Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [712]

Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with O’Brien or the Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room over Mr Charrington’s shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame. Almost at random he said: … ‘Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins “ ‘Oranges and lemons,’ say the bells of St Clement’s”?’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 712

Note

The associative ordering of private memory—mother’s bedroom, Charrington’s shop, the paperweight, the engraving—is the deepest interiority Winston expresses, answering O’Brien’s ‘Any question?’ with poetry rather than politics. The rhyme becomes a test of shared memory from the pre-Revolution past, the one thing he can reach for against the machinery of the Brotherhood.