1984 - Planet eBook

or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existenceanywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more sobecause the processes that it involved could not be calledby their true names. Everyone in the Records Departmentworked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two threehoursnatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up fromthe cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consistedof sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled roundon trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time thatWinston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried toleave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawledback sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that anothershower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift,halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to thefloor, so that the first job was always to stack them into aneat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worstof all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical.Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another,but any detailed report of events demanded care andimagination. Even the geographical knowledge that oneneeded in transferring the war from one part of the worldto another was considerable.By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and hisspectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was likestruggling with some crushing physical task, somethingwhich one had the right to refuse and which one was neverthelessneurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as hehad time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact thatevery word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke