1984; by George Orwell !

Chapter 3

Winston was dreaming of his mother.

He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was

a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered

more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark

clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles

of his father’s shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of

them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the

first great purges of the fifties.

At this moment his mother was sitting in some place

deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms.

He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble

baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them

were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place—the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very

deep grave—but it was a place which, already far below him,

was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of

a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening

water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see

him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down,

down into the green waters which in another moment must

hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and

air while they were being sucked down to death, and they 8 1984

were down there because he was up here. He knew it and

they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces.

There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts,

only the knowledge that they must die in order that he

might remain 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.Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 9

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 there. In the ragged hedge on the

opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were

swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring

in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand,

though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream

where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow

trees.

The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across

the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off

her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body

was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that

instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had

thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness

it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system

of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the

Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture

belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the

word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.

The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle

which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It 40 1984

was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers.

Winston wrenched his body out of bed—naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons

annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600—and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair.

The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next

moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which

nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied

his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing

again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps.

His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the

varicose ulcer had started itching.

‘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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 41

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 time when his

country had not been at war, but it was evident that there

had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid

which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was

the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester.

He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember

his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down,

down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and

round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which

finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and

they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy

way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister—or perhaps it was only a bundle of

blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether 41984

his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into

a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube

station.

There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor,

and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on

metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother

and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near

them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by

side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and

a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his

face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He

reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place

of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling

from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he

was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and

unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some

terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and

could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed

to him that he 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 continu-Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 4

ous, 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 thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward

(with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from

the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the

back muscles)—the frightening thing was that it might all

be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and

say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED—that, 44 1984

surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance

with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had

been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years

ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own

consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—

if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into

history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the

Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present

controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was

true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All

that was needed was an unending series of victories over

your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

‘Stand easy!’ barked the instructress, a little more genially.

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled

his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to

be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions

which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory

and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic,

to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe

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 Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 4

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 41984

and how much invented. Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He

did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before

1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form—’English Socialism’, that is to say—it had been current earlier.

Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could

put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example,

as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party

had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since

his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There

was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had

held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the

falsification of an historical fact. And on that occasion——

‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.

‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do

better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! THAT’S

better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and

watch me.’

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston’s

body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker

of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while

the instructress raised her arms above her head and—one

could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and

efficiency—bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

‘THERE, comrades! THAT’S how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four

children. Now look.’ She bent over again. ‘You see MY Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 4

knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to,’ she added as she straightened herself up. ‘Anyone under forty-five

is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don’t all 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.48 1984