This is 1984 by George Orwell.
Part 2, chapter 3.
'We can come here once again,' said Julia.
'It's generally safe to use any hide-out twice.
But not for another month or two, of course.'
As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed.
She became alert and business-like, put her
clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash about
her waist, and began arranging the details
of the journey home.
It seemed natural to leave this to her.
She obviously had a practical cunning which
Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have
an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside
round London, stored away from innumerable
community hikes.
The route she gave him was quite different
from the one by which he had come, and brought
him out at a different railway station.
'Never go home the same way as you went out,'
she said, as though enunciating an important
general principle.
She would leave first, and Winston was to
wait half an hour before following her.
She had named a place where they could meet
after work, four evenings hence.
It was a street in one of the poorer quarters,
where there was an open market which was generally
crowded and noisy.
She would be hanging about among the stalls,
pretending to be in search of shoelaces or
sewing-thread.
If she judged that the coast was clear she
would blow her nose when he approached; otherwise
he was to walk past her without recognition.
But with luck, in the middle of the crowd,
it would be safe to talk for a quarter of
an hour and arrange another meeting.
'And now I must go,' she said as soon as he
had mastered his instructions.
'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty.
I've got to put in two hours for the Junior
Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or
something.
Isn't it bloody?
Give me a brush-down, would you?
Have I got any twigs in my hair?
Are you sure?
Then good-bye, my love, good-bye!'
She flung herself into his arms, kissed him
almost violently, and a moment later pushed
her way through the saplings and disappeared
into the wood with very little noise.
Even now he had not found out her surname
or her address.
However, it made no difference, for it was
inconceivable that they could ever meet indoors
or exchange any kind of written communication.
As it happened, they never went back to the
clearing in the wood.
During the month of May there was only one
further occasion on which they actually succeeded
in making love.
That was in another hidlng-place known to
Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an
almost-deserted stretch of country where an
atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.
It was a good hiding-place when once you got
there, but the getting there was very dangerous.
For the rest they could meet only in the streets,
in a different place every evening and never
for more than half an hour at a time.
In the street it was usually possible to talk,
after a fashion.
As they drifted down the crowded pavements,
not quite abreast and never looking at one
another, they carried on a curious, intermittent
conversation which flicked on and off like
the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped
into silence by the approach of a Party uniform
or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken
up again minutes later in the middle of a
sentence, then abruptly cut short as they
parted at the agreed spot, then continued
almost without introduction on the following
day.
Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind
of conversation, which she called 'talking
by instalments'.
She was also surprisingly adept at speaking
without moving her lips.
Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings
they managed to exchange a kiss.
They were passing in silence down a side-street
(Julia would never speak when they were away
from the main streets) when there was a deafening
roar, the earth heaved, and the air darkened,
and Winston found himself lying on his side,
bruised and terrified.
A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near
at hand.
Suddenly he became aware of Julia's face a
few centimetres from his own, deathly white,
as white as chalk.
Even her lips were white.
She was dead!
He clasped her against him and found that
he was kissing a live warm face.
But there was some powdery stuff that got
in the way of his lips.
Both of their faces were thickly coated with
plaster.
There were evenings when they reached their
rendezvous and then had to walk past one another
without a sign, because a patrol had just
come round the corner or a helicopter was
hovering overhead.
Even if it had been less dangerous, it would
still have been difficult to find time to
meet.
Winston's working week was sixty hours, Julia's
was even longer, and their free days varied
according to the pressure of work and did
not often coincide.
Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening
completely free.
She spent an astonishing amount of time in
attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing
literature for the junior Anti-Sex League,
preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections
for the savings campaign, and such-like activities.
It paid, she said, it was camouflage.
If you kept the small rules, you could break
the big ones.
She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another
of his evenings by enrolling himself for the
part-time munition work which was done voluntarily
by zealous Party members.
So, one evening every week, Winston spent
four hours of paralysing boredom, screwing
together small bits of metal which were probably
parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit
workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled
drearily with the music of the telescreens.
When they met in the church tower the gaps
in their fragmentary conversation were filled
up.
It was a blazing afternoon.
The air in the little square chamber above
the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt
overpoweringly of pigeon dung.
They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered
floor, one or other of them getting up from
time to time to cast a glance through the
arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.
Julia was twenty-six years old.
She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls
('Always in the stink of women!
How I hate women!' she said parenthetically),
and she worked, as he had guessed, on the
novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department.
She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly
in running and servicing a powerful but tricky
electric motor.
She was 'not clever', but was fond of using
her hands and felt at home with machinery.
She could describe the whole process of composing
a novel, from the general directive issued
by the Planning Committee down to the final
touching-up by the Rewrite Squad.
But she was not interested in the finished
product.
She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said.
Books were just a commodity that had to be
produced, like jam or bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the
early sixties and the only person she had
ever known who talked frequently of the days
before the Revolution was a grandfather who
had disappeared when she was eight.
At school she had been captain of the hockey
team and had won the gymnastics trophy two
years running.
She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and
a branch secretary in the Youth League before
joining the Junior Anti-Sex League.
She had always borne an excellent character.
She had even (an infallibIe mark of good reputation)
been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section
of the Fiction Department which turned out
cheap pornography for distribution among the
proles.
It was nicknamed Muck House by the people
who worked in it, she remarked.
There she had remained for a year, helping
to produce booklets in sealed packets with
titles like Spanking Stories or One Night
in a Girls' School, to be bought furtively
by proletarian youths who were under the impression
that they were buying something illegal.
'What are these books like?' said Winston
curiously.
'Oh, ghastly rubbish.
They're boring, really.
They only have six plots, but they swap them
round a bit.
Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes.
I was never in the Rewrite Squad.
I'm not literary, dear -- not even enough
for that.'
He learned with astonishment that all the
workers in Pornosec, except the heads of the
departments, were girls.
The theory was that men, whose sex instincts
were less controllable than those of women,
were in greater danger of being corrupted
by the filth they handled.
'They don't even like having married women
there,' she added.
'Girls are always supposed to be so pure.
Here's one who isn't, anyway.'
She had had her first love-affair when she
was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty
who later committed suicide to avoid arrest.
'And a good job too,' said Julia, 'otherwise
they'd have had my name out of him when he
confessed.'
Since then there had been various others.
Life as she saw it was quite simple.
You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the
Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke
the rules as best you couId.
She seemed to think it just as natural that
'they' should want to rob you of your pleasures
as that you should want to avoid being caught.
She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest
words, but she made no general criticism of
it.
Except where it touched upon her own life
she had no interest in Party doctrine.
He noticed that she never used Newspeak words
except the ones that had passed into everyday
use.
She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and
refused to believe in its existence.
Any kind of organized revolt against the Party,
which was bound to be a failure, struck her
as stupid.
The clever thing was to break the rules and
stay alive all the same.
He wondered vaguely how many others like her
there might be in the younger generation people
who had grown up in the world of the Revolution,
knowing nothing else, accepting the Party
as something unalterable, like the sky, not
rebelling against its authority but simply
evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting
married.
It was too remote to be worth thinking about.
No imaginable committee would ever sanction
such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston's
wife, could somehow have been got rid of.
It was hopeless even as a daydream.
'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.
'She was -- do you know the Newspeak word
goodthinkful?
Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking
a bad thought?'
'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the
kind of person, right enough.'
He began telling her the story of his married
life, but curiousIy enough she appeared to
know the essential parts of it already.
She described to him, almost as though she
had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's
body as soon as he touched her, the way in
which she still seemed to be pushing him from
her with all her strength, even when her arms
were clasped tightly round him.
With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking
about such things: Katharine, in any case,
had long ceased to be a painful memory and
became merely a distasteful one.
'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for
one thing,' he said.
He toId her about the frigid little ceremony
that Katharine had forced him to go through
on the same night every week.
'She hated it, but nothing would make her
stop doing it.
She used to call it -- but you'll never guess.'
'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
'How did you know that?'
'I've been at school too, dear.
Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens.
And in the Youth Movement.
They rub it into you for years.
I dare say it works in a lot of cases.
But of course you can never tell; peopIe are
such hypocrites.'
She began to enlarge upon the subject.
With Julia, everything came back to her own
sexuality.
As soon as this was touched upon in any way
she was capable of great acuteness.
Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner
meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism.
It was not merely that the sex instinct created
a world of its own which was outside the Party's
control and which therefore had to be destroyed
if possible.
What was more important was that sexual privation
induced hysteria, which was desirable because
it could be transformed into war-fever and
leader-worship.
The way she put it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy;
and afterwards you feel happy and don't give
a damn for anything.
They can't bear you to feel like that.
