1985: Chapter 2

Gregory was in the field again. Running with his sister, playing some game that he had long ago forgotten. The world seemed to be in ruin; England was no longer how it seemed in his history books from school. This did not seem like some majestic place fit for royalty; it had been torn apart by the munitions of war.

The fighting seemed to never end, and when he and his sister were in bed, he could overhear his parents concern about the constant dwindling supply of food and other basic staples. A few years later, his mother disappeared like so many others. He could not pinpoint the exact date (or even the exact date that he lived in now, you could never trust anything official, but he was confident that the year was now 1985). He only knew that one day he no longer had a mother. After his father vanished in a similar manner, he stopped thinking about what happened to his parents; the disappearances became so common that it stopped being a mystery.

After the loss of his parents, Gregory thought that he had become emotionless. But when his sister was taken, he was full of rage. He remembered fighting when they came to take her to the orphanage; why couldn’t they take him? When would he see her? When they wouldn’t tell him, he fought so hard that looking back, he couldn’t understand how they didn’t kill him. While he certainly received a good beating, the real damage was to his emotional well being.

Had he been a different type of person, he would have simply given in to the propaganda, and forgotten all about his beloved sister (some days it was hard to remember her name, let alone her face), but despite being an inner party member, buried in parades and slogans, community activities, and preparations for Hate Week, Gregory would never forget, or forgive what the party had taken from him. After his family was gone, a part of him longed to be made an unperson as well; forgotten, completely erased. But even in its early days, The Party understood the value of isolating people from each other, of breaking a man rather than simply killing him, and of course killing love for all things, except for Big Brother.