Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1
or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence
anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so
because the processes that it involved could not be called
by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department
worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-
hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from
the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals con-
sisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round
on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that
Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to
leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled
back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another
shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snow-
drift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the
floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a
neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst
of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical.
Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for an-
other, but any detailed report of events demanded care and
imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one
needed in transferring the war from one part of the world
to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his
spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like
struggling with some crushing physical task, something
which one had the right to refuse and which one was never-
theless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he
had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that
every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke