A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from
the contact
of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed
so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent
spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy,
grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin
and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in
your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a
feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a
right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything
greatly different. In any time that he could accurately
remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had
never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes,
furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms
underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces,
bread dark- coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting,
cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except
synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's
body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the
natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the
discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the
stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the
cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to
pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one
feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral
memory that things had once been different?
He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was
ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise
than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room,
sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man
was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting
suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the
physical type set up by the Party as an ideal-tall muscular
youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt,
carefree -- existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as
he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were
small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that
beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy
men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift
scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small
eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the
dominion of the Party.
The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on
another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons,
stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took
his pipe out of his mouth.
'The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this
year,' he said with a knowing shake of his head. 'By the way,
Smith old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades you
can let me have?'
'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been using the same blade
for six weeks myself.'
'Ah, well -- just thought I'd ask you, old boy.'
'Sorry,' said Winston.
The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily
silenced during the Ministry's announcement, had started up
again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found
himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the
dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those
children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs
Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston
would be vaporized. O'Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the
other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with
the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little
beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine
corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized.
And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction
Department -- she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to
him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would
perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was
not easy to say.
At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a
violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly
round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair.
She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious
intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away
again.
The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible
pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once,
but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she
watching him? Why did she keep following him about?
Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already
been at the table when he arrived, or had come there
afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes
Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no
apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been
to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly
enough.
His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not
actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was
precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all.
He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but
perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that
his features had not been perfectly under control. It was
terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in
any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest
thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look
of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that
carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having
something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression
on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced,
for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a
word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after
all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was
coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running.
His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the
edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he
could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the
next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he
would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three
days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded
up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons
had begun talking again.
'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' he said, chuckling round
the stem of his pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers of
mine set fire to the old market-woman's skirt because they saw
her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind
her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite
badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard!
That's a first-rate training they give them in the Spies
nowadays -- better than in my day, even. What d'you think's the
latest thing they've served them out with? Ear trumpets for
listening through keyholes ! My little girl brought one home
the other night -- tried it out on our sitting-room door, and
reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the
hole. Of course it's only a toy, mind you. Still, gives 'em the
right idea, eh?'
At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle.
It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to
their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the
remaining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette.
x x x
Winston was writing in his diary:
It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a
narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She
was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp
that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very
thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the
whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party
women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the
street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I
For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his
eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze
out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost
overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at
the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to
kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window --
to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black
out the memory that was tormenting him.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous
system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to
translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of a man
whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back; a quite
ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to
forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case. They were a few
metres apart when the left side of the man's face was suddenly
contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as they
were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid
as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He
remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for.
And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly
unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your
sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he
could see.
He drew his breath and went on writing:
I went with her through the doorway and across a
backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the
wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She
His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit.
Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he
thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married -- had been
married, at any rate: probably he still was married, so far as
he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed to breathe again the
warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but
nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used
scent, or could be imagined as doing so. Only the proles used
scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up
with fornication.
When he had gone with that woman it had been his first
lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes
was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that
you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was
dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught
with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour
camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence. And it
was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught in
the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready
to sell themselves. Some could even be purchased for a bottle
of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly
the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an
outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed.
Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was
furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged
and despised class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity
between Party members. But -- though this was one of the crimes
that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed to --
it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
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