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.