They want you to be bursting with energy all
the time.
All this marching up and down and cheering
and waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour.
If you're happy inside yourself, why should
you get excited about Big Brother and the
Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate
and all the rest of their bloody rot?'
That was very true, he thought.
There was a direct intimate connexion between
chastity and political orthodoxy.
For how could the fear, the hatred, and the
lunatic credulity which the Party needed in
its members be kept at the right pitch, except
by bottling down some powerful instinct and
using it as a driving force?
The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party,
and the Party had turned it to account.
They had played a similar trick with the instinct
of parenthood.
The family could not actually be abolished,
and, indeed, people were encouraged to be
fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned
way.
The children, on the other hand, were systematically
turned against their parents and taught to
spy on them and report their deviations.
The family had become in effect an extension
of the Thought Police.
It was a device by means of which everyone
could be surrounded night and day by informers
who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine.
Katharine would unquestionably have denounced
him to the Thought Police if she had not happened
to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy
of his opinions.
But what really recalled her to him at this
moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon,
which had brought the sweat out on his forehead.
He began telling Julia of something that had
happened, or rather had failed to happen,
on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven
years ago.
It was three or four months after they were
married.
They had lost their way on a community hike
somewhere in Kent.
They had only lagged behind the others for
a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong
turning, and presently found themselves pulled
up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry.
It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres,
with boulders at the bottom.
There was nobody of whom they could ask the
way.
As soon as she realized that they were lost
Katharine became very uneasy.
To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even
for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing.
She wanted to hurry back by the way they had
come and start searching in the other direction.
But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts
of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the
cliff beneath them.
One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red,
apparently growing on the same root.
He had never seen anything of the kind before,
and he called to Katharine to come and look
at it.
'Look, Katharine!
Look at those flowers.
That clump down near the bottom.
Do you see they're two different colours?'
She had already turned to go, but she did
rather fretfully come back for a moment.
She even leaned out over the cliff face to
see where he was pointing.
He was standing a little behind her, and he
put his hand on her waist to steady her.
At this moment it suddenly occurred to him
how completely alone they were.
There was not a human creature anywhere, not
a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake.
In a place like this the danger that there
would be a hidden microphone was very small,
and even if there was a microphone it would
only pick up sounds.
It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon.
The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled
his face.
And the thought struck him...
'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said
Julia.
'I would have.'
'Yes, dear, you would have.
I would, if I'd been the same person then
as I am now.
Or perhaps I would -- I'm not certain.'
'Are you sorry you didn't?'
'Yes.
On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'
They were sitting side by side on the dusty
floor.
He pulled her closer against him.
Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant
smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung.
She was very young, he thought, she still
expected something from life, she did not
understand that to push an inconvenient person
over a cliff solves nothing.
'Actually it would have made no difference,'
he said.
'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'
'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative.
In this game that we're playing, we can't
win.
Some kinds of failure are better than other
kinds, that's all.'
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent.
She always contradicted him when he said anything
of this kind.
She would not accept it as a law of nature
that the individual is always defeated.
In a way she realized that she herself was
doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police
would catch her and kill her, but with another
part of her mind she believed that it was
somehow possible to construct a secret world
in which you could live as you chose.
All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness.
She did not understand that there was no such
thing as happiness, that the only victory
lay in the far future, long after you were
dead, that from the moment of declaring war
on the Party it was better to think of yourself
as a corpse.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'Not physically.
Six months, a year -- five years, conceivably.
I am afraid of death.
You are young, so presumably you're more afraid
of it than I am.
Obviously we shall put it off as long as we
can.
But it makes very little difference.
So long as human beings stay human, death
and life are the same thing.'
'Oh, rubbish!
Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a
skeleton?
Don't you enjoy being alive?
Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is
my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid,
I'm alive!
Don't you like this?'
She twisted herself round and pressed her
bosom against him.
He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm,
through her overalls.
Her body seemed to be pouring some of its
youth and vigour into his.
'Yes, I like that,' he said.
'Then stop talking about dying.
And now listen, dear, we've got to fix up
about the next time we meet.
We may as well go back to the place in the
wood.
We've given it a good long rest.
But you must get there by a different way
this time.
I've got it all planned out.
You take the train -- but look, I'll draw
it out for you.'
And in her practical way she scraped together
a small square of dust, and with a twig from
a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the
floor.
