and Tom won’t be back from work in time.’

’Why can’t we go and see the hanging?’ roared the boy in his huge voice.

’Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!’ chanted the little girl, stil capering round.

Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.

’Goldstein!’ bel owed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman’s greyish face. Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the table again, stil rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between lceland and the Faroe lslands. With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly al children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of al was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematical y turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the dril ing with dummy rifles, the yel ing of slogans, the worship of Big Brother — it was al a sort of glorious game to them. Al their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak — ’child hero’

was the phrase general y used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

The sting of the catapult bul et had worn off. He picked up his pen halfheartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O’Brien again.

Years ago — how long was it? Seven years it must be — he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: ’We shal meet in the place where there is no darkness.’ It was said very quietly, almost casual y — a statement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him.