Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr Charrington’s shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster.
A bolster is a firm pillow shaped like a long tube which is sometimes put across a bed under the ordinary pillows.
Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain.
Muslin is very thin cotton cloth.
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.
Sacking is rough woven material that is used to make sacks./A clothesline is a thin rope on which you hang washing so that it can dry./to fasten something in place with pegs.
Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:
A contralto is a woman with a low singing voice.
The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.
=versifier: a writer who composes rhymes; a maker of poor verses (usually used as terms of contempt for minor or inferior poets)
There it lay, fixed in future time, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100.
to be or go before something or someone in time or space
The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.
An emanation is a form of energy or a mass of tiny particles that comes from something.
Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain.
Someone who is abstracted is thinking so deeply that they are not fully aware of what is happening around them.
He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman’s cavernous mouth.
If something is cavernous, there is a very large open space inside it.
I’m going to get hold of a real woman’s frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers.
A frock is a dress.
Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle.
Your calf is the thick part at the back of your leg, between your ankle and your knee.
There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them.
Threadbare clothes, carpets, and other pieces of cloth look old, dull, and very thin, because they have been worn or used too much./If something is springy, it returns quickly to its original shape after you press it.
She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes Hate.
If someone or something hurtles somewhere, they move there very quickly, often in a rough or violent way.
A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting.
a lining applied to the walls of a room, esp one of wood panelling
And next time we come here I’ll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.
If something is bunged up, it is blocked.
It was like the two halves of a countersign.
a secret word or phrase known only to a restricted group
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