George Orwell's '1984', daily

One fell on a crowded film theater in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighborhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting.

Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground, and several dozen children were blown to pieces.

The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper.

Winston’s evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of volunteers, organised by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.

Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred meters of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.

He turned over toward the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself.

There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete.

He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself.

“Who taught you that?” he said.

“My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight—at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,” she added inconsequently. “I’ve seen oranges. They’re a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.”

“I can remember lemons,” said Winston. “They were quite common in the Fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them.”

“It’s a church, or at least it used to be. St. Clement’s Dane its name was.” The fragment of rhyme that Mr. Charrington had taught him came back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s!”

To his astonishment she capped the line:

“You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s, When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey—”

“And that picture over there—” she nodded at the engraving on the opposite wall—“would that be a hundred years old?”

“More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can’t tell. It’s impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.”