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.
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