Chapter III
Julia meets Winston in the forest clearing and, after a brief kiss, immediately adopts a businesslike tone. She knots a scarlet sash, explains that she will leave first and that Winston must wait thirty minutes before following her, and insists on never using the same exit route twice. She gives Winston a new, longer route that ends at a different railway station and outlines a future meeting spot in a crowded market street of a poorer quarter, where she will pretend to look for shoelaces and signal his approach by blowing her nose. Julia departs for her Junior Anti‑Sex League duties, which involve distributing leaflets for two hours, and kisses Winston violently before disappearing into the woods.
The narrative notes that the couple never returns to the forest clearing. Their only other sexual encounter occurs months later in the belfry of a ruinous church that survived an atomic bomb thirty years earlier; the approach to this hide‑out is described as extremely hazardous. Most of their subsequent meetings are on crowded streets, each lasting no more than half an hour, and their conversations are fragmented, interrupted by Party uniforms, telescreens, and patrols. Julia has mastered “talking by instalments” and can speak without moving her lips; they exchange only a single kiss during almost a month of nightly meetings.
During one street walk a rocket bomb detonates nearby, shaking the ground and covering both faces with plaster. Winston initially believes Julia has been killed, but discovers she is still alive, their faces smeared with powdery plaster.
Julia’s daily life is then detailed. She spends the majority of her time in lectures, demonstrations, and distributing Junior Anti‑Sex League literature, preparing Hate‑Week banners, collecting for savings campaigns, and performing other Party‑approved activities, which she describes as “camouflage.” To free more evenings for Winston, she persuades him to take on part‑time munition work, where he spends four hours each week assembling bomb‑fuse components in a dim workshop.
When they finally meet in the church tower, the heat and pigeon‑dung in the cramped stone chamber are described. They sit for hours on the dusty floor, periodically glancing through arrow‑slits for patrols. Julia reveals personal details: she is twenty‑six, lives in a hostel with thirty other girls, works on novel‑writing machines in the Fiction Department, enjoys the mechanical work, is “not clever” but fond of using her hands, and does not care for reading. She has no memories before the early ’60s except for a grandfather who vanished when she was eight. At school she captained the hockey team, won two gymnastics trophies, led the Spies, and served as branch secretary of the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti‑Sex League. She briefly worked in “Pornosec,” the Fiction Department sub‑section that produced cheap pornography for proles, describing the material as boring and noting that only girls worked there because men’s sexual instincts were deemed more dangerous.
Julia expresses her hatred of the Party in crude language but never offers a systematic critique; she focuses on how the Party’s sexual puritanism suppresses pleasure, turning the resulting hysteria into war‑fever and leader worship. She argues sexual repression fuels the Party’s control, likening it to the manipulation of parenthood. Winston reflects on his own failed marriage to Katharine, recounting a childhood hike that led them to a cliff and a moment when he considered pushing her. Julia questions why he feels remorse, and they discuss the futility of rebellion, the inevitability of death, and the idea that “we are the dead.” Their conversation becomes erotically charged, with Julia pressing her body against Winston.
Finally, Julia insists they must change their meeting route again, drawing a crude map on the floor with a twig and dust.