[terrorysta]

and his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side
of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be
frosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very old man,
bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of
a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching,
it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had
already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others
like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of
capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas
had been formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been
wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who
survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender.
If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of
conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole.
Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his
diary came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of
him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old
man and question him. He would say to him: 'Tell me about your life when
you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better than
they are now, or were they worse?'
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descended
the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. As
usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and frequenting
their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the
patrols appeared he might plead an