After the excitements of Berlin, Britain was inevitably a come-down. Nothing in London had the emotional charge of those days, except – in a very different form – the music to which my viola-studying cousin Denis introduced me, and which we played on a hand-wound gramophone in the attic room of his mother’s house in Sydenham, where the family first found shelter in London, and discussed with the intensity of teenage passion over tins of heavily sugared condensed milk (‘Unfit for Babies’) and cups of tea: hot jazz. Not much of it was as yet available, and certainly, given our cash limits, not much at any one moment. The sort of teenagers who were most likely to be captured by jazz in 1933 were rarely in a position to buy more than a few records, let alone build a collection.3 Still, enough was already being issued in Britain for the local market: Armstrong, Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and John Hammond’s last recordings of Bessie Smith. What is more, shortly before a trade dispute stopped American jazz-players from coming to Britain for some twenty years, the greatest of all the bands – I can still recite its then line-up from memory – came to London: Duke Ellington’s. It was the season when Ivy Anderson sang ‘Stormy Weather’. Denis and I, presumably financed by the family, went to the all-night session (‘breakfast dance’) they played at a Palais de Danse in the wilds of Streatham, nursing single beers in the gallery as we despised the slowly heaving mass of South London dancers below, who were concentrating on their partners and not on the wonderful noises. Our last coins spent, we walked home in dark and daybreak, mentally floating above the hard pavement, captured for ever. Like the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who has written better about it than most,4 I experienced this musical revelation at the age of first love, sixteen or seventeen. But in my case it virtually replaced first love, for, ashamed of my looks and therefore convinced of being physically unattractive, I deliberately repressed my physical sensuality and sexual impulses. Jazz brought the dimension of wordless, unquestioning physical emotion into a life otherwise almost monopolized by words and the exercises of the intellect.
I did not then guess that in adult life my reputation as a jazz-lover would serve me well in unexpected ways. Then and for most of my lifetime a passion for jazz marked off a small and usually embattled group even among the cultural minority tastes. For two-thirds of my life this passion bonded together the minority who shared it, into a sort of quasi-underground international freemasonry ready to introduce their country to those who came to them with the right code-sign. Jazz was to be the key that opened the door to most of what I know about the realities of the USA, and to a lesser extent of what was once Czechoslovakia, Italy, Japan, postwar Austria and, not least, hitherto unknown parts of Britain.
What contributed to the ultra-intellectualization of my next years was the fact that I lived constantly with an effective pair of parents, who flatly refused to allow their impassioned sixteen-year-old to plunge into the life of political militancy which filled his mind. No doubt they took the view that concentrating on getting into a university under his own steam was the first priority for an obviously bright boy who could not rely on family cash. They were of the firm opinion that I was too young to join the Communist Party.5 For the same reason, and in spite of family solidarity with Uncle Harry, they were equally opposed to my joining the Labour Party, which I proposed to do in order to subvert it – what later political generations of Trotskyists knew as ‘entryism’. I now know how they must have felt, confronted with my combination of priggishness and immaturity. I cringe as I reread the desperate entries in my diary for 1934 during this episode of family crisis. So, though the ban was slowly relaxed, for the following two and a half years I lived a life of suspended political animation, and correspondingly concentrated on intense intellectual activity and an amount of reading that in retrospect still amazes me. Not that the British revolution seemed to be making much progress with or without me.
Since for the next three years we lived so closely together, let me recall the two people who had become my sister’s and my new parents. Both Nancy and I agreed that they were fairly useless at this job, but, looking back at my diary of 1934–5, I think we underestimated both the problems of adults forced to face a series of migrations in several countries, and the extraordinary strains of dealing with two difficult orphans whose disrupted lives had had no real chance to settle, not to mention a peripatetic small boy of eight who was always falling ill. Bringing up the two of us must have been a nightmare. Anyway, they made as much of a mess of their own son’s upbringing as of ours, although it did me less harm than my sister, who developed a settled determination to live an adult life which had nothing whatever in common with the continental, emotional, argumentative, intellectual households of her teenage years. Indeed, I can recall her most fondly as a demonstrably conventional Anglican country matron and Conservative Party activist in Worcestershire in the 1960s.
Unlike her, I had no real reason for blaming them. On the contrary, they struck me not as tyrannical but, as I wrote shortly before my eighteenth birthday, as ‘tragic’. I saw them, especially Gretl, as the victims of the decline and disintegration of the old conventions that had determined the relations between the generations. The Victorian rules about bringing up children were dead. They had been tough on the children – though probably not unacceptable to most – but a great prop for parents. Now nothing filled this gap. Paradoxically I came to analogous conclusions as my sister from the opposite point of view. The future should not bring a society without accepted rules and a firm structure of expectations. ‘The socialist state,’ I told my diary, ‘must and will create a new socialist convention which will get rid of the disadvantages of the old conventions while maintaining their advantages.’ One might even say that I developed the instincts of a Tory communist, unlike the rebels and revolutionaries drawn to their cause by the dream of total freedom for the individual, a society without rules.
I liked my aunt Gretl enormously, and developed a deep respect for her common sense. What is less usual between parents and touchy teenagers, I liked to talk to her about the problems of life, and parts of my reading. Furthermore, I took her opinions seriously, even on such subjects as sex and love, of which I knew nothing. However, obviously, she could not replace my mother.6 As I passed people in the street, I would sometimes stare, shut my eyes for a moment and say to myself, ‘he or she has eyes like Mama’.7 The youngest, prettiest and socially the most successful of the Grün girls, cherished by both her sisters, and the only one never to have had to earn a living, Gretl faced the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of her life and family – and there were plenty – armed with charm, sympathy, an inborn sensibleness and a notable lack of self-pity. ‘Sidney won’t believe it, he is always the optimist,’ she wrote in a brief note to her sister, as she waited for the operation to remove from her stomach a suddenly discovered tumour ‘as big as a fist’, a few months before I was due to go up to Cambridge. She was neither an optimist nor a pessimist. She took things as they came, and she knew, in this instance correctly, that what might come tomorrow was death. Sidney took me to see her corpse in bed in the old Hampstead General Hospital. I pass the site, now the car park of the Royal Free Hospital, most days on my way to and from Belsize Park. Hers was the first dead body I had ever seen.
I am not sure that I respected Sidney. I did not want to be like him. Indeed I was embarrassed by, and contemptuous of, his self-pity, his temperamental instability, those characteristic swings from outbursts of rage to effusive sentimentality and back again, the one an expression of impotence, the other a cry for help. As we both had the well-developed sense of confrontation (i.e. contrariness) so often found within Jewish families, our conversations at home tended to be loud, dramatic and often absurd. I think he was absolute hell for Nancy, especially after Gretl’s death deprived him of ballast. Fortunately I was by then that much older, and knew myself to be on the verge of independence. And yet, I remember him intensely and with pleasure. We talked, especially in Paris, and on the long journeys when I acted as his chauffeur – for after a year we were prosperous enough to buy a car, which I learned to drive, just in time to pass the newly introduced driving test. He knew about the ways of the world, and what he said about them I took seriously, not least the observation that men should keep quiet about the women they slept with. His tips on what was good in the French cinema of the 1930s came from the horse’s mouth. He gave me what I clearly had not had from my biological father. And he, in turn, hoped that I would compensate for the repeatedly disappointed hopes of his own life.
For though Solomon Sidney Berkwood Hobsbaum, short, wearing pince-nez below a forehead that (unlike my father’s) folded vertically, was the only one of Grandfather David’s sons to become a full-time businessman, making money was not his dream. He had the salesman’s ability to believe passionately in the product of the moment, the body armour protecting him against the blows of the unreturned phone call and the cancelled order. Years later I recognized much of him in Arthur Miller’s wonderful Death of a Salesman , as must the intellectual sons of so many Jewish fathers. But though he had ambitions – Napoleon was his favourite character in history, Rawdon Crawley of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in fiction – money was not what inspired him.
What had his ambitions been in his East End youth? Had he been born much later, when there came to be money in the game and the British took to it, he might have made something of his natural talent for chess, which was evidently considerable. Putting up his hand somewhere in France when chess players were asked for had got him from the western front into intelligence (i.e. codebreaking) in the First World War. He seemed to know something about such matters, but then anyone in his position knocking around central Europe in 1919–33 was quite likely to have come across people involved in secret services. He kept out of politics.
In other respects he was not creative, but he had the self-educated poor Jew’s passion for culture and loved being in the milieu of creative people – musicians, theatre actors and above all movie people. On his and Gretl’s phonograph in Vienna I heard for the first time and many times after that, a still somewhat Victorian selection of the great vocal classics of the first recorded generation – Caruso, Melba, Tetrazzini – and the repertoire of the great, mainly Italian and French, arias: Verdi, Meyerbeer, Gounod. In practice his musical contacts were more modern: Rose Pauly-Dreesen, the most famous Elektra of her day, with whose career he was associated in the late twenties, was the leading dramatic soprano in Klemperer’s Berlin Krolloper, very much at the cutting edge of Weimar music. He tried to mobilize on her behalf Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), Edwardian feminist and the most celebrated female composer of her day, with whom he had somehow established a relationship as a young man. But it was the cinema that captured his heart for good. Not so much the atmosphere of bigshots, wheeler-dealers, the entrepreneurial adventurers and confidencetricksters, though he had got to know them in his time with Universal. It was the milieu of the studio floor – the large world-creating hangars, small emigrant Jews around big stages, cameras, lights, make-up and scenery, all drenched in the atmosphere of technique, gossip, bohemian informality and scandal. I drove him there on his visits to Isleworth and Elstree. For him it was where man was in touch with creation. He succeeded in fighting his way back into it in England by convincing a British photographic firm that his contacts in the movie world made him the man to sell their film-stock in competition with Kodak and Agfa. After a few years of losing battle armed with an uncompetitive product (‘Uncle Sidney goes to Budapest tomorrow. Furious telegram from Joe Pasternak. Selofilm apparently poor quality’) he gave up the struggle, emigrated again and, presumably introduced by his brother Berk, invested his small capital in a share of a modest Chilean enterprise producing kitchenware. At the end of the war he left an unexciting but safe business on little more than the hint from an old contact that there might be a place for him on some new film operation to be launched in connection with the new United Nations. Nothing happened. The dream of the creative life was over. He had thrown up a reasonable livelihood in his mid-fifties for a dream. He never succeeded in getting another.
Still, for a few years in the 1930s he managed to live his fantasy on the edge of the European tragedy and I received some of the benefit. For who else would give him a chance but those on the margins of the film world – the refugees and the radicals? So he found himself involved in political movies financed by the French left in the Popular Front days, notably Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise, and in the political news-reels which enabled me to see the great Bastille Day of 1936 from the Socialist Party’s camera truck with a Socialist Party steward’s badge. During the Civil War he took up his Spanish, or rather Catalan, contacts again. He returned from visits to Barcelona in 1937 with stories of conversations with the Catalan leader, Luis Companys (later executed by Franco) and with an upper-class Englishman called Eric Blair. These were losing causes. My uncle, though his sympathies were with the left like the great majority of Jews from poor working-class families, wanted nothing better than to keep out of party politics. The logic of history pushed him into earning his living from and with the battling antifascists, while he and they still could. It was not to be for long.
II
The Britain I came to in 1933 was utterly different in almost every way from the country in which I write this at the start of the new century. The history of the island in the twentieth century divides sharply into two halves – to put it in a phrase, before and after the simultaneous shocks of Suez and rock and roll. Almost every generalization about the country to which I came in 1933 ceases to apply after 1956, even the notorious inefficiency of the British system of domestic heating and – one of its consequences – the impenetrable Dickensian fog which, until 1953, still occasionally forced London to a standstill. Britain was no longer a major empire or a world power, and after Suez nobody believed that it was. Popular culture compensated by creating sagas of British heroism and eventual victory against the Germans in the Second World War. In 1933 people thought about the Great War not as a heroic memory, but as a graveyard. However, everyone knew that a larger area of the world map than ever before was coloured pink, and that we were the only global empire, even if intelligent imperialists recognized that our grasp was already much more restricted than our reach. But British skins were still white. In 1933 black and brown faces were far easier to find on the streets of Paris than London and, except for Veeraswamy’s in the West End, the Indian restaurant was still virtually absent. Indeed, foreigners of any kind were rare, since Britain was not a centre of international tourism, which was in any case still tiny by present standards.
Only Hitler and the war were to bring into Britain a modest number of the sort of middle-class continentals whose reactions the Hungarian George Mikes has described fondly in the little book How to be an Alien . Contrary to the native myth, the country did its best to exclude refugees but, unlike Mikes, the next generation of Hungarian immigrants, the refugees of 1956–7, would no longer have thought of describing Britain as a country where hot-water bottles took the place of sex. It was the 1950s that revolutionized the sexual and social mores of the British young. In the 1930s the idea of London as the international city of style, fun and promiscuity (as in the ‘Swinging London’ of the 1960s) was inconceivable. For heterosexual males the action was in Paris or the French Riviera, for homosexual ones – at least until Hitler came – in Berlin. For women the public scope was more limited either way.
Britain in 1933 was still a self-contained island where life was lived by unwritten but compelling rules, rituals and invented traditions: mostly class rules or gender rules, but also virtually universal ones, usually linked to royalty. The national anthem was played at the end of every performance in theatres and cinemas and people stood for it before they went home. Wherever you were, you did not talk during the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day, 11 November. The ‘right’ kind of accent bonded together the upper classes (but not parvenus who could thus be recognized) and ensured deferential behaviour from the lower orders, class-conscious or not, at least in public.
In the 1930s these things were obvious. But, of course, they were not expected to apply on the other side of the seas which separated us from the foreigners. Britain was insular in every sense. When an upper-middle-class Jewish refugee doctor applied for admission to Britain as a potential domestic servant (the only option available) and offered to work as a butler, the British Passport Control officer in Paris refused him without a moment’s hesitation, humanitarian or otherwise. ‘This is absurd,’ he wrote, ‘as butlering requires a lifelong experience.’8 He could not imagine a non-British Jeeves.
Nevertheless, by continental European standards, Britain was still a rich, technically and economically advanced and well-equipped country, even if for a cash-strapped teenager Paris was unquestionably more enjoyable. Its train and underground seats were upholstered, even in third-class carriages, bumpy paving-stones were not frequent in its city streets and even rural by-roads had tarmac surfaces. Bathrooms and water-closets could be expected in the new, small family homes, each with its own garden, multiplying in their tens of thousands on the outskirts of the big cities in what few as yet recognized as a major building boom. Not only the rich had motor-cars and even most of the poor had radios. On the other hand, material expectations were low and most Britons had not yet poked their heads far outside the realm where income is still spent chiefly on the modest necessities of life, as I discovered when we briefly came to live among the car-owning and cocktail-drinking middle class of Canons Park, Edgware. Britain was a long way from a modern consumer society, especially for its teenagers. Not until the middle fifties and full employment did working teenagers have money to spend, and their parents could dispense with their contributions to the family budget. Fortunately the most readily available luxuries for budding intellectuals were also cheap: the films, performed in increasingly vast palaces and preceded by organs rising from the depths to changing lights, and books, second-hand, paperback – the new sixpenny Penguins – and even given away free by mass circulation newspapers competing to pass the two-million mark. I still have the copy of Bernard Shaw’s Collected Plays acquired by buying six issues of the Labour Party’s Daily Herald, which briefly won this race (and, in the later course of British twentieth-century history, turned into the tabloid Sun, which is unlikely to do its circulation-building by offering its readers classic literature). Even the form of transport that set us free was cheap, for we, or our parents, heeded the advertisements on the back of the London double-deckers: ‘Get off that bus. It will never be yours. Twopence a day will buy you a bicycle.’ And indeed, not many weekly instalments would purchase a bike – in my case a new shiny Rudge-Whitworth for something like five or six pounds. If physical mobility is an essential condition of freedom, the bicycle has probably been the greatest single device for achieving what Marx called the full realization of the possibilities of being human invented since Gutenberg, and the only one without obvious drawbacks. Since cyclists travel at the speed of human reactions and are not insulated behind plate glass from nature’s light, air, sound and smells there was no better way in the 1930s – before the explosion of motor traffic – to explore a middle-sized country with an astonishingly lovely and varied landscape. With bike, tent, Primus stove and the newly invented Mars bar my cousin Ronnie (who pronounced it ‘Marr’, as though it had been French) and I explored large parts of the civilized beauties of southern England and, on one memorable but wintry tour, the more savage ones of North Wales. (Almost sixty years later the memory of those distant Mars-eating cycle rides was revived by the surprising proposal which reached me from the man himself in Las Vegas, Forrest B. Mars, then in his eighties and owner of the largest purely private company in the world, to assist him in explaining his ideas about the world to a wider public. I refused politely. It seems a studious young woman of his acquaintance had suggested this unique collaboration between a textbook example of unreconstructed rock-ribbed private enterprise and a Marxist historian.)
How was an immigrant teenager to come to terms in 1933 with this strange country, which was also his own? In some ways I came to it like Lewis Carroll’s Alice to Wonderland, through a few narrow doors and passages opened by the family, and especially the cousins who were also my best, and indeed my only close, friends.
By then the English family was reduced. David and Rose Obstbaum, who first landed in London in the 1870s and doubtless acquired the initial H of their name from a Cockney immigration officer, were dead. So were three of their eight children: Lou, a provincial actor, Phil, who followed the family woodworking trade, and my father. (A daughter of David’s first marriage, my aunt Millie Goldberg, had long since moved to America, matriarch of a clan now distributed through the USA and Israel.) A fourth, my uncle Ernest (Aron), who had originally persuaded my father to join him in Egypt where he worked in the Post and Telegraph Service, died not long after our arrival, amid the brass ornaments and anecdotes recalling life in the Orient. He left behind a Catholic Belgian widow, better at earning a living than he, and two attractive girls who were of some interest to the male cousins. Uncle Berkwood (Ike), with a Welsh wife and five children, had long since settled in Chile, though he remained in contact. That left Aunt Cissie (Sarah), a schoolteacher with a husband permanently absent ‘on business’ and Uncle Harry, the unshakeable pillar of the family – if only because he was the only member to earn a steady if modest salary of perhaps £4 a week as a telegraphist in the Post Office, where he remained all his life except for the Great War. He served on the Ypres salient and then, luckily for survival, on the Italian front. A Labour councillor in the London borough of Paddington, he eventually became its first Labour mayor. The Hobsbaums had arrived as a family of poor artisans. The family had advanced beyond its first recorded addresses in White-chapel, Spitalfields and Shoreditch, but not very far. In England they stubbornly remained on the lower slopes of the mountains of society.
Nevertheless, the social universe in which they operated covered a large and representative part of England. It ranged from the classes run by my cousin Rosalie, Cissie’s daughter, in dance and ‘elocution’, that is to say learning to speak with the bourgeois accent, for the daughters of aspiring suburban mothers in Sydenham, to the Labour milieu of councillor Harry Hobsbaum in North Paddington, and the world of self-shaping plebeian intellectuals and would-be artists in which my cousins moved, the world of meetings in Lyons or ABC tea shops, discussion groups, evening classes and that marvellous institution, the free public library and reading room. This was the world for which in 1936 Allen Lane created the first great self-educational paperback series, Penguin, or rather its intellectual section, Pelican Books, and Victor Gollancz his Left Book Club, in which my cousin Ruby (Philip’s son) published the family’s first contribution to left-wing literature, Reuben Osborn’s Freud and Marx.
My introduction to the British scene outside family and school came through this world. It came in part through Cissie’s son Denis, a dark and – within his financial limits – dandyish figure who bit his nails, dropped out of education and from the middle 1930s somehow got by without a clear job in the lower reaches of the worlds of music, theatre and popular entertainment. But chiefly it came through Harry’s son Ronnie, small, physically wiry and very Jewish-looking, who was then still living with his parents in Maida Vale nursing a lifelong passion for the sea, which he satisfied in the navy during the war and as a sailor of small boats on the Blackwater estuary ever since. When I came to England he was working as a dogsbody somewhere in the entrails of the Natural History Museum, home at that time to a varied assortment of grassroots thinkers and quiet bohemians, while he studied nights at the Regent Street Polytechnic to pass the secondary-school examinations. He went on to take a First in economics at the London School of Economics that would allow him the slow climb up the steps of the civil service – clerical, executive – to the heights of the administrative grade in the Ministry of Labour.
I refused all contact with the suburban petty-bourgeoisie, which I naturally regarded with contempt. Since it was in the hands of reformist social democrats, I naturally also found the labour movement as represented by my uncle Harry, and even his somewhat more left-wing son, disappointing, but also puzzling. Unlike the German social democrats, it could not simply be condemned to the flames. For, though Harry was a Labour loyalist who defended the Party against the bitter attacks of the British CP, he shared the general assumption in the British labour movement (other than, perhaps, among those under the direct influence of the Catholic Church) that, say what you like, Soviet Russia was after all a workers’ state. Like most Labour and union activists, he shook his head about communists, but saw them in basically the same game as Labour people. Moreover, I could not deny that, unlike in German social democracy, only a few Labour leaders had sold out to the bourgeoisie in 1931, when the Prime Minister of the 1929 Labour administration, Ramsay Macdonald, and two colleagues, had joined the Tories in a so-called ‘National Government’, which went on to govern the country until the fall of Neville Chamberlain in 1940. How could one regard the passionately anti-Macdonald bulk of the party, reduced to a rump of some fifty in the House of Commons, as class traitors in the same sense?
On the other hand, and in view of the 1926 General Strike, the labour movement simply did not correspond to my ideal vision of ‘the (revolutionary) proletariat’. It was puzzling, for in some ways the British scene was recognizably like the German, shaken by the tremors of the global economic and political earthquake of the world crisis of 1929. Britain’s politics had also been convulsed. There was radicalization on both right and left, including a blackshirted fascist movement which seemed to be a serious national threat for a moment. Nevertheless, though the structure shook a little, it did not seem, and indeed was not, on the verge of collapse. To judge by Britain, the world revolution would clearly take a lot longer than one supposed. Since, according to my diary, I did not expect to reach the age of forty years (at the age of seventeen even this seemed quite far away), perhaps I might not see it. But by this time the Comintern itself was about to discover that there would be no revolution unless the fight against fascism and world war was won first.
III
It may seem strange that I have said hardly anything so far about the institution I attended from the moment I arrived in England until I left it for Cambridge three years later, longer than any of my other schools in any country, namely St Marylebone Grammar School, on the corner of the Marylebone Road and Lisson Grove in central London. It had been my cousin Ronnie’s old school (I followed him by winning its Debating Cup). Like the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium, it no longer exists, though it was destroyed not by enemy bombing, but by the ideology of the 1970s, a bad era for secondary education. It refused the choice it was given – to turn itself into a non-selective ‘comprehensive’ school for all comers or to go private – and was consequently shut down. It gave me as good an education as any available in England in the 1930s and I owe its teachers an incalculable debt of gratitude. But, for reasons that still puzzle me, it contributed surprisingly little to my understanding of England, except the discovery that, unlike the Herren Professoren of Berlin, all teachers at St Marylebone had a sense of humour. (I made a special note of this.) What did not strike me at the time is that in Britain secondary-school masters might have belonged socially but not intellectually to the world of the university. Unlike those who would have taught me in the top forms of German, French or Italian schools, they were only in the rarest of cases researchers, scholars and future academics. They had their being in the separate sphere of schoolmastering.
More surprisingly, I established no serious friendships in my three years there. Almost certainly the historic gap between my old and new countries was too wide. By 1932 Berlin standards London seemed a relapse into immaturity. There was no way to continue the conversations of the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium of 1931–3 on the Marylebone Road of 1933–6. Except with my cousin Ronnie, already a university student, I resumed them only when I arrived in Cambridge. That may also be one reason why for the first two years I underestimated the modest, but real, political radicalization of several of my fellow-pupils. To judge by my diary, another reason was plain conceit. I thought of myself as intellectually on the masters’ level and superior to the rest. Nor did I take to the social aspirations of the school, a caricature version of the (non-boarding) bourgeois ‘public school’ – compulsory uniforms and school caps, prefects, rival ‘houses’, moral rhetoric and the rest, and did my best to indicate dissent. The school, in turn, was not quite sure what to make of the incompletely disciplined arrival from central Europe, ignorant of the rules of both cricket and rugby football and uninterested in both games, but too senior not to be made a prefect sooner or later and too intellectual not to be made editor of the school magazine, The Philologian. There, between reports of sports fixtures, my first printed writings appeared, all of which I have forgotten except a long review of the London Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, with one of whose exhibitors I spent some social nights in Paris later that year. Still, it was soon evident to the school that I took to examinations as to ice-cream, and might stand a good chance of a university scholarship.
What reconciled me to these pretensions of the school was the quality, and above all the devotion to their calling, of the masters, starting with the headmaster Philip Wayne (later the translator of Goethe’s Faust for the Penguin Classics), who, in our first interview, regretted that the school could continue to teach me only Latin but not Greek, and pressed a volume of the philosopher Immanuel Kant and a selection of the essays of William Hazlitt into my hands instead.
The Philological School had been founded in the 1790s for the sons of the modest but aspiring parents of Marylebone, and continued, eventually taken over by the London County Council, as a grammar school providing the sort of instruction needed by London’s lower middle class, who never expected to get beyond secondary education or to make much of a mark on the world. Fortunately for the generation of their sons who began to go to university from the 1930s, this was in no sense a second-best education, even though it sometimes seemed to come to us as a voluntary gift from those firmly established at the top to deserving social inferiors.
Harold Llewellyn-Smith, a handsome, well-connected, never-married pillar of the Liberal Party, son of the architect of the Labour policy of Edwardian and Georgian Britain and of a good part of the welfare state, who taught me history, steered me into Oxbridge, and eventually became headmaster of the school himself, knew that he came out of the top drawer – Winchester and New College, Oxford, war in the Scots Guards. If he had chosen to teach in an undistinguished state secondary school, the only one of whose Old Boys known to the outside world was that singer of London lower-middle-class adventure, Jerome K. Jerome, author of Three Men in a Boat, it was almost certainly for the same reason that he worked in a South London slum settlement. Leaving aside the attraction of working with boys, it was the desire to do good works among the unprivileged. He lent me his books, mobilized his connections on my behalf, told me (correctly) how to handle the Oxbridge scholarship examinations, which colleges were the right ones for me (Balliol in Oxford, King’s in Cambridge), and warned me that I would there have to live like the rich, among gentlemen. He clearly never regarded me even as potentially belonging to his world.
A similar social gap divided us from the most interesting of the masters, a young English literature graduate, who came to Marylebone from Cambridge bringing to those who wanted to listen – certainly to me – the great gospel of I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism and F. R. Leavis. I gulped down New Bearings in English Poetry which he lent me, together with the editions of his most admired poets which he owned in private press editions, and moved me to name Leavis’s college, Downing, as my third choice in the scholarship exam (after King’s, and, because of the presence of Maurice Dobb, Trinity). Leavis’s reputation as a great literary critic has not survived the twentieth century very well, and by the time I came to Cambridge my own Leavisite passion had cooled, but no don in his century had a greater impact on the teaching of literature. He had an awesome capacity to inspire generations of future schoolteachers who, in turn, inspired their bright pupils. English, for Mr Maclean, was a crusade that had to be taken to the people. I am sure that he would have remained a teacher, had he not been killed during the war. Certainly his teaching inspired me. I felt he had much in common with me – if only because he also had an ugly, large-nosed, incompletely shaped face with brown eyes ill at ease under his horn-rims, a big, clumsy body which did not quite know what to do with its arms and legs, and a sensitive soul. Alas, I doubted whether he would make a Marxist.
For three years Marylebone was my intellectual centre – not only the school, but also, a few yards away, the splendid Public Library in the Town Hall of what was then a London borough, where I spent most of my mid-day breaks in omnivorous reading and borrowing. (Though I have never used the library since, this is the building which contains the Register Office where many years later, in 1962, I was to be married to Marlene.) I certainly did not get my education only at school. Indeed, in my last year there (1935–6) it was little more than a study where I did my own reading. But my debt to St Marylebone Grammar School is crucial, and not only because it introduced me to the astonishing marvels of English poetry and prose. Without its teaching and direction, I do not see how a boy who had never had any kind of English schooling, arriving in this country at the age of almost sixteen, could, in little more than two years, have got to the stage of winning a major scholarship at Cambridge and, once arrived there, have the choice of reading for a degree in at least three subjects. It was St Marylebone also who helped me to move from the no-man’s land in which (but for the family) I had lived since leaving Berlin, once again into the essential territory of youth: of friendship, comradeship, of collective and private intimacy.
IV
What had actually happened to that young man’s intellectual development in those three years? First, I had read more widely and generally during that time, particularly in literature, than in any period before or since. Since secondary-school examinations required far less in the way of specialized knowledge than universities, let alone research, they left adventurous pupils with relatively more time for their own explorations – and at that age almost everything is there to be discovered. Moreover, an English sixth form demanded less effort than a continental one, if only because one had to choose between the arts and the sciences, and therefore dropped half the continental syllabus. After arriving at a university nobody who takes the degree seriously has anything like the enterprising teenager’s time to read about everything, rapidly, voraciously, and with endless curiosity. But what did I do with all this reading?
The short answer is: I tried to give it a Marxist, that is to say an essentially historical, interpretation. There was not much else to do for an impassioned but unorganized and necessarily inactive communist teenage intellectual. Since I had not read much more than the CommunistManifesto when I left Berlin – action came before words – I therefore had to acquire some knowledge of Marxism. My Marxism was, and still to some extent remains, that acquired from the only texts then easily available outside university libraries, the systematically distributed works and selections of ‘the classics’ published (and translated in heavily subsidized local editions) under the auspices of the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow. Curiously, until Stalin’s notorious Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1939), which contained a central section on ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, there was no formal compendium of Soviet communist orthodoxy in these matters. When this section appeared, I read it with enthusiasm, allowing for its pedagogic simplifications. It corresponded pretty much to what I, and perhaps most of the British intellectual reds of the 1930s, understood by Marxism. We liked to think of it as ‘scientific’ in a rather nineteenth-century sense. Since, unlike in continental lycées and Gymnasia, philosophy was not a central part of higher secondary education, we did not approach Marx with the philosophical interests of our continental contemporaries, let alone with their knowledge of philosophy. This helped to anglicize my way of thinking quite rapidly. What Perry Anderson has called ‘western Marxism’, the Marxism of Lukács, the Frankfurt School and Korsch, never crossed the Channel until the 1950s. We were content to know that Marx and Engels had turned Hegel the right way up, without bothering to find out just what it was they had stood on its feet. What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. ‘Dialectical materialism’ provided, if not a ‘theory of everything’, then at least a ‘framework of everything’, linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world in constant flux.
As I read my diary of 1934–5, it is perfectly clear that its writer was getting ready to be a historian. What I was trying to do above all else was to elaborate Marxist historical interpretations of my reading. And yet I was doing so in a way I almost certainly would not have done, had I continued my education on the continent. The ‘materialist conception of history’ was, of course, central to Marxism. However, Britain in the 1930s was one of the rare countries in which a school of Marxist historians developed, and I think this was partly due to the fact that on the arts side of British sixth forms literature took the space left vacant by the absence of philosophy. British Marxist historians began, more often than not, as young intellectuals who moved to historical analysis from, or with, a passion for literature: Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan, Leslie Morton, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and indeed myself. This may help to explain the otherwise surprising influence of the anti-Marxist F. R. Leavis on many who became communists. Cambridge communists who read English swore by him.
My own Marxism developed as an attempt to understand the arts. What filled my mind then was not the classic macro-historical problems of Marxist historical debate about historical development – the succession of ‘modes of production’. It was the place and nature of the artist and the arts (in fact, literature) in society or, in Marxist terms, ‘How is the superstructure connected to the base?’ Sometime in the autumn of 1934 I began to recognize this as ‘the problem’, and to worry at it, like a small dog at an excessively large bone, with the help of a lot of unsystematic reading in psychology and anthropology and echoes from the continental days of my biological, ecological and evolutionary readings in the publications of Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde. The theory was ambitious. ‘Marx could predict the socialist system on the basis of a precise analysis of the capitalist system. A precise analysis of capitalist literature, which takes into consideration all circumstances, all connections and relations, must allow us to draw similar conclusions about the proletarian culture of the future.’ I soon thought no more about such global predictions, but the historical question I asked myself at the age of seventeen has permanently shaped my work as a historian. I am still trying to ‘analyse the (social) influences which determine the form and content of poetry [and more generally of ideas] at different times’. But I had learned little more history than what was necessary, together with a little gamesmanship (a word that had not yet been invented) to get through the Cambridge scholarship exam.
V
At the start of 1936 I decided, cautiously – for ‘I live in the twentieth century and … in any case I am not given to optimism’ – to end the diary I had kept for almost two years. ‘I just don’t need it any more,’ I wrote in the last entry.
God knows why. Maybe because I’ve won my Cambridge scholarship, and, if all goes well, at least three years of independence lie ahead. Maybe because S. [whom I had got to know during the scholarship exam, and who became a lifelong friend] is the first acquaintance I have made myself, and not drawn parasitically from the pockets of other people … Maybe because I now have a year of nothing but my own work ahead of me? [i.e. until going up to Cambridge] Because things just look rosier for me? Because, perhaps, just maybe, I shall live a less ‘second-hand’ life?
It seemed the moment to balance the accounts, I hoped without sentimentality and self-delusion. I did so as follows:
Eric John Ernest Hobsbaum, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of eighteen and a half, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which is all the more dangerous and at times effective, as he talks himself into believing in them himself. Not in love and apparently quite successful in sublimating his passions, which – not often – find expression in the ecstatic enjoyment of nature and art. Has no sense of morality, thoroughly selfish. Some people find him extremely disagreeable, others likeable, yet others (the majority) just ridiculous. He wants to be a revolutionary but, so far, shows no talent for organization. He wants to be a writer, but without energy and the ability to shape the material. He hasn’t got the faith that will move the necessary mountains, only hope. He is vain and conceited. He is a coward. He loves nature deeply. And he forgets the German language.
In this spirit I faced the year 1936 and Cambridge University.
7
Cambridge
In a society like that of England in the first half of the last century, moving from the milieu of one class to that of another was a form of emigration. So winning a scholarship to Cambridge in 1935 meant moving into a strange new country – stranger because more unfamiliar than the ones I had settled in before. Except in one respect: after a break of three years I now returned to the politics and the conversations I had been forced to abandon when we left Berlin. I arrived in Cambridge quite determined to join the Communist Party at last and plunge into politics. As it turned out, I was not alone. Mine was the reddest and most radical generation in the history of the university, and I was in the thick of it. It happened that I also arrived in the middle of what, even allowing for a past that contained the names of Newton, Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, was probably the most distinguished era in the history of a university that was for some decades virtually synonymous with British scientific achievement. The two were not entirely separated: the 1930s was one of the few periods when an unusual proportion of eminent natural scientists was also politically radicalized. I am bound to add that the achievements of Cambridge science in the 1930s have survived better than those of the political radicalism of Cambridge students. Few of these have left much trace, even on public memory, except for one minor spin-off from 1930s communism, the ‘Cambridge spies’.
Since I was one of the leading Cambridge undergraduate communists in the second half of the 1930s, most readers of this book who belong to the Cold War generations will certainly ask what I knew about them. I might as well answer this question at the outset. Yes, I knew some of them. No, I did not know they were or had been working for Soviet intelligence until after this became public knowledge. The ‘big five’ (Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby) belonged to an earlier student generation than mine, and my contemporaries associated none of them with the Party except Burgess, whom we regarded as a traitor, because he took care to advertise his alleged conversion to right-wing views as soon as he had gone down. I knew none of them personally before the war, and only Blunt and Burgess casually after 1945. What I know about them came not from politics but via the Apostles (for which see chapter 11) or from homosexual friends or from survivors of the interwar Oxbridge establishment such as Isaiah Berlin, whose passion for gossiping about the people he had known was irrepressible. I recall Burgess only from two annual dinners of the Apostles – the one he presided over in 1948 at the Royal Automobile Club (a suitably bizarre location), recorded in the memoirs of Michael Straight whom Blunt tried to recruit for the Soviets,1 and the one I organized in the late 1950s in a shortlived Portuguese restaurant in Frith Street, Soho, and to which, knowing his nostalgia for England, I sent him an invitation addressed to ‘Guy Burgess, Moscow’. I remember the first occasion because Burgess asked us to agree that Roman Catholics were not suitable for membership of the Apostles, because their commitment to the Church’s dogma precluded the intellectual frankness so essential to the society. I remember the second because he woke me with an early morning phone call from Moscow to Bloomsbury, regretting his inability to be at the dinner, and, I assume, making absolutely certain that my phone would thenceforth be bugged. His message helped to make the dinner a great success. If I had known Anthony Blunt at all well, I would not have committed a heartless gaffe, for which I am still sorry. When I found myself standing next to him at the bar at yet another Apostles dinner in Soho, shortly after the flight of Burgess and Maclean, and made some fairly cynical wisecrack, I had no idea of the close emotional ties between him and Guy Burgess. My words must have hurt him, but how could one tell? That elongated, elegant, slightly supercilious face showed no emotions it did not want to. According to his Soviet handler, he was the toughest of the bunch. He was a man of such ruthless self-control that he spent the day of his public exposure, besieged by the hacks and the paparazzi in the house of a friend, quietly correcting proofs.
I knew those of my contemporaries who became Soviet agents as militant members of the student Party, which makes it 99 per cent certain that they were not yet recruited for work which, by general convention, was quite separate from the open activities of a legal political party and, if discovered, might be regarded as discrediting these. We knew such work was going on, we knew we were not supposed to ask questions about it, we respected those who did it, and most of us – certainly I – would have taken it on ourselves, if asked. The lines of loyalty in the 1930s ran not between but across countries.3
After this brief intermezzo, let me return to Cambridge in the 1930s. It is first necessary to grasp, in spite of all apparent continuities, how different the place was then from what it is today.
I have had an association with Cambridge ever since I first went up for the scholarship exam in 1935, or rather with King’s, for (apart from arranging to examine me for a BA and a Ph.D.) the university has firmly kept me at a distance. On the other hand, my links with King’s College are unbroken. There is no time of day or night, no season of the year, and no phase of my life since 1935, when I have not looked from the humpbacked bridge over the river Cam, across the unbroken expanse of the great back lawn, to the extraordinary combination of the bleak Gothic rear of the chapel, giving no hint of the marvels inside, and the equally spare eighteenth-century elegance of the Gibbs Building: and always with the same astonished intake of breath as the first time. Not many people have been so lucky.
For young men who, like scholars of King’s, passed all their undergraduate terms within college, Cambridge was like enjoying the constant and envied public company of a universally admired woman – you might say it was like going to all one’s parties with Botticelli’s Primavera. (The domestic side of college life in the 1930s – peeing into the sink in the gyp room since the nearest bathroom and toilet might be three flights of stairs, a courtyard and a basement away – could be less inspiring.) However, even the majority of undergraduates who spent at least part of their years in some remote bedsit in a Victorian terrace could not escape the sheer force of seven centuries of Cambridge teaching and learning. Everything was designed to make us into pillars of a tradition reaching back to the thirteenth century, though some of the most apparently ancient expressions of it, such as the Festival of Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve in King’s College Chapel, had in fact been invented only a few years before I came to the college. (Many years later this was to inspire a conference and book on The Invention of Tradition.)2 Undergraduates wore their short black gowns to go to lectures and supervisions, into the obligatory collective dinner in college halls and (with caps) whenever out in the streets after dark, policed by more amply gowned and capped Proctors, assisted by their ‘bulldogs’. Dons entered lecture rooms with their long gowns billowing and the squares planted with precision on their heads.3 Scholars read the Latin grace to the standing multitude before dinner and lessons in ancient chapels. (With tongue in cheek, the chapel dean of King’s made me read a piece of the book of Amos, the closest thing to a militant bolshevik preacher in the Old Testament.) The Cambridge past, like the ceremonial fancy-dress past of British public life, was not, of course, a chronological succession of time, but a synchronic jumble of its surviving relics. The glory and continuity of seven centuries were supposed to inspire us, to assure us of our superiority and to warn us against the temptations of ill-considered change. (In the 1930s they spectacularly failed to do so.) The main contribution of Cambridge to political theory and practice, as described brilliantly by the classicist F. M. Cornford in his little squib Microcosmographia Academica (1908), was ‘the principle of unripe time’. Whatever anyone proposed, the time for doing it was not yet ripe. It was powerfully reinforced by the principle of ‘the entering wedge’. Of course our undergraduate lives were lived at a level far below that of the master-operators of these principles, but those of us who became dons soon discovered their force.
Cambridge has changed so profoundly since the 1950s that it is difficult to grasp just how isolated and parochial the place was in the 1930s even academically – apart from the incomparable national and international distinction of its natural sciences. With the exception of its world-class economics, it refused to recognize the social sciences. Its arts subjects were, at best, patchy. However implausible it seems, outside the natural sciences most of the university took little interest in research, and none in higher degrees such as Ph.D.s which were regarded at best as a German peculiarity and, more likely, as a lower-middle-class affectation. Even on the eve of the war Cambridge contained fewer than 400 research students.4 It remained essentially a finishing school for young men and a much smaller number of young women, operating a double standard. Getting a Cambridge First, or the rarer ‘starred’ First, was, indeed, extremely hard, but it was even more difficult not to get a degree at all, because ‘passes’, or even the bottom layer of Third class honours, were virtually given away. I recall a discussion at an examiners’ meeting for the Economics Tripos in the early 1950s – I examined the economic history papers for some years – when we decided, not entirely with tongue in cheek, that anyone who knew the difference between production and consumption should pass the line. It was typical of this dichotomy that such degrees were known (among dons) as ‘Trinity Thirds’, for Trinity, Isaac Newton’s own college, contained plenty of young men of this description as well as, at this period, probably more Nobel Prize winners and aspirants than any other educational institution of its size on the globe. At the time I arrived in Cambridge one future Nobel laureate (R. L. M. Synge) was already a research student in biochemistry, another (J. C. Kendrew) was just about to start his first year.
The university and college authorities would certainly have been amazed and appalled by the Cambridge of 2000, filled with ‘science parks’, business negotiations with global entrepreneurs and ‘Cambridge’s spires (that) dream not of academe but of profit’.5 Theirs was a modest, introverted country town on the edge of East Anglia. Lacking industry it was not so much overshadowed as blotted out by the university, on which it largely depended in an antique way, by providing the colleges with porters, servants and landladies for the majority of the university’s young men for whom there was no room in the actual college buildings, and multiple incentives for 5,000 undergraduates, assumed to be fairly well heeled, to spend more than their allowances. By later standards it had surprisingly few places for eating meals out, although the Arts Theatre, one of Maynard Keynes’s many initiatives, had just opened, and included what set out to be a fashionable restaurant. It had ten cinemas. (Filmgoing was sufficiently familiar at the High Tables for an essay De Fratribus Marx (On the Marx Brothers) to be set in 1938 for one of the Classics prizes.)
What made Cambridge parochialism worse was that the place circumscribed within college walls the lives of the dons who lived there all the time – unlike undergraduates who spent only twenty-four weeks a year there – many of them bachelor scholars, then still so common. The Second World War, which sent so many of them into the wider world – if sometimes no further than the codebreaking centre at Bletchley – was still in the future. Some of them, one felt, knew about the world beyond Royston, ten miles south of Cambridge, only by hearsay. Indeed, compared to Oxford, Cambridge University was surprisingly remote from the centres of national life, which may explain why, unlike Oxford, none of its twentieth-century alumni became prime minister. Norfolk, where dons went on holiday, not to mention Newmarket, the famous racecourse, seemed a good deal closer than London.
Such was the place I came to, from a family no member of which had ever been to a university and a school which had never sent anyone to Cambridge. It was not like the university I had imagined. (In the vacations I soon discovered and frequented one that conformed to my idea of a ‘real’ university, namely the London School of Economics.) Cambridge was exciting, it was wonderful, but it took some getting used to for a stranger who knew nobody while, it seemed to me, everybody else knew somebody – a brother, a cousin or certainly earlier arrivals from their schools. The dons had even taught their fathers and uncles. I did not know that Cambridge was the centre of that network of intermarrying professional families, my friend and Cambridge contemporary Noel Annan’s ‘intellectual aristocracy’ which has played so central a role in Britain, although anyone in King’s soon discovered it. There were still plenty of Ricardos and Darwins, Huxleys, Stracheys and Trevelyans, both among undergraduates and dons. On the other hand, nothing was more obvious than that Cambridge was penetrated by the tribal customs of the British boarding schools, from which most arts undergraduates still came, and which were familiar to the likes of me only from boys’ magazines designed for those who did not go to such establishments. For instance, to my amazement, academic life came to a stop for two or three hours every afternoon, when it was assumed that the young men would be practising games and sports. I now found myself surrounded by Etonians (they still had a special connection with King’s, since in 1440 King Henry VI had founded both establishments together), Rugbeians, Carthusians, Stoics and crowds of people from major and sometimes virtually indistinguishable minor public schools. Ready to supply such a public, the firm of Ryder and Amies, still present on King’s Parade opposite the University Church of Great St Mary’s and the Senate House, stocked 656 old school, college, club and other institutional ties, where necessary designed in-house, as well as top hats, blazers and the other accoutrements of the traditional Cambridge undergraduate.6 There were no prefects, but the undergraduate weekly Granta published regular profiles of persons regarded as important, such as presidents of major sports clubs and societies, under the heading ‘In Authority’. (Those of its own retiring editors came under the modest heading ‘In Obscurity’.)
For practical purposes, for the new undergraduates the university meant their college. Being at King’s made things easier. The scholars, having as such the right to live in college, were decanted en masse into a gloomy slum generally known as ‘The Drain’, and thus had the chance to get to know each other, and the local mores of King’s favoured informality in the relations between teachers and students, seniors and juniors. I cannot say that I was a very characteristic Kingsman – the college was at its social high noon and the centre of Cambridge theatre and music – or that I was of any great interest to its establishment. For instance, I never had occasion to meet its most famous fellow, Maynard Keynes. However, King’s was liberal and tolerant, even of enthusiasts for team games, religious believers, conservatives, revolutionaries and heterosexuals, even of the less than good-looking young from grammar schools.
Fortunately, in spite of its Provost, it also respected the intellect and had a sense of its duty to bright students. After the war I got a post as a university lecturer within a year of leaving the army, entirely on the strength of the reference written about my undergraduate record by my pre-war supervisor, Christopher Morris, admittedly a master at this genre of literary composition. Since he had also originally interviewed me for my scholarship, I suspect that it was his recommendation that got me into King’s. A few years older than me and – uncharacteristically for the college – a family man, he was typical of the don of the old school, who was primarily a teacher, or rather a personal tutor. His calling was to get average young men from a public school a decent Second in the Tripos. Beyond this he concentrated on asking what he called ‘Socratic questions’, i.e. forcing his pupils to discover what it was they had written or meant to write in their weekly essay. This worked extremely well in my case, even when I did not accept his critical remarks about my prose style. I did not much respect him, and we dealt with one another at arm’s length, but I owe him a considerable debt.
I had less contact with the college’s three serious historians. As professors, two no longer supervised undergraduates: the tiny, witty, eminent and unbelievably conservative F. A. Adcock, Professor of ancient history, and the impressive and craggy John Clapham, just retired from the chair of economic history, author of that rarest of products of history in interwar Cambridge, a major work on a major topic, namely the three volumes of his Economic History of Modern Britain (1926–38). He was a mountaineer, which fitted in with the ethos of King’s; but was also both a solidly married man and firmly attached to the North of England nonconformity from which he sprang, which did not. (Nobody would have guessed that both Provost Sheppard and Maynard Keynes came from provincial Baptist stock.) I wish I had learned more from the third, John Saltmarsh, who did supervise me, for he published hardly anything, but poured his enormous learning into the lectures I did not attend.
The man who from 1933 to 1954 presided over the college’s fortunes (which, though we did not know it, were growing rather satisfactorily thanks to the financial acumen of his backer, fellow-gambler and fellow-Apostle Maynard Keynes) was Provost Sheppard. He was then in his mid-fifties, but since his full head of hair had gone white during the First World War, he had adopted the character of an old gentleman, doddering round the college in dark suits of stiffish cloth and a stiff wing-collar, saying ‘bless you, dear boy’ to (preferably good-looking) undergraduates encountered on his way. He kept open house at the Provost’s Lodge every Sunday evening, and would sit on the floor among the young men pretending, or possibly actually trying, to light his pipe, to encourage conversation. It was on one of these occasions that I encountered my first Cabinet minister, a man of platitudes and pompous body language whom Neville Chamberlain had just appointed to co-ordinate British defence. Not unexpectedly, he confirmed all my prejudices against the government of appeasers.
Undergraduates enjoyed the Provost as a star music-hall turn, on and off the boards and in the lecture hall, which he treated as a stage. 7 He was not respected, but quite often sentimentalized, and he certainly sentimentalized himself. In fact, he was a lifelong spoiled child of quite appalling character, which, as he grew older, was no longer mitigated by the charm, sense of fun and liberalism of his younger days. As he grew older he became more passionately royalist. A classicist, he had long given up research himself, and was no longer taken seriously by others. A failure as a scholar and as the head of a college – he never had his brief stint as Vice-Chancellor, the usual reward for even moderately competent heads of houses – he became an active enemy to the pursuit of knowledge. King’s may have been the centre of the Cambridge beau monde in the 1930s, but it was not an academically distinguished college (except in economics, over which he had no control). He was against science. ‘King’s College, Cambridge?’ said the President of Harvard. ‘Isn’t that the place where the natural sciences are denounced from the chair?’ As undergraduates we had little idea of the malice and bitchiness behind the mask of camp senile benevolence. Still, though he is one of the few people in my life for whom I came to feel genuine hate, I cannot bring myself not to feel pity for his miserable last years, when, no longer Provost and unable to conceive of a King’s that was not an extension of his own personality, in visible mental decline, he chose the last of his roles on the college stage, that of a dishevelled King Lear standing by the college gates, silently denouncing the injustices done to him.
The only other fellows with whom I had contact were the Tutor and Dean, and the history teachers. The Tutor, Donald Beves, was a large, peaceful, broad-beamed man whose passions were amateur dramatics – he was a celebrated Falstaff – and collecting Stuart and Georgian glass, which he displayed in his comfortable set of rooms, from which he surveyed the disciplinary problems of the young with an intermittent attention to administrative detail. His field was French, and he kept in regular touch with that country by touring its restaurants during vacations with friends in his Rolls-Bentley. He is not known to have published anything on its language or literature. Many years later, since his surname had five letters and began with a B like Anthony Blunt’s, some journalist, misinterpreting a leak, suggested that he might be the notorious ‘third’ or ‘fourth’ of the Cambridge spies for whom every editor was then looking. The idea of Donald Beves as a Soviet agent struck everybody who had ever met him as even more absurd than the suggestion, which was also floated for a moment at the peak of the espionage mania, that another closet bolshevik was the genuinely distinguished Professor A. C. Pigou, fellow of King’s for fifty-seven years, the founder of welfare economics, and reputed (with the great physicist J. J. Thompson) to be the worst-dressed man in Cambridge. Still, Pigou, another lifelong bachelor, was at least a pacifist, when not reflecting on economic matters and inviting intelligent, athletic and handsome young scholars to climb the crags from his cottage in the Lake District.
Actually, with one alleged exception, the links of King’s dons with intelligence were with the British rather than the Soviet secret services. Kingsmen, headed by the small, roly-poly later professor of ancient history, F. E. Adcock, had set up the British codebreaking establishment in the First World War, and at least seventeen King’s dons were recruited by Adcock for the much more famous establishment at Bletchley during the Second World War, including probably the only genius at King’s in my undergraduate years, the mathematical logician Alan Turing, whom I recall as a clumsy-looking, pale-faced young fellow given to what would today be called jogging. The person generally understood to be the local talent-spotter for the secret services – most Oxbridge colleges had at least one – was the Dean, Patrick Wilkinson, an exceptionally courteous and agreeable classical scholar with a constant half-smile and a tall head with very little hair that put me in mind, I don’t know why, of Long John Silver in Treasure Island. To everyone’s surprise he returned after the war from Bletchley a married man. Unlike the Provost, he was genuinely, deeply and unselfishly devoted to the college and its members. For many years he was responsible for the annual college report which provided full, if sometimes not completely explicit, obituaries of all Kingsmen without exception, however obscure: a document as elegantly written as it was (and continues to be) sociologically invaluable.
Cambridge in the 1930s no longer paid much attention to the object of medieval universities, instruction for the professions requiring special forms of knowledge – the clergy, the law and medicine – although it made provision for the early stages of training for them. Its purpose, at least in the arts, was not to train experts, but to form members of a ruling class. In the past this had been done on the basis of an education in the classics of ancient Greece and, above all, Rome, largely achieved by instructing the young in such esoteric practices as writing Greek and Latin verse. This tradition was far from dead. Something like seventy-five people (as against about fifty each in history and natural sciences) won scholarships or exhibitions in classics in the 1935 scholarship examination, most of them, of course, from the public schools, since not many grammar schools like my own taught Greek. But increasingly since the late nineteenth century history (centred on the political and constitutional development of England) had become the vehicle for all-purpose ‘general education’ at Cambridge. It was therefore taken by undergraduates in their hundreds, almost none of whom envisaged using it to earn their living, except perhaps as schoolmasters. It was not an intellectually very demanding subject.
