Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [396]

But he lingered for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not Weeks – as one might have gathered from the inscription over the shopfront – but Charrington. Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that they were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston’s head. Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 396

Note

The detail of the sign saying ‘Weeks’ when the man is Charrington — a lie in plain sight, a name that never got fixed — quietly undermines every assumed fact in this scene. The ‘bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten’ is a haunting image of the past’s persistence precisely through misremembering: the rhyme is the only channel for a history the books and buildings have erased.