if you could get
the bugs out of it. But I dare say you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.'
He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room,
and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought
flitted through Winston's mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent
the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a
wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but the
room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory.
It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room
like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender
and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody
watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the
kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things. Too
expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Now that's a
nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you'd have to put
new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.'
There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had
already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The
hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same
thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely
that there existed a