for children. It was the law by which every
capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his
factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the
average human being was better off now than he had been before the
Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your
own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were
intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It
struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not
its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its
listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only
to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals
that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary
jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a
saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party
was something huge, terrible, and glittering -- a world of steel and
concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons -- a nation of
warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the
same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting,
triumphing, persecuting -- three hundred million people all with the same
face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled
to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of
London, vast and ruinous, city of a