Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [1146]

Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candlelit room with a vast white-counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the floor, shaking a dice-box and laughing excitedly. His mother was sitting opposite him and also laughing. … Soon he was wildly excited and shouting with laughter as the tiddleywinks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then came slithering down the snakes again, almost back to the starting-point. They played eight games, winning four each. His tiny sister, too young to understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster, laughing because the others were laughing. For a whole afternoon they had all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 1146

Note

The counterpoint of shared childhood laughter against the lone, surveilled present; the Snakes and Ladders (a dice game, luck-based) contrasting with the rigged chess problem where ‘white always mates.’ Orwell lets the memory do its own work before Winston dismisses it as ‘a false memory.’