The essential elements in a Cambridge education outside the natural sciences were the weekly essay written for a private session with a ‘supervisor’, and the Tripos, the degree examination in two parts, at the end of a one-year and a two-year course. Lectures were less important. They were mainly aimed at those who relied on the notes taken in the so-called ‘bread-and-butter courses’ to get them through the Tripos. Good students soon discovered that they could get more out of an hour’s reading in the magnificent libraries of college, faculty and university than an hour’s listening to undemanding public speech. Except for the ‘Special Subject’ taken in one’s last year, I doubt whether I went to any lecture course consistently after my first term, other than M. M. Postan’s economic history lectures, lectures so intellectually exciting – at the time I wrote about ‘that air of revivalism that pervaded’ them8 – that they brought the brightest of my generation of history students out at nine a.m. Good students might end by hardly going to lectures at all, but nobody seemed to mind. We learned more from reading and talking to other good students.
Not that getting a degree, let alone a good degree, was the only thing in the minds of young men and young women who found themselves in a place as full of interesting things to do as Cambridge, and with more leisure to do them than most other adults. I myself found no difficulty in combining enough academic work to do well at exams, with active undergraduate journalism and pretty full-time activity in the Socialist Club and the Communist Party. And that without counting such time spent on extra-curricular talking, social life, punting on the Cam, the pursuit of friendship and love, etc. There seemed to be time for almost everything. Perhaps the only two activities I started but gave up were taking the university course in Russian from the formidable Elizabeth Hill – which has confined me to remaining a purely western cosmopolitan – and the Cambridge Union, whose debates were commonly regarded as the training ground for future politicians. I cannot remember why I decided to give up the Union, although my early efforts had been encouraged by the then President, whom I discovered later to be a non-public Party member. It certainly saved money.
As soon as I arrived, my politics had been discovered and I was immediately invited to join the Cambridge Student Branch of the Communist Party. I eventually became a member of its ‘Secretariat’ of three, the highest political function I have ever occupied. The memoirs of a contemporary are mistaken in saying I became its Secretary in 1938, but correct in observing that I was not a natural leader figure.9 Still, its two most prestigious leaders had gone: the dark and handsome John Cornford, whose photograph was on all progressive Cambridge mantelpieces, to fight and die in Spain; James Klugmann (see below) to Paris. Its most obvious nursery of revolution was the set of rooms, bursting with posters and leaflets, in Whewell’s Court, Trinity, just below Ludwig Wittgenstein, shared by the American Michael Whitney Straight and the biochemist Hugh Gordon. However, Trinity was the centre of graduate rather than undergraduate communism. That was, somewhat unexpectedly, Pembroke College, which, in addition to one of the rare communist dons (the superb Germanist Roy Pascal), sheltered a number of comrades, including two of the main organizers, David Spencer and Ephraim Alfred (‘Ram’) Nahum, a squat, dark natural scientist with a big nose, radiating physical strength, energy and authority. He was the son of a prosperous Sephardic textile merchant from Manchester and, by general consent, the ablest of all communist student leaders of my generation. As a graduate physicist he stayed in Cambridge during the war, and was killed in 1941 by the only German bomb to fall on the city. Unlike Ram Nahum (who was known only on the left), Pieter Keunemann, a dashing, witty and remarkably handsome Ceylonese (the island was not yet Sri Lanka) who lived in Pembroke in some style, was a great figure in university society – President of the Union, among other things – not to mention the lucky partner of the ravishing Hedi Simon from Vienna (and Newnham), with whom I vainly fell in love. (After we graduated Pieter and I rented a tiny house together in the now no longer extant Round Church Street a few yards from the house where Ram was to die.) Although both were devoted Party members, I do not think anyone would have predicted that this debonair socialite, who first introduced me to the poems of John Betjeman, would spend most of his later life as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka.
On the other hand, we all expected that the elegant charmer Mohan Kumaramangalam, of Madras, Eton and King’s, also President of the Union, the admired friend of so many of us, would become an important figure in his native India, as indeed he did. As an Indian, Mohan was not, of course, officially in the Party. Nor were the other ‘colonial students’ – overwhelmingly from the Indian subcontinent. I soon found myself working with their special ‘colonial group’, headed, in a sort of local inheritance, by a succession of Trinity historians with a bent for ‘Third World’ history. Unlike their mentors, the young ‘colonial communists’ did not envisage academic life, although that is where one or two ended up. They looked forward to liberation and social revolution in their countries. The two Kingsmen among them did best, for Mohan’s younger contemporary, the modest and selfless Indrajit (‘Sonny’) Gupta, after a succession of jobs as trade union and political leader ended up, in old age, as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India and, for a short spell, as Interior Minister of his country.
The Party was, of course, my primary passion. But even for a 100 per cent communist there was simply too much to do in Cambridge to remain entirely confined to agitation, propaganda and organization, which in any case were not my forte. (In the end I reluctantly realized that the only really desirable career, that of the ‘professional revolutionary’, i.e. the Party functionary, was not for me, and I resigned myself to earning my living in a less uncompromising way.) Of course, everything was political in a sense, though not in the post-1968 sense for which ‘the personal is political’. We felt that what we wanted personally was not of interest to the Party, so long as it did not conflict with the Party line. But it was our duty not only to get good degrees but to bring Marxism into our work, just as politics entered the activities of those who went for acting or undergraduate journalism. Nevertheless, I cannot honestly say that I wrote for, and eventually edited, the student weekly Granta primarily for political reasons; nor that it was ever a journal that had much place for politics. Looking at old numbers today, I must sadly acknowledge that it was not much good as a journal, though my predecessor as editor, Charles Wintour, successfully used it to join Lord Beaverbrook’s stable, eventually editing the London Evening Standard. It was in fact pretty terrible, but we had a marvellous time in its office on Market Square over tea, gossip and jokes, and it gave us a golden opportunity to get free tickets for films: second to editing Granta, being its film editor was the potential contributor’s chief ambition. The film reviews even provided a neutral territory for friends of different politics, such as the young Arthur Schlesinger Jr, whom I met there, then as later a consistent anti-communist New Dealer.
8
Against Fascism and War
Whatever happened in Cambridge in those years was coloured by the knowledge that we lived in a time of crisis. Before Hitler came to power, the modest student radicalization of the time was almost certainly precipitated by the world economic crisis, the miserable collapse of the 1929–31 Labour government, and such dramatic demonstrations of what mass unemployment and poverty meant as the Hunger Marches from the smokeless and silent industrial areas. After 1933 it was increasingly a movement to resist the advance of fascist dictatorships and the next world war their advance would certainly bring; that is to say a movement directed against craven, as well as capitalist and imperialist, British governments that did nothing to stop the drift to fascism and war. In the second half of the 1930s, and especially after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, this was certainly the main force behind the remarkable growth of the Socialist Club: the effect of Munich in Cambridge was that the Cambridge University Socialist Club (CUSC) recruited 300 new members in a week.1
Throughout the decade the black cloud of the coming world war dominated our horizons. Could it be avoided? If not, how should we act? Would we fight ‘for King and Country’ as the Oxford Union had notoriously refused to do in 1933? Certainly not, but should we fight at all? Pacifism divided the Cambridge left, or rather the awkwardly combined anti-fascist and anti-war movement, for pacifism extended far beyond those interested in the politics of parties and movements, and even beyond the range of organized religion. As most of this apolitical pacifism disappeared after the fall of France in 1940, its strength in the 1930s is often forgotten. Indeed, pacifism was the only important issue that divided the Cambridge left, for within the Socialist Club the CP’ s line of broad anti-fascist unity had virtually unanimous support. Only one prominent member, Sammy Silkin of Trinity Hall, supported the official position of the Labour Party and was consequently cherished as proof of the ideological comprehensiveness of the Club (as distinct from the Labour Party itself which banned any organization with communists in it).
For most purposes the CUSC meant the ‘Red Cambridge’ of the 1930s. This was not true literally, since even at the peak of its strength, in early 1939, it had no more than 1,000 members out of fewer than 5,000 undergraduates, and when I went up in the autumn of 1936 only about 450.2 The Party never had much more than 100 members. Nevertheless, given the family origins, socio-political milieu and traditional customs of undergraduates at the ancient universities, as well as the overwhelmingly right-wing political inclinations of west and central European university students between the wars, the domination of the left in both Oxford and Cambridge during the 1930s was quite astonishing. All the more so as, with the exception of the London School of Economics, the left was not particularly strong in any of the other British centres of higher education.4
What is more to the point, the political transformation of Cambridge came from below. The typical politics of Cambridge dons were no doubt in the moderate centre rather than (as in Oxford) strongly Conservative, but prominent supporters of the Labour Party were rare, and communist dons could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Even so uncontroversial a campaign as that nominally organized by the Cambridge Peace Council, which succeeded in raising the then enormous sum of £1,000 for food for the women and children of Republican Spain in the autumn of 1938, was officially supported by only two heads of houses (St John’s and King’s), six professors – only one (M. M. Postan) in history – an eminent pacifist clerical don and Maynard Keynes.3 In the natural sciences, what turned Cambridge red were junior physicists and biochemists from the two intellectual powerhouses, the Cavendish and the Biochem Lab. But Cambridge science went its own political ways, building its campaigns round the Cambridge Scientists’ Antiwar Group, which entered wider consciousness mainly by demonstrating the inadequacy of the government’s defences against air-raids and poison gas, in the next war. A scientists’ faculty group of the Socialist Club was not established until late in 1938. Outside the natural sciences it was unquestionably the conversion of undergraduates that turned Cambridge red.
Who were the Cambridge reds? The question is easier to answer for the less numerous communists than for the CUSC. Before the era of anti-fascism and the Popular Front there were occasional aristocrats, such as the splendidly named A. R. Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, later a kind-hearted judge, who as a small child had played at Chats-worth, where he broke one of the Duke’s massive oriental vases, but mostly they came from the prosperous professional, or more rarely business, upper middle class – the Schlegels rather than the Wilcoxes (to use the convenient distinction in E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End). Noel Annan’s ‘intellectual aristocracy’ was represented, not least by the charismatic John Cornford, a great-grandson of Charles Darwin, but not dominant. The proportion of members from public schools was distinctly smaller in my time, that is after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, when the numbers both of the Party and the CUSC shot up. The grammar schools of England and Wales (though not their equivalents in Scotland) were almost certainly better represented in the Party, and certainly in its leadership, than in the general body of Cambridge undergraduates. The student Party’s chief local commissar at the time was a lean-and-hungry-looking mathematician from a working-class family, George Barnard of St John’s, who ended his career as President of the Royal Statistical Society and in a chair at Essex University and whose younger sister, Dorothy (Wedderburn), whom I got to know after the war, was to become and remain an intimate friend of Marlene and myself. Equally prominent, a little later, was Ralph Russell, a working-class classics student of steely bolshevik demeanour – we called him ‘Georgi’ after Georgi Dimitrov, the Secretary of the Comintern. The products of ‘progressive schools’ (Bedales, Dartington, etc.) were also likely to move left, as were the young of Quaker families. It has been suggested that Jews were slightly over-represented, but that is not my memory. Communism – irreligious and anti-Zionist – attracted very few in the small body of Jewish students at Cambridge, sympathetic to Liberals and Labour though these tended to be. If anyone in my time was regarded as a prominent Jewish leftist student, it was the South African Aubrey Eban (Abba Eban), destined for political eminence in Israel, whose Zionism kept him safe from communist temptation. Nor did the few Party members who were Jews think about their Judaism until, I think in 1937, King Street decided we should, and formed a ‘Jewish group’ or committee in London which ‘Ram’ Nahum and I reluctantly attended a few times before concluding that it had little reference to what we were doing. I remember the committee for my first encounter with the sort of East End communists who could not stop telling (extremely funny) Jewish jokes, a practice not characteristic of Party meetings in Cambridge.
No doubt this type of socio-cultural analysis throws some light on the distinction between Cambridge right and left, but it is less illuminating than another phenomenon, which still needs explanation. More than one observer might agree with Henry Ferns, that ‘the only element common to all the Communists I encountered (in Cambridge) was high intelligence’.4 In the 1930s the left attracted the intellectually brightest members of the student generation in the country’s elite universities.
Much larger though their numbers were, the members of the CUSC were also characteristically people of intellectual interests, although the club was sufficiently aware of the social dimension of life to organize a dancing class. It had the substantial advantage, not enjoyed by many undergraduate societies, of a large membership in both Girton and Newnham, whose idea of political activism, though just as serious as the men’s, was often less heavy. (The first Valentine I ever received was collectively from the Newnham group of the Communist Party of which I was the political instructor.) They were serious about studying. ‘The Committee wishes all CUSC members success in their Trips (Triposes)’ the Bulletin recorded before the 1937 exams. ‘Let us be as much to the fore on the academic front as on the political.’ 5 Starting with the modern linguists and historians, the club set up ‘faculty’ groups to debate problems of their subjects, and by late 1938 had twelve of them, including even such politically unpromising territories as agriculture, engineering and law.6 On the other hand, contempt for organized sports (but not, of course, for such traditional pursuits of progressive Cambridge as long hikes and mountaineering) was part of CUSC political consciousness. The CUSC gloried in the (frequent) success of socialists or communists at the Union, in drama and journalism – at one moment the presidents of the Union and the ADC (the main dramatic society) and the editor of Granta were all in the Party – but I am not aware that it took much interest in converting any of the university’s celebrated sports stars – admittedly an uphill task – or in the sporting or mountaineering achievements of its own members.
Whatever else the CUSC did, it campaigned: constantly, passionately, and in a spirit of hopeful confidence that surprises me as I look back in old age on my undergraduate years in Cambridge, the years when Europe (but not yet the world) slid into catastrophe.
The briefest headline summary of the politics of Europe in the 1930s shows that, from the point of view of the left, they were a virtually unbroken succession of disasters. Admittedly, as the song ‘Gaudeamus igitur ’ tells us, student days are not a time for depression, but should we not have been a little more desperate? We were not. Unlike the post-1945 anti-nuclear movement, we did not feel ourselves fighting a probably doomed rearguard action against enemies far beyond our reach. We lived from crisis to crisis, organizing like football teams living from match to match, each calling for the best efforts. As far as Cambridge was concerned, we were winning our matches. Each season was better than the last. In a way, the student left shared the university’s remoteness from the national centre, not to mention its traditional self-absorption. In everyday practice, for Cambridge comrades ‘the Party’ and the International meant the Cambridge student Party, for our only regular pre-war contact with the national leadership came through the notably un-authoritarian student organizer Jack Cohen, whose political command we naturally accepted without question, but who was aware that a worker without much formal schooling and who came to the students from Party work in the industrial Northeast, had much to learn about universities.
And yet, could we really forget that our greatest triumph, Spain Week, was won at a time when the Spanish Republic was visibly on its last legs and virtually beyond hope? Moreover, though we constructed scenarios about how war could be avoided by firm collective resistance to Hitler, we did not really believe them. We knew in our bones that a Second World War was coming, and we did not expect to survive it. I remember one bad night in a hotel room, possibly in Lyon, in the middle of the Munich crisis of 1938 – I was returning from a long vac study trip to French North Africa – when the thought that war might break out within days suddenly hit me. The nightmares of mass aerial bombardments and clouds of poison gas, against which, as we had so often warned, there was no protection, would become reality. There was no comparable hysteria in September 1939. The year from Munich to the invasion of Poland had allowed us to get used to the prospect of war.
I think we kept cheerful for three reasons. First, we had only one set of enemies – fascism and those who (like the British government) did not want to resist it. Second, there was an actual battlefield – Spain – and we were on it. Our own hero, the charismatic John Cornford, fell on the Córdoba front on his twenty-first birthday. True, he and one or two others who had gone out during the summer of 1936 were to be our only direct participants in the war, for curiously – the fact has not been much noticed – a Party decision at the highest level actually discouraged recruiting students for the International Brigades, unless they had special military qualifications, on the grounds that their primary Party duty was to get a good degree first, so they would, presumably, be of greater usefulness to the Party. Finally, we thought we knew what the new world would be like after the old world had come to an end. In this, like all generations, we were mistaken.
Hence the 1930s were for us very far from the ‘low and dishonest decade’ of the disenchanted poet Auden. For us it was a time when the good cause confronted its enemies. We enjoyed it, even when, as for most of radical Cambridge, it did not occupy the bulk of our time, and we did a certain amount of world-saving as a matter of course, because it was the thing to do. ‘On the other hand we avoided that strain of unhappiness which today frustrates people whose instinct it is to feel about world affairs exactly as we did then, but who find it impossible to translate their feelings into action, as we did.’7
In doing so we ‘distributed our emotions and energies evenly over the public and private sectors of the landscape’, or rather we made no sharp distinction between these two sectors. It is true that we sang, to a Cole Porter-like tune:
Let’s liquidate love Let’s say from now on That all our affection’s For the workers alone. Let’s liquidate love Till the revolution Until then love is An un-bolshevik thing.
Nevertheless, since close comradeship between emancipated men and women was part of the cause, we did not live up to this aspiration, even though Cambridge communists’ private lives, at least among the more specialized politicians, seem to have been less highly coloured than contemporary Oxford ones. The ethos of the CUSC and the Party was, of course, overwhelmingly heterosexual as, indeed, outside theatrical circles and King’s College, it was among the undergraduates generally. In the 1930s even the Apostles had left the era of the Edwardian ‘higher sodomy’ behind. No doubt some of us were not as naïve as Henry Ferns, who claims that ‘I never once encountered a Communist in Cambridge who was a homosexual’, but it is true that inside the Comintern (and still less in the CUSC) one did not advertise membership of the Homintern. It was treated on both sides as a private matter. I can think of at least two friends I first knew in the pre-war Party of whose lifelong homosexuality I was simply not aware until after the war.
There was no sharp division between term and vacation. Students did not do much paid vacation work yet, other than tour-guiding for linguists. The odd grant was available – one of these paid for my study trip to Tunisia and Algeria in 1938 – and I financed the long vacation of 1939 with my share of the profits of editing Granta, which amounted to some £50. (Thanks to the May Week number, summer term was the time to be editor. At the end of each term the editor pocketed what was left after the technical owners, the printing firm of Messrs Foister and Jagg had been paid for production and distribution.
My own vacations, broadly speaking, were divided between the London School of Economics and France. The LSE, or at least its main building in Houghton Street, Aldwych, is still recognizably what it was some sixty years ago, even down to the survival of a small snack-bar immediately to the left of the main entrance, which in those days was known as Marie’s café, where the student activists used to discuss politics or try to win converts, usually observed by a silent lone central European rather older than ourselves, apparently one of those ‘eternal students’ who hang around inner-city campuses, but who was in fact the totally unknown and unconsidered Norbert Elias, just about to publish his great work on The Process of Civilization in Switzerland. Academic Britain in the 1930s was extraordinarily blind to the brilliance of the central European Jewish and anti-fascist refugee intellectuals unless they operated in conventionally recognized fields such as classics and physics. The LSE was probably the only place where they would be given house-room. Even after the war, Elias’s academic career in this country was marginal, and the worth of scholars such as Karl Polanyi was not recognized until after they crossed the Atlantic.
I found the atmosphere of the LSE congenial, and its library, then still in the main building, a good place to work. It was full of central Europeans and colonials, and therefore markedly less provincial than Cambridge, if only by its commitment to social sciences such as demography, sociology and social anthropology, which were of no interest on the Cam. Curiously enough, the subject that gave its name to the school was at that time – and indeed had always been – both less distinguished and less enterprising than at Cambridge, though it attracted some very brilliant junior talent, which alas found no lasting posts in Houghton Street.
I must in some ways have felt more at ease in the LSE student atmosphere, and certainly with its women students, for I established a lifetime friendship with two of the girls I met there, and later married another, though less permanently. Three of my LSE communist student contemporaries became lifetime friends: the historian John Saville (then still known as Stamatopoulos or ‘Stam’), his companion and later wife, Constance Saunders, and the impressive James B. Jefferys, who made the transition from a Ph.D. in economic history to wartime convenor of shop stewards at Dunlops, and – less successfully – back again to research, for he became a victim of the Cold War ban on communist academics. It was through another LSE contemporary that I maintained, or rather re-established, links with Austria: the sporting, bushy-haired charmer Tedy Prager, who later got his economics Ph.D. under Joan Robinson in Cambridge, more in tune with his ideas than the LSE’s Robbins and Hayek. Sent by his family out of harm’s way from Vienna, having got into trouble resisting the Austrofascist regime after the civil war of 1934, he abandoned promising careers in Britain and in the ruins of postwar Vienna, to which, like almost all Austrian communists, he returned from British exile.
In the summer vacations the Cambridge student Party militants went to France to work with James Klugmann. With Margot Heinemann, James was my link with the heroic era of Cambridge communism before my time. (Both remained communists to the end of their lives.) Margot, one of the most remarkable people I have ever known, had been John Cornford’s last love, to whom he wrote one of his last poems from Spain, which has since become an anthology piece, and later partnered J. D. Bernal. Through a lifetime of comradeship, example and advice, she probably had more influence on me than any other person I have known.
James had been the Party’s acknowledged co-leader with John. For most of the Cambridge student militants he was and long remained a person of enormous prestige, even a sort of guru. I assume that, of all the student communists of his time, he was the one in closest touch with the International, for after graduation, abandoning an academic future for which he was admirably suited, he moved to Paris as Secretary of the Rassemblement Mondial des Etudiants (RME) (World Student Assembly) a broad, but Party-controlled international student organization. On my way to see him there once I recall crossing the path of one Raymond Guyot, a French heavyweight and for several years the Secretary-General of the Communist Youth International. It operated out of one of those small dusty Balzacian backstairs offices so characteristic of unofficial pre-war politics, in the ill-named Cité ś Paradis, a gloomy dead-end in the 10th arrondissement, and later in a more ambitious locale on the Left Bank. Its most obvious public activities were to organize periodic world congresses, which Cambridge and other student volunteers helped to prepare. I acted as translator at the 1937 Congress, which coincided with the great Paris World Exposition, the last before the Second World War, in a marvellous series that began with Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851. I can recall no major spell under James in 1938 – much of that summer I travelled in North Africa – nor can I confirm the report that I was mobilized for a meeting with Arab and Jewish students organized by James in the Easter vacation of 1939, to form a joint front against fascism, Mussolini having just occupied the largely Muslim country of Albania.8 I spent all the summer of 1939 working on the technical preparations for what would be the largest of these congresses, which ended a few days before Hitler invaded Poland.
In almost every way except intelligence and political devotion James Klugmann was the opposite of the romantic, heroic, highly colourful image of his partner in leadership, John Cornford. Bespectacled, soft-voiced, with a demure wit, always looking as though he was about to smile, he lived alone in a hotel room just by the Odéon theatre. As far as I know he continued a monastic existence as an unattached man for the rest of his life, surrounded, when the occasion arose, by admiring juniors. I am told he made sexual jokes in the company of intimates – of whom I was never one – and, since he had been at Gresham’s School, the nursery of more than one eminent homosexual of his day, he may very well have been queer, but one never associated him with any kind of sexual activity. His only obvious passion, at least in his postwar British life, when I saw more of him, was book-collecting. His personal remoteness added to the respect in which we, and indeed most of those who had anything to do with him, held him. What did one know about him? He gave nothing away. The only obvious thing about him was his capacity for remarkably lucid and simple exposition, and the air of authority he exuded – until he was ruined by the break between Stalin and Tito. Not that I can recall much political conversation with James in pre-war Paris in the intervals between work, when we sat in cafés playing chess – he was good at explaining why he beat us – or otherwise taking a break from meetings and the duplicating machine in bars playing table football, Jews playing Asians.
Almost certainly it was the RME that laid the foundations for James’s extraordinary wartime career as the key figure in British relations with Tito’s Partisans. Left-wing student movements of significance were rare enough in continental Europe, where the typical political stance of students (but not necessarily of university teachers) in the 1930s was a right-wing nationalism shading over into fascism. The great exception were the communist students of Yugoslavia, and especially the university of Belgrade, one of whose leaders, Ivo (Lolo) Ribar, a central figure in what would become the Partisan movement, was a familiar figure at the RME. Probably no man west of Moscow, and certainly no man in Cairo, knew more about who was who in Yugoslav communism and how to make contact with them.
After Stalin’s break with Tito, James was forced, almost certainly by direct pressure from Moscow, to make his own irreparable break by writing an utterly implausible and insincere book, From Trotsky to Tito . His reputation as the only first-rate intellectual (other than Palme Dutt) to reach the Party leadership, never recovered. From then on he took no risks or initiatives and said nothing, and ceased to be a serious force even within the small CPGB. The Party put him in charge of Education (assisted by our old student organizer Jack Cohen), a job he did brilliantly well, for he was a born teacher. He was far too intelligent and perceptive not to feel the disappointment, indeed the pity of his admirers from the 1930s for a man from whom so much had been expected. He had had the stuffing knocked out of him. Only in 1975 was there a last flash of the old James Klugmann. British intelligence, which had periodically got at him ever since Burgess and Maclean left for Moscow in 1951 suggested that he might at last be prepared to help the British spooks as others had done. Perhaps inducements were offered. 9 The idea that British intelligence, which he knew well – he had after all been in it during the war – should have thought him capable of disloyalty to his cause, hurt him. He refused. He died not long after in a nondescript South London house filled with books.
My last term, May–June 1939, was pretty good. I edited Granta, was elected to the Apostles and got a starred First in the Tripos, which also gave me a Studentship at King’s. There was only one downside. In the spring of 1939 Uncle Sidney, too old for any kind of war service, gave up the long struggle to make a living in Britain and decided to emigrate to Chile with Nancy, Peter and the few hundred pounds he had been able to raise to start a new life. There was never any question of my going a few weeks before Tripos, and in any case I was not going to leave the country with a war coming. In those days Chile was still a very long way from Europe. I saw them on to the boat in Liverpool, and took the train back to Edgware, to sleep one last night on the floor of the now totally empty house in Handel Close, where I had left my rucksack. The bottle of good Tokay, which I had saved from the old home, had somehow disappeared in my absence. Then I went back to Cambridge.
I spent the summer living in a grim but well-placed Paris hotel in the rue Cujas on the editorial profits of Granta, working on James’s great Congress. A photograph from the Congress is before me: a mixture of whites (mostly from Cambridge) with Indians, Indonesians, the odd Middle and Far Easterner and a solitary African. I recognize that well-meaning girl from Amsterdam – she was later killed in the Dutch Resistance. There, among the crowd of forgotten youthful faces, is the handsome Javanese Satjadjit Soegono, who became a major trade union leader in Indonesia after the war until he was killed in the 1948 communist insurrection in Madiun. There, next to James, is Pieter Keunemann, the future General Secretary of the CP of Sri Lanka and P. N. Haksar, the future chief-of-staff of Mrs Gandhi. There are the Spanish refugees – little Miggy Robles, who worked so hard at the duplicator with Pablo Azcarate of the Spanish Communist Party. There is the small, intense, Bengali face of Arun Bose. It was a successful Congress except for one thing: the Second World War began less than two weeks later.
