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 could. 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 e