Winston goes for a walk through the prole district and envies the simple lives of the common people. He enters a pub where he sees an old man, a possible link to the past.
He talks to the old man and tries to ascertain whether, in the days before the Party, people were really exploited by bloated capitalists, as the Party records claim.
The old man’s memory is too vague to provide an answer. Winston laments that the past has been left to the proles, who will inevitably forget it. Winston walks to the secondhand store in which he bought the diary and buys a clear glass paperweight with a pink coral center from Mr. Charrington, the proprietor.
Mr. Charrington takes him upstairs to a private room with no telescreen, where a print of St. Clement’s Church looks down from the wall, evoking the old rhyme: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s / You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s.”
On the way home, Winston sees a figure in blue Party overalls—the dark-haired girl, apparently following him. Terrified, he imagines hitting her with a cobblestone or with the paperweight in his pocket.
He hurries home and decides that the best thing to do is to commit suicide before the Party catches him. He realizes that if the Thought Police catch him, they will torture him before they kill him.
He tries to calm himself by thinking about O’Brien and about the place where there is no darkness that O’Brien mentioned in Winston’s dreams.
Troubled, he takes a coin from his pocket and looks into the face of Big Brother. He cannot help but recall the Party slogans: “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”
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SparkNotes Editors. “George Orwell 1984.” SparkNotes.com, SparkNotes LLC, 2005.