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proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung
himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right
when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed
to possess some kind of instinct which told them several
seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although
the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. Win-
ston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar
that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light
objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found
that he was covered with fragments of glass from the near-
est window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of
houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke
hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which
a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a
little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and
in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he
got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the
wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so com-
pletely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid
the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. With-
in three or four minutes he was out of the area which the
bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the
streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It
was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the
proles frequented (’pubs’, they called them) were choked
with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly
opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine,