the kind of detail that might betray you. Some
nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little
sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department)
might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval,
why he had used an old-fashioned pen, what he had been writing -- and then
drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and
carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which
rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this
purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of
hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had
been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the
tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and
deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken
off if the book was moved.



III

Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother