Page 126 - 1984

owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s——‘
there, now, that’s as far as I can get. A farthing, that was
a 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 tri-
angular porch and pillars in front, and a big flight of steps.’
Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used
for propaganda displays of various kinds—scale models of
rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux il-
lustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.
‘St Martin’s-in-the-Fields it used to be called,’ supple-
mented the old man, ‘though I don’t recollect any fields
anywhere in those parts.’
Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an
even more incongruous possession than the glass paper-
weight, and impossible to carry home, unless it were taken
out of its frame. But he lingered for some minutes more,
talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not
Weeks—as one might have gathered from the inscription
over the shop-front—but Charrington. Mr Charrington, it
seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabit-
ed this shop for thirty years. Throughout that time he had
been intending to alter the name over the window, but had
never quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that
they were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept run-
ning through Winston’s head. Oranges and lemons say the
bells of St Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the
bells of St Martin’s! It was curious, but when you said it to

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