‘Wass your name, dearie?’ she said.
‘Smith,’ said Winston.
‘Smith?’ said the woman. ‘Thass funny. My name’s Smith
too. Why,’ she added sentimentally, ‘I might be your mother!’
She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about the right age and physique, and it was probable that people changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp.
No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the ordinary criminals ignored the Party prisoners. ‘The polITS,’ they called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt. The Party prisoners seemed terrified of speaking to anybody, and above all of speaking to one another. Only once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed close together on the bench, he overheard amid the din of voices a few hurriedly-whispered words; and in particular a reference to something called ‘room one-oh-one’, which he did not understand.