He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him. Such a thing could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. He called it the Golden Country. It was an old pasture.

The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips.

The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was getting-up time for office workers. Winston got out of bed and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes.

“Thirty to forty group!” yelled a piercing female voice. “Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!”

Winston stood in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.

“Arms bending and stretching!” she rapped out. “Take your time by me. 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!…”

Winston mechanically shot his arms back and forth, with the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks. He was struggling to think his way backward into his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late fifties everything faded. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it 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, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was a piece of knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened.

“Stand easy!” barked the instructress.

Winston slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of the truth while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,. That was the ultimate subtlety:. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.

The instructress had called them to attention again. “And now let’s see which of us can touch our toes!” she said enthusiastically. “Right over from the hips, please, comrades. ONE-two! ONE-two!…”

Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on a coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. And on that occasion—

“Smith!” screamed the voice 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 stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.”

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston’s body. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head, bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

“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 bent over again. “You see MY knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to,” she added as she straightened herself up. “Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. Now try again. That’s better, comrade, that’s MUCH better,” she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.

With the deep, unconscious sigh, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already lopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. 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, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed everywhere around the building, not only in every room but in every corridor. They were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in. A current of warm air would then bring it to one of the enormous furnaces somewhere within the building.

Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines—consisting largely of Newspeak words—which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran: