18 1984For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity
which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right
pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and
using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to
the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had
played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The
family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people
were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the
old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were
systematically turned against their parents and taught to
spy on them and report their deviations. The family had
become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was
a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded
night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine
would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought
Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the
unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what really recalled her
to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon,
which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began
telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had
failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon,
eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married. They
had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent.
They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of min-
utes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found
themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk
quarry. It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with