Speaker 1: Section eleven of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
Speaker 1: Leagamis recording may be freely distributed and adapted for any purpose.
Speaker 1: Part two, Chapter three. We can come here once again,
Speaker 1: said Julia. It's generally safe to use any hide out twice,
Speaker 1: but not for another month or two. Of course, as
Speaker 1: soon as she woke up, her demeanor had changed. She
Speaker 1: became alert and business like, put her clothes on, knotted
Speaker 1: the scarlet sash about her waist, and began arranging the
Speaker 1: details of the journey home. It seemed natural to leave
Speaker 1: this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which
Speaker 1: Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive
Speaker 1: knowledge of the country side round London, stored away from
Speaker 1: innumerable community hikes. The route she gave him was quite
Speaker 1: different from the one by which he had come, and
Speaker 1: brought him out at a different railway station. Never go
Speaker 1: home the same way as you went out, she said,
Speaker 1: as though enunciating an important general principle. She would leave first,
Speaker 1: and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.
Speaker 1: She had named a place where they could meet after
Speaker 1: work four evenings. Hence, it was a street in one
Speaker 1: of the poorer quarters, where there was an open market,
Speaker 1: which was generally crowded and noisy. She would be hanging
Speaker 1: about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of
Speaker 1: shoelaces or sewing thread. If she judged that the coast
Speaker 1: was clear, she would blow her nose when he approached. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: he was to walk past her without recognition. But with
Speaker 1: luck in the middle of the crowd, it would be
Speaker 1: safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and
Speaker 1: arrange another meeting. And now I must go, she said,
Speaker 1: as soon as he had mastered his instructions. I'm due
Speaker 1: back at nineteen thirty. I've got to put in two
Speaker 1: hours for the Junior Antisex League, handing out leaflets or something,
Speaker 1: isn't it bloody? Give me a brush down, would you have?
Speaker 1: I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then? Goodbye,
Speaker 1: my love, good bye. She flung herself into his arms,
Speaker 1: kissed him almost violently, and a moment lay pushed her
Speaker 1: way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood with
Speaker 1: very little noise. Even now he had not found out
Speaker 1: her surname or her address. However, it made no difference,
Speaker 1: for it was inconceivable that they could ever meet indoors
Speaker 1: or exchange any kind of written communication. As it happened,
Speaker 1: they never went back to the clearing in the wood.
Speaker 1: During the month of May. There was only one further
Speaker 1: occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That
Speaker 1: was in another hiding place, known to Julia, the belfry
Speaker 1: of a ruinous church in an almost deserted stretch of
Speaker 1: country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.
Speaker 1: It was a good hiding place when once she got there,
Speaker 1: but the getting there was very dangerous. For the rest
Speaker 1: they could meet only in the streets, in a different
Speaker 1: place every evening, and never for more than half an
Speaker 1: hour at a time. In the street, it was usually
Speaker 1: possible to talk after a fashion, as they drifted down
Speaker 1: the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at
Speaker 1: one another, they carried on a curious intermittent conversation which
Speaker 1: flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse,
Speaker 1: suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a party
Speaker 1: uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up
Speaker 1: again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then
Speaker 1: abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot,
Speaker 1: then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia
Speaker 1: appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation,
Speaker 1: which she called talking by installments. She was also surprisingly
Speaker 1: adept at speaking without moving her lips. Just once in
Speaker 1: almost a month of nightly meetings, they managed to exchange
Speaker 1: a kiss. They were passing in silence down a side street.
Speaker 1: Julia would never speak when they were away from the
Speaker 1: main streets. When there was a deafening roar, the earth
Speaker 1: heaved and the air darkened, and Winston found himself lying
Speaker 1: on his side, bruised and terrified. A rocket bomb must
Speaker 1: have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware
Speaker 1: of Julia's face, a few centimeters from his own, deathly white,
Speaker 1: as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She
Speaker 1: was dead. He clasped her against him and found that
Speaker 1: he was kissing a live, warm face, But there was
Speaker 1: some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips.
Speaker 1: Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster. There
Speaker 1: were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had
Speaker 1: to walk past one another without a sign because a
Speaker 1: patrol had just come round the corner, or a helicopter
Speaker 1: was hovering overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous,
Speaker 1: it would still have been difficult to find time to meet.
Speaker 1: Winston's working week was sixty hours, Julius was even longer,
Speaker 1: and their three days varied according to the pressure of
Speaker 1: work and did not often coincide. Julia, in any case,
Speaker 1: seldom had an evening completely free. She spent an astonishing
Speaker 1: amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature
Speaker 1: for the Junior Antisex League, preparing banners for Hate Week,
Speaker 1: making collections for the Savings campaign, and such like activities.
Speaker 1: It paid. She said, it was camouflage. If you kept
Speaker 1: the small rules, you could break the big ones. She
Speaker 1: even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings
Speaker 1: by enrolling himself for the the part time munition work,
Speaker 1: which was done voluntarily by zealous party members. So one
Speaker 1: evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralyzing boredom
Speaker 1: screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts
Speaker 1: of bomb fuses in a drafty, ill lit workshop, where
Speaker 1: the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of
Speaker 1: the telescreens. When they met in the church tower, the
Speaker 1: gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was
Speaker 1: a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square chamber
Speaker 1: above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt over
Speaker 1: poweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on
Speaker 1: the dusty, twig littered floor, one or other of them
Speaker 1: getting up from time to time to cast a glance
Speaker 1: through the arrow slits and to make sure that no
Speaker 1: one was coming. Julia was twenty six years old. She
Speaker 1: lived in a hostel with thirty other girls. Always in
Speaker 1: the stink of women. How I hate women, she said parenthetically.
Speaker 1: And she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel
Speaker 1: writing machines in the fiction department. She enjoyed her work,
Speaker 1: which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but
Speaker 1: tricky electric motor. She was not clever, but was fond
Speaker 1: of using her hands, and felt at home with machinery.
Speaker 1: She could describe the whole process of composing a novel
Speaker 1: from the general directive issued by the planning committee, dant
Speaker 1: of the final touching up by the rewrite squad, but
Speaker 1: she was not interested in the finished product. She didn't
Speaker 1: much care for reading. She said books were just a
Speaker 1: commodity that had to be produced, like jam or boot lacers.
Speaker 1: She had no memories of anything before the early sixties,
Speaker 1: and the only person she had ever known who talked
Speaker 1: frequently of the days before the revolution was a grandfather
Speaker 1: who had disappeared when she was eight. At school, she
Speaker 1: had been captain of the hockey team and had won
Speaker 1: the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a
Speaker 1: troop leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in
Speaker 1: the youth league before joining the Junior Antisex League. She
Speaker 1: had always borne an excellent character. She had even an
Speaker 1: infallible mark of good reputation. Been picked out to work
Speaker 1: in porno, the sub section of the fiction department which
Speaker 1: turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It
Speaker 1: was nicknamed muck House by the people who worked in it.
Speaker 1: She remarked there she had remained for a year, helping
Speaker 1: to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking
Speaker 1: Stories or One Night in a Girl's School, to be
Speaker 1: bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression
Speaker 1: that they were buying something illegal. What are these books like,
Speaker 1: said Winston curiously. Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring. Really, they
Speaker 1: only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit.
Speaker 1: Of course. I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was
Speaker 1: never in the rewrite squad. I'm not literary, dear, not
Speaker 1: even enough for that. He learned with astonishment that all
Speaker 1: the workers in Porno sec except the heads of the departments,
Speaker 1: were girls. The theory was that men whose sex instincts
Speaker 1: were less controllable than those of women were in greater
Speaker 1: danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled. They
Speaker 1: don't even like having married women there, she added. Girls
Speaker 1: are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who
Speaker 1: isn't anyway. She had had her first love affair when
Speaker 1: she was sixteen, with a party member of sixty who
Speaker 1: later committed suicide to avoid arrest. And a good job too,
Speaker 1: said Julia, Otherwise they'd have had my name out of
Speaker 1: him when he confessed. Since then, there had been various others. Life,
Speaker 1: as she saw it, was quite simple. You wanted a
Speaker 1: good time, they meaning the party, wanted to stop you
Speaker 1: having it. You broke the rules as best you could.
Speaker 1: She seemed to think it just as natural that they
Speaker 1: should want to rob you of your pleasures as that
Speaker 1: you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party,
Speaker 1: and said so in the crudest words, but she made
Speaker 1: no general criticism of it, except where it touched upon
Speaker 1: her own life. She had no interest in party doctrine.
Speaker 1: He noticed that she never used new speak words except
Speaker 1: the ones that had passed into every day use. She
Speaker 1: had never heard of the Brotherhood and refused to believe
Speaker 1: in its existence. Any kind of organized revolter against the Party,
Speaker 1: which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid.
Speaker 1: The clever thing was to break the rules and stay
Speaker 1: alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others
Speaker 1: like her there might be in the younger generation, people
Speaker 1: who had grown up in the world of the revolution,
Speaker 1: knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like
Speaker 1: the sky, not rebelling against its authority, but simply evading
Speaker 1: it as a rabbit, dodge as a dog. They did
Speaker 1: not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too
Speaker 1: remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would
Speaker 1: ever sanction such a marriage, even if Catherine Winston's wife
Speaker 1: could somehow have been got rid of it was hopeless,
Speaker 1: even as a day dream. What was she like your wife,
Speaker 1: said Julia. She was Do you know the new speak
Speaker 1: word good thinkful meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a
Speaker 1: bad thought? No, I didn't know the word, but I
Speaker 1: know the kind of person. Right enough, he began telling
Speaker 1: her the story of his married life, but curiate enough,
Speaker 1: she appeared to know the essential parts of it already.
Speaker 1: She described to him, almost as though she had seen
Speaker 1: or felt it, the stiffening of Catherine's body as soon
Speaker 1: as he touched her, the way in which she still
Speaker 1: seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength,
Speaker 1: even when her arms were clasped tightly around him. With Julia,
Speaker 1: he felt no difficulty in talking about such things. Catherine,
Speaker 1: in any case, had long ceased to be a painful
Speaker 1: memory and became merely a distasteful one. I could have
Speaker 1: stood it if it hadn't been for one thing, he said.
Speaker 1: He told her about the frigid little ceremony that Catherine
Speaker 1: had forced him to go through on the same night
Speaker 1: every week. She hated it, but nothing would make her
Speaker 1: stop doing it. She used to call it, but you'll
Speaker 1: never guess our duty to the party, said Julia promptly,
Speaker 1: How did you know that? I've been at school too, Dear,
Speaker 1: Sex talks once a month for the over sixteens, and
Speaker 1: in the youth movement they rub it into you for years.
Speaker 1: I dare say it works in a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: but of course you can never tell. People are such hypocrites.
Speaker 1: She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything
Speaker 1: came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this
Speaker 1: was touched upon in any way, she was capable of
Speaker 1: great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning
Speaker 1: of the party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that
Speaker 1: the sex instinct created a world of its own which
Speaker 1: was outside the party's control, and which therefore had to
Speaker 1: be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that
Speaker 1: sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could
Speaker 1: be transformed into war fever and leader worship. The way
Speaker 1: she put it was, when you make love, you're using
Speaker 1: up energy, and afterwards you feel happy and don't give
Speaker 1: a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel
Speaker 1: like that. They want you to be bursting with energy
Speaker 1: all the time, all this marching up and down and
Speaker 1: cheering and waving flags as simply sex gone sour. If
Speaker 1: you are happy inside yourself, why should you get excited
Speaker 1: about big brother and the three year plans and the
Speaker 1: two minutes hate and all the rest of them. Bloody rot.
Speaker 1: That was very true. He thought there was a direct
Speaker 1: intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could
Speaker 1: the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the
Speaker 1: party needed in its members be kept at the right
Speaker 1: pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using
Speaker 1: it as a driving force. The sex impulse was dangerous
Speaker 1: to the party, and the Party had turned it to account.
Speaker 1: They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood.
Speaker 1: The family could not actually be abolished, and indeed people
Speaker 1: were encouraged to be fond of their children in almost
Speaker 1: the old fashioned way. The children, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy
Speaker 1: on them and report their deviations. The family had become,
Speaker 1: in effect an extension of the thought police. It was
Speaker 1: a device by means of which every one could be
Speaker 1: surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. Abruptly,
Speaker 1: his mind went back to Catherine. Catherine would unquestionably have
Speaker 1: denounced him to the thought police if she had not
Speaker 1: happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of
Speaker 1: his opinions. But what really recalled her to him at
Speaker 1: this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which
Speaker 1: had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began
Speaker 1: telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had
Speaker 1: failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon eleven years ago.
Speaker 1: It was three or four months after they were married.
Speaker 1: They had lost their way on a community hike somewhere
Speaker 1: in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning
Speaker 1: and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge
Speaker 1: of an old chalk quarry. It was a sheer drop
Speaker 1: of ten or twenty meters with boulders at the bottom.
