It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.[1] To escape the horrible cold wind, Winston Smith[2] walked quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, but dirt still blew in from the outside.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for outdoor display, had been fixed to the wall. It simply showed an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a handsome man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache.[3] Winston took the stairs, knowing that the lift[4] would not be working – at present the electricity was cut off during the daylight hours. It was part of the economy measures in preparation for Hate Week. His flat was on the sixth floor, and Winston, who was only thirty-nine, but had a problem with his right leg, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift doors, the same poster with the enormous face looked at him from the wall. Its eyes followed you about when you moved. Underneath was the caption: BIG BROTHER[5] IS WATCHING YOU.

Inside his flat an attractive voice was reading out a list of numbers connected with the production of pig-iron.[6] The voice came from a piece of metal that look like a dull mirror and formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice went a bit quieter, but he could still hear the words it was saying. It was called a telescreen[7] and could be turned down but could not be switched off completely.

Winston was a small, weak man, his thinness made more obvious by the plain blue Party uniform that he had to wear.[8] His hair was very fair and his face naturally hopeful, but his skin had been made rough by the cheap soap and the cold of the winter that had just ended.[9]

Outside, even through the closed window, the world looked cold. In the street, the wind was blowing up dust and torn paper and even though the sun was shining and the sky was blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything except the posters that were everywhere. The face with the moustache looked down from every main corner. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, its caption said, and the dark eyes looked into Winston’s own. Down at the street level, there was a torn poster, and you could see the word INGSOC under it. In the far distance a helicopter was flying at roof level, a police patrol, looking through people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston’s back, the voice from the telescreen was still talking about pig-iron and how the ninth Three-Year plan had been exceeded. The device could also record, so any sound Winston made above a whisper could be heard and he could be watched through it as well. There was no way of knowing whether you were being watched or not. You had to live with the assumption that every sound you made was heard, and every movement was seen and analysed.

Winston turned his back to the telescreen, which was safer, although he knew that even a back could reveal things. This was because he worked at the Ministry of Truth, a kilometre away, which was a huge white building.[10] It was much taller than anything in the sad landscape of London, the main city of Airstrip One and the third biggest province of Oceania. He tried to remember what London had been like when he was a child. Were there always these falling down nineteenth-century houses, held up with pieces of wood, their windows covered with cardboard, and their garden walls falling down? But it was no use: he could not remember anything from his childhood except for a series of scenes that were mostly impossible to understand.

The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak[11] – was remarkably different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramid shape, built of bright white bricks, 300 metres tall. From Winston’s flat he could just read the three slogans of the party on the side of it:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

The Ministry of Truth was said to have three thousand rooms above ground and a similar number below. The were just three other buildings in London of a similar size, and they were so much bigger than the buildings around that you could also see them all from the roof of Victory Mansions. They were the homes of the three other Ministries into which the government was divided. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained the law. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak, were Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty, and the Ministry of Truth was Minitrue.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. It had no windows and Winston had never been inside it or even near it. It was impossible to enter except on official business, and then only be going through tight security.

Winston made his face look quietly optimistic, which was the safest expression, and turned to the telescreen. He went into the kitchen, having missed his lunch at the Ministry by returning early, and had no food except for a piece of dark-coloured bread which had to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. Instead he poured some colourless VICTORY GIN, which smelt of oil, and drank some as quickly as if it was bad-tasting medicine.

His face went bright red and water ran from his eyes. Drinking it felt like being hit on the back of the head with a big stick. He took a VICTORY CIGARETTE out of a packet and foolishly held it upright which meant all the tobacco fell on to the floor.[12] He went back into the living room and took out a pen and a beautiful old notebook from a drawer.

Winston had bought the notebook in an ordinary shop. Party members were not supposed to go into such places (‘dealing on the free market’, it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept because there were many essential things that were impossible to buy in any other way. He had been very careful when he bought it: even with nothing written in it, just owning it could have got him into trouble.

He was about to start keeping a diary. This was not illegal because nothing was illegal as there were no longer any laws, but if it was found, he would have been punished by death, or at least twenty-five years in prison. Fortunately, his telescreen was in an unusual position. Normally they could see the whole room, but in Winston’s flat there was a space that it could not see, and he went into that area. He was not used to writing by hand because it was usual to say everything into the speakwrite,[13] but of course that was impossible for this purpose.

In small, poorly-written letters, he wrote

April 4th 1984.

He sat back, feeling helpless. He was not even sure if this was 1984. He was fairly sure that he was thirty-nine and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945, but it was never possible nowadays to be certain about a year.

Who was he writing this diary for? For the future – for those who had not been born yet. What should he write? The Newspeak word doublethink[14] came uncomfortably into his head. How could you communicate with the future? It was, of course, impossible. Either the future would be like the present, in which case it would not listen to him; or it would be different from it, in which case his situation would seem meaningless.

He sat looking at the paper. It was strange that he had lost the ability to express himself – he had even forgotten what he had wanted to say. He had been getting ready for this moment for weeks, and he had thought that all he needed was courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was write down the thoughts that had been going around his head for years. But he could not write and his bad leg had become unbearably painful.

Suddenly he began to write in a panic, not really aware of what he was saying:

April 4th 1984. Last night went to the cinema. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed in the Mediterranean. The audience was very amused by a very fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter chasing him. When he died, the audience shouted with laughter. Then there was a small boat full of children with a helicopter flying over it. The helicopter dropped a 20 kilogram bomb on it and there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going right up into the air.[15] There was much applause from the Party’s seats, but someone in the proles’ section started complaining that such things shouldn’t be shown to children but the police came and kicked her but I don’t think anything will happen to her because nobody cares what proles say –

Winston stopped writing, partly because his hand was hurting. He did not know what had made him write this rubbish. But strangely, as he had been doing so, another clearer memory came into his head which he felt he could write down. The reason why he had come home early today – something that had happened at the Ministry.

It had been nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were gathering in front of a big telescreen in preparation for Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place when two people whose faces he knew, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them he knew worked in the Fiction Department. Because he had seen her with tools and oily hands, he thought she had a job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a sporty, brave-looking girl, with thick dark hair, of about twenty-seven and was wearing the sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League. Winston had disliked her when he first saw her because of the atmosphere of hockey fields, cold baths, community hikes and general clean-mindedness she had about her. He disliked nearly all women, especially young and pretty ones. It was always women who were the most loyal members of the Party, who accepted all the slogans, and this girl, he thought looked more dangerous than most. Once when they had passed in the corridor she had given him a quick look which seemed to get right inside him and filled him with terror. He even thought she might be a member of the Secret Police.[16] Although this seemed unlikely, she still made him feel very uneasy. The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party whose position was so important and distant from Winston’s life that he had almost no idea what he did. He was a large, powerful man with a thick neck and brutal face, although he had some charm. There was a strange contrast between his fighter’s body and his sophisticated manner and Winston wanted to know him, wondering if his intelligence and charm suggested that he was not a perfect Party member. Whether this was true or not, he seemed like the kind of person Winston could have had a conversation with, had he been able to cheat the telescreens and talk to him alone.[17]

After they had all sat down, there was a terrible noise, sounding like a huge machine that had run out of oil. The Hate had started. As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein,[18] the Enemy of the People, appeared on the screen. He had once been a leading member of the Party, almost on the level of the Big Brother himself, but had committed some anti-revolutionary activities. He had been condemned to death, but had somehow escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but Goldstein was always the main figure. His attacks on the Party and Big Brother were wild, but just believable enough to make people worried that the foolish might follow him. After about 30 seconds of the Hate, uncontrollable anger broke out in the audience. The terrible face of Goldstein, with the army of Eurasia[19] marching behind him, automatically produced anger and fear. After a while, people were jumping up and down and shouting loudly so that nobody could hear the terrible words that were being spoken in the film. Even Winston joined in. The horrible thing about the Hate was not that you had to pretend to hate but that you found yourself unable to not join in. At first, Winston felt his hatred directed not at Goldstein, but at Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police. And yet a moment later, he was joining with all the people around him and everything that was said of Goldstein seemed to be true and Big Brother seemed to be their fearless protector against the forces of Asia.

The Hate rose to a climax as Goldstein’s face was replaced by a Eurasian soldier who advanced, huge and terrible, his gun firing, so realistically that people in the front row thought he was attacking them. But at the same moment, there was relief when the face of Big Brother appeared, with his black hair and black moustache, full of power and mysterious calm, and so big, he almost filled the screen. Nobody heard what he was saying in all the shouting, but his presence was enough to restore confidence. His face disappeared, and the three slogans of the Party were shown on the screen in big letters:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

A woman threw herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. She seemed to say ‘My Saviour!’ and put her arms out towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands and said a prayer.

At that moment the whole group started a deep, slow chant of ‘B-B!…B-B’ – over and over again. Winston felt his stomach grow cold. He could not help sharing the feelings of the group in the Two Minutes Hate but this chanting of ‘B-B!…B-B’ always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with them – it was impossible to do otherwise. You had to hide your feelings, control your face and do what everyone else was doing. But there were a couple of seconds when the expression in his eyes showed his true feelings.

This was the moment when O’Brien looked at him. In that second, Winston knew for certain that O’Brien was thinking the same as him. A message had passed between them. It was as if O’Brien was saying ‘I am with you.’ ‘I know exactly what you are feeling. I know all about your hatred and disgust. But don’t worry. I am on your side!’ But the moment passed and O’Brien’s face became as impossible to read as everybody else’s, at which point Winston wondered if it had actually happened.

Such incidents never led to anything, but they kept in Winston the belief, or hope, that others were also enemies of the Party. Perhaps the stories that there were so many enemies around were true! It was impossible, in spite of all the arrests, confessions and executions, not to be sure that they existed. In spite of his not knowing whether O’Brien’s look meant anything, it was still a memorable event in his lonely life.

His eyes went back to the pages of his diary. His pen now felt freer and in large neat capitals he wrote:

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

over and over again filling half a page.

He could not help feeling a little panic. It was foolish, because writing those words was not more dangerous than writing a diary and he thought about tearing out the pages and giving it up. He did not do so because it made no difference. He had already committed the basic crime that contained all the other crimes in itself. They called it Thoughtcrime.[20] It was not something that could be hidden for ever. They would catch him in the end.

The arrest would happen at night and in most cases there would be no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared. Your name was removed from the registers and everything you had ever done was taken out and your existence was forgotten.

For a moment he panicked again and wrote quickly and untidily:

Theyll shoot me I dont care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck. I dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck I dont care down with big brother[21] –

He sat back in the chair feeling slightly ashamed. The next moment he got a violent shock: there was a knocking at the door. Already! He sat absolutely still, in the hope that whoever it was would go away, but the knocking continued. His heart was beating like a drum, but his face probably had no expression. He got up and moved towards the door.

As he put his hand to the door, Winston noticed that he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it in big letters. It was an unbelievably stupid thing to have done. But, even in his panic, he had not wanted to shut it while the ink was still wet.

He opened the door and and when he saw who it was felt a great sense of relief. It was a colourless, defeated-looking woman.

‘Oh, comrade,’ she said in a sad voice. ‘I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink. It’s got blocked up and –’

It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor. (‘Mrs’ was not a word you were supposed to use – you were supposed to call everyone ‘comrade’.) She was about thirty but she looked much older. This kind of problem was common: Victory Mansions were old flats, built in around 1930 and were falling down. If you could not do repairs yourself, you had to request them, and you might have to wait two years.

‘Of course it’s only because Tom isn’t home,’ said Mrs Parsons.

The Parsons’ flat was bigger than Winston’s and sad-looking in a different way. Everything had a broken look, as if it had just been visited by a large violent animal. ‘It’s the children,’ said Mrs Parsons. ‘They haven’t been out today. And of course – ’ She had a habit of stopping her sentences in the middle.

The kitchen sink was full with dirty greenish water. Winston knelt down and looked at the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which often made him start coughing. Mrs Parsons watched helplessly.

‘Of course if Tom was home he’d put it right in a moment’ she said. ‘He loves anything like that. He’s ever so good with his hands, Tom is.’

Tom Parsons was a colleague of Winston’s at the Ministry of Truth. He was quite fat, but active and full of ridiculous enthusiasm. He was unbelievably stupid and completely unquestioning: the type of man that the Thought Police relied on. At the Ministry he was employed in a low-level position for which intelligence was not required, but he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and on other committees which organised demonstrations, savings campaigns and other volunteer activities. He was proud of the fact that he had been to the Community Centre every evening for the past four years.

Mrs Parsons managed to find the right tool for Winston and he completed the disgusting job of fixing the sink.

‘Put your hands up’, yelled a violent voice.

A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine was pointing a toy pistol at him, while his younger sister was doing the same with a piece of wood. Winston raised his hands above his head with the uneasy feeling that this was not a game.

‘You’re a thought-criminal’ shouted the boy. ‘You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you. I’ll send you to the mines.’

Suddenly they were both jumping around him shouting ‘Thought criminal’. It was slightly frightening, like the movements of baby tigers which would soon grow up into man-eaters. The boy looked very ready to hit or kick Winston and was nearly big enough to do so. It was lucky he was not holding a real pistol, Winston thought.

‘They do get so noisy,’ Mrs Parsons said. ‘They’re disappointed because they couldn’t go to see the hanging, that’s what it is. I’m too busy to take them, and Tom won’t be back from work in time.’

‘Why can’t we go and see the hanging?’ shouted the boy in his loud voice.

Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the park that evening, Winston remembered. It happened about once a month and was a popular event. Children always wanted to be taken to see it.

Winston left, but he had only taken six steps down the corridor when he felt something very painful hit the back of his neck. The boy had fired his catapult at him. ‘Goldstein’, the boy shouted as Mrs Parsons closed the door on him. What Winston noticed most was the look of helpless fear on her greyish face.

Winston returned to his flat and sat down at the table, his neck still painful. With those children, he thought, that poor woman lived a life of terror. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. They rebelled against their families but not against the Party. Rather they loved the Party and everything connected to it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the practising with toy guns, the shouting of slogans, the worship of Big Brother, was all a wonderful game to them. All their violent feelings were focused on enemies of the State. It was almost normal for people to be frightened of their own children. There was good reason for this – almost every week the newspaper would have a story about a ‘child hero’ who had reported his parents to the Thought Police.[22]

Winston returned to his diary again, but rather than write, he started thinking about O’Brien again. He had never felt sure of whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it matter. There was some link of understanding between them, which was more important. ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness’, O’Brien had told him in a dream. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.

The voice from the telescreen paused. There was a trumpet call, clear and beautiful and the voice continued:

‘Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has just arrived from the Malabar front.[23] Our army in India has won a glorious victory. The war may be coming to an end! There followed a horrible description of the destruction of a Eurasian army, with extraordinary numbers of killed and prisoners taken. It added that from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from 30 to 20 grams.

The telescreen then started the song ‘Oceania, ’tis for thee.’[24] You were supposed to stand for this, but Winston was out of sight of the telescreen, so did not have to.

After ‘Oceania, ’tis for thee’, they played lighter music. Winston walked across to the window. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb[25] exploded. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.

He felt as if he was wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a terrible world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single person now living was on his side? And what way did he have of knowing that the Party would not last for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white front of the Ministry of Truth came back at him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

He took a twenty-five cent coin out of his pocket. These slogans were written on it as well, and on the other side was the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin his eyes looked at you. On coins, stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters and on cigarette packets – everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice talking to you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed – there was no escape. Nothing was your own except a little space inside your head.

The telescreen chimed fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.

Strangely the chiming of the clock gave him courage. He was a lonely ghost saying a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he said it, in some way, it was not completely lost. He went back to his table 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 sameness, from the age of loneliness, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!

He was already dead, he thought. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to organise his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. He wrote

Thoughtcrime does not mean death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Now that he had recognised himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. He had ink on two fingers of his right hand. It was exactly the kind of detail that might destroy you. Someone in the Ministry might wonder why he had been writing during the lunch break, and what he had been writing – and report him. He carefully cleaned the ink away in the bathroom.

He put the diary in the drawer. It was useless to think of hiding it, but he could find a way of knowing whether it had been discovered. A hair laid across the page ends was too obvious. He picked up a little white dust and put it on the corner of the cover, where it would be shaken off if it was moved.

Winston was dreaming of his mother.

He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven when his mother disappeared. She was a tall, rather silent woman with slow movements and wonderful fair hair. He remembered his father less well: he was dark and thin, and always dressed in neat dark clothes and wore glasses. They both must have been taken during one of the purges[26] in the 1950s.

He suddenly realised that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sad in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy belonged to a past time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family supported each other without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory gave him pain because she had died loving him, when he was too young and too selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not know how, she had died because of her loyalty to her family. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother in this dream, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of metres down, and still sinking.

Suddenly he was standing on soft grass, on a summer evening when the last light of the sun made the ground golden. He had seen this landscape so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. When awake, he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, untidy field and nearby, although out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where fish were swimming in the pools under the trees.

The girl with dark hair from the Ministry of Truth was coming towards him across the field. She took off her clothes and her body was white and smooth, but he hardly looked at it. What amazed him was the way she had thrown her clothes to the side. With its grace and carelessness, that action seemed to destroy a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be made nothing by a single beautiful movement of her arm. That movement belonged to the ancient time. Winston woke up speaking the word ‘Shakespeare’.

There was a loud whistle coming from the telescreen, which continued for thirty seconds. It was zero seven fifteen, when office workers had to get up. Winston did get up, naked, because a member of the Outer Party only received three thousand clothing coupons a year, and a pair of pyjamas cost six hundred. He quickly put on the shorts and sports shirt. The exercises would begin in three minutes. Winston started coughing, as he nearly always did when he woke up, and had trouble breathing.

‘Thirty to forty-year-old group! Take your places please. Thirties to forties!’ Winston was in this age group and had to stand in front of the telescreen.

‘Arms bending and stretching!’ She shouted. ‘Take you time by me. One, two three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on comrades, try harder! One, two, three four! One, two, three, four!

As Winston moved his arms backwards and forwards, with the look of painful enjoyment which was considered proper during the exercises, he tried to think back to his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Before the late 1950s nearly everything was lost. When there were no records to look at, you forgot even basic things about your own life. You remembered big events which quite probably never happened. You remembered the details of incidents without knowing the atmosphere. There were long blank periods when you did not know anything that had happened. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for example, had been called England or Britain he thought, although he felt fairly sure that London had always been called London.

Winston could not remember a time when his country had not been at war, but there must have been a fairly long period of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid that seemed to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when an atom bomb had fallen on a town near London. He did not remember the raid itself, but he remembered his father taking him deep underground.

Since about that time, war had been continuous, although it was not actually the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been fighting in the streets of London, some of which he remembered clearly. But to understand the whole history of the period was impossible because there was no record of it. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. It was never admitted that the three powers had been grouped differently, but, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia – therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

The frightening thing, he thought as he was forcing his shoulders painfully backwards, is that it might all be true. If the Party could change the past and say about some event, it never happened, that surely was more terrifying than torture and death?

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. Winston knew that it had, just four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own mind, which must soon be destroyed. If everybody accepted the lies that the Party told – if all records told the same story – then that lie became the truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ said the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past could not be changed. Whatever was true now was true for ever. It was quite simple. All that was needed was victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

During a break in the exercises, Winston thought about doublethink. To know and not to know; to be aware of the truth, while telling carefully-constructed lies; to have two opposite opinions, knowing that it was impossible that both were right, but believing in both of them; to use logic against logic; to ignore morality while claiming you were moral; to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to remember it again at the moment it was needed, and then to immediately forget it again.

