CHAPTER 8

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell ofroasting coffee — real coffee, not Victory Coffee — camefloating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily.For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world ofhis childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell asabruptly as though it had been a sound.He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and hisvaricose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in threeweeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: arash act, since you could be certain that the number of yourattendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle aParty member had no spare time, and was never alone except inbed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, orsleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communalrecreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, evento go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. Therewas a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaningindividualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he came out ofthe Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him. Thesky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenlythe long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhaustinggames, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, hadseemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the busstop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south,then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.‘If there is hope,’ he had written in the diary, ‘it lies in theproles.’ The words kept coming back to him, statement of amystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in thevague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what hadonce been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a cobbledstreet of little two-storey houses with battered doorways whichgave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiouslysuggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of filthy water here andthere among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, anddown narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, peopleswarmed in astonishing numbers — girls in full bloom, withcrudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, andswollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would belike in ten years’ time, and old bent creatures shuffling along onsplayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in thepuddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers.Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken andboarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a feweyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous womenwith brick-red forearms folded across their aprons were talkingoutside a doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as heapproached.‘“Yes,” I says to ’er, “that’s all very well,” I says. “But if you’d ofbeen in my place you’d of done the same as what I done. It’s easyto criticize,” I says, “but you ain’t got the same problems as what Igot.”’‘Ah,’ said the other, ‘that’s jest it. That’s jest where it is.’The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied himin hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at thepassing of some unfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Partycould not be a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it wasunwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite businessthere. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run intothem. ‘May I see your papers, comrade? What are you doing here?What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?’—and so on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walkinghome by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention toyou if the Thought Police heard about it.Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yellsof warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorwayslike rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead ofWinston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped herapron round it, and leapt back again, all in one movement. At thesame instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, who hademerged from a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedlyto the sky.‘Steamer!’ he yelled. ‘Look out, guv’nor! Bang over’ead! Laydown quick!’‘Steamer’ was a nickname which, for some reason, the prolesapplied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on hisface. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you awarning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of instinctwhich told them several seconds in advance when a rocket wascoming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster thansound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was aroar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of lightobjects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found that hewas covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window. He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky,and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was alreadyforming around the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying onthe pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see abright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a humanhand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the handwas so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid thecrowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or fourminutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, andthe sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as thoughnothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours, and thedrinking-shops which the proles frequented (‘pubs’, they calledthem) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors,endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine,sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting housefront three men were standing very close together, the middle oneof them holding a folded-up newspaper which the other two werestudying over his shoulder. Even before he was near enough tomake out the expression on their faces, Winston could seeabsorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously someserious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few pacesaway from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of themen were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almoston the point of blows.‘Can’t you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you nonumber ending in seven ain’t won for over fourteen months!’‘Yes, it ’as, then!’‘No, it ’as not! Back ’ome I got the ’ole lot of ’em for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes ’em down reg’lar asthe clock. An’ I tell you, no number ending in seven ——’‘Yes, a seven ‘AS won! I could pretty near tell you the bleedingnumber. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February — secondweek in February.’‘February your grandmother! I got it all down in black andwhite. An’ I tell you, no number ——’‘Oh, pack it in!’ said the third man.They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked backwhen he had gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid,passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormousprizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid seriousattention. It was probable that there were some millions of prolesfor whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason forremaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne,their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned,even people who could barely read and write seemed capable ofintricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was awhole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems,forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with therunning of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry ofPlenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware)that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums wereactually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existentpersons. In the absence of any real intercommunication betweenone part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling onto that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it waswhen you looked at the human beings passing you on thepavement that it became an act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he had been in thisneighbourhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare notfar away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of shoutingvoices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight ofsteps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keeperswere selling tired-looking vegetables. At this moment Winstonremembered where he was. The alley led out into the main street,and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junkshop where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary.And in a small stationer’s shop not far away he had bought hispenholder and his bottle of ink.He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On theopposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whosewindows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merelycoated with dust. A very old man, bent but active, with whitemoustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushedopen the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, itoccurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least,had already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. Heand a few others like him were the last links that now existed withthe vanished world of capitalism. In the Party itself there were notmany people left whose ideas had been formed before theRevolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in thegreat purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who survived hadlong ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. Ifthere was any one still alive who could give you a truthful accountof conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be aprole. Suddenly the passage from the history book that he hadcopied into his diary came back into Winston’s mind, and a lunaticimpulse took hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him. He wouldsay to him: ‘Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What wasit like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or werethey worse?’Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, hedescended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madnessof course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking toproles and frequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual anaction to pass unnoticed. If the patrols appeared he might plead anattack of faintness, but it was not likely that they would believehim. He pushed open the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sourbeer hit him in the face. As he entered the din of voices dropped toabout half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyoneeyeing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at theother end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much asthirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing atthe bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large,stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms. A knot ofothers, standing round with glasses in their hands, were watchingthe scene.‘I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man,straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’tgot a pint mug in the ’ole bleeding boozer?’‘And what in hell’s name IS a pint?’ said the barman, leaningforward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.‘‘Ark at ’im! Calls ’isself a barman and don’t know what a pintis! Why, a pint’s the ’alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to thegallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’‘Never heard of ’em,’ said the barman shortly. ‘Litre and halflitre — that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.’‘I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ’a drawed meoff a pint easy enough. We didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when Iwas a young man.’‘When you were a young man we were all living in thetreetops,’ said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused byWinston’s entry seemed to disappear. The old man’s whitestubbled face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering tohimself, and bumped into Winston. Winston caught him gently bythe arm.‘May I offer you a drink?’ he said.‘You’re a gent,’ said the other, straightening his shouldersagain. He appeared not to have noticed Winston’s blue overalls.‘Pint!’ he added aggressively to the barman. ‘Pint of wallop.’The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer intothick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter.Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. The proleswere supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could gethold of it easily enough. The game of darts was in full swing again,and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about lotterytickets. Winston’s presence was forgotten for a moment. There wasa deal table under the window where he and the old man could talkwithout fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but atany rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had madesure of as soon as he came in.‘‘E could ’a drawed me off a pint,’ grumbled the old man as hesettled down behind a glass. ‘A ’alf litre ain’t enough. It don’tsatisfy. And a ’ole litre’s too much. It starts my bladder running.Let alone the price.’ ‘You must have seen great changes since you were a youngman,’ said Winston tentatively.The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the darts board tothe bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though itwere in the bar-room that he expected the changes to haveoccurred.‘The beer was better,’ he said finally. ‘And cheaper! When Iwas a young man, mild beer — wallop we used to call it — wasfourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.’‘Which war was that?’ said Winston.‘It’s all wars,’ said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass,and his shoulders straightened again. ‘‘Ere’s wishing you the verybest of ’ealth!’In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s apple made asurprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished.Winston went to the bar and came back with two more half-litres.The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice againstdrinking a full litre.‘You are very much older than I am,’ said Winston. ‘You musthave been a grown man before I was born. You can remember whatit was like in the old days, before the Revolution. People of my agedon’t really know anything about those times. We can only readabout them in books, and what it says in the books may not betrue. I should like your opinion on that. The history books say thatlife before the Revolution was completely different from what it isnow. There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, povertyworse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, the greatmass of the people never had enough to eat from birth to death.Half of them hadn’t even boots on their feet. They worked twelvehours a day, they left school at nine, they slept ten in a room. And at the same time there were a very few people, only a fewthousands — the capitalists, they were called — who were rich andpowerful. They owned everything that there was to own. They livedin great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about inmotor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, theywore top hats ——’The old man brightened suddenly.‘Top ’ats!’ he said. ‘Funny you should mention ’em. The samething come into my ’ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was jestthinking, I ain’t seen a top ’at in years. Gorn right out, they ’ave.The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law’s funeral. And thatwas — well, I couldn’t give you the date, but it must’a been fiftyyears ago. Of course it was only ’ired for the occasion, youunderstand.’‘It isn’t very important about the top hats,’ said Winstonpatiently. ‘The point is, these capitalists — they and a few lawyersand priests and so forth who lived on them — were the lords of theearth. Everything existed for their benefit. You — the ordinarypeople, the workers — were their slaves. They could do what theyliked with you. They could ship you off to Canada like cattle. Theycould sleep with your daughters if they chose. They could order youto be flogged with something called a cat-o’-nine tails. You had totake your cap off when you passed them. Every capitalist wentabout with a gang of lackeys who ——’The old man brightened again.‘Lackeys!’ he said. ‘Now there’s a word I ain’t ’eard since everso long. Lackeys! That reg’lar takes me back, that does. I recollect— oh, donkey’s years ago — I used to sometimes go to ‘Yde Park ofa Sunday afternoon to ’ear the blokes making speeches. SalvationArmy, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians — all sorts there was. And there was one bloke — well, I couldn’t give you ’is name, but a realpowerful speaker ’e was. ’E didn’t ’alf give it ’em! “Lackeys!” ’e says,“lackeys of the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!” Parasites— that was another of them. And ’yenas —’e definitely called ’em’yenas. Of course ’e was referring to the Labour Party, youunderstand.’Winston had the feeling that they were talking at crosspurposes.‘What I really wanted to know was this,’ he said. ‘Do you feelthat you have more freedom now than you had in those days? Areyou treated more like a human being? In the old days, the richpeople, the people at the top ——’‘The ‘Ouse of Lords,’ put in the old man reminiscently.‘The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is, werethese people able to treat you as an inferior, simply because theywere rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for instance, that you hadto call them “Sir” and take off your cap when you passed them?’The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about aquarter of his beer before answering.‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They liked you to touch your cap to ’em. Itshowed respect, like. I didn’t agree with it, myself, but I done itoften enough. Had to, as you might say.’‘And was it usual — I’m only quoting what I’ve read in historybooks — was it usual for these people and their servants to pushyou off the pavement into the gutter?’‘One of ’em pushed me once,’ said the old man. ‘I recollect it asif it was yesterday. It was Boat Race night — terribly rowdy theyused to get on Boat Race night — and I bumps into a young blokeon Shaftesbury Avenue. Quite a gent, ’e was — dress shirt, top ’at, black overcoat. ‘E was kind of zig-zagging across the pavement, andI bumps into ’im accidental-like. ‘E says, “Why can’t you lookwhere you’re going?” ’e says. I say, “Ju think you’ve bought thebleeding pavement?” ‘E says, “I’ll twist your bloody ’ead off if youget fresh with me.” I says, “You’re drunk. I’ll give you in charge in’alf a minute,” I says. An’ if you’ll believe me, ’e puts ’is ’and on mychest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent me under the wheelsof a bus. Well, I was young in them days, and I was going to ’avefetched ’im one, only ——’A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’smemory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One couldquestion him all day without getting any real information. Theparty histories might still be true, after a fashion: they might evenbe completely true. He made a last attempt.‘Perhaps I have not made myself clear,’ he said. ‘What I’mtrying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time; you livedhalf your life before the Revolution. In 1925, for instance, you werealready grown up. Would you say from what you can remember,that life in 1925 was better than it is now, or worse? If you couldchoose, would you prefer to live then or now?’The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. Hefinished up his beer, more slowly than before. When he spoke itwas with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the beer hadmellowed him.‘I know what you expect me to say,’ he said. ‘You expect me tosay as I’d sooner be young again. Most people’d say they’d soonerbe young, if you arst ’em. You got your ’ealth and strength whenyou’re young. When you get to my time of life you ain’t never well.I suffer something wicked from my feet, and my bladder’s jestterrible. Six and seven times a night it ’as me out of bed. On the other ’and, there’s great advantages in being a old man. You ain’tgot the same worries. No truck with women, and that’s a greatthing. I ain’t ’ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you’d credit it.Nor wanted to, what’s more.’Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use goingon. He was about to buy some more beer when the old mansuddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at theside of the room. The extra half-litre was already working on him.Winston sat for a minute or two gazing at his empty glass, andhardly noticed when his feet carried him out into the street again.Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simplequestion, ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect itwas unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivorsfrom the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age withanother. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel witha workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on along-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morningseventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the rangeof their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objectsbut not large ones. And when memory failed and written recordswere falsified — when that happened, the claim of the Party to haveimproved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted,because there did not exist, and never again could exist, anystandard against which it could be tested.At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. Hehalted and looked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few darklittle shops, interspersed among dwelling-houses. Immediatelyabove his head there hung three discoloured metal balls whichlooked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the junk-shop where hehad bought the diary.A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficientlyrash act to buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn neverto come near the place again. And yet the instant that he allowedhis thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of theirown accord. It was precisely against suicidal impulses of this kindthat he had hoped to guard himself by opening the diary. At thesame time he noticed that although it was nearly twenty-one hoursthe shop was still open. With the feeling that he would be lessconspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, hestepped through the doorway. If questioned, he could plausibly saythat he was trying to buy razor blades.The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gaveoff an unclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps sixty,frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyesdistorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white, but hiseyebrows were bushy and still black. His spectacles, his gentle,fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacketof black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as though hehad been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician. Hisvoice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased thanthat of the majority of proles.‘I recognized you on the pavement,’ he said immediately.‘You’re the gentleman that bought the young lady’s keepsakealbum. That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was. Cream-laid, itused to be called. There’s been no paper like that made for — oh, Idare say fifty years.’ He peered at Winston over the top of hisspectacles. ‘Is there anything special I can do for you? Or did youjust want to look round?’ ‘I was passing,’ said Winston vaguely. ‘I just looked in. I don’twant anything in particular.’‘It’s just as well,’ said the other, ‘because I don’t suppose Icould have satisfied you.’