while he was doing so a totally different memory had
clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to
writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident
that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous
could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where
Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and
grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in
preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in
one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never
spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he
often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that
she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes
seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner -- she had some mechanical
job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of
about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic
movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring