[peachy ashie passion]

grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond
forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed
to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved -- a little
granddaughter, perhaps -- had been killed. Every few minutes the old man
kept repeating:
'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's
what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave
trusted the buggers.'
But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted Winston could not
now remember.
Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though
strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months
during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London
itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history
of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment,
would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken
word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At
this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with
Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private