Chapter 5In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep
underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly
forward.
The room was already very full and deafeningly
noisy.
From the grille at the counter the steam of
stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic
smell which did not quite overcome the fumes
of Victory Gin.
On the far side of the room there was a small
bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could
be bought at ten cents the large nip.
‘Just the man I was looking for,’ said
a voice at Winston’s back.
He turned round.
It was his friend Syme, who worked in the
Research Department.
Perhaps ‘friend’ was not exactly the right
word.
You did not have friends nowadays, you had
comrades: but there were some comrades whose
society was pleasanter than that of others.
Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak.
Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of
experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh
Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston,
with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes,
at once mournful and derisive, which seemed
to search your face closely while he was speaking
to you.
‘I wanted to ask you whether you’d got
any razor blades,’ he said.
‘Not one!’ said Winston with a sort of
guilty haste.
‘I’ve tried all over the place.
They don’t exist any longer.’
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades.
Actually he had two unused ones which he was
hoarding up.
There had been a famine of them for months
past.
At any given moment there was some necessary
article which the Party shops were unable
to supply.
Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was
darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces;
at present it was razor blades.
You could only get hold of them, if at all,
by scrounging more or less furtively on the
‘free’ market.
‘I’ve been using the same blade for six
weeks,’ he added untruthfully.
The queue gave another jerk forward.
As they halted he turned and faced Syme again.
Each of them took a greasy metal tray from
a pile at the end of the counter.
‘Did you go and see the prisoners hanged
yesterday?’ said Syme.
‘I was working,’ said Winston indifferently.
‘I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.’
‘A very inadequate substitute,’ said Syme.
His mocking eyes roved over Winston’s face.
‘I know you,’ the eyes seemed to say,
‘I see through you.
I know very well why you didn’t go to see
those prisoners hanged.’
In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously
orthodox.
He would talk with a disagreeable gloating
satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy
villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals,
the executions in the cellars of the Ministry
of Love.
Talking to him was largely a matter of getting
him away from such subjects and entangling
him, if possible, in the technicalities of
Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and
interesting.
Winston turned his head a little aside to
avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.
‘It was a good hanging,’ said Syme reminiscently.
‘I think it spoils it when they tie their
feet together.
I like to see them kicking.
And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking
right out, and blue — a quite bright blue.
That’s the detail that appeals to me.’
‘Nex’, please!’ yelled the white-aproned
prole with the ladle.
Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath
the grille.
On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation
lunch — a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey
stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a
mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine
tablet.
‘There’s a table over there, under that
telescreen,’ said Syme.
‘Let’s pick up a gin on the way.’
The gin was served out to them in handleless
china mugs.
They threaded their way across the crowded
room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped
table, on one corner of which someone had
left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess
that had the appearance of vomit.
Winston took up his mug of gin, paused for
an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped
the oily-tasting stuff down.
When he had winked the tears out of his eyes
he suddenly discovered that he was hungry.
He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew,
which, in among its general sloppiness, had
cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably
a preparation of meat.
Neither of them spoke again till they had
emptied their pannikins.
From the table at Winston’s left, a little
behind his back, someone was talking rapidly
and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like
the quacking of a duck, which pierced the
general uproar of the room.
‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said
Winston, raising his voice to overcome the
noise.
‘Slowly,’ said Syme.
‘I’m on the adjectives.
It’s fascinating.’
He had brightened up immediately at the mention
of Newspeak.
He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his
hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his
cheese in the other, and leaned across the
table so as to be able to speak without shouting.
‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive
edition,’ he said.
‘We’re getting the language into its final
shape — the shape it’s going to have when
nobody speaks anything else.
When we’ve finished with it, people like
you will have to learn it all over again.
You think, I dare say, that our chief job
is inventing new words.
But not a bit of it!
We’re destroying words — scores of them,
hundreds of them, every day.
We’re cutting the language down to the bone.
The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single
word that will become obsolete before the
year 2050.’
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed
a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking,
with a sort of pedant’s passion.
