two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit
of life into it! One, two, three four! One two, three, four!...'
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's
mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the
exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and
forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered
proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way
backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily
difficult. Beyond the late fifties everything faded. When there were no
external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life
lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not
happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to
recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you
could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of
countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One,
for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called
England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been
called London.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not
been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval
of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an
air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the
time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the
raid itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as
they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and
round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so
wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest.
His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was f