'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 added:
'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, memorial 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 owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's
-- "there, now, that's as far as I can get.
A farthing, thatwas 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 triangular 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 illustrating
enemy atrocities, and the like.
'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,'
supplemented 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 paperweight,
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 inhabited 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 running 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 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 another
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 reconnoitring 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 upstairs 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 preliminary 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
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels
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 walking 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 minded
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 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 cobblestone. 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 teacupful 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 female
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.
Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were
actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to 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 never 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 tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture
chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting
for are always 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 stomach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary. It was important to write something
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 knew of them) there was the routine
of confession that had to be gone through: the grovelling on
the floor and screaming 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 always
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 succumbed 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 summon
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. The face of
Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O'Brien.
Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of
his pocket and looked at it. The face gazed up at him, heavy,
calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the
dark moustache? Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
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