In the middle of the morning, as Winston stepped out of the office to go to the toilet, he saw the girl with the dark hair coming towards him. Four days had passed since he had seen her following him. As she came nearer, he saw that she had injured her right arm.

They were about four metres apart when she suddenly fell and she cried out in pain. She must have fallen on her injured arm. Winston stopped and she got up. Her face was milky yellow, which made her mouth look very red. She looked at him with an expression that looked more like fear than pain.

Winston felt a strange emotion in his heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him. In front of him also was a human being, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Without thinking he had moved forward to help her when he saw her fall.

‘You’re hurt?’ he said.

‘It’s nothing. My arm. It’ll be all right in a second.’

She did not look all right – she looked nervous and very pale.

She held out her free hand to him and he helped her up. When she was standing she looked better.

‘It’s nothing’ she repeated, ‘I only gave my wrist a bang. Thanks, comrade!’

She then started walking again, as quickly as if there really was nothing wrong. The fall and getting up had taken maybe half a minute. It was very important not to show your feelings in your face – especially as there had been a telescreen right in front of them when it happened. However, it was difficult not to show surprise, especially as when she was getting up, the girl put something into Winston’s hand. It was a small piece of paper.

While he was in the toilet, he opened the paper but could not read it. He wanted to go into one of the cubicles to see what she had written, but that would have been a very stupid mistake. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens would be watching you.

He went back to his desk and casually threw the piece of paper among the other papers on his desk and started working again.

Whatever was written on the paper must have some kind of political meaning. He thought there were two possibilities. One, the most likely, was that she was a member of the Thought Police, as he had feared. He did not know why the Thought Police would send messages like this, but perhaps they had their reasons. There might be a threat, or instructions to go somewhere, or an order to commit suicide, or some kind of trap. But there was another possibility that he hardly dared to think about. Perhaps the message was from some kind of secret organisation.[44] Perhaps the girl was part of it! It was probably a stupid idea, but it was his first thought. Even though his brain told him the message probably meant death, he still had an unreasonable hope that it meant something else.

He managed to look at the note and on it was written, in large, simple letters:

I love you.

For several seconds he was too amazed even to throw this dangerous thing away. When he did, he knew that there was a danger of showing too much interest in it, but he had to look at it once more to make sure that the words were really there.

For the rest of the morning, it was difficult for Winston to concentrate. What was worse than having to focus on his tasks was not showing his emotions to the telescreen. Lunch in that hot, crowded, noisy canteen was terrible. He had hoped to be alone for a while, but he was unlucky: that idiot Parsons sat down beside him. His sweat was so bad that it was almost stronger than the bad smell of the stew and he kept on and on talking about his plans for Hate Week. He was particularly excited about a two-metre-wide model of Big Brother’s head which was being made for it by his daughter’s group of Spies. The annoying thing was that Winston could hardly hear Parsons, so had to keep asking him to repeat his stupid comments. Just once he saw the dark-haired girl, but she seemed not to have seen him, so he did not look in her direction again.

The afternoon was better. He had to do a delicate, difficult piece of work which was important and would take several hours. He had to change a series of production reports from two years ago, in such a way as to make a well-known member of the Inner Party, who was in trouble, look bad. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, and for two hours he managed to stop thinking about the dark-haired girl and concentrate on the task. Then the memory of her face came back to him and he desperately wanted to be alone. He could not work out what to do unless he was alone. Tonight he had to go to the Community Centre. He quickly ate another tasteless meal at the canteen and then hurried to the Centre to take part in a serious, but foolish, ‘discussion group’, played two games of table tennis, drank several glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a lecture called ‘Ingsoc in relation to chess’. His heart was full of boredom, but unusually he had no desire to leave. Just seeing those words I love you made him want to stay alive, and this made the taking of small risks suddenly seemed stupid. It was not until twenty-three hours, when he was home and in bed, in the darkness, when he was safe even from the telescreen (as long as he stayed silent), that he was able to think properly.

How could he contact the girl and arrange a meeting? He now thought it was impossible that she was trying to trap him. He knew this because of her genuine nervousness when she gave him the note. She had obviously been very frightened. He never considered refusing her. Only five nights ago he had thought of killing himself, but now he thought of her naked, young body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had thought she was a fool like everybody else, filled with lies and hatred, her stomach full of ice. He felt panic at the thought that he might somehow lose her. He feared she would change her mind if he did not contact her quickly. But the difficulty of meeting was very big. Whichever way you turned, a telescreen was watching you. He thought of how he might communicate with her.

He did not really know where in the building she worked and could not have given a reason for going there. He did not know where she lived and it was not safe to try and follow her because he would have had to wait outside the Ministry and he would be certain to be noticed. He could not send a letter, because all letters were checked, so few people wrote them. For messages that you sometimes had to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases and you crossed out the ones that you did not want. In fact, he did not know the girl’s name. He decided the safest place was the canteen, if he could get a table for just the two of them, somewhere in the middle, not too near the telescreens, and with sufficient conversation around them that they could not be heard. Possibly they could speak a few words together.

For the next week, Winston’s life was like a restless dream. On the next day she did not come to the canteen – she must have changed to a later shift. They passed without looking at each other. On the day after that she was in the canteen at the usual time, but with three other girls and right under a telescreen. Then for three terrible days she was not there at all. His whole mind and body felt unbearably sensitive, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, painful. He did not write in his diary during those days. The only relief he felt was when working, when he could forget about himself for about ten minutes. He had no idea what had happened to her. He could not ask anybody. She might have been killed, she might have killed herself, she might have been sent somewhere. Worst, and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.

The next day she came. He was so relieved that he could not stop looking at her for several seconds. On the following day, he nearly spoke to her. When he walked into the canteen, she was sitting alone at a table away from a wall. As he walked towards her with his food, a voice behind him shouted ‘Smith!’ He pretended not to hear. ‘Smith!’, repeated the voice more loudly. He had to turn round. A blond-haired young idiot named Wilsher, who he hardly knew, was inviting him to sit beside him. It was not safe to refuse. He could not now go and sit with a girl on her own. It would have been noticed. He sat down with a friendly smile. Winston imagined smashing an axe into Wilsher’s annoying face.

The next day he came early and she was again sitting alone in the same place. With his heart beating hard, Winston took his food to her table. He did not look at her and began eating. He had thought it was so important to start talking straight away, but he now felt a terrible fear that she had changed her mind and was now not interested in him. It was impossible that things would go well between them – such things did not happen in real life. Winston panicked when he saw someone moving towards the table. If he did not speak now, he would lose the chance. He started talking very quietly, and neither of them looked up.

‘What time do you leave work?’

‘Eighteen-thirty.’

‘Where can we meet?’

‘Victory Square, near the monument.’

‘It’s full of telescreens.’

‘It doesn’t matter if there’s a crowd.’

‘Any signal?’

‘No. Don’t come up to me until you see me among a lot of people. And don’t look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.’

‘What time?’

‘Nineteen hours.’

‘All right.’

They did not speak again and did not look at one another. The girl finished her lunch quickly and left, while Winston stayed to smoke a cigarette.

Winston was in Victory Square early. He walked around the base of the tall column at the top of which was Big Brother’s statue.[45] At five minutes past the hour, the girl had still not come. Again, Winston had the terrible fear that she would not come because she had changed her mind! He walked slowly up to St. Martin’s church. Then he saw the girl at the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran up the column. It was not safe to go near her until some more people had come. There were telescreens all around the bottom of the column. But at that moment there was loud shouting and the sound of heavy vehicles coming. Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square. The girl joined in and Winston followed. As he ran, he heard that some Eurasian prisoners were passing.

Already there was a big crowd tightly gathered. Winston normally avoided such crowds, but he was in the middle desperately pushing to get near the girl.

A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards, was passing slowly down the streets. In them were little Asian men. Truck after truck of their sad faces past. Winston and the girl were now pushed together and she began speaking without any emotion, her lips hardly moving.

‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you get Sunday afternoon off?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then listen carefully. You’ll have to remember this. Go to Paddington Station –’

She carefully told him the route he had to follow. He would ride on a train for half and hour, turn left outside the station; walk two kilometres along the road; look for a gate with the top part missing; he would walk along a path across a field; then take a track between bushes; and find a dead tree on it. It was though she had a map inside her head. ‘Can you remember all that?’ she said when she had finished.

‘Yes.’

‘You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate has the top part missing.’

‘Yes. What time?

‘About fifteen. You may have to wait. I’ll go there by another way. Are you sure you remember everything?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then get away from me as quickly as you can.’

He knew that he had to, but for the moment, they could not get out of the crowd. The trucks were still coming past and the crowd were still watching. There had been a few shouts from Party members, but most people were proles, who were just curious. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. As the line of trucks came to an end, it was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd was still pushing them together, her hand felt for his and gave it a little squeeze.

It could not have been ten seconds, yet it seemed much longer. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. At the same moment he realised that he did not know what colour her eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark hair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would have been too dangerous. Holding hands, invisible in the crowd, they stared in front of them. Instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of an old prisoner looked sadly at Winston.

Winston walked along the path in lovely sunshine. It was 2 May and the air was fresh and the trees and flowers were beautiful.

He was a bit early. He had had no difficulties getting there – the girl seemed to know how to find a safe place. In general you were much safer in the country than in London. There were no telescreens, but there was always the danger of hidden microphones and it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without getting some attention. For distances of less than 100 kilometres, you did not need to get special permission, but there were sometimes patrols at railway stations who checked the papers of any Party member they found them and asked them where they were going. However, there had been no patrols when Winston passed through and he had carefully checked that he was not being followed. The train was full of proles who were happy because of the warm weather.

There were so many flowers on the path he found it difficult not to tread on them. He started picking some, thinking that he might give them to her. While he was smelling them he heard a sound. It might be the girl or he might have been followed. Looking round made it seem like you were doing something bad. So he kept on picking the flowers. A hand fell on his shoulder.

He looked up and it was her. She quickly led him along a narrow path into the wood. Winston followed, still holding his flowers. His first feeling was relief, but as he followed her and realised how beautiful she was, he had the heavy feeling that he was ugly and old. He was scared that she would think this and move away. The sweetness of the air and the green of the leaves frightened him. He was always indoors and he was used to the dirty air of London. The girl stopped in a little open space surrounded by trees.

‘Here we are,’ she said.

He was standing quite far from her. He was not brave enough to move nearer to her.

‘I didn’t want to say anything in the lane,’ she said, ‘in case there’s a microphone hidden there. I don’t think there is, but there could be. There’s always the chance that somebody would recognise your voice. We’re all right here.’

He still did not have the courage to approach her. ‘We’re all right here?’ he repeated stupidly.

‘Yes. Look at the trees.’ They were small and thin. ‘There’s nothing big enough to hide a microphone in.’

He moved closer and she stood before him very upright with a strange smile on her face, as if she was wondering why he was so slow to do anything. He took her hand.

‘Would you believe’ he said, ‘that until this moment I didn’t know what colour your eyes were?’ They were a rather light shade of brown. ‘Now that you’ve seen what I’m really like, do you still want to look at me?’ she said.

‘Yes, easily.’

‘I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve got a wife that I can’t get rid of. I’ve got problems with my legs. I’ve got five false teeth.’

‘I don’t care’, said the girl.

The next moment, she was in her arms. At the beginning, the only feeling he had was disbelief. Her young body was pressing against his own and she had turned her face up and was kissing him. Her arms were around his neck, and she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one. They were now down on the ground and he could do what he liked with her. But all he felt was disbelief and pride. He was glad that this was happening but he had no sexual feelings. It was too soon, and her youth and beauty frightened him. He was too used to living without women. She sat against him putting her arm around his waist.

‘Never mind, dear. There’s no hurry. We’ve got the whole afternoon. Isn’t this a great place to hide? I found it when I got lost once on a community hike. If anyone was coming we could hear them a hundred meters away.’

‘What is your name?’ said Winston.

‘Julia. I know yours. It’s Winston – Winston Smith.’

‘How did you find that out?’

‘I expect I’m better at finding things out than you are, dear. Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?’

He did not want to lie to her. It was even a way of showing his love to start off by telling the worst.

‘I hated the sight of you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to rape you and then murder your afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head with a stone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police.’

The girl laughed happily, glad she had disguised herself so well.

‘Not the Thought Police! You didn’t honestly think that?’

‘Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your general appearance – because you’re young and fresh and healthy, you understand – I thought you were probably –’

‘You thought I was a good Party member. Perfect in thought and action. Banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes – all those things. And you thought if I had any chance I would report you as a thought-criminal and get you killed?’

‘Yes, something like that. A lot of girls are like that.’

‘It’s this stupid thing that does it,’ she said, taking off the red sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and throwing it into a tree. Then she took out some chocolate and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he had taken it, he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate.[46] It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper. Chocolate was normally horrible, but at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she had given him. It brought back some memory, but he was not sure what of.

‘Where did you get this?’ he said.

‘Black market,’ she replied casually. ‘I’m the sort of girl who can get things. I’m got at sport. I was a leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Anti-Sex League. I’ve spent hours and hours spreading their lies all over London. I always carry one end of the banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never say no to anything. Always shout with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.’

‘You’re very young,’ Winston said. ‘You are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me.’

‘It was something in your face. I thought I’d take a chance. I’m good at noticing people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them.’

Them, he thought, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, which she talked about with such rude hatred, it made Winston nervous. A thing that surprised him was her bad language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very rarely did swear. He did not dislike it. It was part of her revolt against the Party and somehow it seemed natural and healthy. They started walking through the wood, speaking very quietly. When they reached the edge of the wood, she stopped him.

‘Don’t go out into the open. There might be someone watching.’ Winston looked at the field and suddenly realised that he recognised the place. Surely, he thought, somewhere nearby there was a stream with green pools.

‘Isn’t there a stream somewhere near here?’ he whispered.

‘That’s right, there is a stream. It’s at the edge of the next field, actually. There are fish in it, great big ones.’

‘It’s the Golden Country – almost’, he said quietly.

‘The Golden Country?’

‘It’s nothing, really. A place I’ve seen sometimes in a dream.’

He stopped thinking and just felt. He pulled her towards him. She took off her Party uniform and standing naked was almost as it had been in his dream.

‘Have you done this before?’

‘Of course. Hundreds of times – well, lots of times, anyway.’

‘With Party members?’

‘Yes, always with Party members.’

‘With members of the Inner Party?’

‘Not with those pigs, no. But many of them would if I gave them the chance. They’re not so pure as they pretend.’

He felt happy. Anything that suggested that they were not perfect filled him with hope. Perhaps the Party was bad under the surface and everything about the effort and the sacrifices its members made was all a lie, hiding wickedness. If he could have given them all a terrible disease, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to weaken them! He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face.

‘Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes, perfectly.’

‘I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any morals to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be dishonest.’

‘Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I’m dishonest to the bones.’

‘We can come here once again,’ said Julia. ‘It’s generally safe to use a hiding place twice. But not for another month or two, of course.’

They had to leave, and she became businesslike, putting her clothes on, and arranging the details of their journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She had practical common sense, which Winston lacked, and she seemed to know all about the countryside around London from her community hikes. The route she gave him was completely different to the one he had taken. ‘Never go home the same way as you went out,’ she told him. She would leave first and he had to wait half an hour before following her.

She told him where they would meet next, after work, in four days. It was in one of the poorer areas at a market. Hopefully they would be safe to talk for fifteen minutes and arrange another meeting.

‘And now I must go,’ she said. ‘I’m due back at nineteen-thirty. I’ve got to do two hours work for the Junior Anti-Sex League, giving out leaflets or something. Isn’t it annoying? Good-bye, my love, good-bye!’

She kissed him almost violently, and then disappeared into the forest making very little noise. Even now he did not know her surname or her address. However, it made no difference because they could never meet indoors or exchange a note or letter.

They could only meet once in May, at another of Julia’s hiding-places, the tower of a ruined church in an area which had been destroyed by an atom bomb thirty years earlier.[47] It was a good hiding-place, but it was very dangerous to get to. Otherwise, they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening and never more than for half an hour at a time. They would walk along in crowds, never looking at each other, while they carried on a strange, broken conversation, stopping as soon as they saw someone in a Party uniform approaching, or a telescreen nearby, but then starting again in the middle of a sentence. They would then continue where they had stopped the following day. Julia was good at this kind of conversation, and also at talking without moving her lips. Just once, in a month of meetings, did they kiss.

They were walking in silence down a side-street (Julia would never speak away from main streets), when suddenly there was a loud noise, the earth moved and the air darkened and Winston fell to the ground. A rocket bomb must have dropped nearby. Julia was beside him, deathly white - even her lips were white. She was dead he thought, but he hugged her and found that she was alive – he was kissing a live warm face.

It was hard to meet; sometimes there was a patrol or a helicopter overhead, and they had to pass each other without a sign. Other times they were too busy. Winston worked sixty hours a week and Julia even longer. Julia almost never had an evening completely free. She attended lectures and demonstrations, distributed leaflets for the Junior Anti-Sex League, made banners for Hate Week etc. It worked she said: if you kept the small rules you could break the big ones. She even persuaded Winston to spend an evening a week making weapons as a volunteer.

When they met in the church tower, Winston found out more about Julia. She was twenty-six years old and lived with thirty other girls (‘Always around the smell of women! I hate women!’). The only person she had really talked to about the time before the revolution was her grandfather, who had disappeared when she was eight.

She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a sixty-year-old Party member who killed himself to avoid arrest. ‘That was lucky’ said Julia, ‘otherwise he would have told them my name.’ Since then there had been others. For her, life was quite simple. You wanted to have a good time; ‘they’, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She hated the Party but was not interested in it. She thought it was stupid to rebel against it, as you were certain to fail. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive. He wondered how many others like her there were in the younger generation – people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something that would never change, like the sky, not rebelling against authority, but avoiding it.

They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. No Party committee would ever allow it, even if Katharine, Winston’s wife could somehow have been got rid of.

‘What was she like, your wife?’ said Julia.

‘She followed all the rules, and never had a wrong thought.’ Julia seemed to understand what she had been like. He was happy to talk to Julia about her. Katharine was no longer a painful memory, more just an annoying one.

Katharine had seen sex as an unpleasant duty, but it was Julia’s favourite subject. Unlike Winston, she understood why the Party wanted to destroy it.

‘When you have sex you’re using energy, and afterwards you feel happy and don’t care about anything. They don’t want you to feel like that. They want you to be full of energy all the time. All their marching up and down and cheering and waving flags was simply sexual feelings gone in a different direction. If you’re happy in yourself, why would you get excited about Big Brother and their Three-Year Plans and Two Minutes’ Hate and all the rest of their nonsense?’

This was very true, Winston thought. Sexual feelings were dangerous to the Party. They had played a similar trick with parenthood. They could not get rid of families, and in fact people were encouraged to love their children. Children however were not supposed to love their parents. Rather, they were taught to spy on them and report anything they did wrong. The family became part of the Thought Police. It was a way in which every adult could be surrounded by people who were watching them.

He thought about Katharine again. She would have reported him to the Thought Police if she had not been too stupid to realise that he hated Big Brother. He recalled a hot summer afternoon, eleven years ago, when he told Katharine about something that had happened.

It was three or four months after they had married. They had taken a wrong turn and got lost on a community hike outside London. They found themselves in front of a cliff with a drop of about ten or twenty metres. Katharine was very uncomfortable – she hated being away from the noisy group even for a moment. She wanted to search for them, but Winston noticed some plants he had never seen before.

‘Look. Katherine! Look at those flowers.’

She had already turned to go, but she did reluctantly look down at them. He held her waist to support her. He realised that they were completely alone – there was nothing at all, not even a bird.

‘Why didn’t you push her?’ said Julia. ‘I would have.’

‘Yes, dear, you would have. I would have, if I’d been the same person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would – I’m not certain.’

‘Are you sorry you didn’t?’

‘Yes. I think I’m sorry I didn’t.’

They were sitting together on the dirty floor. He pulled her closer to him. Her head rested on his shoulder, and her hair smelled nice. She was very young, he thought, and she still expected something from life. She did not understand that pushing an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

‘Actually it would have made no difference,’ he said.

‘Then why are you sorry you didn’t do it?’

‘Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.’

She didn’t like it when he said things like that. She would not accept that the individual was always defeated. In a way she knew that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her. But at the same time, she thought that it was somehow possible to make a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and to be clever and brave. She did not realise that there was no such thing as happiness. The only victory would be far in the future, long after you were dead. From the moment of starting to fight the Party it was better to think of yourself as dead.

‘We are the dead,’ he said.

‘We’re not dead yet’ – Julia said the obvious truth.

‘Our bodies are still alive. Six months, a year – five years, possibly. I am afraid of death. You are young, so you must be more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall try to live as long as possible. But it makes very little difference. As long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.’

‘That is stupid! Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg. I’m real, I’m alive! Don’t you like this?’

She turned around and pressed her body into his.

‘Yes, I like that,’ he said.

‘Then stop talking about dying.’

Winston looked round the dirty little room above Mr Charrington’s shop. Beside the window was the big bed and the old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking.

Mr. Charrington had provided a stove, with a pan and cups. Winston lit the stove and boiled some water. He had some Victory Coffee in an envelope. The clock said seven-twenty – it was nineteen-twenty really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty.

Stupid, stupid, his heart kept saying: suicidal stupidity. Of all the crimes a Party member could commit, this was the least possible to hide. As he had thought, Mr Charrington had made no difficulty about renting the room to him. He was obviously glad of the few dollars it would bring him. Nor did he seem shocked when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room to be with a woman. Rather, he said that privacy was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. He would not report them.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! he thought again. It was impossible that they could come to this place for more than a few weeks without being caught. But the possibility of having a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoors and near at hand, was too good to miss. Recently it had been impossible to meet. They had been so busy preparing for Hate Week. It was a month away, but the complicated preparations made everybody have to work longer than usual.

Winston wished they were a married couple. He wished they could walk in the streets together without fear, talking of everyday, boring things. When he suggested renting Mr Charrington’s room, Julia agreed straightaway. Both of them knew that it was madness. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed, he thought of the basement of the Ministry of Love. There, death was certain. You usually tried to postpone it, but occasionally you brought it nearer.

At this moment, he heard Julia coming up the stairs, carrying a tool-bag.

‘Let me show you what I’ve brought. Did you bring some of that horrible Victory Coffee? I thought you would. You can throw it away again, because we won’t be needing it. Look here.’

She fell on her knees, threw open the bag and took out the tools at the top of it. Underneath were some neat paper packets.

‘It isn’t sugar?’ he said.

‘Real sugar. And here’s a loaf of bread – proper white bread, not our disgusting stuff – and a little pot of jam. And here’s a tin of milk – but look! This is the one I’m really proud of. I had to wrap it up because – ’

She did not need to explain. The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which reminded him of his early childhood.

‘It’s coffee,’ he said quietly, ‘real coffee.’

‘It’s Inner Party coffee. There’s a whole kilogram here,’ she said.

‘How did you manage to get these things?’

‘It’s all Inner Party stuff. There’s nothing those pigs don’t have, nothing. But of course waiters and servants steal things, and – look, I got a little packet of tea as well. There’s been a lot of tea about recently. They’ve captured India, or something. But listen, dear. I want you to turn away for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed. Don’t go too near the window. And don’t turn round till I tell you.’

When she told him he could turn round, for a second he almost could not recognise her. He had expected to see her naked. But she was not naked. She had painted her face.

She must have gone into a shop in the prole area and bought herself some make-up. It was not very skilfully done, but Winston did not know much about make-up. He had never before seen a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. She looked much better – she had become not only much prettier, but more feminine. As he hugged her, he smelt some perfume.

