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So, we are off on our walk with Winston to the prole quarters on this beautiful spring evening when suddenly all hell breaks loose:
There were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron around it, and leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran toward Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.A rocket bomb, as Orwell calls them. His proles call them steamers. Don’t worry, our novel is not ending yet. Winston only gets a little shower of debris on his back. He gets up, shakes himself off, and walks on in the chaos:
“Steamer!” he yelled. “ Look out, guv’nor! Bang over’ead! Lay down quick!”
There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.Well, it’s early yet. No need to cut short our walk. It is just another day in this Orwellian world of totalitarian powers.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened.
