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houses, their sides
shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and
their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all
directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air
and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places
where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid
colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he
could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of
bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly
unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak[1] -- was startlingly
different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal
structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace,
300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to
read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans
of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms
above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about
London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and
size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from
the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously.
They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire
a