com
haven't seen a brass candlestick in years.
haven't seen a brass candlestick in years.
Orwell - 1984
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
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me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding li-
tres 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 cus-
tomers.
There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused
by Winston's entry seemed to disappear. The old man's whit-
estubbled 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 shoul-
ders 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
1984
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 chang-
es 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 Revo-
lution. 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
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 113
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 every-
thing that there was to own. They lived in great gorgeous
houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars
and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore
top hats '
The old man brightened suddenly.
'Top 'ats! ' he said. 'Funny you should mention 'em. The
same thing come into my 'ead only yesterday, I dono why. I
was jest thinking, I ain't seen a top 'at in years. Gorn right
out, they 'ave. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-
law's funeral. And that was — well, I couldn't give you the
date, but it must 'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only
'ired for the occasion, you understand. '
'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston
patiently. 'The point is, these capitalists — they and a few
lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them — were
the lords of the earth. Everything existed for their benefit.
You — the ordinary people, the workers — were their slaves.
They could do what they liked with you. They could ship
you off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your
daughters if they chose. They could order you to be flogged
with something called a cat-o'-nine tails. You had to take
your cap off when you passed them. Every capitalist went
1984
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, Indi-
ans — 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 cross-
purposes.
'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.
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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 his-
tory 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 recol-
lect 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 acci-
dental-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
1984
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 wor-
ries. 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 stink-
ing 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-
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 117
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 bicy-
cle 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 suf-
ficiently 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,
1984
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 per-
haps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose,
and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was al-
most 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. Cream-
laid, 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? '
T was passing,' said Winston vaguely. T 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
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com
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 val-
ue. 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 snuffbox-
es, 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,
1984
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 pres-
ent 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
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room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of car-
pet on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep,
slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fash-
ioned 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 holding 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 arm-
chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a
kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody
watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the
singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
'There's no telescreen! ' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things.
Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it,
somehow. Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner there.
1984
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 win-
dows, 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 re-
member 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-
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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, memori-
al 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
1984
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 tri-
angular 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 il-
lustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.
'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,' supple-
mented 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 paper-
weight, 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 inhabit-
ed 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 run-
ning 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
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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 an-
other 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 recon-
noitring 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 up-
stairs 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 pre-
liminary 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
1984
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bow-
els 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 walk-
ing 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 mind-
ed 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
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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 cob-
blestone. 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 twenty-
three thirty. He went into the kitchen and swallowed nearly
a teacup ful 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 fe-
male 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. Un-
doubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances
were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to
1984
kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and
certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought
with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness
of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which
always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a
special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-
haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely
because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power
to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is nev-
er 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 trag-
ic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on
a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are al-
ways 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 stom-
ach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary. It was important to write some-
thing 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
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knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had
to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and scream-
ing 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 al-
ways 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 suc-
cumbed 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 sum-
mon 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.
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
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 111
me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding li-
tres 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 cus-
tomers.
There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused
by Winston's entry seemed to disappear. The old man's whit-
estubbled 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 shoul-
ders 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
1984
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 chang-
es 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 Revo-
lution. 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
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 113
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 every-
thing that there was to own. They lived in great gorgeous
houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars
and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore
top hats '
The old man brightened suddenly.
'Top 'ats! ' he said. 'Funny you should mention 'em. The
same thing come into my 'ead only yesterday, I dono why. I
was jest thinking, I ain't seen a top 'at in years. Gorn right
out, they 'ave. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-
law's funeral. And that was — well, I couldn't give you the
date, but it must 'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only
'ired for the occasion, you understand. '
'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston
patiently. 'The point is, these capitalists — they and a few
lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them — were
the lords of the earth. Everything existed for their benefit.
You — the ordinary people, the workers — were their slaves.
They could do what they liked with you. They could ship
you off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your
daughters if they chose. They could order you to be flogged
with something called a cat-o'-nine tails. You had to take
your cap off when you passed them. Every capitalist went
1984
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, Indi-
ans — 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 cross-
purposes.
'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.
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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 his-
tory 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 recol-
lect 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 acci-
dental-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
1984
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 wor-
ries. 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 stink-
ing 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-
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 117
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 bicy-
cle 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 suf-
ficiently 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,
1984
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 per-
haps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose,
and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was al-
most 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. Cream-
laid, 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? '
T was passing,' said Winston vaguely. T 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
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com
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 val-
ue. 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 snuffbox-
es, 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,
1984
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 pres-
ent 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
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room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of car-
pet on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep,
slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fash-
ioned 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 holding 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 arm-
chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a
kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody
watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the
singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
'There's no telescreen! ' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things.
Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it,
somehow. Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner there.
1984
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 win-
dows, 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 re-
member 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-
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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, memori-
al 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
1984
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 tri-
angular 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 il-
lustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.
'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,' supple-
mented 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 paper-
weight, 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 inhabit-
ed 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 run-
ning 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
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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 an-
other 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 recon-
noitring 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 up-
stairs 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 pre-
liminary 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
1984
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bow-
els 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 walk-
ing 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 mind-
ed 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
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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 cob-
blestone. 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 twenty-
three thirty. He went into the kitchen and swallowed nearly
a teacup ful 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 fe-
male 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. Un-
doubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances
were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to
1984
kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and
certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought
with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness
of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which
always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a
special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-
haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely
because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power
to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is nev-
er 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 trag-
ic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on
a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are al-
ways 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 stom-
ach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary. It was important to write some-
thing 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
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knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had
to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and scream-
ing 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 al-
ways 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 suc-
cumbed 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 sum-
mon 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.
