No More Learning

The smell that rose from the saucepan was
so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest
anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive.
What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the
silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had
almost forgotten after years of saccharine. With one hand
in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other, Ju-
lia wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the
bookcase, pointing out the best way of repairing the gate-
leg table, plumping herself down in the ragged arm-chair to
see if it was comfortable, and examining the absurd twelve-



1984



hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement. She brought
the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a
better light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always,
by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass.

'What is it, do you think? ' said Julia.

'I don't think it's anything — I mean, I don't think it was
ever put to any use. That's what I like about it. It's a little
chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter. It's a mes-
sage from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it. '

'And that picture over there' — she nodded at the engrav-
ing on the opposite wall — 'would that be a hundred years
old? '

'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's impos-
sible to discover the age of anything nowadays. '

She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute stuck
his nose out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting immediate-
ly below the picture. 'What is this place? I've seen it before
somewhere. '

'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement Danes
its name was. ' The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington
had taught him came back into his head, and he added
half-nostalgically: 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St
Clement's! '

To his astonishment she capped the line:

'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey '

'I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway

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I remember it ends up, 'Here comes a candle to light you to
bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head! "

It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there
must be another line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps
it could be dug out of Mr Charrington's memory, if he were
suitably prompted.

'Who taught you that? ' he said.

'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a lit-
tle girl. He was vaporized when I was eight — at any rate, he
disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,' she added incon-
sequently 'I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round yellow
fruit with a thick skin. '

T can remember lemons,' said Winston. "They were quite
common in the fifties. They were so sour that it set your
teeth on edge even to smell them. '

T bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia. 'I'll
take it down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose
it's almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this
paint off. What a bore! I'll get the lipstick off your face af-
terwards. '

Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The
room was darkening. He turned over towards the light and
lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly
interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the in-
terior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and
yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the
surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing
a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feel-
ing that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside

184 1984



it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and
the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself.
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was
Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart
of the crystal.



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Chapter 5



Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was miss-
ing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on
his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On
the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Re-
cords Department to look at the notice-board. One of the
notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess
Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost
exactly as it had looked before — nothing had been crossed
out — but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had
ceased to exist: he had never existed.

The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry
the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal
temperature, but outside the pavements scorched one's feet
and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a hor-
ror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and
the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Pro-
cessions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks,
displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be
organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans
coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs
faked. Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been tak-
en off the production of novels and was rushing out a series
of atrocity pamphlets. Winston, in addition to his regular
work, spent long periods every day in going through back



1984



files of 'The Times' and altering and embellishing news
items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night,
when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town
had a curiously febrile air. The rocket bombs crashed of-
tener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there
were enormous explosions which no one could explain and
about which there were wild rumours.

The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate
Week (the Hate Song, it was called) had already been com-
posed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens.
It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be
called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared
out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it
was terrifying. The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the
midnight streets it competed with the still-popular 'It was
only a hopeless fancy'. The Parsons children played it at all
hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a
piece of toilet paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than
ever. Squads of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were pre-
paring the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting
posters, erecting flagstaff's on the roofs, and perilously sling-
ing wires across the street for the reception of streamers.
Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display
four hundred metres of bunting. He was in his native ele-
ment and as happy as a lark. The heat and the manual work
had even given him a pretext for reverting to shorts and
an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once,
pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jolly-
ing everyone along with comradely exhortations and giving

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out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaust-
ible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.

A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It
had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous fig-
ure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding
forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enor-
mous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From
whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the
gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be point-
ed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every
blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the por-
traits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about
the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical fren-
zies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general
mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers
of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film theatre in
Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins.
The whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for
a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in
effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece
of waste ground which was used as a playground and sever-
al dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further
angry demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hun-
dreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were
torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops
were looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round that
spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless
waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of
foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished



1984



of suffocation.

In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could
get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on a stripped
bed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness.
The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied
hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or
clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they
would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the black
market, tear off their clothes, and make love with sweating
bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs had
rallied and were massing for the counter-attack.

Four, five, six — seven times they met during the month
of June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at
all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had
grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only
a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of cough-
ing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life
had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse
to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of
his voice. Now that they had a secure hiding-place, almost a
home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only
meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What
mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist.
To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as
being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where
extinct animals could walk. Mr Charrington, thought Win-
ston, was another extinct animal. He usually stopped to talk
with Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs.
The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors,

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and on the other hand to have almost no customers. He
led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop, and
an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals
and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably
ancient gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed
glad of the opportunity to talk. Wandering about among
his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles
and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had always
vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman.
With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap
of rubbish or that — a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of
a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket containing a strand
of some long-dead baby's hair — never asking that Winston
should buy it, merely that he should admire it. To talk to
him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out musical-
box. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory
some more fragments of forgotten rhymes. There was one
about four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a cow
with a crumpled horn, and another about the death of poor
Cock Robin. 'It just occurred to me you might be interested,'
he would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he
produced a new fragment. But he could never recall more
than a few lines of any one rhyme.

