A little later all three were re-arrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again. They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the Party histories. About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was working on documents when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of “The Times” of about ten years earlier—the top half of the page, so that it included the date—and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, and their names were in the caption at the bottom.

The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown to Siberia, and had worked with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.

It was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms.

He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen.

He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. Without uncovering the picture again, he dropped it into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.

That was ten—eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that photograph. But today, it might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then there had been other changes—two, three, he could not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer mattered. The past changed continuously. He took up his pen again and wrote:

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be ALONE in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.

He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother on the cover. The eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull,

His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The face of O’Brien had floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than before, that O’Brien was on his side. He was writing the diary for O’Brien—TO O’Brien.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power positioned against him,.And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, he wrote:

Winston had walked for several kilometres. 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 activity. But this evening as he came out of the Ministry 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 had seemed intolerable. He had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London.

“If there is hope,” he had written in the diary, “it lies in the proles.” The words kept coming back to him. He was walking up a cobbled street of little houses. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Winston. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be here, unless you had definite business. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them.

He turned to the right. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles went to (“pubs”, they called them) were full with customers.

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 took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into an alley. 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 junkshop where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary.

He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of the alley there was a pub. A very old man pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, had already been middleaged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others like him were the last links to the past. 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. Suddenly, an impulse took hold of him. He would go into the pub and question the old man. 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, he went down the steps and crossed the street. It was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and going to their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. He pushed open the door, and a hideous smell 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 looking at his blue overalls. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, talking to the barman.

“I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?” said the old man. “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.”