People of my age don't really know
anything
about
those times.
those times.
Orwell - 1984
It was their final, most essential command.
His heart
sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against
him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would over-
throw him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would
not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he
was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The
obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Tru-
isms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws
do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsup-
ported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that
he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting
forth an important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If
that is granted, all else follows.
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Chapter 8
From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of
roasting coffee — real coffee, not Victory Coffee — came
floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily.
For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten
world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut
off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and
his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time
in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Com-
munity Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that
the number of your attendances at the Centre was care-
fully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare
time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed
that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would
be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do
anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a
walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was
a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, mean-
ing individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he
came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had
tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it
that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Cen-
tre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking
camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On im-
1984
pulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered
off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among unknown streets and
hardly bothering in which direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in
the proles. ' The words kept coming back to him, statement
of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was some-
where in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and
east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was
walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with
battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement
and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes.
There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the
cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow
alley- ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed
in astonishing numbers — girls in full bloom, with crude-
ly lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and
swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls
would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuf-
fling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children
who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells
from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in
the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people
paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of
guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red
forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a
doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he ap-
proached.
"Yes,' I says to 'er, 'that's all very well,' I says. 'But if you'd
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of been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done.
It's easy to criticize,' I says, 'but you ain't got the same prob-
lems as what I got. "
'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where it is. '
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women stud-
ied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not
hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary
stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The
blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in
a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such
places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols
might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see
your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time
did you leave work? Is this your usual way home? ' — and so
on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking
home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw atten-
tion to you if the Thought Police heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There
were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting
into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out
of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny
child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and
leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a
man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from
a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the
sky.
'Steamer! ' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead!
Lay down quick! '
'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the
1984
proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung
himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right
when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed
to possess some kind of instinct which told them several
seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although
the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. Win-
ston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar
that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light
objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found
that he was covered with fragments of glass from the near-
est window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of
houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke
hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which
a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a
little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and
in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he
got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the
wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so com-
pletely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid
the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. With-
in three or four minutes he was out of the area which the
bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the
streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It
was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the
proles frequented (pubs', they called them) were choked
with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly
opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine,
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sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting
house-front three men were standing very close togeth-
er, the middle one of them holding a folded- up newspaper
which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even
before he was near enough to make out the expression on
their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of
their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news
that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them
when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were
in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on
the point of blows.
'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you
no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen
months! '
'Yes, it 'as, then! '
'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over
two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down
reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in
seven '
'Yes, a seven 'AS won! I could pretty near tell you the
bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in Feb-
ruary — second week in February'
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black
and white. An' I tell you, no number '
'Oh, pack it in! ' said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked
back when he had gone thirty metres. They were still ar-
guing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its
weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event
1984
to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable
that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lot-
tery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining
alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their
intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned,
even people who could barely read and write seemed capa-
ble of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.
There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by
selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had
nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was
managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (in-
deed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were
largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out,
the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In
the absence of any real intercommunication between one
part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to ar-
range.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling
on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable:
it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on
the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into
which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he
had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was
a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead
there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp
turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into
a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tired-
looking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered
where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and
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down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junk-
shop where he had bought the blank book which was now
his diary. And in a small stationer's shop not far away he
had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the
opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose
windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were
merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but active,
with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a
prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Win-
ston stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man,
who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-
aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others
like him were the last links that now existed with the van-
ished world of capitalism. In the Party itself there were not
many people left whose ideas had been formed before the
Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out
in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who
survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellec-
tual surrender. If there was any one still alive who could
give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part
of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the pas-
sage from the history book that he had copied into his diary
came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took
hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape ac-
quaintance with that old man and question him. He would
say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy.
What was it like in those days? Were things better than they
are now, or were they worse? '
1984
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened,
he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It
was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule
against talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it
was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the pa-
trols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it
was not likely that they would believe him. He pushed open
the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in
the face. As he entered the din of voices dropped to about
half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eye-
ing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at
the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as
much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed
was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation
with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man
with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round
with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene.
'I arst you civil enough, didn't I? ' said the old man,
straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me
you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer? '
And what in hell's name IS a pint? ' said the barman, lean-
ing forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
"Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what
a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four
quarts to the gallon. Ave to teach you the A, B, C next. '
'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and
half litre — that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf
in front of you. '
'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man. 'You could 'a drawed
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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
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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-
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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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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.
sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against
him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would over-
throw him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would
not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he
was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The
obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Tru-
isms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws
do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsup-
ported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that
he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting
forth an important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If
that is granted, all else follows.
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Chapter 8
From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of
roasting coffee — real coffee, not Victory Coffee — came
floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily.
For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten
world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut
off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and
his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time
in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Com-
munity Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that
the number of your attendances at the Centre was care-
fully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare
time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed
that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would
be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do
anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a
walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was
a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, mean-
ing individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he
came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had
tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it
that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Cen-
tre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking
camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On im-
1984
pulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered
off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among unknown streets and
hardly bothering in which direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in
the proles. ' The words kept coming back to him, statement
of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was some-
where in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and
east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was
walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with
battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement
and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes.
There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the
cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow
alley- ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed
in astonishing numbers — girls in full bloom, with crude-
ly lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and
swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls
would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuf-
fling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children
who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells
from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in
the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people
paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of
guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red
forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a
doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he ap-
proached.
"Yes,' I says to 'er, 'that's all very well,' I says. 'But if you'd
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of been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done.
It's easy to criticize,' I says, 'but you ain't got the same prob-
lems as what I got. "
'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where it is. '
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women stud-
ied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not
hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary
stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The
blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in
a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such
places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols
might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see
your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time
did you leave work? Is this your usual way home? ' — and so
on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking
home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw atten-
tion to you if the Thought Police heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There
were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting
into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out
of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny
child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and
leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a
man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from
a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the
sky.
'Steamer! ' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead!
Lay down quick! '
'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the
1984
proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung
himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right
when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed
to possess some kind of instinct which told them several
seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although
the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. Win-
ston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar
that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light
objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found
that he was covered with fragments of glass from the near-
est window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of
houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke
hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which
a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a
little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and
in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he
got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the
wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so com-
pletely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid
the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. With-
in three or four minutes he was out of the area which the
bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the
streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It
was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the
proles frequented (pubs', they called them) were choked
with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly
opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine,
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sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting
house-front three men were standing very close togeth-
er, the middle one of them holding a folded- up newspaper
which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even
before he was near enough to make out the expression on
their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of
their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news
that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them
when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were
in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on
the point of blows.
'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you
no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen
months! '
'Yes, it 'as, then! '
'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over
two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down
reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in
seven '
'Yes, a seven 'AS won! I could pretty near tell you the
bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in Feb-
ruary — second week in February'
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black
and white. An' I tell you, no number '
'Oh, pack it in! ' said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked
back when he had gone thirty metres. They were still ar-
guing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its
weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event
1984
to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable
that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lot-
tery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining
alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their
intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned,
even people who could barely read and write seemed capa-
ble of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.
There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by
selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had
nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was
managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (in-
deed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were
largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out,
the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In
the absence of any real intercommunication between one
part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to ar-
range.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling
on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable:
it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on
the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into
which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he
had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was
a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead
there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp
turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into
a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tired-
looking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered
where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and
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down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junk-
shop where he had bought the blank book which was now
his diary. And in a small stationer's shop not far away he
had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the
opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose
windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were
merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but active,
with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a
prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Win-
ston stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man,
who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-
aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others
like him were the last links that now existed with the van-
ished world of capitalism. In the Party itself there were not
many people left whose ideas had been formed before the
Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out
in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who
survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellec-
tual surrender. If there was any one still alive who could
give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part
of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the pas-
sage from the history book that he had copied into his diary
came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took
hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape ac-
quaintance with that old man and question him. He would
say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy.
What was it like in those days? Were things better than they
are now, or were they worse? '
1984
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened,
he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It
was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule
against talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it
was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the pa-
trols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it
was not likely that they would believe him. He pushed open
the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in
the face. As he entered the din of voices dropped to about
half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eye-
ing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at
the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as
much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed
was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation
with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man
with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round
with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene.
'I arst you civil enough, didn't I? ' said the old man,
straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me
you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer? '
And what in hell's name IS a pint? ' said the barman, lean-
ing forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
"Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what
a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four
quarts to the gallon. Ave to teach you the A, B, C next. '
'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and
half litre — that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf
in front of you. '
'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man. 'You could 'a drawed
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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-
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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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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.
