CHAPTER 1

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the
cubicle to go to the lavatory.
A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other
end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. It was the girl with dark hair.
Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into
her outside the junk-shop. As she came nearer he saw that her
right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because it was
of the same colour as her overalls. Probably she had crushed her
hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which
the plots of novels were ‘roughed in’. It was a common accident in
the Fiction Department.
They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled
and fell almost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung out
of her. She must have fallen right on the injured arm. Winston
stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her face had turned
a milky yellow colour against which her mouth stood out redder
than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression
that looked more like fear than pain.
A curious emotion stirred in Winston’s heart. In front of him
was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was
a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already
he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as
though he felt the pain in his own body.
‘You’re hurt?’ he said.
‘It’s nothing. My arm. It’ll be all right in a second.’
She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had
certainly turned very pale.
‘You haven’t broken anything?’
‘No, I’m all right. It hurt for a moment, that’s all.’
She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up. She
had regained some of her colour, and appeared very much better.
‘It’s nothing,’ she repeated shortly. ‘I only gave my wrist a bit
of a bang. Thanks, comrade!’
And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had
been going, as briskly as though it had really been nothing. The
whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Not
to let one’s feelings appear in one’s face was a habit that had
acquired the status of an instinct, and in any case they had been
standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened.
Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary
surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her
up the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no
question that she had done it intentionally. It was something small
and flat. As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to
his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of
paper folded into a square.
While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more
fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of
some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it
into one of the water-closets and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you
could be more certain that the telescreens were watched
continuously.
He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of
paper casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his
spectacles and hitched the speakwrite towards him. ‘Five minutes,’
he told himself, ‘five minutes at the very least!’ His heart bumped
in his breast with frightening loudness. Fortunately the piece of
work he was engaged on was mere routine, the rectification of a
long list of figures, not needing close attention.
Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of
political meaning. So far as he could see there were two
possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an
agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared. He did not know
why the Thought Police should choose to deliver their messages in
such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. The thing that
was written on the paper might be a threat, a summons, an order to
commit suicide, a trap of some description. But there was another,
wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly
to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the
Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground
organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps
the girl was part of it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had
sprung into his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of
paper in his hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the
other, more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even
now, though his intellect told him that the message probably
meant death — still, that was not what he believed, and the
unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with
difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmured his figures into the speakwrite.
He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the
pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re-adjusted his
spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work
towards him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it
out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting:
I LOVE YOU.
For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the
incriminating thing into the memory hole. When he did so,
although he knew very well the danger of showing too much
interest, he could not resist reading it once again, just to make sure
that the words were really there.
For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What
was even worse than having to focus his mind on a series of
niggling jobs was the need to conceal his agitation from the
telescreen. He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly. Lunch
in the hot, crowded, noise-filled canteen was torment. He had
hoped to be alone for a little while during the lunch hour, but as
bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped down beside
him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of stew,
and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.
He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of
Big Brother’s head, two metres wide, which was being made for the
occasion by his daughter’s troop of Spies. The irritating thing was
that in the racket of voices Winston could hardly hear what
Parsons was saying, and was constantly having to ask for some
fatuous remark to be repeated. Just once he caught a glimpse of
the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room.
She appeared not to have seen him, and he did not look in that
direction again. The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch
there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would take
several hours and necessitated putting everything else aside. It
consisted in falsifying a series of production reports of two years
ago, in such a way as to cast discredit on a prominent member of
the Inner Party, who was now under a cloud. This was the kind of
thing that Winston was good at, and for more than two hours he
succeeded in shutting the girl out of his mind altogether. Then the
memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable
desire to be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible to
think this new development out. Tonight was one of his nights at
the Community Centre. He wolfed another tasteless meal in the
canteen, hurried off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery
of a ‘discussion group’, played two games of table tennis,
swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a
lecture entitled ‘Ingsoc in relation to chess’. His soul writhed with
boredom, but for once he had had no impulse to shirk his evening
at the Centre. At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to
stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks
suddenly seemed stupid. It was not till twenty-three hours, when
he was home and in bed — in the darkness, where you were safe
even from the telescreen so long as you kept silent — that he was
able to think continuously.
It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in
touch with the girl and arrange a meeting. He did not consider any
longer the possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for
him. He knew that it was not so, because of her unmistakable
agitation when she handed him the note. Obviously she had been
frightened out of her wits, as well she might be. Nor did the idea of
refusing her advances even cross his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but
that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body,
as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all
the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly
full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might
lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him! What
he feared more than anything else was that she would simply
change her mind if he did not get in touch with her quickly. But the
physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying to
make a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever
way you turned, the telescreen faced you. Actually, all the possible
ways of communicating with her had occurred to him within five
minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think, he went
over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments
on a table.
Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this
morning could not be repeated. If she had worked in the Records
Department it might have been comparatively simple, but he had
only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building the Fiction
Department lay, and he had no pretext for going there. If he had
known where she lived, and at what time she left work, he could
have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try
to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean loitering
about outside the Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As for
sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a
routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit.
Actually, few people ever wrote letters. For the messages that it
was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards
with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the ones that were
inapplicable. In any case he did not know the girl’s name, let alone her address. Finally he decided that the safest place was the
canteen. If he could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the
middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a
sufficient buzz of conversation all round — if these conditions
endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a
few words.
For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. On the
next day she did not appear in the canteen until he was leaving it,
the whistle having already blown. Presumably she had been
changed on to a later shift. They passed each other without a
glance. On the day after that she was in the canteen at the usual
time, but with three other girls and immediately under a
telescreen. Then for three dreadful days she did not appear at all.
His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an
unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every
movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to
speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether
escape from her image. He did not touch the diary during those
days. If there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he could
sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a stretch. He had
absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her. There was no
enquiry he could make. She might have been vaporized, she might
have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the
other end of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply
have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.
The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling and
she had a band of sticking-plaster round her wrist. The relief of
seeing her was so great that he could not resist staring directly at
her for several seconds. On the following day he very nearly
succeeded in speaking to her. When he came into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite alone. It
was early, and the place was not very full. The queue edged forward
till Winston was almost at the counter, then was held up for two
minutes because someone in front was complaining that he had
not received his tablet of saccharine. But the girl was still alone
when Winston secured his tray and began to make for her table. He
walked casually towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some
table beyond her. She was perhaps three metres away from him.
Another two seconds would do it. Then a voice behind him called,
‘Smith!’ He pretended not to hear. ‘Smith!’ repeated the voice,
more loudly. It was no use. He turned round. A blond-headed, sillyfaced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was
inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. It was not
safe to refuse. After having been recognized, he could not go and sit
at a table with an unattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat
down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his.
Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right
into the middle of it. The girl’s table filled up a few minutes later.
But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps
she would take the hint. Next day he took care to arrive early.
Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and
again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue
was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man with a flat face and
tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from the counter
with his tray, he saw that the little man was making straight for the
girl’s table. His hopes sank again. There was a vacant place at a
table further away, but something in the little man’s appearance
suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own
comfort to choose the emptiest table. With ice at his heart Winston
followed. It was no use unless he could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous crash. The little man was
sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying, two streams of
soup and coffee were flowing across the floor. He started to his feet
with a malignant glance at Winston, whom he evidently suspected
of having tripped him up. But it was all right. Five seconds later,
with a thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the girl’s table.
He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly
began eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone
else came, but now a terrible fear had taken possession of him. A
week had gone by since she had first approached him. She would
have changed her mind, she must have changed her mind! It was
impossible that this affair should end successfully; such things did
not happen in real life. He might have flinched altogether from
speaking if at this moment he had not seen Ampleforth, the hairyeared poet, wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking
for a place to sit down. In his vague way Ampleforth was attached
to Winston, and would certainly sit down at his table if he caught
sight of him. There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both
Winston and the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they were
eating was a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans. In a low
murmur Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up;
steadily they spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and
between spoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low
expressionless voices.
‘What time do you leave work?’
‘Eighteen-thirty.’
‘Where can we meet?’
‘Victory Square, near the monument.’
‘It’s full of telescreens.’
‘It doesn’t matter if there’s a crowd.’

‘Any signal?’
‘No. Don’t come up to me until you see me among a lot of
people. And don’t look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.’
‘What time?’
‘Nineteen hours.’
‘All right.’
Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another
table. They did not speak again, and, so far as it was possible for
two people sitting on opposite sides of the same table, they did not
look at one another. The girl finished her lunch quickly and made
off, while Winston stayed to smoke a cigarette.
Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time. He
wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at the
top of which Big Brother’s statue gazed southward towards the
skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the
Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the Battle of
Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was a statue of a man
on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell. At
five minutes past the hour the girl had still not appeared. Again the
terrible fear seized upon Winston. She was not coming, she had
changed her mind! He walked slowly up to the north side of the
square and got a sort of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St
Martin’s Church, whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed ‘You
owe me three farthings.’ Then he saw the girl standing at the base
of the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran
spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her until some
more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all round
the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of shouting and
a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left. Suddenly
everyone seemed to be running across the square. The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in
the rush. Winston followed. As he ran, he gathered from some
shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of
the square. Winston, at normal times the kind of person who
gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved,
butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd. Soon
he was within arm’s length of the girl, but the way was blocked by
an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous woman,
presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of
flesh. Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge
managed to drive his shoulder between them. For a moment it felt
as though his entrails were being ground to pulp between the two
muscular hips, then he had broken through, sweating a little. He
was next to the girl. They were shoulder to shoulder, both staring
fixedly in front of them.
A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with
sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing
slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby
greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their
sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly
incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank
of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after
truck-load of the sad faces passed. Winston knew they were there
but he saw them only intermittently. The girl’s shoulder, and her
arm right down to the elbow, were pressed against his. Her cheek
was almost near enough for him to feel its warmth. She had
immediately taken charge of the situation, just as she had done in
the canteen. She began speaking in the same expressionless voice
as before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you get Sunday afternoon off?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then listen carefully. You’ll have to remember this. Go to
Paddington Station ——’
With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she
outlined the route that he was to follow. A half-hour railway
journey; turn left outside the station; two kilometres along the
road; a gate with the top bar missing; a path across a field; a grassgrown lane; a track between bushes; a dead tree with moss on it. It
was as though she had a map inside her head. ‘Can you remember
all that?’ she murmured finally.
‘Yes.’
‘You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate’s got no
top bar.’
‘Yes. What time?’
‘About fifteen. You may have to wait. I’ll get there by another
way. Are you sure you remember everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then get away from me as quick as you can.’
She need not have told him that. But for the moment they
could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were
still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there
had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party
members among the crowd, and had soon stopped. The prevailing
emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or
from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners
one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did
one know what became of them, apart from the few who were
hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably
into forced-labour camps. The round Mogol faces had given way to
faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From
over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston’s, sometimes
with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was
drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his
face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in
front of him, as though he were used to having them bound
together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at
the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand
felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long
time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn
every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely
nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the
smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from feeling it he would have
known it by sight. In the same instant it occurred to him that he
did not know what colour the girl’s eyes were. They were probably
brown, but people with dark hair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn
his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With
hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they
stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl,
the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of
nests of hair.