The church belfry

The church belfry is a ruined bell-chamber in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. As a hiding-place known to Julia, it is used once, in May, by Winston Smith and Julia — the second place where their love affair reaches consummation, after the clearing in the wood, and the only further occasion of the kind that the month allows. It is a good hiding-place when once one gets there, but the getting there is very dangerous.

A Ruined Refuge in a Dead Zone

The belfry stands in a landscape that the atomic bomb had emptied a generation before, leaving the church a ruin among deserted fields. Its remoteness is exactly what makes it usable, but it is a one-off refuge. During the whole month of May there is only this single further occasion on which Winston and Julia actually succeed in making love; for the rest of the month they can meet only in the streets, changing the rendezvous every evening and never staying together for more than half an hour. Those street encounters are conducted as a curious, intermittent conversation, flicking on and off like the beams of a lighthouse — cut short by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, resumed minutes later in the middle of a sentence.

Candour Above the Bells

The tower's chamber above the bells is hot and stagnant on the afternoon they use it, thick with the smell of pigeon-dung, its dusty floor littered with twigs. They sit there for hours, one or the other rising from time to time to peer through the arrow-slits and make sure no one is coming. With time at last on their side, the gaps in their fragmentary conversation are filled up. Julia speaks about her work in the Fiction Department, her years as a troop-leader in the Spies and branch secretary in the Youth League, and her hatred of the Party; Winston tells her about Katharine, including the story of the chalk quarry in Kent where he once stood alone with his wife and did not push her over the edge. Before they leave, Julia draws him a map on a scraped square of dust, using a twig from a pigeon's nest, to fix their next meeting.

Narrative Significance

In a world where privacy has been abolished, the belfry is one of the novel's rare sanctuaries — a place where the lovers can be alone and can talk at length without fear. Yet its ruinous, bomb-blasted setting and the danger of the approach insist that such sanctuaries belong to the abolished past and cannot last. The single visit is a quiet interlude at the heart of the Winston–Julia story, the moment when their relationship deepens from physical rebellion into a shared private world, before the street meetings resume and eventually give way to the riskier indoor arrangement in the room above Mr Charrington's shop. The visit stands alone in the narrative.