‘Yes, dear, perfume too. And do you know what I’m going to do next? I’m going to get a real woman’s dress from somewhere and wear it instead of these horrible trousers. I’ll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I’m going to be a woman, not a Party member!’

They threw their clothes off and jumped into the bed.

‘It’s sure to be full of insects, but who cares?’ she said.

They fell asleep and when she woke up she said she would make some coffee. We’ve got an hour. What time do they switch off the lights at your flats?

‘Twenty-three thirty.’

‘It’s twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in earlier than that, because – Hi! Get out, you disgusting animal!’

She suddenly stood up and threw a shoe into the corner.

‘What was it?’ He said in surprise.

‘A rat.’

‘Rats!’ said Winston. ‘In this room!’

‘They’re all over the place,’ said Julia unworried. ‘We’ve even got them in the kitchens at the hostel. Did you know they attack children?’

‘Don’t go on!’ said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.

‘Dearest! You’ve gone white. What’s the matter? Do they make you feel sick?’

‘Of all the horrors in the world – a rat!’

Julia made the coffee. The smell was so powerful they shut the windows in case someone noticed it. What was even better than the coffee was the silky flavour of the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten.

She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand, liking, as always, the glass, which looked like it had soft rainwater in it.

‘What is it, do you think?’ said Julia.

‘I don’t think it’s anything – I mean I don’t think it’s ever been used. That’s what I like about it. It’s a little piece of history that they’ve forgotten to change. It’s a message from a hundred years ago, if we knew how to read it.’ It was not the coral inside it but the inside of the glass that Winston found so interesting. He had the feeling he could get inside it and that in fact he was inside it, along with the bed, table, clock and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed for ever at the heart of that glass.

Syme had disappeared.[48] He just did not come to work and a few people talked about it. On the next day nobody mentioned him. Winston looked at the list of members of the Chess Committee which he had been on. His name was missing. It was enough. Syme had stopped existing – he had never existed.

The preparations for Hate Week were continuing and everybody was working overtime. Processions, meetings, parades, lectures, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organised.[49] Julia’s unit in the Fiction Department had stopped producing novels and were writing a series of pamphlets about terrible events. Winston had to go through old copies of the Times, changing news items which would be mentioned in speeches. Late at night, crowds of noisy proles were walking in the streets. The rocket bombs were crashing more often than ever.

The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (it was called the Hate Song) had already been composed and was being played again and again on the telescreens. Its noisy rhythm could not exactly be called music, but rather sounded like the beating of a drum. The proles liked it and the Parsons’ children played it at all hours of the night and day.

In the room over Mr Charrington’s shop, when they could get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on the bed under an open window, naked to stay cool. The insects were terrible, but dirty or clean, the room was paradise.

They met seven times in June. Winston had stopped drinking gin all the time. He had grown fatter, his health had improved and he looked better. But both of them knew – in a way, it was never out of their minds – that it could not last long. However, the room still felt like a safe place, although getting there was difficult and dangerous. Sometimes they thought they might stay lucky and it could continue. Or Katherine would die and somehow they could get married. Or they would kill themselves together. Or they would disappear, learn to speak like a prole, get jobs in a factory. It was all stupid, as they both knew. There was no escape. The only plan that could work, suicide, they would not follow. They just had to carry on from day to day, week to week, trying to make a present that had no future last as long as possible.

Sometimes they talked about rebelling against the Party, but with no idea how to take the first step. He told Julia about the strange understanding he felt between himself and O’Brien and of idea of just walking into O’Brien’s presence, saying he was an enemy of the Party and asking for his help. Strangely, this did not seem such a bad idea to Julia. She was used to judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should trust O’Brien just from one look. Moreover, she was sure that everybody secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if they thought it was safe to do so. But she did not think that any real opposition existed.

In some ways she was more wise than Winston and far less likely to believe the Party propaganda. Once when he mentioned the war against Eurasia, she shocked him by saying that she thought the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’. He had never thought of that as a possibility. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party which affected her own life. She was often ready to accept the official lies, simply because the difference between truth and lies did not seem important to her. She believed, for example, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented planes. (When he was at school, Winston remembered, it was only the helicopter that they said they had invented.)

Sometimes he told her about the facts they had to change in the Records Department. This did not seem to worry her. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. It did not make much impression on her.

‘Were they friends of yours?’ she said.

‘No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members. Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged to the old days, before the Revolution.’

‘Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed all the time, aren’t they?’

He tried to make her understand. ‘It wasn’t just about people being killed. Do you realise that the past has been destroyed? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects, with no words attached to them. Already we know almost nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or changed, every book has been re-written, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been re-named, every date has been changed. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. The Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford case was important because I actually held the photograph that proved they were innocent after the event – years after it.’

‘And what good was that?’

‘It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes later. But if the same thing happened today, I would keep it.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t!’ said Julia. ‘I’m quite ready to take risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you have done with it even if you had kept it?

‘Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have made a few people doubt the Party, if I’d dared to show it to them. I don’t imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But by leaving a few records behind, little groups of resistance may get together, and the next generation will be different.’

‘I’m not interested in the next generation, dear. I’m interested in us.

‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,’ he told her.

She thought this was very funny and put her arms around him in delight.

Finally, the thing he had expected happened.

He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry when he became aware that a big person was walking just behind him. The person gave a small cough and Winston stopped and turned around. It was O’Brien.

At last they were face to face and he wanted to run away. His heart was beating violently. He could not have spoken. O’Brien, however, laid a friendly hand on Winston’s arm, and the two of them walked side by side. He began speaking with the serious politeness that made him seem so different from most Party members.

‘I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,’ he said. ‘I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in the Times the other day. You are an expert in Newspeak, I believe?’

Winston had calmed down. ‘Not an expert,’ he said. It’s not my subject. I have never had anything to do with the actual making of the language.’

‘But you write it very elegantly,’ said O’Brien. ‘That is not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an expert. I’ve forgotten his name.’

Again Winston became nervous. O’Brien must be talking about Syme. But Syme was not only dead, but had become an unperson. Speaking of him would have been very dangerous. O’Brien must have meant it as a signal. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime they had become partners.

