When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled up.
It was a blazing afternoon.
The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung.
They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.
Julia was twenty-six years old.
She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls ('Always in the stink of women!
How I hate women!' she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department.
She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor.
She was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery.
She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad.
But she was not interested in the finished product.
She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said.
Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight.
At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running.
She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League.
She had always borne an excellent character.
She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles.
It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked.
There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like
'Spanking Stories' or
'One Night in a Girls' School', to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.
'Oh, ghastly rubbish.
They're boring, really.
They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit.
Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes.
I was never in the Rewrite Squad.
I'm not literary, dear--not even enough for that.'
He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls.
The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.
'They don't even like having married women there,' she added. Girls are always supposed to be so pure.
Here's one who isn't, anyway.
She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest.
'And a good job too,' said Julia, 'otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed.'
Since then there had been various others.
Life as she saw it was quite simple.
You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could.
She seemed to think it just as natural that 'they' should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught.
She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it.
Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.
He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use.
She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence.
Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid.
The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.
He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married.
It was too remote to be worth thinking about.
No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been got rid of.
It was hopeless even as a daydream.