Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the
protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she
was singing in a powerful contralto:
It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless
similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of
the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any
human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.
But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an
almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of
her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street,
and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the
room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
(1984, Chapter 4)