Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia
rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might
have been 'What's the matter?'
'I dreamt-' he began, and stopped short. It was too
complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and
there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his
mind in the few seconds after waking.
He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the
atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which
his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a
landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred
inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was
the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded
with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable
distances. The dream had also been comprehended by -- indeed,
in some sense it had consisted in -- a gesture of the arm made
by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish
woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small
boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to
pieces.
'Do 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 his last glimpse of his
mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small
events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that
he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over
many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not
have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had
happened.
His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much
earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the
rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical
panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the
piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations
posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the
same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the
intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above all, the
fact that there was never enough to eat. He remembered long
afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbins
and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves,
potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from
which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in
waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over a
certain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which,
when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes
spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.
When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any
surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over
her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was
evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that
she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed --
cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted
the mantelpiece -- always very slowly and with a curious lack
of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay- figure moving of
its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse
naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit
almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny,
ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made
simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in
her arms and press him against her for a long time without
saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and
selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the
never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
He remembered the room where they lived, a dark,
closesmelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a
white counterpane. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a
shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was
a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He
remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas
ring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he
remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles
at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over
again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm at
her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was
beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a
peculiar way), or he would attempt a snivelling note of pathos
in his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quite
ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted
that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion; but
however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every
meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember
that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it
was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped
ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of
her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate. He knew
that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it;
he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger
in his belly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his
mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the
wretched store of food on the shelf.
One day a chocolate-ration was issued. There had been no
such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered quite
clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a
two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days)
between the three of them. It was obvious that it ought to be
divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were
listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in
a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece.
His mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging
argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears,
remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny sister, clinging to her
mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking
over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end
his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave
it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The
little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not
knowing what it was. Winston stood watching her for a moment.
Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of
chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the
door.
'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come
back! Give your sister back her chocolate!'
He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious
eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the
thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of
happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of
something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm
round the child and pressed its face against her breast.
Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He
turned and fled down the stairs. with the chocolate growing
sticky in his hand.
He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the
chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in
the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home.
When he came back his mother had disappeared. This was already
becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the room
except his mother and his sister. They had not taken any
clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not
know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was
perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a
forced-labour camp. As for his sister, she might have been
removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for
homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which
had grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have
been sent to the labour camp along with his mother, or simply
left somewhere or other to die.
The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the
enveloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole
meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another
dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother had sat on the
dingy whitequilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she
had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning
deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the
darkening water.
He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance.
Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself
into a more comfortable position.
'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,'
she said indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'
'Yes. But the real point of the story-'
From her breathing it was evident that she was going off
to sleep again. He would have liked to continue talking about
his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of
her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an
intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility,
a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed
were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be
altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an
action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you
loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to
give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate
was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was
no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate,
it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed
natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also
covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use
against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing
that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses,
mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time
robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you
were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel,
what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no
difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor
your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean
out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two
generations ago this would not have seemed all-important,
because they were not attempting to alter history. They were
governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What
mattered were individual relationships, and a completely
helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying
man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly
occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not
loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to
one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise
the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which
would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The
proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.
They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had
to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he
remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he
had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it
into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not
human.'
'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.
He thought for a little while. 'Has it ever occurred to
you. 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, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm
not going to do it, all the same.'
'We've been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much
longer. You're young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep
clear of people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty
years.'
'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to
do. And don't be too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying
alive.'
'We may be together for another six months -- a year --
there's no knowing. At the end we're certain to be apart. Do
you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get
hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that
either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot
you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the
same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying,
will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of
us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall
be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that
matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even
that can't make the slightest difference.'
'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that,
right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it.
They torture you.'
'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 it over. 'They can't do that,' she said
finally. 'It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you
say anything -- any- thing -- but they can't make
you believe it. They can't get inside you.'
'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite
true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that
staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any
result whatever, you've beaten them.'
He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear.
They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your
head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness
they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another
human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you
were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened
inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess:
tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your
nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and
solitude and persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could
not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they
could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was
not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it
ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that
matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted
to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that
you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose
workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained
impregnable.
Click here to return to the table of contents
Click here to continue with the next section