Speaker 1: There was nobody of whom they could ask the way.
Speaker 1: As soon as she realized that they were lost, Catherine
Speaker 1: became very uneasy to be away from the noisy mob
Speaker 1: of hikers. Even for a moment, gave her a feeling
Speaker 1: of wrongdoing. She wanted to hurry back by the way
Speaker 1: they had come and start searching in the other direction.
Speaker 1: But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loose
Speaker 1: strife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them.
Speaker 1: One tuft was of two colors, magenta and brick red,
Speaker 1: apparently growing on the same route. He had never seen
Speaker 1: anything of the kind before, and he called to Catherine
Speaker 1: to come and look at it. Look, Catherine, look at
Speaker 1: those flowers that clumped down near the bottom. Do you
Speaker 1: see there are two different colors. She had already turned
Speaker 1: to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for
Speaker 1: a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face
Speaker 1: to see where he was pointing. He was standing a
Speaker 1: little behind her, and he put his hand on her
Speaker 1: waist to steady her. At this moment, it suddenly occurred
Speaker 1: to him how completely alone they were. There was not
Speaker 1: a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even
Speaker 1: a bird awake. In a place like this, the danger
Speaker 1: that there would be a hidden microphone was very small,
Speaker 1: and even if there was a microphone, it would only
Speaker 1: pick up sounds. It was the hottest, sleepiest hour of
Speaker 1: the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them. The sweat
Speaker 1: tickled his face, and the thought struck him. Why didn't
Speaker 1: you give her a good shove? Said Julia. I would have, Yes, dear,
Speaker 1: you would have. I would if I had been the
Speaker 1: same person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would.
Speaker 1: I'm not certain. Are you sorry you didn't? Yes? On
Speaker 1: the whole, I'm sorry I didn't. They were sitting side
Speaker 1: by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer
Speaker 1: against him, her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant
Speaker 1: smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was
Speaker 1: very young, he thought, she still expected something from life.
Speaker 1: She did not understand that to push an inconvenient person
Speaker 1: over a cliff solves nothing. Actually, it would have made
Speaker 1: no difference, he said, then, why are you sorry? You
Speaker 1: didn't do it? Only because I prefer a positive to
Speaker 1: a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win.
Speaker 1: Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, That's all.
Speaker 1: He felt. Her shoulders give a wriggle of descent. She
Speaker 1: always contradicted him when he said anything of this. Kind,
Speaker 1: She would not accept it as a law of nature
Speaker 1: that the individual is always defeated. In a way, she
Speaker 1: realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later
Speaker 1: the thought police would catch her and kill her. But
Speaker 1: with another part of her mind, she believed that it
Speaker 1: was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which
Speaker 1: you could live as you chose. All you needed was
Speaker 1: luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that
Speaker 1: there was no such thing as happiness, that the only
Speaker 1: victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead,
Speaker 1: that from the moment of declaring war on the party,
Speaker 1: it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.
Speaker 1: We are the dead, he said. We're not dead yet,
Speaker 1: said Julia, prosaically, not physically. Six months, a year, five years, conceivably.
Speaker 1: I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably
Speaker 1: you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously, we
Speaker 1: shall put it off as long as we can, but
Speaker 1: it makes very little difference so long as human beings
Speaker 1: stay human death and life are the same thing. Oh rubbish,
Speaker 1: Which would you sooner sleep with me or a skeleton?
Speaker 1: Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling. This
Speaker 1: is me, this is my hand, this is my leg.
Speaker 1: I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive. Don't you like this?
Speaker 1: She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him.
Speaker 1: He could feel her breasts ripe yet firm through her overalls.
Speaker 1: Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth
Speaker 1: and vigor into his. Yes, I like that, he said.
Speaker 1: Then stop talking about dying, and now listen, dear, we've
Speaker 1: got to fix up about the next time we meet.
Speaker 1: We may as well go back to the place in
Speaker 1: the wood. We've given it a good long rest, but
Speaker 1: you must get there by a different way this time.
Speaker 1: I've got it all planned out. You take the train,
Speaker 1: but look, I'll draw it out for you. And in
Speaker 1: her practical way, she scraped together a small square of dust,
Speaker 1: and with a twig from a pigeon's nest, began drawing
Speaker 1: a map on the floor. End of Section eleven,