Chapter eight. This chapter is so long it will be split into two videos.
From somewhere at the bottom of a passage
the smell of roasting coffee — real coffee,
not Victory Coffee — came floating out into
the street.
Winston paused involuntarily.
For perhaps two seconds he was back in the
half-forgotten world of his childhood.
Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the
smell as abruptly as though it had been a
sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements,
and his varicose ulcer was throbbing.
This was the second time in three weeks that
he had missed an evening at the Community
Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain
that the number of your attendances at the
Centre was carefully checked.
In principle a Party member had no spare time,
and was never alone except in bed.
It was assumed that when he was not working,
eating, or sleeping he would be taking part
in some kind of communal recreation: to do
anything that suggested a taste for solitude,
even to go for a walk by yourself, was always
slightly dangerous.
There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE,
it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.
But this evening as he came out of the Ministry
the balminess of the April air had tempted
him.
The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen
it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy
evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting
games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie
oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable.
On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop
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 the proles.’
The words kept coming back to him, statement
of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured
slums to the north and east of what had once
been Saint Pancras Station.
He was walking up a cobbled street of little
two-storey houses with battered doorways which
gave straight on the pavement and which were
somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes.
There were puddles of filthy water here and
there among the cobbles.
In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either
side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers
— girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked
mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and
swollen waddling women who showed you what
the girls would be like in ten years’ time,
and old bent creatures shuffling along on
splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children
who played in the puddles and then scattered
at angry yells from their mothers.
Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street
were broken and boarded up.
Most of the people paid no attention to Winston;
a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity.
Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms
folded across their aprons were talking outside
a doorway.
Winston caught scraps of conversation as he
approached.
‘“Yes,” I says to ’er, “that’s
all very well,” I says.
“But if you’d of been in my place you’d
of done the same as what I done.
It’s easy to criticize,” I says, “but
you ain’t got the same problems as what
I got.”’
‘Ah,’ said the other, ‘that’s jest
it.
That’s jest where it is.’
The strident voices stopped abruptly.
The women studied him in hostile silence as
he went past.
But it was not hostility, exactly; merely
a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening,
as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal.
The blue overalls of the Party could not be
a common sight in a street like this.
Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places,
unless you had definite business there.
The patrols might stop you if you happened
to run into them.
‘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 walking
home by an unusual route: but it was enough
to draw attention to you if the Thought Police
heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion.
There were yells of warning from all sides.
People were shooting into the doorways like
rabbits.
A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little
ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child
playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round
it, and leapt back again, all in one movement.
At the same instant a man in a concertina-like
black suit, who had emerged from a side alley,
ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to
the sky.
‘Steamer!’ he yelled.
‘Look out, guv’nor!
Bang over’ead!
Lay down quick!’
‘Steamer’ was a nickname which, for some
reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs.
Winston promptly flung himself on his face.
The proles were nearly always right when they
gave you a warning of this kind.
They seemed to possess some kind of instinct
which told them several seconds in advance
when a rocket was coming, although the rockets
supposedly travelled faster than sound.
Winston clasped his forearms above his head.
There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement
heave; a shower of light objects pattered
on to his back.
When he stood up he found that he was covered
with fragments of glass from the nearest window.
He walked on.
The bomb had demolished a group of houses
200 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 already forming around the ruins.
There was a little pile of plaster lying on
the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle
of it he could see a bright red streak.
When he got up to it he saw that it was a
human hand severed at the wrist.
Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was
so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster
cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then,
to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street
to the right.
Within three or four minutes he was out of
the area which the bomb had affected, and
the sordid swarming life of the streets was
going on as though nothing had happened.
It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops
which the proles frequented (‘pubs’, they
called them) 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 house-front
three men were standing very close together,
the middle one of them holding a folded-up
newspaper which the other two were studying
over his shoulder.
Even before he was near enough to make out
the expression on their faces, Winston could
see absorption in every line of their bodies.
It was obviously some serious piece of news
that they were reading.
He was a few paces away from them when suddenly
the group broke up and two of the men were
in violent altercation.
For a moment they seemed almost on the point
of blows.
‘Can’t you bleeding well listen to what
I say?
I tell you no number 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 as the clock.
An’ I tell you, no number ending in seven
——’
‘Yes, a seven ‘AS won!
I could pretty near tell you the bleeding
number.
Four oh seven, it ended in.
It were in February — second week in February.’
‘February your grandmother!
I got it all down in black and white.
An’ I tell you, no number ——’
‘Oh, pack it in!’ said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery.
Winston looked back when he had gone thirty
metres.
They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate
faces.
The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous
prizes, was the one public event to which
the proles paid serious attention.
It was probable that there were some millions
of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal
if not the only reason for remaining 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
of intricate calculations and staggering feats
of memory.
There was a whole tribe of men who made a
living simply by selling systems, forecasts,
and lucky amulets.
Winston had nothing to do with the running
of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry
of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone
in the party was aware) that the prizes were
largely imaginary.
Only small sums were actually paid out, the
winners of the big prizes being non-existent
persons.
In the absence of any real intercommunication
between one 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 on to that.
When you put it in words it sounded reasonable:
it was when you looked at the human beings
passing you on the pavement 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 this
neighbourhood before, and that there was a
main thoroughfare not far away.
From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting
voices.
The street took a sharp turn and then ended
in a flight of steps which led down into a
sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were
selling tired-looking vegetables.
At this moment Winston remembered where he
was.
The alley led out into the main street, and
down the next turning, not five minutes away,
was the junk-shop 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 his penholder and his bottle
of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps.
On the opposite side of the alley there was
a dingy little pub whose windows appeared
to be frosted over but in reality were merely
coated with dust.
A very old man, bent but active, with white
moustaches that bristled forward like those
of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and
went in.
As Winston stood watching, it occurred to
him that the old man, who must be eighty at
the least, had already been middle-aged when
the Revolution happened.
He and a few others like him were the last
links that now existed with the vanished world
of capitalism.
In the Party itself there were not many people
left whose ideas had been formed before the
Revolution.
The older generation had mostly been wiped
out in the great purges of the fifties and
sixties, and the few who survived had long
ago been terrified into complete intellectual
surrender.
If there was any one still alive who could
give you a truthful account of conditions
in the early part of the century, it could
only be a prole.
Suddenly the passage from the history book
that he had copied into his diary came back
into Winston’s mind, and a lunatic impulse
took hold of him.
He would go into the pub, he would scrape
acquaintance with that old man and question
him.
He would say to him: ‘Tell me about your
life when you were a boy.
What was it like in those days?
Were things better than they are now, or were
they worse?’
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become
frightened, he descended the steps and crossed
the narrow street.
It was madness of course.
As usual, there was no definite rule against
talking to proles and frequenting their pubs,
but it was far too unusual an action to pass
unnoticed.
If the patrols appeared he might plead an
attack of faintness, but it was not likely
that they would believe him.
He pushed open the door, and a hideous cheesy
smell of sour beer hit him in the face.
As he entered the din of voices dropped to
about half its volume.
Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing
his blue overalls.
A game of darts which was going on at the
other end of the room interrupted itself for
perhaps as much as thirty seconds.
The old man whom he had followed was standing
at the bar, having some kind of altercation
with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed
young man with enormous forearms.
A knot of others, standing round with glasses
in their hands, were watching the scene.
‘I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’
said the old man, straightening his shoulders
pugnaciously.
‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug
in the ’ole bleeding boozer?’
‘And what in hell’s name IS a pint?’
said the barman, leaning forward with the
tips of his fingers on the counter.
‘‘Ark at ’im!
Calls ’isself a barman and don’t know
what a pint is!
Why, a pint’s the ’alf of a quart, and
there’s four quarts to the gallon.
‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’
‘Never heard of ’em,’ said the barman
shortly.
‘Litre and half litre — 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 me off a pint easy
enough.
We didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when
I was a young man.’
‘When you were a young man we were all living
in the treetops,’ said the barman, with
a glance at the other customers.
There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness
caused by Winston’s entry seemed to disappear.
The old man’s white-stubbled face had flushed
pink.
He turned away, muttering to himself, and
bumped into Winston.
Winston caught him gently by the arm.
‘May I offer you a drink?’ he said.
‘You’re a gent,’ said the other, straightening
his shoulders again.
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 into thick glasses which he had rinsed
in a bucket under the counter.
Beer was the only drink you could get in prole
pubs.
The proles were supposed not to drink gin,
though in practice they could get hold 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 lottery tickets.
Winston’s presence was forgotten for a moment.
There was a deal table under the window where
he and the old man could talk without fear
of being overheard.
It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate
there was no telescreen in the room, a point
he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
‘‘E could ’a drawed me off a pint,’
grumbled the old man as he settled down behind
a glass.
‘A ’alf litre ain’t enough.
It don’t satisfy.
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 young man,’ said Winston tentatively.
The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from
the darts board to the bar, and from the bar
to the door of the Gents, as though it were
in the bar-room that he expected the changes
to have occurred.
‘The beer was better,’ he said finally.
‘And cheaper!
When I was a young man, mild beer — wallop
we used to call it — was fourpence 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 very best of
’ealth!’
