bus-stop and
wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then
north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in
which direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the
proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth
and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured
slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He
was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow
curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of filthy water here
and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers -- girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you
what the girls would be like in ten years" time, and old bent creatures
shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played
in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers.
Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up.
Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort
of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded
across thelr aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught scraps
of conversation a

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