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In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his
mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster
of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a
memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his
consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the
date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, pos-
sibly twelve, when it had happened.
His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much
earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the
rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical
panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations,
the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proc-
lamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in
shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside
the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the dis-
tance—above all, the fact that there was never enough to
eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking
out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes
even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully
scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the pass-
ing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted
over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few frag-
ments of oil-cake.
When his father disappeared, his mother did not show
any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came
over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless.
It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for