He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his overalls.
It was even possible--he thought this because from time to time something seemed to tickle his leg--that there might be a sizeable bit of crust there.
In the end the temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped a hand into his pocket.
'Smith!' yelled a voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.!
Hands out of pockets in the cells!'
He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee.
Before being brought here he had been taken to another place which must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used by the patrols.
He did not know how long he had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocks and no daylight it was hard to gauge the time.
It was a noisy, evil-smelling place.
They had put him into a cell similar to the one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen people.
The majority of them were common criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among them.
He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others.
The Party prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody.
They yelled insults at the guards, fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried to restore order.
On the other hand some of them seemed to be on good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole in the door.
The guards, too, treated the common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them roughly.
There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent.
It was 'all right' in the camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes.
There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled from potatoes.
The positions of trust were given only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy.
All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals.
There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers, drunks, prostitutes.
Some of the drunks were so violent that the other prisoners had to combine to suppress them.
An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down in her struggles, was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her one at each corner.
They wrenched off the boots with which she had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down across Winston's lap, almost breaking his thigh-bones.
The woman hoisted herself upright and followed them out with a yell of
'F---- bastards!'
Then, noticing that she was sitting on something uneven, she slid off Winston's knees on to the bench.
'Beg pardon, dearie,' she said. 'I wouldn't 'a sat on you, only the buggers put me there.
They dono 'ow to treat a lady, do they?' She paused, patted her breast, and belched.
'Pardon,' she said, 'I ain't meself, quite.'
She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
'Thass better,' she said, leaning back with closed eyes.
'Never keep it down, thass what I say.
Get it up while it's fresh on your stomach, like.' She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and seemed immediately to take a fancy to him.
She put a vast arm round his shoulder and drew him towards her, breathing beer and vomit into his face.
'Wass your name, dearie?' she said.
'Smith,' said Winston.
'Smith?' said the woman.
'Thass funny.
My name's Smith too. Why,' she added sentimentally,
'I might be your mother!'
She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about the right age and physique, and it was probable that people changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp.
No one else had spoken to him.
To a surprising extent the ordinary criminals ignored the Party prisoners.
'The polITS,' they called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt.
The Party prisoners seemed terrified of speaking to anybody, and above all of speaking to one another.
Only once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed close together on the bench, he overheard amid the din of voices a few hurriedly-whispered words; and in particular a reference to something called 'room one-oh-one', which he did not understand.
It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought him here.
The dull pain in his belly never went away, but sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded or contracted accordingly.