O’Brien stopped walking and said, ‘What I really wanted to say was I noticed that in your article you included two words which are no longer used. But this was only decided very recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?’

‘No’, said Winston. ‘I didn’t think it was available yet. We are still using the ninth in the Records Department.’

‘The tenth edition still has not been published, but there are a few copies available. I have one myself. Would you be interested in it?’

‘Very much so,’ said Winston.

‘Some of the changes are very clever. You will like the reduction in the number of verbs. Let me see, shall I ask someone to deliver it to you? But I always forget things like that. Perhaps you could pick it up at my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my address.’

Winston thought about what happened. He was sure that O’Brien had planned the whole conversation so as to give him his address. It was never possible to find out where someone lived except by asking. O’Brien seemed to want to talk to him. Perhaps there would be a message hidden in the Dictionary. Whatever had happened, one thing was true: there was some kind of rebellion being planned and he had reached the outer edges of it.

Winston woke with his eyes full of tears. Julia sleepily asked him what the matter was. He had had a frightening dream.

‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that until this moment I believed I had murdered my mother?’

‘Why did you murder her?’ said Julia, almost asleep.

‘I didn’t murder her. Not physically.’

In the dream he had remembered the last time he saw his mother, something he must have deliberately been pushing out of his memory. He was not certain but it must have been when he was ten, or maybe twelve.

His father had disappeared some time earlier, but he could not remember when. When this happened, his mother did not look upset, but she changed – she lost her spirit. He was a selfish child and in spite of the food shortage always demanded more from her. His mother asked him to remember that his baby sister was sick and needed food as well, but it was no use. One day, they got a small amount of chocolate. It should have been shared between the three of them, but he wanted it all. His mother told him not to be greedy but she gave him three-quarters of it and one quarter to his sister. He took her quarter from her and ran away with all of it.

‘Winston, Winston!’ his mother called after him. ‘Come back! Give your sister back her chocolate!’

His sister started crying and his mother hugged her tightly in a way that made Winston think she was dying. He turned and ran down the stairs with the chocolate in his hand.

He never saw his mother again. After he had eaten the chocolate, he felt ashamed of himself and stayed out for a while. When he went back home, his mother and sister were gone. He did not know with certainty that his mother or sister were dead – they might have been sent somewhere else – but he never saw them again.

He told Julia this story and she said ‘I expect you were a horrible little boy in those days.’ ‘All children are horrible.’

He wanted to talk about his mother again but she was falling asleep. As he thought of his mother, he remembered that she was ordinary and not especially intelligent. But she followed her own beliefs. Her feelings were her own and could not be changed by anything outside her. She believed that if you loved someone, you loved them, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave them love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, she held her daughter. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not save the child’s life, but it seemed natural to her to do it. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to make you feel that such feelings were unimportant. In the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or didn’t do, made no difference. The proles, he suddenly realised were still like his mother had been. They did not love a party or a country or an idea, they loved one another. The proles had stayed human – they had not lost their feelings for each other.

‘The proles are human beings,’ he said. ‘We are not human.’

‘Why not?’ said Julia, who had woken up again.

‘Have you ever thought,’ he said, ‘that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here before it’s too late, and never see each other again?’

‘Yes I have’ said Julia, ‘but I’m not going to do it.’

‘We’ve been lucky,’ he said, ‘but it can’t last much longer. You’re young. If you avoid people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty years.’

‘No,’ said Julia. ‘I’ve decided that what you do, I’m going to do. And don’t feel sad. I’m rather good at staying alive.’

‘We may be together for another six months’, Winston replied, ‘or a year – we don’t know. At the end, we will certainly be separated and there will be nothing we can do for each other. I won’t know if you’re alive or dead. The one thing that matters is that we don’t betray one another, although that won’t make any difference.’

‘If you mean confessing’, she said, ‘everybody does that – they torture you until you do.’

‘I don’t mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you – that would be the real betrayal.’

She thought about it. ‘They can’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything, but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.’

They had done it, they had done it at last!

Winston and Julia were standing in a long, soft-lit room with a beautiful dark-blue carpet. At the far end of the room, O’Brien was sitting at a table under a green lamp, with many papers around him. He had not even looked up as Winston and Julia was shown in by a small servant, who looked Chinese.

Winston’s heart was beating so hard he thought that he could not speak. They had done it, they had come at last. It was stupid to come together, although they had taken different routes and only met outside O’Brien’s flat. But just to walk into such a place needed courage. It was very rare to see inside the house of a member of the Inner Party, or even go into the area where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the large block of flats, the richness and size of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and fast lifts going up and down, the white-jacketed servants running around – was frightening. Although he had a good reason for coming, Winston was scared that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear, demand to look at his papers and order him out. O’Brien’s servant, however, had let them in without hesitation.

O’Brien stood up and walked towards them. He looked as if he was not pleased about being disturbed. Winston’s fear was now mixed with embarrassment. It seemed very possible that he had made a stupid mistake. What evidence did he really have that O’Brien as interested in rebelling? But he could not pretend that he had come to borrow the Dictionary, because how could he explain Julia’s presence? As O’Brien passed a telescreen, he stopped, and pressed a switch on the wall. The voice stopped.

Julia uttered a little noise of surprise.

‘You can turn it off!’ Winston said.

‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have the privilege.’

He was opposite them now, his large body standing over them. His expression was impossible to read. He was waiting, for Winston to speak, but about what? Nobody spoke and after the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed absolutely silent. The seconds went past and with difficulty Winston continued looking at O’Brien.

‘Shall I say it, or will you?’ he said.

‘I will say it,’ said Winston quickly. ‘That thing is really turned off?’

‘Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.’

‘We have come here because –’

He paused, realising for the first time how unclear his motives were. Because he did not know what kind of help he expected from O’Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, aware that what he was saying must sound both weak and false.

‘We believe that there is some kind of secret organisation working against the Party, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We do not believe in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also sexual criminals.’

He stopped and looked over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little Chinese servant had come in with some drinks.

‘Martin is one of us,’ said O’Brien. ‘Bring the drinks over here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.’