The exercises started again and the instructor told them to touch their toes. Winston hated this exercise which sent pain up his legs and often made him cough as well. The past, he realised, had not just been changed, but had been destroyed. For how could you be certain of the most obvious fact when there was no record outside your own memory. He tried to remember in what year he had first heard of Big Brother. He thought it must have been some time in the 1960s, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother was the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His great actions had been pushed back in time until they entered the world of the 1940s and 1930s when capitalists in strange hats still rode through the streets of London in cars. How much of what was said was true? Winston could not even remember when the Party itself had started. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but in its Old-speak[27] form – ‘English Socialism’ – it had been around earlier. Sometimes you could say something was a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented planes. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held written proof of a lie. And on that occasion –

‘Smith!’ screamed the horrible voice 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 stop and watch me.’

Winston suddenly started sweating. His face remained emotionless. Never show anger! Never show unhappiness! A single movement of the eyes could get you into trouble. He stood watching while the instructor raised her arms above her head and neatly bent over, putting the ends of her fingers under her toes.

‘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 bent over again. ‘You see my knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to,’ she added as she straightened up. ‘Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We aren’t all lucky enough to fight in the war, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys fighting in Malabar! And the sailors in the Floating castles! Just think what they have to do. Now try again. That’s better comrade, that’s much better,’ she added as Winston, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.

Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was boring routine, but there were some jobs that were so difficult and complicated that he could forget everything else while he was doing them. He worked in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth and his job was to change, or ‘correct’ the records to make them fit with what the party wanted. For example, it had said in the Times[28] of 17 March that Big Brother had predicted that the South Indian war would be quiet, but there would be fighting in North Africa. However, after that there was fighting in South India and North Africa was quiet. It was therefore necessary to rewrite Big Brother’s speech so that it correctly predicted what would happen. Or, the Times on 19 December had published the official forecasts of what goods would be produced. Today’s statement of the actual output showed that all the figures were wrong, so Winston had to correct the old figures so they were the same as the new ones. Last February, the Ministry of Plenty had promised that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration in 1984. Actually, it was being reduced from thirty grams to twenty at the end of the week. This was easy to correct: all he needed to do was take out the original promise and put in a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the chocolate ration.

As soon as all the corrections to an old newspaper were made, it would be reprinted and the corrected version would replace the original one. This process of correction applied not only to newspapers, but to books, magazines, pamphlets, posters, films, cartoons, photographs – anything that might have some political importance. This meant that every prediction made by the Party could be shown to be correct.

Most of the statistics anyway had no connection with anything in the real world. For example, the Ministry of Plenty predicted that 145 million boots would be produced. However, the actual output was 62 million. In correcting the original prediction, Winston made it 57 million, so they could claim that they had produced more than expected. In fact, none of the numbers were true. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Even likelier, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All anybody knew is that a huge number of boots were reported to be produced, while most people in Oceania had nothing to wear on their feet.

Winston read through an article in the Times about Comrade Withers, a famous member of the Inner Party who had been specially praised and given an award. Three months later, he suddenly disappeared, meaning that he and his associates had done something wrong, but there was nothing about this in the newspapers or on the telescreen. This was normal, because political criminals usually did not have a trial. The great purges of thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals, who confessed their crimes and then were executed, only happened once every two years or so. More commonly people who the Party decided were bad, simply disappeared, and were never heard from again.[29] Perhaps thirty people known to Winston, not including his parents, had disappeared at one time or another.

Winston did not know why Withers had been taken away. Maybe he had been dishonest or done his job badly. Perhaps Big Brother had wanted him gone because he was too popular. Or perhaps – what was the likeliest of all – was that such disappearances were a necessary part of the way the government worked. The only real clue lay in his being called an ‘unperson’ which meant that Withers was already dead. He did not exist: he had never existed.

Winston needed to make some corrections to Big Brother’s speech. He could invent a victory in the war, or some success of over-production, but that might make the records too complicated. Something different was needed. Suddenly he remembered that a Comrade Ogilvy had died in battle in a heroic way. Sometimes Big Brother would talk about ordinary Party members whose life and death were a good example for everyone to follow. Today he should talk about Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and two faked photographs would soon make him exist.

Winston invented the story of Comrade Ogilvy’s life. At the age of 3 he had refused all toys except a drum, a gun and a model helicopter. At 6 (a year early, by special permission) he had joined the Spies, at 9 he had been a group leader. At 11 he had reported his uncle to the Thought Police because he seemed to him to have criminal tendencies. At 17 he had been a district organiser of the anti-sex league. At 19 he had designed a weapon which had been used by the Ministry of Peace and which, the first time it was used, had killed 31 Eurasian prisoners at one time. At 23 he had heroically died in action, being chased by enemy jet planes. He had been carrying important papers, and had jumped out of his helicopter with them, to avoid them being captured by the Eurasians. Winston added a few remarks about Ogilvy’s character: he did not smoke or drink and had no hobbies except an hour a day in the gymnasium. He promised not to marry because he believed that the care of a family would mean he could not do his duty twenty-four hours a day.

Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past. He would exist just as truly as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

Winston was in the canteen, deep underground in the Ministry of Truth. In the queue for the food, he saw his friend Syme, although ‘friend’ was not the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades. However, some comrades were more fun to be with than others.

‘I wanted to ask you whether you’d got any razor blades’ he said.

‘Not one!’ said Winston. ‘I’ve tried all over the place. They don’t exist any longer.’

Everyone kept asking for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones that he had been saving. There was always some necessary thing that could not be bought at the Party shops. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get them, if at all, on the ‘free’ market.

‘Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?’ said Syme.

‘I was working,’ said Winston. ‘I shall see it in the cinema, I suppose.’

‘It isn’t as good as the real thing,’ said Syme.

‘Next’, please!’ shouted a staff member. Winston and Syme pushed their trays forward and received the regulation lunch: a metal can of pinkish-grey stew, some bread, a square piece of cheese, a mug of Victory Coffee without milk, and one sugar tablet.

‘There’s a table over there, under that telescreen,’ said Syme. ‘Let’s pick up some Victory Gin on the way.’

Winston took up his mug of gin and drank the oily-tasting stuff as quickly as he could. He then ate the disgusting stew. Syme was working on the Newspeak dictionary, the eleventh volume. ‘We’re getting the language into its final shape – the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again.’

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words’, he said. Of course there is a lot of waste in verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns we can take out as well. It isn’t only words that mean the same, but words with opposite meanings. After all, what is the need for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? Take “good” for example. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well – better, because it’s the exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger word than “good”, what is the sense in having useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” is better, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. In the end the whole idea of “good” and “bad” will be described by only six words. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was Big Brother’s idea originally, of course,’ he added.

‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to use Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and useless small differences in meaning. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?

Winston did know that of course. He smiled, in agreement he hoped, not trusting himself to speak.

‘Don’t you know that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word with its meaning clearly known. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not just changed into something different, but actually changed into something that contradicts what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has disappeared? The whole way of thinking will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now.

