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Chapter 3

Winston was dreaming of his mother.

He was ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, rather silent woman with slow movements and beautiful fair hair. His father was dark and thin, dressed always in dark clothes and wearing spectacles. Winston remembered his mother better than his father. The two of them disappeared in the fifties. A lot of people disappeared during that time.

At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down under him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all. Both of them were looking up at him. They were somewhere under the ground, and this place was moving downwards. They were in a sinking ship, looking up at him through the water. There was still air in the ship, they could still see him and he them. He was out in the light and air, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see it in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die so that he was alive.

He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that his mother and his sister gave their lives for his own. When he woke up, he realized that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still love and friendship. It was tragic, because his mother had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there was fear, hatred, and pain, but no deep sorrows. All this he saw in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, who looked up at him through the green water.

Suddenly he was standing on a pasture, on a summer evening. He saw this landscape in his dreams very often and he was never sure whether or not he had seen it in the real world. He called it the Golden Country.

The girl with dark hair was coming towards him across the field. She tore off her clothes and threw them aside. Her body was white and soft, but he didn't even look at it. He admired the gesture. It was graceful and careless and it also belonged to the ancient time. It seemed to him that she tore off Big Brother, and the Party, and the Thought Police. Winston woke up with the word «Shakespeare» on his lips.

From the telescreen Winston heard a whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, time for office workers to get up. Winston slept naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons a year, and pyjamas were 600. He took his dirty clothes from a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he started coughing. It happened nearly always soon after he woke up. He had to lie down on his back and breathe deeply.

«Take your places, please!» shouted a youngish woman dressed in tunic and gym-shoes from the telescreen. «Take your places, please». One had to look as if one enjoyed the exercise, because was proper during the Physical Jerks. «One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four!.».

The rhythmic movements made Winston remember his dream. He tried to remember his early childhood, but it was very difficult. Everything that happened before the late fifties disappeared. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.

Winston could not remember a time when his country had not been at war. He remembered that there had been an air raid which had taken everyone by surprise. So during his childhood the country had been at peace for quite a long time. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester². He remembered that his father had taken him by the hand and that they had hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth. His mother was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister – or perhaps blankets: he was not sure whether his sister had been born then. Finally they had come into a noisy place with a lot of people. He realized it had been a Tube station.

There were people sitting all over the floor, and other people were sitting on metal bunk beds, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor. Near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side. The old man smelled of gin. He looked scared and Winston could see that he was in pain. Someone whom the old man loved – a little granddaughter, perhaps – had been killed. Every few minutes the old man said to the woman that they shouldn't have trusted someone. Winston could not now remember who it had been.

Since about that time, war had continued without an end, but it had not always been the same war. But Winston could never say who was fighting whom at any given moment. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania and Eastasia were at war with Eurasia. Four years ago Oceania and Eurasia had been at war with Eastasia. Officially, however, the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Winston was now doing an exercise for back muscles.

What if the Party could say that this or that event had never happened? It was frightening.

The Party said that Oceania had never been at peace with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been at peace with Eurasia four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only inside his head. And if all others accepted the lie, if all records told the same tale, then the lie became truth. «Who controls the past», ran the Party slogan, «controls the future: who controls the present controls the past». And yet the past never had been changed. It was quite simple. You just had to win against your own memory. «Reality control», they called it: in Newspeak it was called «doublethink».

The exercise was over. Winston breathed deeply. He thought about the word «doublethink». To know and not to know, to know the truth and tell lies, to have two opinions at the same time, to know that they were contradictory and to believe in both of them, to use logic against logic, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party protected democracy, to forget what it was necessary to forget, to remember it when it was necessary to remember and then to forget it again. Even to understand the word «doublethink» you had to use doublethink.

The instructress had called them to attention again. «And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!» she said. «Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One- two! One-two!.».

Winston hated this exercise. His often started coughing after he did it. The past, he thought, had not just been changed, it had been destroyed. He tried to remember in what year he had first heard of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but he wasn't sure. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother was the leader of the Revolution since its very earliest days. Winston didn't know how much of this legend was true. Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself appeared. He hadn't heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form – «English Socialism» – it had been used earlier. Sometimes, indeed, you were able to understand that something was a lie. It was not true, for example, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands proof there were lies in the Party histories. And then -

«Smith!» shouted the woman from the telescreen. «6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now, comrades, watch me».

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face didn't show any emotions. He stood watching while the woman did the exercise. She wasn't graceful, but she did it easily.

«There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look». She did it again. «You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to», she said. «Anyone under forty-five can touch his toes. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better», she added as Winston touched his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.

Chapter  4

Winston sighed deeply and pulled the speakwrite towards him. He blew the dust from it, and put on his spectacles. Four small cylinders of paper had already fell out of the pneumatic tube on the right side of his desk. He unrolled them.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three holes. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, a large slit with a wire grating. This last was for waste paper. There were thousands or tens of thousands of similar slits in the building, not only in every room but also in every corridor. For some reason they were called memory holes. Warm air carried away the waste paper that you put in those holes to some place where it was burnt.

Winston examined the four pieces of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated Newspeak words.

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.12.83 reporting bb day order doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

Winston felt happy that he got the forth message; it was a responsible job, so he laid the fourth message aside. The other three were easy tasks.

Winston dialled «back numbers» on the telescreen and called for the Times, which appeared out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes. He had received messages about articles or news items which it thought necessary to change for one reason or another. The word that described the process was «to rectify». For example, it appeared in the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother had said the previous day that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian army would shortly attack North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had attacked South India and left North Africa alone. It was necessary to rewrite a small PART of Big Brother's speech, as if he had predicted the thing that had actually happened. Or again, the forecasts for the fourth quarter of 1983 in the Times of the nineteenth of December were wrong. Winston's job was to change the forecast. As for the third message, there was a very simple mistake which could be corrected in a couple of minutes. In February, the Ministry of Plenty promised that the chocolate ration would not be reduced during 1984. However, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of this week. He just needed to change the promise into a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he pushed his speakwritten corrections with the appropriate copy of the Times into the pneumatic tube. Then he threw the original message and any notes that he himself had made into the memory hole.

He didn't know in detail what happened to the corrections, but he knew in general terms. The number of the Times would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed and replaced with the corrected copy. Not only newspapers were changed, but also books, posters, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs and so on. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was corrected. It was impossible to prove that any falsification had taken place. There was the largest section of the Records Department that collected all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which were corrected and had to be destroyed.

But actually, he thought, it was not even a falsification. It was a substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material had no connection with anything in the real world. Statistics were a fantasy in their original version and in their corrected version. For example, according to the Ministry of Plenty's forecast, 145 million pairs of boots had been produced this quarter. In reality, it had been sixty-two millions. Winston, however, wrote that it had been only fifty-seven millions, so that it looked like they produced more boots than they had planned. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Or nobody knew how many had been produced, and nobody cared. One knew that millions of boots were produced on paper, while half the people in Oceania went barefoot.

Winston looked across the hall. In the cubicle on the other side a small man named Tillotson was working. He had a newspaper on his knee and his mouth was very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He looked as if he was trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked at Winston in an unfriendly way.

Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he did. People in the Records Department did not talk about their jobs. There were some people whom Winston saw every day, but did not even know by name. He knew that in the cubicle next to him there worked the little woman with sandy hair. She deleted from the Press the names of people who had been vapourized. She was somehow the right person to do the job. Her own husband had been vapourized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away Ampleforth, a man with very hairy ears, corrected poems that were against the Party ideas, but could not be destroyed. And it was only one subsection of the Records Department. There were many more. There were many more people whose job was simply to write lists of books and magazines. There were the rooms with the corrected documents and rooms where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other there were the people who coordinated the whole process.

And the Records Department was only one PART of the Ministry of Truth. Its job was to publish newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels for the citizens of Oceania. There were also departments that worked on proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. They published newspapers with almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, cheap stories, films with sex in them, and songs which were composed on a versificator, a special kind of machine. There was Pornosec that made the lowest kind of pornography, which no Party member was allowed to look at, other than those who worked on it.

While he was working, Winston got three more messages, but they were simple, and he had finished working on them before the Two Minutes Hate. After the Hate he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and started his main job of the morning.

Winston loved his work. Most of it was boring, but there were also some difficult tasks. He could lose himself in them, he knew the principles of Ingsoc and he understood what the Party wanted him to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. He had even rectified the Times leading articles, which were written from beginning to end in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had put aside earlier. It said:

times 3.12.83 reporting bb day order doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

In Oldspeak (or standard English) it was:

The article in the Times of December 3rd 1983 on Big Brother's Order for the Day is very unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.

In his Order for the Day, Big Brother had spoken about FFCC. It was an organization, which supplied cigarettes and other things to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a member of the Inner Party, had been awarded the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.

Three months later FFCC had suddenly stopped existing. There had been no report of it in the Press or on the telescreen. People who had done something against the Party usually simply disappeared and you never heard of them again, public trials were rare and happened only when the Party needed them. One never knew what had happened to those people. In some cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people Winston personally knew had disappeared at one time or another.

Winston was lost in thought. In the cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still working. He raised his head for a moment: again the same unfriendly look. Winston asked himself whether Comrade Tillotson was doing the same job as himself. It was possible. A single person couldn't do such a job. A committee couldn't work on it either, because they would then have to admit that they falsified facts. Very likely several people were now working away on different versions of the Order for the Day. Then someone in the Inner Party would choose one of the versions, re-edit it, and then the chosen lie would become truth.

Winston did not know what had happened to Withers. There were many possibilities. What Winston knew for sure was that Withers had already been dead. He knew it from the words «refs unperson». You don't talk of someone as an unperson when they were arrested. Sometimes they were released for a year or two years before they were executed. Withers, however, did not exist: he had never existed. Winston decided that it was better to make Big Brother's speech deal with something totally different from its original subject.

Big Brother might have spoken about traitors and thoughtcriminals, about a victory at the front, or about the Ninth Three- Year Plan. But that was either too obvious or too complicated. It should rather be pure fantasy. Suddenly Winston thought of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle as a hero. Today Big Brother should speak about Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that Comrade Ogilvy didn't exist, but a few lines of print and a couple of photographs that had never been taken would soon change it.

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother's military and pedantic style. It was easy to imitate, because Big Brother often asked questions and then answered them («What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lesson that», etc., etc.).

At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had played only with a drum, a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter. At six – a year early – he had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had reported his uncle to the Thought Police. At seventeen he had been an active member of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which the Ministry of Peace had started using and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners at once. At twenty-three he had died in action. Big Brother added that Comrade Ogilvy hadn't drunk or smoked, had never been married, and had been devoted to the Party. He had only spoken to his comrades about the principles of Ingsoc, and had fought the Eurasian enemy and hunted down spies, thought-criminals, and traitors.

Winston thought for a moment whether he should award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit, but he decided against. It would make it too complicated.

Once again he looked at Tillotson in the opposite cubicle. Winston was sure that Tillotson was busy on the same job as himself. He couldn't know whose job would be chosen as a final version, but he felt that it would be his own. Comrade Ogilvy was now a fact. Winston found it curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past. When the act of falsification was forgotten, he would exist just as Charlemagne³or Julius Caesar⁴ existed.