«Smith!» shouted the woman from the telescreen. «6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now, comrades, watch me».
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face didn't show any emotions. He stood watching while the woman did the exercise. She wasn't graceful, but she did it easily.
«There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look». She did it again. «You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to», she said. «Anyone under forty-five can touch his toes. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better», she added as Winston touched his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
Chapter 4
Winston sighed deeply and pulled the speakwrite towards him. He blew the dust from it, and put on his spectacles. Four small cylinders of paper had already fell out of the pneumatic tube on the right side of his desk. He unrolled them.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three holes. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, a large slit with a wire grating. This last was for waste paper. There were thousands or tens of thousands of similar slits in the building, not only in every room but also in every corridor. For some reason they were called memory holes. Warm air carried away the waste paper that you put in those holes to some place where it was burnt.
Winston examined the four pieces of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated Newspeak words.
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb day order doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
Winston felt happy that he got the forth message; it was a responsible job, so he laid the fourth message aside. The other three were easy tasks.
Winston dialled «back numbers» on the telescreen and called for the Times, which appeared out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes. He had received messages about articles or news items which it thought necessary to change for one reason or another. The word that described the process was «to rectify». For example, it appeared in the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother had said the previous day that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian army would shortly attack North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had attacked South India and left North Africa alone. It was necessary to rewrite a small PART of Big Brother's speech, as if he had predicted the thing that had actually happened. Or again, the forecasts for the fourth quarter of 1983 in the Times of the nineteenth of December were wrong. Winston's job was to change the forecast. As for the third message, there was a very simple mistake which could be corrected in a couple of minutes. In February, the Ministry of Plenty promised that the chocolate ration would not be reduced during 1984. However, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of this week. He just needed to change the promise into a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he pushed his speakwritten corrections with the appropriate copy of the Times into the pneumatic tube. Then he threw the original message and any notes that he himself had made into the memory hole.
He didn't know in detail what happened to the corrections, but he knew in general terms. The number of the Times would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed and replaced with the corrected copy. Not only newspapers were changed, but also books, posters, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs and so on. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was corrected. It was impossible to prove that any falsification had taken place. There was the largest section of the Records Department that collected all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which were corrected and had to be destroyed.
But actually, he thought, it was not even a falsification. It was a substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material had no connection with anything in the real world. Statistics were a fantasy in their original version and in their corrected version. For example, according to the Ministry of Plenty's forecast, 145 million pairs of boots had been produced this quarter. In reality, it had been sixty-two millions. Winston, however, wrote that it had been only fifty-seven millions, so that it looked like they produced more boots than they had planned. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Or nobody knew how many had been produced, and nobody cared. One knew that millions of boots were produced on paper, while half the people in Oceania went barefoot.
Winston looked across the hall. In the cubicle on the other side a small man named Tillotson was working. He had a newspaper on his knee and his mouth was very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He looked as if he was trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked at Winston in an unfriendly way.
Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he did. People in the Records Department did not talk about their jobs. There were some people whom Winston saw every day, but did not even know by name. He knew that in the cubicle next to him there worked the little woman with sandy hair. She deleted from the Press the names of people who had been vapourized. She was somehow the right person to do the job. Her own husband had been vapourized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away Ampleforth, a man with very hairy ears, corrected poems that were against the Party ideas, but could not be destroyed. And it was only one subsection of the Records Department. There were many more. There were many more people whose job was simply to write lists of books and magazines. There were the rooms with the corrected documents and rooms where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other there were the people who coordinated the whole process.
And the Records Department was only one PART of the Ministry of Truth. Its job was to publish newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels for the citizens of Oceania. There were also departments that worked on proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. They published newspapers with almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, cheap stories, films with sex in them, and songs which were composed on a versificator, a special kind of machine. There was Pornosec that made the lowest kind of pornography, which no Party member was allowed to look at, other than those who worked on it.
While he was working, Winston got three more messages, but they were simple, and he had finished working on them before the Two Minutes Hate. After the Hate he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and started his main job of the morning.
Winston loved his work. Most of it was boring, but there were also some difficult tasks. He could lose himself in them, he knew the principles of Ingsoc and he understood what the Party wanted him to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. He had even rectified the Times leading articles, which were written from beginning to end in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had put aside earlier. It said:
times 3.12.83 reporting bb day order doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
In Oldspeak (or standard English) it was:
The