His thin dark face had become animated, his
eyes had lost their mocking expression and
grown almost dreamy.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction
of words.
Of course the great wastage is in the verbs
and adjectives, but there are hundreds of
nouns that can be got rid of as well.
It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also
the antonyms.
After all, what justification is there for
a word which is simply the opposite of some
other word?
A word contains its opposite in itself.
Take “good”, for instance.
If you have a word like “good”, what need
is there for a word like “bad”?
“Ungood” will do just as well — better,
because it’s an exact opposite, which the
other is not.
Or again, if you want a stronger version of
“good”, what sense is there in having
a whole string of vague useless words like
“excellent” and “splendid” and all
the rest of them?
“Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood”
if you want something stronger still.
Of course we use those forms already.
but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll
be nothing else.
In the end the whole notion of goodness and
badness will be covered by only six words
— in reality, only one word.
Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?
It was B.B.‘s idea originally, of course,’
he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s
face at the mention of Big Brother.
Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain
lack of enthusiasm.
‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak,
Winston,’ he said almost sadly.
‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking
in Oldspeak.
I’ve read some of those pieces that you
write in “The Times” occasionally.
They’re good enough, but they’re translations.
In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak,
with all its vagueness and its useless shades
of meaning.
You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction
of words.
Do you know that Newspeak is the only language
in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller
every year?’
Winston did know that, of course.
He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting
himself to speak.
Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured
bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak
is to narrow the range of thought?
In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally
impossible, because there will be no words
in which to express it.
Every concept that can ever be needed, will
be expressed by exactly one word, with its
meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary
meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re
not far from that point.
But the process will still be continuing long
after you and I are dead.
Every year fewer and fewer words, and the
range of consciousness always a little smaller.
Even now, of course, there’s no reason or
excuse for committing thoughtcrime.
It’s merely a question of self-discipline,
reality-control.
But in the end there won’t be any need even
for that.
The Revolution will be complete when the language
is perfect.
Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’
he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.
‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that
by the year 2050, at the very latest, not
a single human being will be alive who could
understand such a conversation as we are having
now?’
‘Except ——’ began Winston doubtfully,
and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say
‘Except the proles,’ but he checked himself,
not feeling fully certain that this remark
was not in some way unorthodox.
Syme, however, had divined what he was about
to say.
‘The proles are not human beings,’ he
said carelessly.
‘By 2050 — earlier, probably — all real
knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared.
The whole literature of the past will have
been destroyed.
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll
exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely
changed into something different, but actually
changed into something contradictory of what
they used to be.
Even the literature of the Party will change.
Even the slogans will change.
How could you have a slogan like “freedom
is slavery” when the concept of freedom
has been abolished?
The whole climate of thought will be different.
In fact there will be no thought, as we understand
it now.
Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing
to think.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden
deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized.
He is too intelligent.
He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly.
The Party does not like such people.
One day he will disappear.
It is written in his face.
Winston had finished his bread and cheese.
He turned a little sideways in his chair to
drink his mug of coffee.
At the table on his left the man with the
strident voice was still talking remorselessly
away.
A young woman who was perhaps his secretary,
and who was sitting with her back to Winston,
was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly
agreeing with everything that he said.
From time to time Winston caught some such
remark as ‘I think you’re so right, I
do so agree with you’, uttered in a youthful
and rather silly feminine voice.
But the other voice never stopped for an instant,
even when the girl was speaking.
Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew
no more about him than that he held some important
post in the Fiction Department.
He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular
throat and a large, mobile mouth.
His head was thrown back a little, and because
of the angle at which he was sitting, his
spectacles caught the light and presented
to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes.
What was slightly horrible, was that from
the stream of sound that poured out of his
mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish
a single word.
Just once Winston caught a phrase —‘complete
and final elimination of Goldsteinism’—
jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed,
all in one piece, like a line of type cast
solid.
For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking.
And yet, though you could not actually hear
what the man was saying, you could not be
in any doubt about its general nature.
He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding
sterner measures against thought-criminals
and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against
the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might
be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the
Malabar front — it made no difference.
Whatever it was, you could be certain that
every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure
Ingsoc.
As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw
moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a
curious feeling that this was not a real human
being but some kind of dummy.
It was not the man’s brain that was speaking,
it was his larynx.
The stuff that was coming out of him consisted
of words, but it was not speech in the true
sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness,
like the quacking of a duck.
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with
the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns
in the puddle of stew.
The voice from the other table quacked rapidly
on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding
din.
‘There is a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme,
‘I don’t know whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK,
to quack like a duck.
It is one of those interesting words that
have two contradictory meanings.
Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied
to someone you agree with, it is praise.’
Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston
thought again.
He thought it with a kind of sadness, although
well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly
disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing
him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason
for doing so.
There was something subtly wrong with Syme.
There was something that he lacked: discretion,
aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity.
You could not say that he was unorthodox.
He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he
venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories,
he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity
but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness
of information, which the ordinary Party member
did not approach.
Yet a faint air of disreputability always
clung to him.
He said things that would have been better
unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented
the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters
and musicians.
There was no law, not even an unwritten law,
against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe,
yet the place was somehow ill-omened.
The old, discredited leaders of the Party
had been used to gather there before they
were finally purged.
Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes
been seen there, years and decades ago.
Syme’s fate was not difficult to foresee.
And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped,
even for three seconds, the nature of his,
Winston’s, secret opinions, he would betray
him instantly to the Thought Police.
So would anybody else, for that matter: but
Syme more than most.
Zeal was not enough.
Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
Syme looked up.
‘Here comes Parsons,’ he said.
Something in the tone of his voice seemed
to add, ‘that bloody fool’.
Parsons, Winston’s fellow-tenant at Victory
Mansions, was in fact threading his way across
the room — a tubby, middle-sized man with
fair hair and a froglike face.
At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls
of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements
were brisk and boyish.
His whole appearance was that of a little
boy grown large, so much so that although
he was wearing the regulation overalls, it
was almost impossible not to think of him
as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey
shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies.
In visualizing him one saw always a picture
of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from
pudgy forearms.
Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to
shorts when a community hike or any other
physical activity gave him an excuse for doing
so.
He greeted them both with a cheery ‘Hullo,
hullo!’ and sat down at the table, giving
off an intense smell of sweat.
Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink
face.
His powers of sweating were extraordinary.
At the Community Centre you could always tell
when he had been playing table-tennis by the
dampness of the bat handle.
Syme had produced a strip of paper on which
there was a long column of words, and was
studying it with an ink-pencil between his
fingers.
‘Look at him working away in the lunch hour,’
said Parsons, nudging Winston.
‘Keenness, eh?
What’s that you’ve got there, old boy?
Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect.
Smith, old boy, I’ll tell you why I’m
chasing you.
It’s that sub you forgot to give me.’
‘Which sub is that?’ said Winston, automatically
feeling for money.
About a quarter of one’s salary had to be
earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which
were so numerous that it was difficult to
keep track of them.
‘For Hate Week.
You know — the house-by-house fund.
I’m treasurer for our block.
We’re making an all-out effort — going
to put on a tremendous show.
I tell you, it won’t be my fault if old
Victory Mansions doesn’t have the biggest
outfit of flags in the whole street.
Two dollars you promised me.’
Winston found and handed over two creased
and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in
a small notebook, in the neat handwriting
of the illiterate.
‘By the way, old boy,’ he said.
‘I hear that little beggar of mine let fly
at you with his catapult yesterday.
I gave him a good dressing-down for it.
In fact I told him I’d take the catapult
away if he does it again.’
‘I think he was a little upset at not going
to the execution,’ said Winston.
‘Ah, well — what I mean to say, shows
the right spirit, doesn’t it?
Mischievous little beggars they are, both
of them, but talk about keenness!
All they think about is the Spies, and the
war, of course.
D’you know what that little girl of mine
did last Saturday, when her troop was on a
hike out Berkhamsted way?
