Arrest of Winston and Julia

On a late-summer evening in the room above Mr Charrington's shop, the private world that Winston Smith and Julia had built was broken open in a single sentence. They were standing by the window, listening to the woman in the yard sing, when a voice spoke behind them: 'You are the dead.' It came from a telescreen hidden behind the steel engraving on the wall, and the words were at once a judgement and a confirmation. Julia's face went a milky yellow, the rouge on her cheekbones standing out as though it belonged to a different face. They had always known this moment was coming; what they had not known was that the room itself was the trap.

The Trap Revealed

Julia understood first. 'It was behind the picture,' she breathed, and the voice repeated the words back at her before ordering them to remain exactly where they were. There was a snap, a crash of breaking glass, and the picture fell to the floor, uncovering the telescreen. 'Now they can see us,' said Julia; the voice answered, 'Now we can see you.' They were ordered to stand out in the middle of the room, back to back, hands clasped behind their heads, and not to touch one another. Below them and around them the house was filling with men; the yard seemed full of them, the singing woman had stopped, something was being dragged across the stones, a washtub clanged, and angry shouts ended in a yell of pain. Winston could hear his own teeth chattering and could not control his knees, but Julia said what there was to say: 'I suppose we may as well say good-bye.' The iron voice echoed her, and then a second voice, a thin, cultivated voice that Winston had the impression he had heard before, added the closing rhyme of the old children's game: 'Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!' The head of a ladder burst through the window, and black-uniformed men with iron-shod boots and truncheons filled the room.

The Breaking of the Paperweight

The violence of the arrest was concentrated on the objects that had made the room a home. A guard with a prizefighter's jaw paused in front of Winston, balancing his truncheon between thumb and forefinger, and Winston, hands behind his head, felt the nakedness of being seen. The guard licked the place where his lips should have been and passed on. Then someone picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it on the hearth-stone. The fragment of coral rolled across the mat — 'How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!' — and the tiny pink crinkle was all that remained of the 'little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter' which had seemed to hold their love in a crystal eternity. At the same moment a fist struck Julia in the solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler; she was carried out of the room like a sack, and Winston's last sight of her was an upside-down face, yellow and contorted, eyes shut, with a smear of rouge still on either cheek.

The Man Who Had Been Mr Charrington

Winston had still not been hit, and in the strange passivity of the moment he registered the transformation of the old man who had rented them the room. Mr Charrington entered in the same velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, was black; he was not wearing his spectacles; his body was straighter and seemed bigger, and his face had altered in small ways that amounted to a complete change. The cockney accent had disappeared, and with it Winston suddenly understood whose voice he had heard on the telescreen. The kindly, faded antiquarian was gone, replaced by the alert, cold face of a man of about thirty-five. Winston realized that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police. The room that had seemed a pocket of the past — with its gate-leg table, its twelve-hour clock and its bed without sheets — had been part of the machinery of surveillance all along.

From Sanctuary to Sentence

The arrest was the hinge on which the lovers' story turned into its opposite. Everything that followed was already contained in the moment the iron voice spoke. In the Ministry of Love, O'Brien told Winston that Julia had betrayed him immediately and unreservedly, a 'perfect conversion', and Winston's own re-education was conducted with the same thoroughness: the beating, the questioning, the finger-torture over the number of fingers O'Brien held up, and finally the cage of rats in Room 101. Faced with the mask closing on his face, Winston's only thought of escape was to interpose another body between himself and the rats, and he screamed 'Do it to Julia!' When they were both released, they met by chance in the Park one bitter March day, and each said flatly, 'I betrayed you.' Sitting side by side but not touching, they agreed that after that you do not feel the same towards the other person any longer. The story of the two people who had called themselves 'the dead' ended not in martyrdom but in absorption: Winston, sitting in the Chestnut Tree Café with the chessboard and the endless gin, finally learned what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache, and it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He loved Big Brother.