Outside, even through the shut windowpane, the worldlooked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirlingdust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shiningand the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour inanything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. Theblack-moustachio’d face gazed down from every commandingcorner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite.BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while thedark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street levelanother poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind,alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. Inthe far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs,hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away againwith a curving flight. It was the Police Patrol, snooping intopeople’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen wasstill babbling away about pig iron and the overfulfilment of theNinth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmittedsimultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level ofa very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so longas he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaquecommanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was ofcourse no way of knowing whether you were being watched atany given moment. How often, or on what system, the ThoughtPolice plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It waseven conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But atany rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in theassumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It wassafer;though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, toweredvast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought witha sort of vague distaste—this was London, chief city of AirstripOne, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tellhim whether London had always been quite like this. Were therealways these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, theirsides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patchedwith cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazygarden walls sagging in all directions?And the bombed siteswhere the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herbstraggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where thebombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung upsordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses? But itwas no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of hischildhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring againstno background and mostly unintelligible.
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