He made an apologetic gesture with hissoftpalmed hand. ‘You see how it is; an empty shop, you might say.Between you and me, the antique trade’s just about finished. Nodemand any longer, and no stock either. Furniture, china, glass it’sall been broken up by degrees. And of course the metal stuff’smostly been melted down. I haven’t seen a brass candlestick inyears.’The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full,but there was almost nothing in it of the slightest value. Thefloorspace was very restricted, because all round the walls werestacked innumerable dusty picture-frames. In the window therewere trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out chisels, penknives withbroken blades, tarnished watches that did not even pretend to be ingoing order, and other miscellaneous rubbish. Only on a smalltable in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends — lacqueredsnuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like — which looked as thoughthey might include something interesting. As Winston wanderedtowards the table his eye was caught by a round, smooth thing thatgleamed softly in the lamplight, and he picked it up.It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on theother, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness,as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass. Atthe heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was astrange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a seaanemone.‘What is it?’ said Winston, fascinated.‘That’s coral, that is,’ said the old man. ‘It must have come from the Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass.That wasn’t made less than a hundred years ago. More, by the lookof it.’‘It’s a beautiful thing,’ said Winston.‘It is a beautiful thing,’ said the other appreciatively. ‘Butthere’s not many that’d say so nowadays.’ He coughed. ‘Now, if itso happened that you wanted to buy it, that’d cost you four dollars.I can remember when a thing like that would have fetched eightpounds, and eight pounds was — well, I can’t work it out, but it wasa lot of money. But who cares about genuine antiques nowadays —even the few that’s left?’Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid thecoveted thing into his pocket. What appealed to him about it wasnot so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belongingto an age quite different from the present one. The soft, rainwateryglass was not like any glass that he had ever seen. The thing wasdoubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though hecould guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight.It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately it did not makemuch of a bulge. It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing,for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and forthat matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The oldman had grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the fourdollars. Winston realized that he would have accepted three oreven two.‘There’s another room upstairs that you might care to take alook at,’ he said. ‘There’s not much in it. Just a few pieces. We’ll dowith a light if we’re going upstairs.’He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowlyup the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which did not give on the street but looked out on a cobbled yardand a forest of chimney-pots. Winston noticed that the furniturewas still arranged as though the room were meant to be lived in.There was a strip of carpet on the floor, a picture or two on thewalls, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair drawn up to the fireplace. Anold-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking awayon the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying nearly aquarter of the room, was an enormous bed with the mattress stillon it.‘We lived here till my wife died,’ said the old man halfapologetically. ‘I’m selling the furniture off by little and little. Nowthat’s a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it would be if you couldget the bugs out of it. But I dare say you’d find it a little bitcumbersome.’He was holding the lamp high up, so as to illuminate thewhole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiouslyinviting. The thought flitted through Winston’s mind that it wouldprobably be quite easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, ifhe dared to take the risk. It was a wild, impossible notion, to beabandoned as soon as thought of; but the room had awakened inhim a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed tohim that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this,in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender anda kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobodywatching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singingof the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not help murmuring.‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I never had one of those things. Tooexpensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow.Now that’s a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you’d have to put new hinges on it if you wanted to use theflaps.’There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winstonhad already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish.The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done withthe same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. Itwas very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy ofa book printed earlier than 1960. The old man, still carrying thelamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame whichhung on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the bed.‘Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all ——’ hebegan delicately.Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steelengraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and asmall tower in front. There was a railing running round thebuilding, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be astatue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguelyfamiliar, though he did not remember the statue.‘The frame’s fixed to the wall,’ said the old man, ‘but I couldunscrew it for you, I dare say.’‘I know that building,’ said Winston finally. ‘It’s a ruin now.It’s in the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.’‘That’s right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in — oh,many years ago. It was a church at one time, St Clement Danes, itsname was.’ He smiled apologetically, as though conscious of sayingsomething slightly ridiculous, and added: ‘Oranges and lemons, saythe bells of St Clement’s!’‘What’s that?’ said Winston.‘Oh —“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s.” That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes on Idon’t remember, but I do know it ended up, “Here comes a candleto light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” Itwas a kind of a dance. They held out their arms for you to passunder, and when they came to “Here comes a chopper to chop offyour head” they brought their arms down and caught you. It wasjust names of churches. All the London churches were in it — allthe principal ones, that is.’Winston wondered vaguely to what century the churchbelonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of a Londonbuilding. Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new inappearance, was automatically claimed as having been built sincethe Revolution, while anything that was obviously of earlier datewas ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages. Thecenturies of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of anyvalue. One could not learn history from architecture any more thanone could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorialstones, the names of streets — anything that might throw lightupon the past had been systematically altered.‘I never knew it had been a church,’ he said.‘There’s a lot of them left, really,’ said the old man, ‘thoughthey’ve been put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah!I’ve got it!

“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of StClement’s,You owe me three farthings, say the bells of StMartin’s ——”

there, now, that’s as far as I can get. A farthing, that was a smallcopper coin, looked something like a cent.’‘Where was St Martin’s?’ said Winston.‘St Martin’s? That’s still standing. It’s in Victory Square,alongside the picture gallery. A building with a kind of a triangularporch and pillars in front, and a big flight of steps.’Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used forpropaganda displays of various kinds — scale models of rocketbombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustratingenemy atrocities, and the like.‘St Martin’s-in-the-Fields it used to be called,’ supplementedthe old man, ‘though I don’t recollect any fields anywhere in thoseparts.’Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an evenmore incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, andimpossible to carry home, unless it were taken out of its frame. Buthe lingered for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whosename, he discovered, was not Weeks — as one might have gatheredfrom the inscription over the shop-front — but Charrington. MrCharrington, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and hadinhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that time he hadbeen intending to alter the name over the window, but had neverquite got to the point of doing it. All the while that they weretalking the half-remembered rhyme kept running throughWinston’s head. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clement’s,You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s! It wascurious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion ofactually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existedsomewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostlysteeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet sofar as he could remember he had never in real life heard churchbells ringing. He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairsalone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitring the streetbefore stepping out of the door. He had already made up his mindthat after a suitable interval — a month, say — he would take therisk of visiting the shop again. It was perhaps not more dangerousthan shirking an evening at the Centre. The serious piece of follyhad been to come back here in the first place, after buying the diaryand without knowing whether the proprietor of the shop could betrusted. However ——!Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buyfurther scraps of beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving ofSt Clement Danes, take it out of its frame, and carry it homeconcealed under the jacket of his overalls. He would drag the restof that poem out of Mr Charrington’s memory. Even the lunaticproject of renting the room upstairs flashed momentarily throughhis mind again. For perhaps five seconds exaltation made himcareless, and he stepped out on to the pavement without so muchas a preliminary glance through the window. He had even startedhumming to an improvised tune

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of StClement’s,You owe me three farthings, say the ——

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. Afigure in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not tenmetres away. It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girlwith dark hair. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty inrecognizing her. She looked him straight in the face, then walkedquickly on as though she had not seen him.For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing for themoment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any rate, onequestion was settled. There was no doubting any longer that thegirl was spying on him. She must have followed him here, becauseit was not credible that by pure chance she should have happenedto be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet,kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived. Itwas too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of theThought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated byofficiousness, hardly mattered. It was enough that she waswatching him. Probably she had seen him go into the pub as well.It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket bangedagainst his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it outand throw it away. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For acouple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did notreach a lavatory soon. But there would be no public lavatories in aquarter like this. Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull achebehind.The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for severalseconds wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round andbegan to retrace his steps. As he turned it occurred to him that thegirl had only passed him three minutes ago and that by running hecould probably catch up with her. He could keep on her track tillthey were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with acobblestone. The piece of glass in his pocket would be heavyenough for the job. But he abandoned the idea immediately,because even the thought of making any physical effort wasunbearable. He could not run, he could not strike a blow. Besides,she was young and lusty and would defend herself. He thought alsoof hurrying to the Community Centre and staying there till the place closed, so as to establish a partial alibi for the evening. Butthat too was impossible. A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him.All he wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down and bequiet.It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat. Thelights would be switched off at the main at twenty-three thirty. Hewent into the kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of VictoryGin. Then he went to the table in the alcove, sat down, and took thediary out of the drawer. But he did not open it at once. From thetelescreen a brassy female voice was squalling a patriotic song. Hesat staring at the marbled cover of the book, trying without successto shut the voice out of his consciousness.It was at night that they came for you, always at night. Theproper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedlysome people did so. Many of the disappearances were actuallysuicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a worldwhere firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completelyunprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of thebiological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the humanbody which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment whena special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-hairedgirl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because ofthe extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struckhim that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against anexternal enemy, but always against one’s own body. Even now, inspite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thoughtimpossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroicor tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on asinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are alwaysforgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain,life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold orsleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.He opened the diary. It was important to write somethingdown. The woman on the telescreen had started a new song. Hervoice seemed to stick into his brain like jagged splinters of glass.He tried to think of O’Brien, for whom, or to whom, the diary waswritten, but instead he began thinking of the things that wouldhappen to him after the Thought Police took him away. It wouldnot matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was what youexpected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yeteverybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession thathad to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screamingfor mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth andbloody clots of hair.Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always thesame? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out ofyour life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed toconfess. When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it wascertain that by a given date you would be dead. Why then did thathorror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in futuretime?He tried with a little more success than before to summon upthe image of O’Brien. ‘We shall meet in the place where there is nodarkness,’ O’Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, orthought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was theimagined future, which one would never see, but which, byforeknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the voicefrom the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow thetrain of thought further. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, a bitter dust which wasdifficult to spit out again. The face of Big Brother swam into hismind, displacing that of O’Brien. Just as he had done a few daysearlier, he slid a coin out of his pocket and looked at it. The facegazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smilewas hidden beneath the dark moustache? Like a leaden knell thewords came back at him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH