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his pocket would be heavy

enough for the job. But he abandoned the idea immediately,

because even the thought of making any physical effort was

unbearable. He could not run, he could not strike a blow.

Besides, she was young and lusty and would defend herself.

He thought also of hurrying to the Community Centre and

staying there till the place closed, so as to establish a partial

alibi for the evening. But that too was impossible. A deadly

lassitude had taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get

home quickly and then sit down and be quiet.

It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the

flat. The lights would be switched off at the main at twentythree thirty. He went into the kitchen and swallowed nearly

a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then he went to the table in the

alcove, sat 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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 19

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 darkhaired 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 jagged

splinters of glass. He tried to think of O’Brien, for whom,

or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he began

thinking of the things that would happen to him after the

Thought Police took him away. It would not matter if they

killed you at once. To be killed was what you expected. But

before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody 10 1984

knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had

to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth,

and bloody clots of hair.

Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days

or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection,

and nobody ever failed to confess. When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date

you would be dead. Why then did that horror, which altered

nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?

He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of O’Brien. ‘We shall meet in the place

where there is no darkness,’ O’Brien had said to him. He

knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where

there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one

would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could

mystically share in. But with the voice from the telescreen

nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of thought

further. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Half the tobacco

promptly fell out on to his tongue, a bitter dust which was

difficult to spit out again. The face of Big Brother swam into

his mind, displacing that of O’Brien. Just as he had done a

few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his pocket and looked

at it. The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but

what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?

Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:

WAR IS PEACE Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH11984

Part TwoFree eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1