Both of them knew — in a way, it was never out of their
minds that what was now happening could not last long.
There were times when the fact of impending death seemed
as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling to-
gether with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned
soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock



1984



is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times
when they had the illusion not only of safety but of per-
manence. So long as they were actually in this room, they
both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was
difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary.
It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the pa-
perweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get
inside that glassy world, and that once inside it time could
be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of
escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would
carry on their intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of
their natural lives. Or Katharine would die, and by subtle
manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would succeed in get-
ting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or
they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition,
learn to speak with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory
and live out their lives undetected in a back-street. It was
all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality there was no es-
cape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they
had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to
day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had
no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's
lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is
air available.

Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebel-
lion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take
the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a real-
ity, there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way
into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or



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seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the
impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's
presence, announce that he was the enemy of the Party, and
demand his help. Curiously enough, this did not strike her
as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judg-
ing people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that
Winston should believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the
strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it
for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated
the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe to
do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized
opposition existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein
and his underground army, she said, were simply a lot of
rubbish which the Party had invented for its own purposes
and which you had to pretend to believe in. Times beyond
number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations,
she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of
people whose names she had never heard and in whose sup-
posed crimes she had not the faintest belief. When public
trials were happening she had taken her place in the detach-
ments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts
from morning to night, chanting at intervals 'Death to the
traitors! ' During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled
all others in shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she had only
the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what doctrines
he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the
Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological
battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an indepen-
dent political movement was outside her imagination: and



1984



in any case the Party was invincible. It would always ex-
ist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel
against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts
of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something
up.

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and
far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he
happened in some connexion to mention the war against
Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opin-
ion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell
daily on London were probably fired by the Government
of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'. This was
an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also
stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the
Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting
out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the
Party when they in some way touched upon her own life.
Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply
because the difference between truth and falsehood did not
seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having
learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes.
(In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late
fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to
have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school,
it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more,
and it would be claiming the steam engine. ) And when he
told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was
born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as
totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had



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invented aeroplanes? It was rather more of a shock to him
when he discovered from some chance remark that she did
not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war
with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she
regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had
not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed.
'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said
vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aero-
planes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover
in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she
was grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a
quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her
memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time
Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue
still struck her as unimportant. 'Who cares? ' she said im-
patiently. 'It's always one bloody war after another, and one
knows the news is all lies anyway'

Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department
and the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such
things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the
abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becom-
ing truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had
once held between his fingers. It did not make much im-
pression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point
of the story.

'Were they friends of yours? ' she said.

'No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members.
Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged



1984



to the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them
by sight. '

"Then what was there to worry about? People are being
killed off all the time, aren't they? '

He tried to make her understand. "This was an excep-
tional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being
killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yester-
day, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere,
it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them,
like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost lit-
erally nothing about the Revolution and the years before
the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsi-
fied, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been
repainted, every statue and street and building has been
renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is
continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has
stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which
the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is
falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it,
even when I did the falsification myself.
After the thing is
done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside
my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any
other human being shares my memories. Just in that one
instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evi-
dence after the event — years after it. '

And what good was that? '

'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes lat-
er. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it. '

'Well, I wouldn't! ' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take



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risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of
old newspaper. What could you have done with it even if
you had kept it? '

'Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have
planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I'd
dared to show it to anybody. I don't imagine that we can
alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine lit-
tle knots of resistance springing up here and there — small
groups of people banding themselves together, and gradu-
ally growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that
the next generations can carry on where we leave off. '

'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm inter-
ested in US. '

'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told
her.

She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms
round him in delight.

In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the
faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the princi-
ples of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and
the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words,
she became bored and confused and said that she never paid
any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all
rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when
to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he
persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting
habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can
go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her,
he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of or-

196 1984



thodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy
meant. In a way, the world- view of the Party imposed itself
most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations
of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity
of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently
interested in public events to notice what was happening.
By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply
swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them
no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of
corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.



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Chapter 6



It had happened at last. The expected message had come.
All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this
to happen.

He was walking down the long corridor at the Minis-
try and he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped
the note into his hand when he became aware that some-
one larger than himself was walking just behind him. The
person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a
prelude to speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned.
It was O'Brien.

At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only
impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He
would have been incapable of speaking. O'Brien, however,
had continued forward in the same movement, laying a
friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the
two of them were walking side by side. He began speak-
ing with the peculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him
from the majority of Inner Party members.

'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,'
he said. 'I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in
'The Times' the other day. You take a scholarly interest in
Newspeak, I believe? '

Winston had recovered part of his self-possession.
'Hardly scholarly' he said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my



1984



subject. I have never had anything to do with the actual
construction of the language. '

'But you write it very elegantly' said O'Brien. "That is not
only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of
yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my
memory for the moment. '

Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was incon-
ceivable that this was anything other than a reference to
Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an
unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have
been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously
have been intended as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a
small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them
into accomplices. They had continued to stroll slowly down
the corridor, but now O'Brien halted. With the curious, dis-
arming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the
gesture he resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went
on:

'What I had really intended to say was that in your article
I noticed you had used two words which have become obso-
lete. But they have only become so very recently. Have you
seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary? '

'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued yet.
We are still using the ninth in the Records Department. '

'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months,
I believe. But a few advance copies have been circulated.
I have one myself. It might interest you to look at it, per-
haps? '

'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where



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this tended.

'Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The
reduction in the number of verbs — that is the point that will
appeal to you, I think. Let me see, shall I send a messenger
to you with the dictionary? But I am afraid I invariably for-
get anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it up at
my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you
my address. '

They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat
absentmindedly O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then
produced a small leather-covered notebook and a gold
ink-pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a
position that anyone who was watching at the other end of
the instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled
an address, tore out the page and handed it to Winston.

'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not, my
servant will give you the dictionary'

He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper,
which this time there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless
he carefully memorized what was written on it, and some
hours later dropped it into the memory hole along with a
mass of other papers.

They had been talking to one another for a couple of
minutes at the most. There was only one meaning that the
episode could possibly have. It had been contrived as a way
of letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This was neces-
sary, because except by direct enquiry it was never possible
to discover where anyone lived. There were no directories
of any kind. 'If you ever want to see me, this is where I can



1984



be found,' was what O'Brien had been saying to him. Per-
haps there would even be a message concealed somewhere
in the dictionary. But at any rate, one thing was certain. The
conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had
reached the outer edges of it.

He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's
summons. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long de-
lay — he was not certain. What was happening was only the
working-out of a process that had started years ago. The
first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the sec-
ond had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from
thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last
step was something that would happen in the Ministry of
Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the be-
ginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like
a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while
he was speaking to O'Brien, when the meaning of the words
had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken posses-
sion of his body. He had the sensation of stepping into the
dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because
he had always known that the grave was there and waiting
for him.



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Chapter 7



Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Ju-
lia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something
that might have been 'What's the matter? '

'I dreamt — ' he began, and stopped short. It was too com-
plex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and
there was a memory connected with it that had swum into
his mind in the few seconds after waking.

He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmo-
sphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which
his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a land-
scape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred
inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass
was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything
was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into
interminable distances. The dream had also been compre-
hended by — indeed, in some sense it had consisted in — a
gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again
thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the
news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets,
before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.

'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed
I had murdered my mother? '

'Why did you murder her? ' said Julia, almost asleep.

'I didn't murder her. Not physically'



1984



In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his
mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster
of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a
memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his
consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the
date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, pos-
sibly twelve, when it had happened.

His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much
earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the
rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical
panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations,
the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proc-
lamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in
shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside
the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the dis-
tance — above all, the fact that there was never enough to
eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking
out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes
even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully
scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the pass-
ing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted
over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few frag-
ments of oil-cake.

When his father disappeared, his mother did not show
any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came
over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless.
It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for



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something that she knew must happen. She did everything
that was needed — cooked, washed, mended, made the bed,
swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece — always very slowly
and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an art-
ist's lay- figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely
body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours
at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nurs-
ing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two
or three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occa-
sionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him
against her for a long time without saying anything. He was
aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this
was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing
that was about to happen.

He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-
smelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a white
counterpane. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf
where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was
a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He
remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the
gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he
remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid
battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly,
over and over again, why there was not more food, he would
shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of
his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and
sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt
a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his
share. His mother was quite ready to give him more than



1984



his share. She took it for granted that he, 'the boy', should
have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him
he invariably demanded more. At every meal she would be-
seech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little
sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He
would cry out with rage when she stopped ladling, he would
try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he
would grab bits from his sister's plate. He knew that he was
starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt
that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his bel-
ly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did
not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the wretched
store of food on the shelf.

One day a chocolate-ration was issued. There had been
no such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered
quite clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a
two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days)
between the three of them. It was obvious that it ought to
be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he
were listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself
demanding in a loud booming voice that he should be giv-
en the whole piece. His mother told him not to be greedy.
There was a long, nagging argument that went round and
round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargain-
ings. His tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both hands,
exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at
him with large, mournful eyes. In the end his mother broke
off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to Winston,
giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold

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of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was.
Winston stood watching her for a moment. Then with a
sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate
out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the door.

'Winston, Winston! ' his mother called after him. 'Come
back! Give your sister back her chocolate! '

He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anx-
ious eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking
about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on
the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been
robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother
drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against
her breast. Something in the gesture told him that his sis-
ter was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs, with the
chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured
the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and
hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger
drove him home. When he came back his mother had dis-
appeared. This was already becoming normal at that time.
Nothing was gone from the room except his mother and his
sister. They had not taken any clothes, not even his mother's
overcoat. To this day he did not know with any certainty
that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible that she
had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his
sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself,
to one of the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation
Centres, they were called) which had grown up as a result
of the civil war, or she might have been sent to the labour



1984



camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or
other to die.

The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the en-
veloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole
meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went back to
another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother
had sat on the dingy whitequilted bed, with the child cling-
ing to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath
him, and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking
up at him through the darkening water.

He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance.
Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself
into a more comfortable position.

'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she
said indistinctly. 'All children are swine. '

'Yes. But the real point of the story '

From her breathing it was evident that she was going
off to sleep again. He would have liked to continue talking
about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could
remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still
less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of
nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that
she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own,
and could not be altered from outside. It would not have
occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby
becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him,
and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him
love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother
had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed



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nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert
the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to
do it.