Some day, thought Winston, Syme will disappear. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. He felt some sadness at the thought, but knew that Syme did not like him, and would accuse him of being a thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so.

Syme looked up. ‘Here comes Parsons’, he said.

Parsons, Winston’s neighbour at Victory Mansions told Winston to give him some money. ‘What is it about?’ About a quarter of your salary had to be saved for voluntary payments, which were so numerous, it was hard to remember them.

‘For Hate Week. You know – the house-by-house fund. I’m collecting the money for our building. We’re making a big effort and it will be a wonderful show. I hope Victory Mansions has the biggest flags in the whole street. $2 you promised me.’

Winston found and gave him the money, which Parsons neatly wrote down in his small notebook.

‘By the way’, he said, ‘I hear our terrible boy fired his catapult at you. I scolded him for it.’

‘I think he was upset at not going to the execution’, said Winston.

‘Well, that shows the right spirit, doesn’t it?’ They’re bad children, both of them, but they are so keen. All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. On Saturday, my girl and her friends spent the whole afternoon following a strange man and got the patrols to arrest him.

‘What did they do that for?’ said Winston, somewhat surprised.

‘She was sure he was some kind of enemy agent. She noticed he was wearing strange shoes. So probably he was a foreigner. Pretty clever for a young thing of seven?’

‘What happened to the man?’ asked Winston.

‘I don’t know’, said Parsons, ‘but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been shot.’

A trumpet call came from the telescreen above their heads. ‘Comrades’ shouted a young voice. ‘Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! The standard of living has risen by no less than 20% over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices, shouting their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has give us.

The phrase ‘our new, happy life’ was used several times. It had been a recent favourite of the Ministry of Plenty. The wonderful statistics continued. Compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies – more of everything except disease, crime and madness. Winston thought about his life. Had food always tasted this bad? He had no memories of anything very different. From what he could clearly remember, he had never had quite enough to eat, had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been old and uncomfortable, rooms underheated, subway trains crowded, houses falling down, bread dark-coloured, tea rare, coffee disgusting-tasting, cigarettes not enough – nothing cheap and plentiful except fake gin.

Winston looked around the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would have still been ugly even if they were not all dressed in the blue Party uniform. He thought that if you did not look around you, it would be easy to believe that the physical type which was the ideal of the Party: tall, muscular young men and blonde, energetic, sunburnt, carefree young women, existed, or even were in the majority. Winston thought that most people in Airstrip One were small, dark and unattractive.

‘The Ministry of Plenty’s certainly done a good job this year, ’ Parsons said. ‘By the way Smith, 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 – I just thought I’d ask you.’

‘Sorry,’ said Winston.

For some reason Winston suddenly started thinking about Mrs Parsons. Within two years those children would be reporting her to the Thought Police. She would disappear. Syme would disappear. Winston would disappear. O’Brien would disappear. Parsons, on the other hand, would survive. He felt that he knew who would survive, but he could not say exactly what that was.

It was not the Thought Police that were the biggest danger but the amateur spies. It was terribly dangerous not to control your thoughts when you were in a public place or near a telescreen. The smallest thing could get you into trouble. An anxious look, talking to yourself, looking as if you had something to hide. Having an inappropriate look on your face (looking surprised if a victory was announced, for example) was a crime. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

Parsons began talking again. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ he said with a laugh, ‘about the time when my children set fire to an old market-woman’s skirt because they saw her wrapping sausages in a poster of Big Brother? Burned her quite badly I believe.’ That’s thanks to the great training they give them in the Spies nowadays.’

At that moment, a long, loud whistle came from the telescreen. It was the signal to return to work.

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 attracted 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 –

It was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, wanting to forget the image he had in his head. He wanted to shout swear words as loudly as he could. Or bang his head against the wall, kick over the table and throw the inkpot through the window. To do any violent, noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was making him miserable.

Your worst enemy, he realised, was your own nerves. At any moment the tension inside you could become apparent and put you at risk. The biggest danger was talking in your sleep. There was no way of preventing that.

He continued 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. She –

At the same time as thinking of the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married, probably – as far as he knew his wife was not dead.

Paying for sex was forbidden, but it was the kind of rule men occasionally broke. It was dangerous, but not life-and-death. If you were caught, you may be put in a forced-labour camp for five years. And it was easy enough if you did not get caught. The poorer areas were full of women who were ready to sell themselves. In fact, the Party did not care much about it – the unforgivable crime was relationships between Party members.

The aim of the Party was not only to prevent men and women from forming relationships which it might not be able to control. What it really wanted to do was to remove all pleasure from sex, even within marriage. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee and permission was always refused if the couple appeared physically attracted to each other. The only acceptable purpose of marriage was to have children for the service of the Party.

He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten, – nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious how rarely he thought of her. They had only been together for about fifteen months. The Party did not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases when there were no children.

Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, stood very straight, with excellent movements. She had a bold face, that you might have called noble until you discovered that it had nothing behind it. Very early in their marriage, he discovered that she had the most stupid and empty mind he had ever known. She did not have a thought in her head that was not a slogan and there was no foolishness, absolutely none, that she did not believe, if the Party said it. She hated sex with him, but was determined to have a child to serve the Party. Luckily, no child appeared and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and they separated.

He wanted to have a love affair, but it was almost unthinkable, because the women of the Party did not want sex. By careful early training, by games and cold water, by the terrible food they were given, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans and marching music, the natural feeling had been destroyed in them. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to have sex that he enjoyed. Successful sex was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.

If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.

It was only in these people, 85% of the population of Oceania that the force could be found to destroy the Party. The members were tightly controlled, but the proles needed only to rise up. If they chose they could destroy the Party tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it?

The Party, of course, said that it had freed the proles. Before the Revolution they had been terribly treated by the capitalists, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But, at the same time, using doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were like animals, and must be kept down by using a few simple rules. Very little was known about them. It was not necessary to know much. As long as they continued to work and have children, their other activities were without importance. They went to work at twelve years old, married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, stupid arguments with neighbours, films, football, beer and, above all, gambling, filled up their minds. Controlling them was not hard. A few members of the Thought Police always moved among them, looking for those few who could have become dangerous, and took them away. All that was needed was a basic patriotism which they would be reminded of when they had to accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became unhappy, which they sometimes did, their unhappiness led nowhere, because, without general ideas, they could only focus on little things. They never looked at the bigger evils. Most of them did not have telescreens in their homes. Even the ordinary police did not bother them much. There was a huge amount of crime in London but because it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. As the Party slogan said: ‘Proles and animals are free.’

Winston’s problem was that it was impossible to know what life before the Revolution had really been like. He took out of his drawer a copy of a children’s history textbook, which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying part of it into the diary:

In the old days, before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no shoes on their feet and no homes. Children no older than you are had to work for cruel masters, who punished them if they worked too slowly and only gave them old bread and water to eat and drink. But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with horrible faces. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and –

But he knew the rest of it. How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. It was only the feeling you had inside that life could not have been as bad as it was now. He thought that the only truly characteristic thing about modern life was not cruelty and insecurity, but simply that it was boring, plain, and tired. Life, if you looked around you, was completely different not only to the lies that came out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. The ideal of the Party was something huge, frightening and brilliant – a world of steel and concrete, of great machines and terrifying weapons – a nation of soldiers marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, always working, fighting, winning, – three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was sad, dirty cities where underfed people walked around in shoes with holes in them and living in falling down old houses that always smelt of cabbage and bad toilets.

Day and night, the telescreens attacked your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses – that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. None of it could be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40% of proles could read and write: before the Revolution, they said, the number had only been 15%.

The past was cancelled and forgotten, so the lie could become the truth. Just once in his life he had had – after the event: that was what counted – concrete, unmistakable evidence of the making of one of these lies. He had held it in his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been – around the time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really important date was seven or eight years earlier.

The story really began in the mid 1960s, the period of the great purges in which all the original leaders of the Revolution were destroyed. By 1970 none of them were left, except Big Brother himself. Goldstein had escaped and was hiding somewhere. Of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while most had been executed after big public trials in which they confessed their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. As often happened, they had disappeared for a year or more, so you did not know if they were alive or dead, and then they were suddenly brought out to accuse themselves in the usual way. They had confessed to spying for the enemy (at that time, the enemy was Eurasia), stealing public money, the murder of various trusted Party members, secretly working against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of damaging public equipment that had caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things, they had been pardoned, allowed back in the Party and given jobs which sounded important but in fact meant nothing.

Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Café. He remembered the frightened interest with which he had watched them, while pretending not to look at them. They were far older than him, from the ancient world, almost the last great men left from the heroic early days of the Party. He had the feeling, although he was not at all sure about it, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But they were enemies, who would certainly disappear in a year or two. No one who had been taken by the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were the dead waiting to be sent back to the grave.

The tables nearest them were empty. It was not wise even to be seen with such people. Winston looked at them and realised that Rutherford’s eyes were full of tears and that both he and Aaronson had broken noses.

A little later all three were arrested again. At their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes once again, and a whole lot of new ones. They were executed, and this was recorded in the Party history books, as a warning to others. Winston found out later that all their confessions were lies.

Winston picked up a children’s history book and looked at the picture of Big Brother in the front of it. His powerful eyes looked straight back at Winston. The picture was like a huge force pressing down upon you – it could get inside your head, attack your brain, frighten you so that you stopped believing in things, persuade you, almost, to ignore what you could see with your own eyes. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five and you would have to believe it. And what was most frightening was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the past is unchangeable? If the past and the world outside exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself can be controlled, what then?

But no! His courage seemed to return. He remembered the face of O’Brien and knew, with more certainly than before, that O’Brien was on his side. He was writing the diary for O’Brien – to O’Brien: it was like a never-ending letter which no one would every red, but which was addressed to a particular person.

The Party told you to reject what you saw with your eyes and heard with your ears. He felt depressed at the thought of the enormous power that was against him, and how easily he could be defeated in any argument with any clever Party person. 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. True things are true, hold on to that! The world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects fall. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and that he was telling an important truth, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is given, everything else follows.

Winston had walked several kilometres through the streets and his leg was painful. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre, which was a dangerous thing to do, because you could be sure that your attendances were carefully checked. The basic rule was that no Party member had any spare time, and was never alone except in bed. When they were not working, eating or sleeping they would be taking part in some kind of useful Party activity. Doing anything by yourself, even going for a walk on your own, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism, doing things in your own way. But this evening as he came out of the Ministry, the lovely warmth of the April air tempted him and he started walking. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the thought of a long, noisy evening at the Community Centre with its boring, tiring games and lectures seemed unbearable. He walked first south, then east, then north again, losing himself in unknown streets and hardly caring which direction he was going in.

‘If there is hope,’ he had written in the diary, ‘it lies in the proles.’ He kept thinking about those words, which were somehow both true and stupid. He was somewhere in the poor areas, to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. Perhaps a quarter of the windows were broken and covered up. Two big women were arguing loudly, but stopped speaking as Winston went past. They were not hostile, but were uneasy, as if he were an unfamiliar animal walking past. The blue work clothes of a Party member would 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. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route, but it was enough to get the attention of the Thought Police if they heard about it.

Suddenly the whole street was in a panic. There were shouts of warning from all sides. People were running into doorways like rabbits. A young woman quickly picked up a tiny child and took it inside. At the same moment a man in a black suit ran towards Winston, pointing to the sky.

‘Steamer!’ he shouted. ‘Look out! Bang overhead! Lay down quick!’

‘Steamer’ was the name which, for some reason, the proles gave to rocket bombs. Winston immediately lay down on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They somehow knew several seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rockets were supposed to travel faster than sound. Winston put his arms over his head. There was a loud sound that seemed to make the street move, and he felt a shower of light objects land on his bank. When he stood up he found that he was covered with small pieces of glass from the nearest window.

He walked on. The bomb had destroyed a group of houses 200 metres up the street. There was a black cloud of smoke in the sky. To avoid the crowd that had gathered, he turned down a side-street to the right. Away from where the bomb had landed, it was as if nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles went to (‘pubs’, they called them) were full of customers. He saw three men standing together in the street looking at a folded newspaper. They were concentrating hard – it was obviously some serious piece of news they were reading. He was a few steps away from them when suddenly they started arguing.

‘Can’t you listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven has won for over fourteen months!’

‘Yes it has!’

‘No, it has not! At home I’ve written down all of them for over two years. And I tell you, no number ending in seven –’

‘Yes, a seven has won! I can nearly tell you the number. 407, it ended in. It was in February – the second week in February.’

‘No it didn’t. I’ve written it all down and I tell you no number –’

‘Oh, stop arguing!’ said the third man.

They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had walked 30 metres. They were still arguing. The Lottery, with its weekly big prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. Probably for millions of proles the Lottery was the main, if not the only reason, for staying alive. It was their joy and their foolishness. Even people who could barely read and write could do complicated calculations for the Lottery. There was a whole group of men whose only job was to sell systems, forecasts and lucky charms to help people win it. Winston had nothing to do with the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he knew (indeed everyone in the Party knew) that most of the prizes did not exist. Only small amounts of money were actually paid out and the winners of the big prizes were not real people.

But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to believe in that. The street he turned into went downhill and he had the feeling he had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a main road not far away. From somewhere ahead he could hear shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and ended in some steps that lead to where some men were selling old-looking vegetables. Winston remembered where he was. It was near the shop where he had bought his diary and not far from where he had bought his pen and ink.

He stopped for a moment at the top of the steps. There was a dirty little pub and he saw a very old man go inside. As Winston watched him, he realised that this man, who must be 80 at least, would already have been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others like him were the last links to the disappeared world of capitalism. In the Party, there were not many people like him. The older generation had mostly been killed in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s and the few who had survived had long ago been frightened into forgetting that time. If there was anyone who could tell you truthfully what the early part of the century had been like, it could only be a prole. He decided to go into the pub and ask the old man: ‘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?’

Quickly, in case he lost his courage, he went down the steps and crossed the street. It was madness, of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and going into their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to be unnoticed. He pushed open the door, and the horrible smell of old beer hit him in the face. As he entered, everybody started talking more quietly. The old man was arguing with the barman:

‘I asked you politely enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man. ‘Are you telling me you don’t have a pint glass in the whole place?’

‘And what in hell’s name is a pint?’ said the barman.

‘Listen to him! He calls himself a barman and he doesn’t know what a pint is!’

‘Never heard of it,’ said the barman. ‘Litre and half-litre – that’s all we serve. There are the glasses on the shelf in front of you.’

‘I like a pint,’ said the old man. ‘You could give me a pint easily enough. We didn’t have these stupid litres when I was a young man.’

‘When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,’ said the barman, taking a quick look at the other customers.

There was a shout of laughter, and the nervousness which Winston noticed when he walked in, seemed to disappear. The old man’s white face had turned pink. He turned away and bumped into Winston. Winston caught him gently by the arm.

‘May I offer you a drink?’ He said.

‘You’re a gentleman,’ said the old man, who seemed not to have noticed Winston’s Party uniform. ‘Pint!’ he said to the barman.

The barman put two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. They were not supposed to drink gin, although they could get it easily enough. They forgot about Winston for a moment. Winston’s situation was horribly dangerous, but there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.[30]

‘You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,’ said Winston.

‘The beer was better,’ he said finally. ‘And cheaper! When I was a young man, it was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.’

‘Which war was that?’ Said Winston.

‘All the wars,’ said the old man. He picked up his glass, straightened his shoulders and said ‘Here’s wishing you the best of health!’.

The beer disappeared quickly and Winston went to the bar and came back with two more half-litres.

‘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 Revolution. 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 injustice and poverty – worse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, most people never had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them hadn’t even got shoes on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine years old, they slept ten in a room. And at the same time there were a very few people, only a few thousand – the capitalists, they were called – who were rich and powerful. They owned everything. They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in cars, they drank champagne, they were top hats –’

The old man suddenly looked brighter.

‘Top hats!’ he said. ‘It’s funny you should mention them. The same thing came into my head only yesterday, I don’t know why. I was just thinking, I haven’t seen a top hat in years. They’ve gone right out of fashion. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law’s funeral. And that was – well, I can’t give you the date, but it must have been 50 years ago. Of course it was only hired for the occasion.’

‘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 on – were the lords of the earth.[31] Everything existed for their benefit. You – the ordinary people, the workers – were their slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could send you to Canada like a farm animal. They could sleep with your daughters if they chose to. They could punish you. You had to take your cap off when they passed. But what I really wanted to know was this,’ he said. ‘Do you feel you have more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated more like a human being? Were these people able to treat you as being below them, simply because they were rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for example, that you had to call them “Sir” and take off your cap when you passed them?’[32]

The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank about a quarter of his beer before answering.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They liked you to touch your cap to them. It showed respect. I didn’t agree with it, myself, but I did it often enough. I had to, as you might say.’

‘And was it usual – I’m only saying what I’ve read in history books – was it usual for these people and their servants to push you into the street.

‘One of them pushed me once,’ said the old man. ‘It was the night of the Boat Race[33] – they used to get terribly drunk and noisy on Boat Race night – and I accidentally bumped into a rich young man in the street. He said, “Why can’t you look where you’re going?”. I said, “You think you’ve bought the street?” He said, “I’ll twist your head off it you’re rude to me.” I said, “You’re drunk” and he pushed me into the street and I nearly fell under the wheels of a bus.’

Winston felt it was hopeless speaking to him. The old man’s memory was nothing more than a pile of rubbish. You could ask him questions all day without getting any real information. The Party histories might still be true, in their way: they might even be completely true. He made a last attempt.

‘Perhaps I have not made myself clear,’ Winston 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.[34] In 1925, for instance, you were already grown up. Would you say, from 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 thoughtfully at the darts board. He finished his beer, more slowly than before, and started talking.

‘I know what you expect me to say,’ he said. ‘You expect me to say that I’d rather be young again. Most people would say they’d rather be young, if you asked them. You’ve got your health and strength when you’re young. When you get old, you’re never well. On the other hand, there are great advantages in being an old man. You haven’t got the same worries. You don’t think about women, and that’s a great thing. I haven’t been with a woman for nearly thirty years, if you believe it. Nor have I wanted to.[35]

Winston sat back against the window. It was no use going on. He was about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up and went into the disgusting toilet at the side of the room. Winston sat for a minute or two looking at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet took him out into the street again. Within twenty years, he realised that the huge and simple question, ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have become completely unanswerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few survivors from the old world could not compare one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, but could not think about the important facts. They were like an ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were made into lies – 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 thoughts stopped suddenly. He realised he was standing outside the shop where he had bought the diary. A feeling of fear went through him. It had been sufficiently dangerous to buy the book in the beginning, and he had said that he would never come near the place again. And yet once he started thinking, his feet had brought him back as if he no longer controlled them. It was to avoid doing such suicidal things that he had started 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 obvious inside it than standing in the street, he went in. If questioned, he could say that he was trying to buy razor blades.

The shop owner had just lit an oil lamp[36] which gave off an unclean but friendly smell. He was about sixty, his hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were still black. His glasses, and his gentle, careful movements and fact that he was wearing an old black velvet jacket, made him seem like an intellectual, maybe a writer or a musician. His voice was soft, and he did not sound as uneducated as most proles.

‘I recognised you in the street,’ he said immediately. ‘Is there anything special I can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?’

‘I was passing,’ said Winston. ‘I don’t want anything in particular.’

‘That’s good,’ said the man, ‘because I probably couldn’t have satisfied you. You see how it is; an empty shop, you might say. This is a secret, but the antique trade is almost finished. Nobody wants old things and you can’t get them. Furniture, china, glass – it’s all gradually been broken up.’

The tiny shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but there was almost nothing in it of any value. There was so little space to walk around because there were dusty picture frames standing all along the walls. There were lots of old, useless things, but on a small table in the corner, there were some beautiful little items. He noticed a round, smooth thing that reflected the light from the lamp.