The little man sat down, completely relaxed, and yet still with the air of a servant. Winston realised that his whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it would be dangerous to stop doing this even for a moment. O’Brien poured some dark-red liquid into the glasses. It reminded Winston of something from long ago, but he did not know what.

‘It is called wine,’ said O’Brien with a little smile. ‘You will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am afraid.’ His face grew serious again, and he raised his glass. ‘I think we should begin by drinking a toast. To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein.’

Winston took up his glass eagerly. Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about. It belonged to a disappeared, romantic past. He thought it would be sweet, like blackberry jam, and immediately make him drunk, but when he swallowed it, he was disappointed.

‘Then there is such a person as Goldstein?’ he said.

‘Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.’

‘And his organisation? Is it real? It is not simply an invention of the Thought Police?’

‘No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour. You should not have come together, and you will have to leave separately. ‘You’ – he bowed his head to Julia – ‘will leave first. We have about twenty minutes. You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions. What are you prepared to do?’

‘Anything we can,’ said Winston.

‘You are prepared to die?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are prepared to commit murder?’

‘Yes.’

‘To damage equipment which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?’

‘Yes.’

‘To betray your country to foreign powers?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are prepared to cheat, to destroy the minds of young children, to distribute dangerous drugs, to encourage sex work, to spread sexual diseases – to do anything which is likely to weaken the power of the Party?’

‘Yes.’

‘If, for example, you were asked to throw acid in a child’s face – are you prepared to do that?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are prepared to lose your identity and live as a waiter or a dock-worker?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are prepared to kill yourself, if and when we order you to do so?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?’

‘No!’ Said Julia.

Winston took a long time to answer and until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. ‘No,’ he said finally.

‘You did well to tell me,’ said O’Brien. ‘We need to know everything.’

He turned to Julia and said ‘Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different person? We may have to give him a new identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair – even his voice would be different. And you too might have become a different person. Our doctors make people look completely different. Sometimes we even cut off an arm or a leg.’

Julia quietly said something that seemed to be saying that was all right.

O’Brien looked at his watch again. ‘You had better go back to the kitchen, Martin’ he said. ‘I will switch on the telescreen again in fifteen minutes. Take a good look at their faces before you go. You will be seeing them again. I may not.’

Martin looked at Winston and Julia’s faces without interest or emotion. It occurred to Winston that if his face had been changed completely, he may not be able to show emotion.

‘You understand,’ he said, ‘that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I will send you a book which will tell you the truth about the society we live in, and the way we will destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members of the Brotherhood. I cannot tell you if it has a hundred members or ten million. You will only meet three or four of them at a time. When you receive orders they will come from me. If we need to communicate with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will tell them about a small number of unimportant people. By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.

Winston felt himself admiring O’Brien. When you looked at his powerful shoulders, and face that was so ugly, yet so well mannered, it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated. Even Julia seemed to be impressed.

‘Members of the Brotherhood have no way of knowing who the other members are. Nothing holds it together except the idea. You will get no friendship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary to silence someone, we can occasionally give them a razor blade. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results you will ever see. There is no possibility of any change in our lifetime. We are the dead. We cannot act together. We can only spread our knowledge from person to person, generation after generation. The power of the Thought Police means there is no other way.’

He stopped and looked at his watch again.

‘It is almost time for you to leave,’ he said to Julia. ‘Wait, there is still some wine.’

He filled the glasses and said ‘What shall it be this time? To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?’

‘To the past,’ said Winston.

‘The past is more important,’ agreed O’Brien. They drank their wine and Julia stood up to go. O’Brien gave her a flat white tablet which he told her to put on his tongue. It was important, he said, not to go out smelling of wine. As soon as the door had shut behind her he seemed to forget her existence.

‘There are details to be settled,’ he said to Winston. ‘I assume that you have a hiding-place of some kind?’

Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington’s shop.

‘That will be all right for the moment. Later will be arrange something else for you. It is important to change your hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I will send you a copy of the book – Goldstein’s book.

Winston was weak with tiredness. He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, he had nothing to do until tomorrow morning. Slowly he walked up the dirty little street towards Mr Charrington’s shop, not really caring about patrols. Somehow he was sure that not going to be stopped today. He was carrying the book in his case. He had had it for six years and had not yet opened, or even looked at it.

On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the drums and trumpets, the marching, the planes, the sound of the guns – it was announced that Oceania was not at war with Eurasia. In fact Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.

There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Winston was impressed by the fact that the announcement came in the middle of a sentence – the speaker had made the switch without even a pause.

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Now a large part of the political writing of the last five years had to be immediately rewritten. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, photographs – all had to be corrected with incredible speed. There was so much work. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours a day, sleeping for three hours at a time on mattresses in the corridors. Meals were sandwiches and Victory Coffee was brought from the canteen. The worst thing was that the work needed thought. Often he could just change a name, but detailed reports required care and imagination. Transferring the war from one part of the world to another needed considerable knowledge of geography.

Eventually, on the sixth day, the work stopped coming. A deep but silent sigh of relief went through the Department. A great work, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible to prove with evidence on paper that the war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free until tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the book, went home and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water was hardly even warm.

He went to the room above Mr Charrington’s shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He boiled some water for coffee. Julia would arrive soon: meanwhile there was the book. He sat down and started reading it.

The world is now just three countries: Eurasia is most of northern Europe and Asia; Oceania is North and South America, Britain, Australia and southern Africa. Eastasia is Japan, China and the countries to the south of it. Northern Africa and southern Asia move between the powers. The three powers have been fighting for twenty-five years and none could defeat the other two. The purpose of war is not to win, but to destroy materials that might make ordinary people too comfortable and, eventually, too intelligent.

The effect of the war is to make shortages of half the necessities of life, but this is good. Even the members of the Inner Party only have a few luxuries. But these luxuries put them in a different world from members of the Outer Party. And members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage compared to the proles. When things are short, small differences in lifestyle become very important. And being at war, and therefore in danger, makes a small group having total power seem a natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

It does not matter what ordinary people think as long as they keep working. But Party members are important. Even the lowest are expected to do their jobs well, and even be intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that they believe everything they are told and live in fear, hatred, adulation and triumph. In other words, they must have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening and, as no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that it should exist. The more senior people feel more hysteria and hatred towards the enemy. It is often necessary for members of the Inner Party to know that an item of war news is untrue, and they may even know that the whole war is meaningless, or is being fought for different purposes from the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily got rid of by the technique of doublethink. So no Inner Party member stops believing for a moment that the war is real, and that it will end in victory.

In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The logical, evidence-based way of thinking on which all science operates is opposed to the principles of Ingsoc.[50] Even technological progress can only happen when its products can be used to reduce human liberty. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole earth and to make independent thought impossible. There are therefore two great problems which the Party needs to solve. One is how to discover what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without them having any warning. These are the two purposes of science and there are two kinds of scientist: One is the psychologist, studying in extraordinary detail the meaning of facial expressions, gestures and tones of voice, and testing drugs to force people to tell the truth, along with hypnosis and torture. The other kind studies killing. In the huge laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and out in the Brazilian forests, the Australian desert, or on islands in the Antarctic, teams of experts are at work.

But none of the military projects ever succeeds. The three powers already possess the atom bomb which is far more powerful than any weapon they are likely to discover. Hundreds of them were dropped on industrial centres and the rulers realised that a few more of them might mean the end of organised society, and therefore of their own power. Therefore, although there was no formal agreement, no more atom bombs were dropped. In spite of the endless deaths reported in the press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks have never been repeated.

The three powers only fight in areas round the Equator and the Pole. If Oceania conquered the areas which used to be France and Germany, it would be necessary either to kill everybody living there, a task of great difficulty, or to include them in Oceania. But it is absolutely necessary to the structure of the three states that there should be no contact with foreigners and so learning foreign languages is forbidden. If they had contact with foreigners, they would discover that they were similar to themselves and that most of what they have been told about them is lies. The closed world in which they live would be broken, and the fear and hatred which they must feel might disappear.

Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in the distance he heard a rocket bomb. The joyful feeling of being alone with a forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, still made him happy. The book interested him, or more exactly it reassured him. It told him nothing that was new to him, but that was good. It said what he would have said if he could have organised his thoughts. It was written by someone with a similar mind to his, but one that was much more powerful, more systematic, less frightened. The best books, he realised, are those that tell you what you know already. He heard Julia’s footstep on the stair. He stood up as she entered and they hugged. It was more than a week since they had seen one another.

‘I’ve got the book,’ he said.

‘Oh, you’ve got it? Good,’ she said without much interest and started to make the coffee.

‘We must read it,’ he said. ‘You too. All members of the Brotherhood have to read it.’

‘You read it,’ she said with her eyes shut. ‘Read it aloud. That’s the best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.’

He began reading aloud and carried on for a while until he realised that Julia was very still.

‘Julia.’

No answer.

‘Julia, are you awake?’

No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it carefully on the floor, lay down and pulled the blanket over both of them.

He had still not learned the big secret. He understood how; he did not understand why. But after reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you held on to the truth, even against the whole world, you were not mad.

When he woke it was with the feeling of having slept for a long time, but he saw it was only twenty-thirty. As he lay, he heard some singing from outside. Julia woke at the sound, stretched and got out of bed.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Let’s make some more coffee. Oh no! The stove’s gone out and the water’s cold. She picked the stove up and shook it. ‘There’s no oil in it.’

‘We can get some from Charrington, I expect.’

‘The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I’m going to put my clothes on,’ she added. ‘It seems to have got colder.’

Winston also got up and dressed himself. The voice outside carried on singing. They looked at the singing woman with interest. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, made huge by having children, then roughened by work, could be beautiful. But it was, and after all, he thought, why not?

‘She’s beautiful,’ he said quietly.

‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.

‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the bird that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?’

‘He wasn’t singing to us,’ said Julia. ‘He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.’

The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing.[51] Party members were the dead; the proles were the future. But Party members could share in that future if they kept their minds alive, as they kept their bodies alive, and passed on the secret that two plus two make four.

‘We are the dead,’ he said.

‘We are the dead,’ said Julia without giving it much thought.

‘You are the dead,’ said a hard voice behind them.

They jumped apart. Winston’s stomach seemed to turn into ice. Julia’s face turned milky yellow.

‘You are the dead,’ repeated the voice.

‘It was behind the picture,’ breathed Julia.

‘It was behind the picture,’ said the voice. ‘Remain exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.’

It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing except stand looking into one another’s eyes. They did not even think of running out of the house. It was unthinkable to disobey the voice from the wall. There was a crash of breaking glass – the picture had fallen to the floor, uncovering the telescreen behind it.

‘Now they can see us,’ said Julia.

‘Now we can see you,’ said the voice. ‘Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Put your hands behind your heads. Do not touch each other.’

They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia’s body shaking. Or perhaps it was just his body shaking. There was the sound of men below, inside the house and outside.

‘The house is surrounded,’ said Winston.

‘The house is surrounded,’ said the voice.

‘I suppose we may as well say good-bye,’ said Julia.

‘You may as well say good-bye,’ said the voice.

Something crashed onto the bed behind Winston’s back. A ladder had broken through the window and someone was climbing into the room. Men in black uniforms filled the room.[52]

Winston was not shaking any longer. Only one thing mattered: to keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you! There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight and smashed it. A little piece of coral rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!

One of the men punched Julia in the stomach and she was on the floor, fighting for breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimetre, but he saw her shocked, pained face. Then two of the men picked her up by her knees and shoulders and carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had a very quick look at her face, upside down, and that was the last he saw of her.

He stood absolutely still. No one had hit him yet. He wondered what had happened to Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman outside who had been singing.

Mr Charrington came into the room and the black-uniformed men suddenly calmed down. He noticed the smashed paperweight.

‘Pick up those pieces,’ he said quickly.

A man bent down to obey him. His hair had been white but now it was black. He was not wearing his glasses. He was still recognisable, but he was not the same person any longer. It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking – knowing he was looking – at a member of the Thought Police.