She got two other girls to go with her, slipped
off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon
following a strange man.
They kept on his tail for two hours, right
through the woods, and then, when they got
into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.’
‘What did they do that for?’ said Winston,
somewhat taken aback.
Parsons went on triumphantly:
‘My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy
agent — might have been dropped by parachute,
for instance.
But here’s the point, old boy.
What do you think put her on to him in the
first place?
She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of
shoes — said she’d never seen anyone wearing
shoes like that before.
So the chances were he was a foreigner.
Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?’
‘What happened to the man?’ said Winston.
‘Ah, that I couldn’t say, of course.
But I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if
——’ Parsons made the motion of aiming
a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
‘Good,’ said Syme abstractedly, without
looking up from his strip of paper.
‘Of course we can’t afford to take chances,’
agreed Winston dutifully.
‘What I mean to say, there is a war on,’
said Parsons.
As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet
call floated from the telescreen just above
their heads.
However, it was not the proclamation of a
military victory this time, but merely an
announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
‘Comrades!’ cried an eager youthful voice.
‘Attention, comrades!
We have glorious news for you.
We have won the battle for production!
Returns now completed of the output of all
classes of consumption goods show that the
standard of living has risen by no less than
20 per cent over the past year.
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible
spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched
out of factories and offices and paraded through
the streets with banners voicing their gratitude
to Big Brother for the new, happy life which
his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.
Here are some of the completed figures.
Foodstuffs ——’
The phrase ‘our new, happy life’ recurred
several times.
It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry
of Plenty.
Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet
call, sat listening with a sort of gaping
solemnity, a sort of edified boredom.
He could not follow the figures, but he was
aware that they were in some way a cause for
satisfaction.
He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which
was already half full of charred tobacco.
With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week
it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the
top.
Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which
he held carefully horizontal.
The new ration did not start till tomorrow
and he had only four cigarettes left.
For the moment he had shut his ears to the
remoter noises and was listening to the stuff
that streamed out of the telescreen.
It appeared that there had even been demonstrations
to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate
ration to twenty grammes a week.
And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been
announced that the ration was to be REDUCED
to twenty grammes a week.
Was it possible that they could swallow that,
after only twenty-four hours?
Yes, they swallowed it.
Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity
of an animal.
The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed
it fanatically, passionately, with a furious
desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize
anyone who should suggest that last week the
ration had been thirty grammes.
Syme, too — in some more complex way, involving
doublethink, Syme swallowed it.
Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a
memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour
out of the telescreen.
As compared with last year there was more
food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture,
more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships,
more helicopters, more books, more babies
— more of everything except disease, crime,
and insanity.
Year by year and minute by minute, everybody
and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.
As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken
up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured
gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing
a long streak of it out into a pattern.
He meditated resentfully on the physical texture
of life.
Had it always been like this?
Had food always tasted like this?
He looked round the canteen.
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy
from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered
metal tables and chairs, placed so close together
that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons,
dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces
greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish,
composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee
and metallic stew and dirty clothes.
Always in your stomach and in your skin there
was a sort of protest, a feeling that you
had been cheated of something that you had
a right to.
It was true that he had no memories of anything
greatly different.
In any time that he could accurately remember,
there had never been quite enough to eat,
one had never had socks or underclothes that
were not full of holes, furniture had always
been battered and rickety, rooms underheated,
tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces,
bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee
filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient — nothing
cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin.
And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s
body aged, was it not a sign that this was
NOT the natural order of things, if one’s
heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt
and scarcity, the interminable winters, the
stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that
never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap,
the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food
with its strange evil tastes?
Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless
one had some kind of ancestral memory that
things had once been different?
He looked round the canteen again.
Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still
have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than
in the uniform blue overalls.
On the far side of the room, sitting at a
table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like
man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little
eyes darting suspicious glances from side
to side.
How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did
not look about you, to believe that the physical
type set up by the Party as an ideal — tall
muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens,
blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree — existed
and even predominated.
Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority
of people in Airstrip One were small, dark,
and ill-favoured.
It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated
in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing
stout very early in life, with short legs,
swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable
faces with very small eyes.
It was the type that seemed to flourish best
under the dominion of the Party.
The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty
ended on another trumpet call and gave way
to tinny music.
Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the
bombardment of figures, took his pipe out
of his mouth.
‘The Ministry of Plenty’s certainly done
a good job this year,’ he said with a knowing
shake of his head.
‘By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you
haven’t got any razor blades you can let
me have?’
‘Not one,’ said Winston.
‘I’ve been using the same blade for six
weeks myself.’
‘Ah, well — just thought I’d ask you,
old boy.’
‘Sorry,’ said Winston.
The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily
silenced during the Ministry’s announcement,
had started up again, as loud as ever.
For some reason Winston suddenly found himself
thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair
and the dust in the creases of her face.
Within two years those children would be denouncing
her to the Thought Police.
Mrs Parsons would be vaporized.
Syme would be vaporized.
Winston would be vaporized.
O’Brien would be vaporized.
Parsons, on the other hand, would never be
vaporized.
The eyeless creature with the quacking voice
would never be vaporized.
The little beetle-like men who scuttle so
nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors
of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized.
And the girl with dark hair, the girl from
the Fiction Department — she would never
be vaporized either.
It seemed to him that he knew instinctively
who would survive and who would perish: though
just what it was that made for survival, it
was not easy to say.
At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie
with a violent jerk.
The girl at the next table had turned partly
round and was looking at him.
It was the girl with dark hair.
She was looking at him in a sidelong way,
but with curious intensity.
The instant she caught his eye she looked
away again.
The sweat started out on Winston’s backbone.
A horrible pang of terror went through him.
It was gone almost at once, but it left a
sort of nagging uneasiness behind.
Why was she watching him?
Why did she keep following him about?
Unfortunately he could not remember whether
she had already been at the table when he
arrived, or had come there afterwards.
But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two
Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind
him when there was no apparent need to do
so.
Quite likely her real object had been to listen
to him and make sure whether he was shouting
loudly enough.
His earlier thought returned to him: probably
she was not actually a member of the Thought
Police, but then it was precisely the amateur
spy who was the greatest danger of all.
He did not know how long she had been looking
at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes,
and it was possible that his features had
not been perfectly under control.
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts
wander when you were in any public place or
within range of a telescreen.
The smallest thing could give you away.
A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety,
a habit of muttering to yourself — anything
that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality,
of having something to hide.
In any case, to wear an improper expression
on your face (to look incredulous when a victory
was announced, for example) was itself a punishable
offence.
There was even a word for it in Newspeak:
FACECRIME, it was called.
The girl had turned her back on him again.
Perhaps after all she was not really following
him about, perhaps it was coincidence that
she had sat so close to him two days running.
His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it
carefully on the edge of the table.
He would finish smoking it after work, if
he could keep the tobacco in it.
Quite likely the person at the next table
was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite
likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry
of Love within three days, but a cigarette
end must not be wasted.
Syme had folded up his strip of paper and
stowed it away in his pocket.
Parsons had begun talking again.
‘Did I ever tell you, old boy,’ he said,
chuckling round the stem of his pipe, ‘about
the time when those two nippers of mine set
fire to the old market-woman’s skirt because
they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster
of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire
to it with a box of matches.
Burned her quite badly, I believe.
Little beggars, eh?
But keen as mustard!
That’s a first-rate training they give them
in the Spies nowadays — better than in my
day, even.
What d’you think’s the latest thing they’ve
served them out with?
Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes!
My little girl brought one home the other
night — tried it out on our sitting-room
door, and reckoned she could hear twice as
much as with her ear to the hole.
Of course it’s only a toy, mind you.
Still, gives ’em the right idea, eh?’
At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing
whistle.
It was 
the signal to return to work.
All three men sprang to their feet to join
in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining
tobacco fell out of Winston’s cigarette.
