1984 - Planet eBook

owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s——‘there, now, that’s as far as I can get. A farthing, that wasa small copper coin, looked something like a cent.’‘Where was St Martin’s?’ said Winston.‘St Martin’s? That’s still standing. It’s in Victory Square,alongside the picture gallery. A building with a kind of a triangularporch and pillars in front, and a big flight of steps.’Winston knew the place well. It was a museum usedfor propaganda displays of various kinds—scale models ofrocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustratingenemy atrocities, and the like.‘St Martin’s-in-the-Fields it used to be called,’ supplementedthe old man, ‘though I don’t recollect any fieldsanywhere in those parts.’Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been aneven more incongruous possession than the glass paperweight,and impossible to carry home, unless it were takenout of its frame. But he lingered for some minutes more,talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was notWeeks—as one might have gathered from the inscriptionover the shop-front—but Charrington. Mr Charrington, itseemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabitedthis shop for thirty years. Throughout that time he hadbeen intending to alter the name over the window, but hadnever quite got to the point of doing it. All the while thatthey were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept runningthrough Winston’s head. Oranges and lemons say thebells of St Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say thebells of St Martin’s! It was curious, but when you said it to