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s
apple made a surprisingly 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 against drinking a full litre.
‘You are very much older than I am,’ said
Winston.
‘You must have been a grown man before I
was born.
You can remember what it was like in the old
days, before the Revolution.
People of my age don’t really know anything
about those times.
We can only read about them in books, and
what it says in the books may not be true.
I should like your opinion on that.
The history books say that life before the
Revolution was completely different from what
it is now.
There was the most terrible oppression, injustice,
poverty worse than anything we can imagine.
Here in London, the great mass of the people
never had enough to eat from birth to death.
Half of them hadn’t even boots on their
feet.
They worked twelve hours 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 few thousands — the capitalists,
they were called — who were rich and powerful.
They owned everything that there was to own.
They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty
servants, they rode about in motor-cars and
four-horse carriages, they drank champagne,
they wore top hats ——’
The old man brightened suddenly.
‘Top ’ats!’ he said.
‘Funny you should mention ’em.
The same thing come into my ’ead only yesterday,
I dono why.
I was jest thinking, 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 that was — well, I couldn’t give you
the date, but it must’a been fifty years
ago.
Of course it was only ’ired for the occasion,
you understand.’
‘It isn’t very important about the top
hats,’ said Winston patiently.
‘The point is, these capitalists — they
and a few lawyers and priests and so forth
who lived on them — were the lords of the
earth.
Everything existed for their benefit.
You — the ordinary people, the workers — were
their slaves.
They could do what they liked with you.
They could ship you off to Canada like cattle.
They could sleep with your daughters if they
chose.
They could order you to be flogged with something
called a cat-o’-nine tails.
You had to take your cap off when you passed
them.
Every capitalist went about with a gang of
lackeys who ——’
The old man brightened again.
‘Lackeys!’ he said.
‘Now there’s a word I ain’t ’eard
since ever so 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 of a Sunday
afternoon to ’ear the blokes making speeches.
Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians
— all sorts there was.
And there was one bloke — well, I couldn’t
give you ’is name, but a real powerful 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, you understand.’
Winston had the feeling that they were talking
at cross-purposes.
‘What I really wanted to know was this,’
he said.
‘Do you feel that you have more freedom
now than you had in those days?
Are you treated more like a human being?
In the old days, the rich people, 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, were these people able
to treat you as an inferior, simply because
they were rich and you were poor?
Is it a fact, for instance, that you had to
call them “Sir” and take off your cap
when you passed them?’
The old man appeared to think deeply.
He drank off about a quarter of his beer before
answering.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘They liked you to touch your cap to ’em.
It showed respect, like.
I didn’t agree with it, myself, but I done
it often enough.
Had to, as you might say.’
‘And was it usual — I’m only quoting
what I’ve read in history books — was
it usual for these people and their servants
to push you off the pavement into the gutter?’
‘One of ’em pushed me once,’ said the
old man.
‘I recollect it as if it was yesterday.
It was Boat Race night — terribly rowdy
they used to get on Boat Race night — and
I bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury
Avenue.
Quite a gent, ’e was — dress shirt, top
’at, black overcoat.
‘E was kind of zig-zagging across the pavement,
and I bumps into ’im accidental-like.
‘E says, “Why can’t you look where you’re
going?”
’e says.
I say, “Ju think you’ve bought the bleeding
pavement?”
‘E says, “I’ll twist your bloody ’ead
off if you get 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 my chest and gives me a shove as
pretty near sent me under the wheels of a
bus.
Well, I was young in them days, and I was
going to ’ave fetched ’im one, only ——’
A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston.
The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap
of details.
One could question him all day without getting
any real information.
The party histories might still be true, after
a fashion: they might even be completely true.
He made a last attempt.
‘Perhaps I have not made myself clear,’
he said.
‘What I’m trying to say is this.
You have been alive a very long time; you
lived half your life before the Revolution.
In 1925, for instance, you were already grown
up.
Would you say from what you can remember,
that life in 1925 was better than it is now,
or worse?
If you could choose, would you prefer to live
then or now?’
The old man looked meditatively at the darts
board.
He finished up his beer, more slowly than
before.
When he spoke it was with a tolerant philosophical
air, as though the beer had mellowed him.
‘I know what you expect me to say,’ he
said.
‘You expect me to say as I’d sooner be
young again.
Most people’d say they’d sooner be young,
if you arst ’em.
You got your ’ealth and strength when you’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 jest terrible.
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’t got the same worries.
No truck with women, and that’s a great
thing.
I ain’t ’ad a woman for near on thirty
year, if you’d credit it.
Nor wanted to, what’s more.’
