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 million dustbins, and mixed up with it
was a picture of Mrs. Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair,
fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the
telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had
more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations -- that they
lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger,
happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years
ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed,
for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before
the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The
Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand,
whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 -- and so it went on. It was
like a single equation with two unknowns. It m