He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste - this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Only the Thought Police mattered.īehind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own.
There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.
#TREMULOUS GAME CLUMSYBOY SKIN#
His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move.
On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.