“Why can’t we go and see the hanging?” roared the boy.
“Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!” chanted the little girl.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always wanted to be taken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. They adored the Party and everything connected with it. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which “The Times” did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak—“child hero” was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
Once home, he picked up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write in the diary.
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call sounded. The voice continued raspingly:
“Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash—”
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, soon came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off. The telescreen—perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate—crashed into “Oceania, ‘tis for thee”.
Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.
He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary.
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty darkbrown soap.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered.
Chapter 3
Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes and wearing spectacles. The two of them must have disappeared in one of the first great purges of the fifties.
At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in a place—the bottom of a well, or a very deep grave—which was moving downwards. They could still see him and he them. He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it.
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him. Such a thing could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. He called it the Golden Country. It was an old pasture.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was getting-up time for office workers. Winston got out of bed and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes.
“Thirty to forty group!” yelled a piercing female voice. “Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!”
Winston stood in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
“Arms bending and stretching!” she rapped out. “Take your time by me. ONE, two, three, four! ONE, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! ONE, two, three four! ONE two, three, four!…”
Winston mechanically shot his arms back and forth, with the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks. He was struggling to think his way backward into his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late fifties everything faded. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain. Though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.
Winston could not remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was a piece of knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened.
“Stand easy!” barked the instructress.
Winston slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of the truth while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,. That was the