If she judged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he approached
If you say that the coast is clear, you mean that there is nobody around to see you or catch you./Clear one's nose of mucus by blowing through it into a handkerchief.
That was in another hiding-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.
The belfry of a church is the top part of its tower, where the bells are./A stretch of road, water, or land is a length or area of it.
In the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion.
If you say that something was done after a fashion, you mean that it was done, but not very well.
She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition-work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party members.
Munitions are military equipment and supplies, especially bombs, shells, and guns.
So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty ill-lit work-shop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.
A draughty room or building has currents of cold air blowing through it, usually because the windows and doors do not fit very well./Having dim or inadequate lighting.
They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the arrow-slits and make sure that no onewas coming.
(especially in a medieval fortified building) a narrow vertical slit in a wall for shooting or looking through or to admit light and air.
Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!’ she said parenthetically
in a way that is in addition to the main part of what you are saying or writing
There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls’ School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.
The proletariat is a term used to refer to workers without high status, especially industrial workers.
They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry.
If you pull up or if something pulls you up, you suddenly stop what you are doing.
It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom.
A boulder is a large rounded rock.
But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them
A tuft of something such as hair or grass is a small amount of it which is growing together in one place or is held together at the bottom.
‘We’re not dead yet,’ said Julia prosaically.
When you do something prosaically, you do it in an ordinary, straightforward way. Some could even call it boring. While your poet friend announces that the sky is weeping, you might more prosaically say it’s just raining.
Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can.
If you put something off, you delay doing it.
She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him.
A woman's breasts are sometimes referred to as her bosom or her bosoms.
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