What Is The Chestnut Tree Cafe

1. At the end
of the novel,andmeet again after their conversions to the Party. Julia gives him a quick glance,
but it is full of hatred and contempt, and she tells Winston that she betrayed him. Winston
replies that he, too, has betrayed her. They agree that after a while they began to think only
of themselves. As Julia walks away, Winston exerts no effort to detain her. Instead, he thinks
only of the cafe where he can drink because "From fifteen to closing time he [Winston] was
a fixture in the Chestnut Tree." This restaurant is named after a song by Glenn Miller, a
band leader of the 1940s, whose lyrics claim that two people will meet again under the chestnut
tree:

Underneath the spreading chestnut
tree
I loved him and he loved me

There I used to sit up on his knee
'Neath the spreading chestnut
tree.

Now the lyrics are altered to
"Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold
me." The word love has been changed to
sold.

2. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford are from Part
I, Chapter 7. They sit at a table where Winston has been at the Chestnut Tree Cafe at the
"lonely hour of fifteen," when a particular jeering note is sounded and a voice on the
telescreen sings,

Under the spreading chestnut
tree
I sold you and you sold
me:
There lie they, and here lie
we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

Winston notices that the three men do not move, but Rutherford's
eyes are filled with tears, and the noses of Aaronson and Rutherford are broken. Shortly after
this, the three men are arrested, and at their second trial they confess to having committed all
their former crimes of insurrection. Rutherford was a famous cartoonist whose satirical work
once helped to inflame people's opinions before and during the Revolution. But, more recently,
they were "an endless, hopeless, effort to get back into the past" where people could
learn history.

The changes in the verse in the words "loved" to
"sold" are significant as Winston sells out Julia just as Rutherford, Aaronson, and
Jones have done previously to each other. Another change, from the word "lie" meaning
to tell falsehoods, alludes to Winston's once having held evidence to prove the confessions of
the three men mentioned were lies. Now, the confessions of Julia and Winston are additional
lies.