Chapter
3
Winston was dreaming of his
mother.
He must,
he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared.
She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and
magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more
vaguely as dark and thin,
dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very
thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of them must
evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the
fifties.
At this
moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his
young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a
tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were
looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place — the bottom of a
well, for instance, or a very deep grave — but it was a place which, already
far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a
sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still
air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they
were sinking down, down into the green waters which in another moment must hide
them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and air while they were being
sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew
it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was
no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that
they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of
the unavoidable order of things.
He could
not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the
lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one
of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a
continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of
facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing
that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death, nearly thirty
years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible.
Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was
still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by
one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his
heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love
her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed
herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. 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 and his sister, looking up at him
through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
Suddenly
he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting
rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at
recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not
he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden
Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering
across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite
side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the
breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women's hair. Somewhere
near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where
dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.
The girl
with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a
single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her
body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely
looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the
gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and
carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of
thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all
be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too
was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word
'Shakespeare' on his lips.
The
telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the
same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for
office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed — naked, for a member of
the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually, and a suit of
pyjamas was 600 — and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were
lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next
moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked
him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only
begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps.
His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had
started itching.
'Thirty to
forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. ' Thirty to forty group! Take
your places, please. Thirties to forties!'
Winston
sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a
youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had
already appeared.
'Arms
bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me. One, two,
three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into
it! One, two, three four! One two, three, four! . . .'
The pain
of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the impression
made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it
somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face
the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks,
he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early
childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late fifties everything
faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the
outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which
had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without
being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to
which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the
names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip
One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called
England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been
called London.
Winston
could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but
it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his
childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared
to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had
fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember
his father's hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place
deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet
and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to
stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way
behind them. She was carrying his baby sister — or perhaps it was only a bundle
of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had
been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he
had realized to be a Tube station.
There were
people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed
tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston
and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near them
an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk. The old man
had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white
hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked
of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could
have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. But though
slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and
unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing,
something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just
happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old
man loved — a little granddaughter, perhaps had been killed. Every few minutes
the old man kept repeating:
'We didn't
ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's what comes of
trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers.
But which
buggers they didn't ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember.
Since
about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it
had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there
had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered
vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was
fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no
written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment
than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984),
Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or
private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time
been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only
four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with
Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to
possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. 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, and it followed that any past or future
agreement with him was impossible.
The
frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his
shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their
bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back
muscles) — the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party
could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never
happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party
said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith,
knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four
years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness,
which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie
which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie
passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party
slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And
yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever
was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All
that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.
'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'
'Stand
easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.
Winston
sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind
slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know,
to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed
lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to
be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to
repudiate morality while laying claim to it, 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 draw it back into memory again at the
moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all,
to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate
subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to
become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to
understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
The
instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see which of us
can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over from the hips,
please, comrades. One-two! One-two! ...'
Winston
loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to
his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. The
half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had
not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you
establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your
own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big
Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it was
impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother
figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest
days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already
they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the
capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of
London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There
was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented. Winston
could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence.
He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was
possible that in its Oldspeak form-'English Socialism', that is to say — it had
been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could
put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed
in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He
remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove
nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held
in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an
historical fact. And on that occasion
'Smith!'
screamed the shrewish 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 stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'
A sudden
hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely
inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the
eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her
arms above her head and — one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable
neatness and efficiency — bent over and tucked the first joint 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 herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching
his toes. We don't all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at
least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the
sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with.
Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better,' she added
encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes
with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
[ to be continued with Chapter 4
]
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