12-31-1979 23:01

12
===

when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a
helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman
might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little
boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming
with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he
was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting
her arms round him and comforting him although she was
blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much
as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets
off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among
them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then
there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up
right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose
must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from
the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the
house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they
didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it
aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned
her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her
nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they
never——
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering
from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour
out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that
while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified
itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt
equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because
of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come

31
===

‘Goldstein!’ bellowed the boy as the door closed on him.
But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless
fright on the woman’s greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen
and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The
music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped
military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish,
a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and
the Faroe lslands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman
must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and
they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of
unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.
What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations
as the Spies they were systematically turned into
ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them
no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the
Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything
connected with it. The songs, the processions, the
banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the
yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother—it was all a
sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned
outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners,
traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost
normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own
children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed
in which ‘The Times’ did not carry a paragraph describing
how some eavesdropping little sneak—’child hero’ was the

19
====

a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid
joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always
unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,
a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer,
seemed to flow through the whole group of people
like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will
into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that
one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could
be switched from one object to another like the flame of a
blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not
turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such
moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic
on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world
of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the
people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed
to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of
Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed
to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like
a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite
of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung
about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter,
capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the
structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred
this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the
sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head
away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to

79
===

him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was
possible that his features had not been perfectly under control.
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander
when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen.
The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous
tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to
yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of
abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to
wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous
when a victory was announced, for example) was itself
a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak:
FACECRIME, it was called.
The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after
all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was
coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running.
His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on
the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work,
if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person
at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite
likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love
within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted.
Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in
his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.
‘Did I ever tell you, old boy,’ he said, chuckling round the
stem of his pipe, ‘about the time when those two nippers
of mine set fire to the old market-woman’s skirt because
they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.?
Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches.
Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But

23
===

and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not
simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not.
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might
mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation,
faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once, even, when
two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which
had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It
was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything.
He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brien
again. The idea of following up their momentary contact
hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably
dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it.
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal
glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that
was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which
one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out
a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that
while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as
though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same
cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid
voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat
capitals—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 twinge of panic. It was absurd,
since the writing of those particular words was not


01
===

1984
By George Orwell