It was a heavy piece of glass with a strange pink object inside, that made Winston think of a rose or something from the sea.

‘What is it?’ said Winston.

‘That’s coral, that is,’ said the old man. ‘It must have come from the Indian Ocean. They used to put it inside glass. It must have been made a hundred years ago.’

‘It’s a beautiful thing,’ said Winston.

‘It is a beautiful thing,’ said the old man thankfully. ‘But there aren’t many who would say so nowadays.’ He coughed. ‘Now, if you wanted to buy it, it would cost you four dollars. I can remember when a thing like that would have cost eight pounds. But who cares about genuine antiques nowadays – even the few that are left?’

Winston immediately paid the four dollars and put the lovely thing into his pocket. He liked it not so much for its beauty as for the fact that it belonged to an age that was so different from the present one. The soft glass was not like any glass that he had ever seen. The thing that made it even more attractive was that it was useless – although it must have been a paperweight. It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately it was not obvious. It was a strange thing, even a rather dangerous thing, for a Party member to have. Anything old, even anything beautiful, was always a bit suspicious. The old man had become more cheerful after receiving the four dollars. Winston realised he would have accepted three or even two.

‘There’s another room upstairs that you might like to take a look at, he said. ‘There’s not much in it. We’ll need another light if we’re going upstairs.’

He lit another lamp, and with his bent back, led Winston slowly up the stairs. Winston noticed that the room still looked like someone lived in it. Under the window was a big bed.

‘We lived here until my wife died, said the old man. ‘I’m slowly selling the furniture. Now that’s a beautiful bed, or it would be if you could get the insects out of it. But I expect you would find it too big.’

The old man held the lamp up high so that Winston could see the whole room. The thought went through Winston’s mind that it would be quite easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a foolish idea, but the room made him feel a sort of longing for the past. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a comfortable room like this, completely alone, completely safe, with nobody watching you, no voice telling you what to do, no sound except the noise of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.

‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not help saying.

‘Ah,’ said the old man. ‘I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never felt I needed one, somehow.’

There was a small bookcase in one corner, and Winston was already moving towards it. It contained nothing at all interesting. The destruction of books[37] had been done with the same completeness in the prole areas as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that any book printed before 1960 existed anywhere in Oceania.

‘Now, if you are interested in old prints –’ he began.

Winston looked at the picture. It was of an oval building, and a small tower in front.[38] Behind it seemed to be a statue,[39] which seemed somehow familiar but he did not remember it.

‘I know that building,’ said Winston finally. ‘It’s a ruin now. It’s in the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.’

‘That’s right. Outside the Law Courts.[40] It was bombed in – oh, many years ago. It was a church at one time.’

Winston wondered what century the church had been built in. It was always difficult to work out the age of a London building. Anything large and impressive, if it looked reasonably new, was always said to have been built since the Revolution, while anything that was obviously older was said to belong to the ‘Middle Ages’. The centuries of capitalism were said to have produced nothing of any value. You could not learn history from buildings, any more than you could learn it from books. Statues, memorials, the names of streets, anything that might tell you about the past had been changed.

‘I never knew it had been a church,’ he said.

‘There are a lot of them left, really,’ said the old man, ‘though they have been made into other things. Another one is St. Martin’s.’

‘Where was that?’ said Winston.

‘St. Martin’s? That’s still standing. It’s in Victory Square, beside the picture gallery.[41]

Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used for propaganda of various kinds – models of rocket bombs and big ships, and displays of the terrible things that the enemy had done.

‘St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields it used to be called,’ he said, ‘though I don’t remember any fields anywhere near it.’[42]

Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an even stranger thing than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry home, unless it was taken out of its frame. But he stayed for a few more minutes, finding out that the man was called Mr Charrington. He was 63 and had lived in the shop for 30 years.

Winston went down the stairs and carefully stepped out into the street. He had already decided that after a month or so, he would take the risk of visiting the shop again. It was perhaps not more dangerous than missing an evening at the Community Centre. Coming back here was a seriously foolish thing to do, after buying the diary and without knowing whether the man could be trusted. However –!

Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy more beautiful useless things. He suddenly felt happy, and that might have been what made him careless.

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his stomach to water. A figure in the blue Party uniform was walking towards him, less than ten metres away. It was the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department. It was nearly dark but he had no difficulty recognising her. She looked straight at him and then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.

For a few seconds Winston could not move and did not notice he was going in the wrong direction. She had definitely been following him. It was impossible that she could have been there by chance, kilometres from where any Party members lived. Whether she was an agent of the Thought Police, or just an amateur spy did not matter. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen him go into the pub as well.

It was difficult to walk. The paperweight in his pocket banged against his leg with each step. He thought about throwing it away. But the worst thing was the pain in his stomach. He was feeling that if he did not reach a toilet soon, he would die. But there would be no public toilets in an area like this.

He could not get out of the street. He would have to turn around and walk back and then he realised that he would probably see the girl again and if he ran, he could talk to her. Maybe he could wait until they were in a quiet place and murder her. If he hit her with the paperweight, that would probably do it. But he realised this was a bad idea. He could not run, and he could not hit her. And she was young and fit and would defend herself. He thought also of hurrying to the Community Centre and staying until it closed, so he had some alibi for the evening. But that too was impossible. 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 his flat. The lights would be switched off at twenty-three thirty. He went into the kitchen and drank some Victory Gin. Then he went to the drawer and took the diary out but he did not open it. From the telescreen a disgusting woman was loudly singing a patriotic song.

It was at night they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Surely many people did so. Many of those who disappeared were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where you could not get guns or any quick and certain poison. He thought with a kind of surprise how useless pain and fear were. The human body freezes 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 because the situation was so dangerous, he had lost the power to act. He realised that in a crisis you are never fighting against an enemy, but always against your own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull pain in his stomach made proper thinking impossible.

He opened the diary. It was important to write something down. The woman on the telescreen started a new song. Her voice felt like pieces of glass attacking his brain. He tried to think of O’Brien, who he was writing the diary for, but instead he began thinking of the things that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him away. It would be all right if they killed you at once. You expected to die. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, but everybody knew of them) there was the confession that had to be given and you would be screaming on the floor, with broken bones, smashed teeth and blood in your hair. Why did you have to endure it if the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever failed to confess. Once you were accused of thoughtcrime it was certain that you would die. The horror was what would happen before that.

He tried to think about 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 future in our imagination, which you would never see, but which, if you knew about it, you could somehow share in. But the voice from the telescreen was loud and he could not think any longer. He tried to light a cigarette but half the tobacco fell out onto his tongue and it was difficult to spit it out. The face of Big Brother came into his mind. He took out a coin and looked at it. The face looked up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?[43] The words came back at him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.