had bought the blank book
which was now his diary. And in a small stationer's shop not far away he
had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side
of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be
frosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very old man,
bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of
a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching,
it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had
already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others
like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of
capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas
had been formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been
wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who
survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender.
If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of
conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole.
Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his
diary came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of
him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape acq