CHAPTER 3

‘We can come here once again,’ said Julia. ‘It’s generally
safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another
month or two, of course.’
As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She
became alert and business-like, put her clothes on, knotted the
scarlet sash about her waist, and began arranging the details of the
journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She obviously
had a practical cunning which Winston lacked, and she seemed
also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round
London, stored away from innumerable community hikes. The
route she gave him was quite different from the one by which he
had come, and brought him out at a different railway station.
‘Never go home the same way as you went out,’ she said, as though
enunciating an important general principle. She would leave first,
and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.
She had named a place where they could meet after work, four
evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where
there was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy.
She would be hanging about among the stalls, pretending to be in
search of shoelaces or sewing-thread. If she judged that the coast
was clear she would blow her nose when he approached; otherwise
he was to walk past her without recognition. But with luck, in the
middle of the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a quarter of an
hour and arrange another meeting.
‘And now I must go,’ she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions. ‘I’m due back at nineteen-thirty. I’ve got to put in two
hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or
something. Isn’t it bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you?
Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then good-bye, my
love, good-bye!’
She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently,
and a moment later pushed her way through the saplings and
disappeared into the wood with very little noise. Even now he had
not found out her surname or her address. However, it made no
difference, for it was inconceivable that they could ever meet
indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.
As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the
wood. During the month of May there was only one further
occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That
was in another hiding-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous
church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic
bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good hiding-place
when once you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous.
For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place
every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In
the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they
drifted down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never
looking at one another, they carried on a curious, intermittent
conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a
lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party
uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again
minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short
as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without
introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used
to this kind of conversation, which she called ‘talking by instalments’. She was also surprisingly adept at speaking without
moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings
they managed to exchange a kiss. They were passing in silence
down a side-street (Julia would never speak when they were away
from the main streets) when there was a deafening roar, the earth
heaved, and the air darkened, and Winston found himself lying on
his side, bruised and terrified. A rocket bomb must have dropped
quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware of Julia’s face a few
centimetres from his own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even
her lips were white. She was dead! He clasped her against him and
found that he was kissing a live warm face. But there was some
powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces
were thickly coated with plaster.
There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and
then had to walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol
had just come round the corner or a helicopter was hovering
overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would still have
been difficult to find time to meet. Winston’s working week was
sixty hours, Julia’s was even longer, and their free days varied
according to the pressure of work and did not often coincide. Julia,
in any case, seldom had an evening completely free. She spent an
astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and
demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex
League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for
the savings campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said, it
was camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the
big ones. She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his
evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition work
which was done voluntarily by zealous Party members. So, one
evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were
probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where
the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the
telescreens.
When they met in the church tower the gaps in their
fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing
afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells was
hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung. They
sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor, one or other
of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the
arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.
Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty
other girls (‘Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!’
she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on
the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed
her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a
powerful but tricky electric motor. She was ‘not clever’, but was
fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She
could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the
general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the
final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested
in the finished product. She ‘didn’t much care for reading,’ she said.
Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or
bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and
the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the
days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared
when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey
team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She
had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had
always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallible
mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the
sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap
pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed
Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There
she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed
packets with titles like ‘Spanking Stories’ or ‘One Night in a Girls’
School’, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were
under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
‘What are these books like?’ said Winston curiously.
‘Oh, ghastly rubbish. They’re boring, really. They only have six
plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the
kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I’m not literary,
dear — not even enough for that.’
He learned with astonishment that all the workers in
Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls. The
theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable
than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by
the filth they handled.
‘They don’t even like having married women there,’ she added.
Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here’s one who isn’t,
anyway.
She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a
Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest.
‘And a good job too,’ said Julia, ‘otherwise they’d have had my
name out of him when he confessed.’ Since then there had been
various others. Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a
good time; ‘they’, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it;
you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that ‘they’ should want to rob you of your pleasures as
that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party,
and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism
of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest
in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words
except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never
heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence.
Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to
be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the
rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many
others like her there might be in the younger generation people
who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing
else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not
rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit
dodges a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was
too remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee
would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston’s
wife, could somehow have been got rid of. It was hopeless even as a
daydream.
‘What was she like, your wife?’ said Julia.
‘She was — do you know the Newspeak word
GOODTHINKFUL? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of
thinking a bad thought?’
‘No, I didn’t know the word, but I know the kind of person,
right enough.’
He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously
enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She
described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the
stiffening of Katharine’s body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all her
strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him.
With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things:
Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and
became merely a distasteful one.
‘I could have stood it if it hadn’t been for one thing,’ he said.
He told her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had
forced him to go through on the same night every week. ‘She hated
it, but nothing would make her stop doing it. She used to call it —
but you’ll never guess.’
‘Our duty to the Party,’ said Julia promptly.
‘How did you know that?’
‘I’ve been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the
over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for
years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can
never tell; people are such hypocrites.’
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything
came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon
in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she
had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It
was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own
which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to
be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual
privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be
transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it
was:
‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards
you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear
you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all
the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why
should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans
and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate
connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could
the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party
needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling
down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The
sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it
to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of
parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and,
indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in
almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand,
were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy
on them and report their deviations. The family had become in
effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means
of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers
who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would
unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she
had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his
opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this moment was
the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out
on his forehead. He began telling Julia of something that had
happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering
summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married. They had
lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had
only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they
took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. It was a sheer drop of ten
or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom. There was nobody
of whom they could ask the way. As soon as she realized that they
were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the
noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of
wrong-doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come
and start searching in the other direction. But at this moment
Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of
the cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colours, magenta and
brick-red, apparently growing on the same root. He had never seen
anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and
look at it.
‘Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down
near the bottom. Do you see they’re two different colours?’
She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come
back for a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face to see
where he was pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and he
put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly
occurred to him how completely alone they were. There was not a
human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird
awake. In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden
microphone was very small, and even if there was a microphone it
would only pick up sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the
afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his
face. And the thought struck him . . .
‘Why didn’t you give her a good shove?’ said Julia. ‘I would
have.’
‘Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I’d been the same
person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would — I’m not certain.’
‘Are you sorry you didn’t?’ ‘Yes. On the whole I’m sorry I didn’t.’
They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her
closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant
smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young,
he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not
understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves
nothing.
‘Actually it would have made no difference,’ he said.
‘Then why are you sorry you didn’t do it?’
‘Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game
that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better
than other kinds, that’s all.’
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always
contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would
not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always
defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that
sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but
with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow
possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you
chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did
not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the
only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that
from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to
think of yourself as a corpse.
‘We are the dead,’ he said.
‘We’re not dead yet,’ said Julia prosaically.
‘Not physically. Six months, a year — five years, conceivably. I
am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more
afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings
stay human, death and life are the same thing.’
‘Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a
skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This
is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive!
Don’t you like THIS?’
She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him.
He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her
body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into his.
‘Yes, I like that,’ he said.
‘Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we’ve got
to fix up about the next time we meet. We may as well go back to
the place in the wood. We’ve given it a good long rest. But you
must get there by a different way this time. I’ve got it all planned
out. You take the train — but look, I’ll draw it out for you.’
And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of
dust, and with a twig from a pigeon’s nest began drawing a map on
the floor.