to. 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.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though,
as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the
Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the
grimy landscape. 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. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that
should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there
always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides
shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and
their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all
directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air
and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places
where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid
colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he
could not remember:
.
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