I needed a rest and hitchhiked for a few days to Concarneau in Brittany. I returned on 1 September. A well-dressed but somewhat preoccupied Frenchwoman in a sports car gave me a lift somewhere past Angers. Had I heard? Hitler had marched into Poland. We drove to Paris, stopping to discover the latest from the radio somewhere, with random conversation about the coming war. As this was France, it is inconceivable that we did not stop for lunch, but on such a day that does not stay in the memory. Some Parisians were already going the other way in loaded cars. We wished one another good luck as she dropped me off. I made for the Westminster Bank on the Place Vendôme and queued with the rest of the Brits. A bad-tempered man with a notably retreating chin was ahead of me, whose passport made him out to be the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis. There was not much to pack before going to St Lazare to get tickets, if I could, for the night train to London. It was full of tall, long-legged blondes: the English dancers from the Folies Bergère and the Casino de Paris were returning to their homes in Morecambe or Nottingham. If I remember it right, I came out of Victoria Station on the last morning of peace having underslept, but into a sunny London. I no longer had a home there, but I think I spent the last night of peace in the flat of, or shared by, Lorna Hay, a Scottish graduate from Newnham about to look for a career in London journalism. She had just been told by Mohan Kumaramangalam, returning to India, that his future as a professional revolutionary made it impossible to take her with him.
That is how the 1930s ended for me.
9
Being Communist
I
I became a communist in 1932, though I did not actually join the Party until I went up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1936. I remained in it for some fifty years. The question why I stayed so long obviously belongs in an autobiography, but it is not of general historical interest. On the other hand, the question why communism attracted so many of the best men and women of my generation, and what being communists meant to us, has to be a central theme in the history of the twentieth century. For nothing is more characteristic of that century than what my friend Antonio Polito calls ‘one of the great demons of the twentieth century: political passion’. And the quintessential expression of this was communism.
Communism is now dead. The USSR and most of the states and societies built on its model, children of the October Revolution of 1917 which inspired us, have collapsed so completely, leaving behind a landscape of material and moral ruin, that it must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start. Yet the achievements of those inspired by this conviction, and the associated belief that ‘there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot conquer’, were indeed quite extraordinary. Within little more than thirty years of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station, one third of the human race and all governments between the Elbe and the China Seas lived under the rule of Communist Parties. The Soviet Union itself, defeating the most formidable war machine of the twentieth century, which had pulverized Tsarist Russia, emerged from the Second World War as one of the world’s two superpowers. There had been no comparable triumph of an ideology since the (slower and less global) conquests of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries of our era.
This was achieved by small, often by relatively or absolutely tiny, self-selected ‘vanguard parties’ for, unlike the working-class parties which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, also mostly inspired and encouraged by the ideas of Karl Marx, communism was not designed as a mass movement, and became one only by historical accident, as it were. In this respect it contrasted with, and indeed rejected, the classic approach of Marxist social democracy, which expected everyone who recognized themselves as a ‘worker’ to identify with parties whose essence, often expressed in their very name – Labour Party – was that they were parties of workers. To support the party of labour seemed to them not so much an individual political choice as the discovery of a person’s social existence, which necessarily had certain public implications. Conversely, their least political activities were imbued with the sense of what defined a person’s social existence, so that the clubs which met in the back rooms of pubs in ‘Red Vienna’ – I recall seeing such notices there as late as the 1970s – practised their hobbies not as stamp collectors but as Worker Philatelists, or as Worker Pigeon Fanciers. Such parties were sometimes also to be found in the communist movement, as notably in postwar Italy. There the Party, rooted in family and local community, combined the tradition of the old socialist movement with the organizational efficiency of Leninism and the moral authority of a secular Catholic Church. (As Palmiro Togliatti put it in 1945: ‘in every household a picture of Marx next to the one of Jesus Christ’). It was the kind of Party in which a young woman from Modena could quite naturally ask her Party Federazione to make enquiries to the Padova Federazione, to discover whether the young carabiniere from that city who courted her was ‘serious’ (Alas, he turned out to be already married in Padova.)1 Here public and private, becoming a better person and building a better world, were considered indivisible.
The Communist Parties of the Comintern era were of an entirely different kind, even when they claimed, sometimes correctly, to be rooted in the working class and to express its interests and aspirations. They were Lenin’s ‘professional revolutionaries’, that is to say necessarily a relatively or absolutely small selected group. To join such an organization was essentially an individual decision, and was recognized as life-changing both by those who invited a ‘contact’ to join the Party and by the man or woman who joined it. It was a double decision, for remaining in the Party (at least outside countries of communist rule) implied the continuous choice not to leave it, which was possible easily and at any time. For most of those who joined, membership of the Party was a temporary episode in their political life. Nevertheless, unlike the 1968 generation, few interwar communists went into the revolution as into a political Club Med (which, by the way, was founded as a holiday mini-utopia by a young Communist Party exresister after the Second World War).
Giorgio Amendola, one of the pre-war generation of Italian communist leaders, called the first volume of his beautifully written autobiography Una scelta di vita, ‘A Chosen Life’. For those of us who became communists before the war, and especially before 1935, the cause of communism was indeed something to which we intended to dedicate our lives, and some did so. The crucial difference turned out to be between communists who spent their lives in opposition and those whose Parties took power, and who therefore became directly or indirectly responsible for what was done in their regimes. Power does not necessarily corrupt people as individuals, though its corruptions are not easy to resist. What power does, especially in times of crisis and war, is to make us do and seek to justify things unacceptable when done by private persons. Communists like myself, whose Parties were never in power, or engaged in situations which call for decisions on other people’s life or death (resistance, concentration camps), had it easier.
Membership in these Leninist ‘vanguard parties’ was thus a profound personal choice, but not an abstract one. For most interwar communists joining the Party was a further step on this road for someone who was already ‘on the left’ or, in the parts of the world where this was appropriate, ‘anti-imperialist’. It was, of course, easier for those who came from politically homogeneous environments of the right kind – say, in New York, where, as I once overheard one contributor to The New Yorker say reflectively to another, ‘One actually never meets any Republicans,’ rather than in Dallas, Texas. It was even easier for those who came from communities, generally marginal to the larger society, whose situation placed them outside the national political consensus. Conversely, vast as is the number of ex-communists of my generation, it is uncommon to encounter among them people who have swung to the extreme political right. The exit-route of the politically disillusioned communist usually led either, if young enough, to some other branch of the political left, or, generally by stages, mainly to a militant anti-communist Cold War liberalism. Even in the USA a generation had to pass before the (anti-Stalinist) intellectuals of the New York left abandoned the old family loyalties and frankly declared themselves ‘neo-conservatives’.
This is particularly clear among intellectuals, for the prevailing conventions of rational thinking about society are rooted in the rationalist eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. As the political right has never ceased complaining, this has made intellectuals inclined to sympathize with such causes as liberty, equality and fraternity. Even my friend Isaiah Berlin, with his visceral commitment to a non-negotiable Jewish identity, which made him defend, or at least try to understand, the critics of the Enlightenment, found it impossible not to behave like an Enlightenment liberal. Outside Germany a secular intellectual tradition suitable to the right hardly existed. In the first half of the past century, the left visibly attracted far more intellectuals than the right. Even in the major creative arts, where rational thinking is less relevant, anti-fascism prevailed On this question the last word has been said with admirable brevity by ‘Simon Leys’, the pseudonym of an eminent Belgian sinologue with an unparalleled record as a deconstructor of the myths of Maoism: ‘All of us in the intellectual world know people who have been communists who have changed their minds. How many of us have come across ex-Fascists?’ The truth is, whether they changed their minds or not after the war, there simply were never that many.
This does not mean that communism attracted a particular type or types of personality open to extremism, authoritarianism and other ‘undemocratic’ traits, although in the Cold War era this was argued by authors anxious to demonstrate the similarity of communism and fascism, but politically angled social psychology need not detain us. In any case there is little base for the liberal belief in a fundamental affinity between ‘extremisms’ of right and left, which made it easy to pass from one extreme to the other. Since the British CP was small, communist workers and students, at least in the late 1930s, were exceptional but they were not untypical. I can detect no common personality traits among my Cambridge contemporaries who joined the CP that distinguished them from those who did not join, except perhaps a greater intellectual liveliness. Indeed, in later years, as I met some former comrade again in his post-communist existence as a respectable – though rarely Conservative – middle-class professional, I would sometimes say to myself: ‘To think that I once recruited him and fellows like him into the Party!’ It is less surprising that the workers who joined the Party were, in Britain at least, young, livelier than most, but otherwise typical of their class and trades – mainly engineering, building and in some regions mining. Between the 1930s and 1950s, before A-levels and higher education came within reach of their class, the way in which bright young apprentices or the dynamic young workshop activists would get their political and intellectual education was through the Party. It formed the future national leaders of British trade unionism, and, of course, provided the Party itself with capable working-class cadres, which a consciously ‘proletarian’ party insisted on. Contrary to common opinion, intellectuals as such played no significant part in the Party leadership, until the educational revolution removed the potential exam-passing youth from workshop to college, which therefore became the way into politics or better jobs – and not only in Communist Parties.
Communism was therefore not a way of picking out ‘extremists’ from ‘non-extremist’ personalities, although both poles of the political spectrum may sometimes attract the same clientele, namely persons, usually young, who have a natural taste for adventurous operations or political violence, the sort of people to whom terrorism or direct action appeal. Perhaps Rambo-types have been more attracted to the extreme left since the rise of street confrontation and small-scale armed groups in the aftermath of the student revolt of 1968, with its rhetoric of ‘streetfighting men’. Nevertheless, a life devoted to making revolution is not the same as a life that gets its thrills from irregular warfare or adventure.
Given the tradition and importance of clandestine activities in the Communist Parties, which, with the rarest exceptions (such as Great Britain) were illegal for at least some of their history, there was obviously scope for the life of adventure in the international communist movement of my times, but bolshevism, whose motto was ruthless efficiency rather than romance, did not favour the culture of the bank-robber or commando-raid. It invented the supremacy of the ‘political commissar’ (i.e. the civilian) because it distrusted the impulses of the soldier. It was hostile in theory to individual terrorism. Lenin’s own reaction to such gestures was utterly typical. He could not understand why in 1916 the social democrat Friedrich Adler had publicly shot dead the Prime Minister of the Habsburg Empire as a protest against the First World War. Would it not have been more effective for him, as secretary of the Party, to circulate the branches with a call for a strike?
I have known several communists whose career would interest, and in some cases has interested, the writers of thrillers, but on the whole their ideal of clandestinity, however dangerous, was not buccaneering or self-dramatization. Let me compare the character of Alexander Rado, the head of the extremely important Soviet spy network in wartime Switzerland and the only master spy with whom I have ever spent a somewhat bizarre Christmas in Budapest, and that of his radio operator Alexander Foote, apparently a British double agent, as described in the literature. Foote ‘had not become a secret agent in the first place for ideology, money or patriotism. He made very little money out of spying, abstract political ideas bored him, and M15 did not regard him as a patriot when he eventually returned to Britain. But he was a born adventurer …’2 Rado did not look like a man thirsting for action, but like a comfortable middle-aged businessman whose natural leisure habitat was a central European café śtable. When I met him in 1960, returned to a chair at the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest after several years in Stalin’s camps, he was what he had always wanted to be, a geographer and cartographer. He had spent his entire political life since 1918 in and out of clandestine or unavowable activities, always returning to this vocation. Neither fighting – he was the organizer of the armed workers’ brigades destined to head the (aborted) German revolution of 1923 – nor running spy networks diverted him. No doubt he also enjoyed the thrills of that kind of life, but he did not strike me as a man who chose it for that reason. He did what needed doing. ‘When we were young,’ he told me, ‘Rakosi [the former Hungarian communist leader and dictator, at the time of this conversation retired in exile in the USSR] used to say to me ‘‘Sandor, why not become a full-time professional revolutionary?’’ Well, look at him and look at me. It was a good thing that I had a proper trade and never gave it up.’ Communist Parties were not for romantics.
On the contrary, they were for organization and routine. That is why bodies of a few thousand members – like the Vietnamese CP at the end of the Second World War – could, given the occasion, become the makers of states. The secret of the Leninist Party lay neither in dreaming about standing on barricades or even Marxist theory. It can be summed up in two phrases: ‘decisions must be verified’ and ‘Party discipline’. The appeal of the Party was that it got things done when others did not. Life in the Party was almost viscerally anti-rhetorical, which may have helped to produce that culture of endless and almost aggressively boring and, when reprinted in Party publications, sensationally unreadable ‘reports’ which foreign Parties took over from Soviet practice. Even in operatic Italy the young postwar red intellectuals made fun of the traditional style of speech at the great public meetings on which the faithful still insisted. Not that we were unmoved by powerful oratory, and we recognized its importance on public occasions and in ‘mass work’. Even so, speeches are not a major part of my communist memories, except for one in Paris in the first months of the Spanish Civil War by La Pasionaria, large, black in widow’s weeds, in the tense emotion-charged silence of a packed Vel d’hiv indoor arena. Though hardly any of the audience knew Spanish, we knew exactly what she was telling us. I can still remember the words ‘y las madres, y sus hijos’ (and the mothers, and their sons) floating slowly from the microphones above us, like dark albatrosses.
The Leninist ‘vanguard party’ was a combination of discipline, business efficiency, utter emotional identification and and a sense of total dedication. Let me illustrate. In 1941, pinned down by a fallen beam, our comrade Freddie thought she would die in the fire set off by the only enemy bomb that hit Cambridge during the Second World War. My friend Tedy Prager, who vainly tried to free her until the fire services came – he lived in what had been my old cottage in Round Church Street, almost within arm’s reach of the explosion – tells the story:
My feet, she screamed, it’s burning my feet, and I kept chopping at the beam, but nothing moved. Poor Freddie … It’s no good, she was now crying, I’m done for. And then, as I wept with desperation and smoke, too exhausted to lift the axe any longer, she cried out: Long live the Party, long live Stalin … Long live Stalin, she cried out, and Good-bye boys, good-bye Tedy.3
Freddie did not die, though she has spent the rest of her life with legs amputated below the knees. At the time it would not have struck any of us as surprising that the last words of a dying Party member should be for the Party, for Stalin and for the comrades. (In those days among foreign communists the thought of Stalin was as sincere, unforced, unsullied by knowledge and universal as the genuine grief most of us felt in 1953 at the death of a man whom no Soviet citizen would have wanted, or dared, to call by a pet name like ‘Uncle Joe’ in Britain or ‘Big whiskers’ [baffone] in Italy.) The Party was what our life was about. We gave it all we had. In return, we got from it the certainty of our victory and the experience of fraternity.
The Party (we always thought of it in capital letters) had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow ‘the line’ it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it, although we made heroic efforts to convince ourselves of its intellectual and political ‘correctness’ in order to ‘defend it’, as we were expected to. For, unlike fascism, which demanded automatic abdication and service to the Leader’s will (‘Mussolini is always right’) and the unconditional duty of obeying military orders, the Party – even at the peak of Stalin’s absolutism – rested its authority, at least in theory, on the power to convince of reason and ‘scientific socialism’. After all, it was supposed to be based on a ‘Marxist analysis of the situation’, which every communist was meant to learn how to make. ‘The line’, however predetermined and unchangeable, had to be justified in terms of such an analysis, and, except where circumstances made this physically impossible, ‘discussed’ and approved at all levels of the Party. In Communist Parties outside power, where members were not too scared to pursue the ancient left-wing tradition of argument, the leadership had to go through the process of repeating its case for the official line until there was no room for doubt about what we were expected to vote for. (The technical term for this process was ‘patiently explaining’.) After the vote, ‘democratic centralism’ required that argument should give way to unanimous action.
We did what it ordered us to do. In countries such as Britain it did not order us to do anything very dramatic. Indeed, but for their conviction that what they were doing was saving the world, communists might have been bored by the routine activities of their Party, conducted in the usual ritual of the British labour movement (comrade chairman, branch minutes, treasurer’s report, resolutions, contacts, literature sales and the rest) in private homes or unwelcoming meeting rooms. But whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed. After all, most Soviet and Comintern cadres in the period of Stalin’s terror, who knew what might await them, followed the order to return to Moscow. If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so. After 1933 the German Party in exile ordered Margaret Mynatt (later the inspiration behind the English-language Collected Works of Marx and Engels) to go to England from Paris, since they needed someone in London and, as known German communists were not admitted, a comrade with valid British documentation was needed. Without a moment’s hesitation she abandoned the love of her life (or so she later told me) and went. She never saw him (or was it a her?) again. Party dues in Auschwitz, I was told after the war by a former inmate, were paid in the inconceivably precious currency of cigarettes, and it says something about the Party’s capacity for collective resistance that they could procure them.
To have a serious relationship with someone who was not in the Party or prepared to join (or rejoin it) was unthinkable. Admittedly, since Party members were also apt to be emancipated in their attitude to sex, it is to be supposed that not all militants eschewed completely apolitical sex, but even for the Comintern agent in Brecht’s wonderful poem An die Nachgeborenen (To Those Born Later), his casual couplings (‘der Liebe pflegte ich achtlos’) were yet another proof that the Party’s work came before everything that was personal. I confess that the moment when I recognized that I could envisage a real relationship with someone who was not a potential recruit to the Party was the moment I recognized that I was no longer a communist in the full sense of my youth.
It is easy in retrospect to describe how we felt and what we did as Party members half a century ago, but much harder to explain it. I cannot recreate the person I was. The landscape of those times lies buried under the debris of world history. Even the image – if there was one – of the wonderful hopes we had for human life has been overlaid by the range of goods, services, prospects and personal options which are today available to the majority of men and women in the incredibly wealthy and technologically advanced countries of the West. Marx and Engels wisely refrained from describing what communist society would be like, but most of what little they said about what individual life would be like under it, now seems to be the result, without communism, of that social production of potentially almost unlimited plenty, and that miraculous technological progress, which they expected in some undetermined future, but which is taken for granted today.
Rather than reconstruct in my eighties what made us communists, let me quote from shortly after the 1956 crisis, when I was closer to the convictions of youth. I wrote that even the most sophisticated revolutionaries share ‘that utopianism or ‘‘impossibilism’’ which makes even very modern ones feel a sense of almost physical pain at the realization that the coming of socialism will not eliminate all grief and sadness, unhappy love-affairs or mourning, and will not solve or make soluble all problems’. I observed that ‘revolutionary movements … appear to prove that almost no change is beyond their reach’.
Liberty, equality and above all fraternity may become real for the moment in those stages of the great social revolutions which revolutionaries who live through them describe in the terms normally reserved for romantic love. Revolutionaries not only set themselves a standard of morality higher than that of any except saints, but at such moments actually carry it into practice …Theirs is at such times a miniature version of the ideal society, in which all men are brothers and sacrifice everything for the common good without abandoning their individuality. If this is possible within the movement, why not everywhere?
By this time I had recognized, with Milovan Djilas, who has written wonderfully well of the psychology of revolutionaries, that ‘these are the morals of a sect’, but that is precisely what gave them such force as engines of political change.4
It was easy enough in Europe during and between the world wars to conclude that only revolution could give the world a future. The old world was in any case doomed. However, three further elements distinguished communist utopianism from other aspirations to a new society. First, Marxism, which demonstrated with the methods of science the certainty of our victory, a prediction tested and verified by the victory of proletarian revolution over one sixth of the earth’s surface and the advances of revolution in the 1940s. Marx had shown why it could never have happened before in human history, and why it could and was destined to happen now, as indeed it did. Today the foundations of this certainty that we knew where history was going have collapsed, notably the belief that the industrial working class would be the agency of change. In the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ they looked firm.
Second, there was internationalism. Ours was a movement for all humanity and not for any particular section of it. It represented the ideal of transcending selfishness, individual and collective. Time and again young Jews who began as Zionists became communists because, obvious as the sufferings of the Jews were, they were only part of universal oppression. Julius Braunthal wrote, describing his conversion to socialism in Vienna at the start of the century: ‘I felt sorry for my Zionist friends whom I had deserted; but I hoped I would be able to persuade them one day to understand that the smaller aim has to give way to the bigger.’5 With retrospective bitterness disguised as cynicism my New York colleague the philosopher Agnes Heller describes her conversion to communism in a Hungarian Zionist work camp in 1947 at the age of eighteen:
We lived in community, we felt we belonged together. We needed neither money nor the rich … I didn’t like the rich, today I am ashamed of it. I abominated the black market dealers, the dollar speculators, the men of rapacity and greed. No problem! I’d stay loyal for ever to the poor. So, crazy chick that I was, I joined the Communist Party to be with the poor. 6
In practice, national or other collective or historical identities were far more important than we then supposed. Indeed, communism probably made its greatest impact outside Europe, where it had no effective rival in the fight against national or imperial oppression. Ho Chi Minh, the liberator of Vietnam, chose as his nom-de-guerre in the Comintern ‘Nguyen the Patriot’. Chin Peng, who led the communist insurgency and jungle guerrillas in Malaya, though less successfully, began as a youthful patriot who first turned to communism when he abandoned hope in the ability of the Kuomintang Party to liberate China. He told me so himself, an elderly Chinese gentleman of intellectual interests looking most unlike a former jungle guerrilla leader, in the improbable environment of the Athenaeum’s Coffee Room. Nevertheless, even for those who began with limited aims, even for those who abandoned the wider hope when it disappointed the narrower one, like the many communist Jews who left the Party under the impact of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns, communism represented the ideal of transcending egoism and of service to all humanity without exception.
But there was a third element in the revolutionary convictions of Party communists. What awaited them on the road to the millennium was tragedy. In the Second World War communists were vastly over-represented in most resistance movements, not simply because they were efficient and brave, but because they had always been ready for the worst: for spying, clandestinity, interrogation and armed action. Lenin’s vanguard Party was born in persecution, the Russian Revolution in war, the Soviet Union in civil war and famine. Until the revolution communists could expect no rewards from their societies. What professional revolutionaries could expect was jail, exile and, quite often, death. Unlike the anarchists, the IRA or movements of Islamic suicide bombers, the Comintern did not make much of a cult of individual martyrs, though the French CP after liberation appreciated the attraction of the (true) fact that during the Resistance it had been ‘le parti des fusillés’ (the party of those executed by firing squad). Communists were undoubtedly the quintessential enemy for almost every government, including even the relatively few which allowed their Parties legal existence, and we were constantly reminded of the treatment they could expect in jails and concentration camps. And yet we saw ourselves less as sufferers or potential casualties than as combatants in an omnipresent war. As Brecht wrote in his great 1930s elegy on the Comintern professionals, An die Nochgeborenen:
I ate my meals between battles I lay down to sleep among the murderers.
Hardness is the soldier’s quality, and it ran even through our very political jargon (‘uncompromising’, ‘unbending’, ‘steel-hard’, ‘monolithic’). Hardness, indeed ruthlessness, doing what had to be done, before, during and after the revolution was the essence of the bolshevik. It was the necessary response to the times. As Brecht wrote:
You, who will emerge from the flood In which we have perished Remember also When you speak of our weaknesses The black times You have escaped
But the point of Brecht’s poem, which speaks to communists of my generation as no other does, is that hardness was forced upon the revolutionaries.
We, who wanted to prepare the ground for kindness Could not be kind ourselves.
Of course we did not, and could not, envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet peoples under Stalin at the time when we identified ourselves with him and the Comintern, and were reluctant to believe the few who told us what they knew or suspected.7 Nobody could anticipate the scale of human suffering in the Second World War until it happened. However, it is anachronistic to suppose that only genuine or wilful ignorance stood between us and denouncing the inhumanities perpetrated on our side. In any case, we were not liberals. Liberalism was what had failed. In the total war we were engaged in, one did not ask oneself whether there should be a limit to the sacrifices imposed on others any more than on ourselves. Since we were not in power, or likely to be, what we expected was to be prisoners rather than jailers.
There were Communist Parties and functionaries, such as André ś Marty, who appears in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, who took pride in their necessary ‘steel-hard’ bolshevism, not least the Soviet Communist Party, where it combined with the absolutist tradition of unlimited power and the brutality of everyday Russian existence to produce the hecatombs of the Stalin era. The British CP was not among them, but Party pathology appeared in more masochistic and peaceful forms. To take a case in point: the late Andrew Rothstein (1898–1994). Andrew was a rather boring, round-faced petit-bourgeois figure, who defended whatever needed defending in the Soviet Union, the son of a more dramatic Russian old bolshevik, Theodore Rothstein, who had once been a Soviet diplomat and had written a pioneering book of Marxist labour history. We shared a cold bedroom once at a conference of the Association of University Teachers, and I still recall him carefully unpacking his toilet set and slippers. Possibly I was mandated to protest against the failure of the University of London’s School of Slavonic Studies, where he taught Soviet Institutions, to renew his time-limited contract as a lecturer. A founder member of the British CP, and obviously with good Russian connections, he had been a leading figure in the Party in the 1920s, but in 1929–30 his opposition to the Comintern’s ultra-left course, not to mention his vitriolic temper and lack of proletarian bona fides, led to his fall. He was exiled (minus his wife and children) to Moscow, his Party membership transferred to the CPSU. Luckily for his survival he was soon allowed back into Britain and the British CP on condition that for the rest of his career he occupied only local functions in the Party. Yet he remained a totally loyal, totally committed communist. Indeed, I had the impression that for him, as for others like him, the test of his devotion to the cause was the readiness to defend the indefensible. It was not the Christian ‘ credo quia absurdum’ (I believe it is because it is absurd), but rather the constant challenge: ‘Test me some more: as a bolshevik I have no breaking-point.’ When the British CP finally went out of existence in 1991, he became, at the age of ninety-three, the first member of the tiny hard-line Communist Party of Britain which succeeded it.
I doubt whether any communist of my generation would have been inspired to join the Party, or stayed in the Party, by the career of Rothstein. And yet we had our heroes and models – Georgi Dimitrov, in the Reichstag fire trial of 1933 who stood up alone in the Nazi court, defying Hermann Göring and defending the good name of communism and, incidentally, of the small but proud Bulgarian nation to which he belonged. If I did not leave the Party in 1956, it was not least because the movement bred such men and women. I am thinking primarily of one such figure, barely known in his lifetime, un-remembered except by comrades and friends today. I still recall him, small, sharp-eyed, quizzical, as we walked on a Sunday morning through the sun-dappled and carefully marked footpaths of the Wienerwald hills, among occasional couples of hiking acquaintances, white-haired men and women, who had organized illegal Party and socialist meetings in the remoter parts of those woods before they survived the concentration camps. The open air had always been the characteristic environment of Austrian revolutionaries. There is probably no man for whom I have a greater admiration.
In mid-August 1944 he had written his last words in cell 155 of block 2 and cell 90 of block 1 of Fresnes prison in Paris:
Franz Feuerlich, communist Franz Feuerlich, Austrian will be executed 15 August 1944 On the eve of liberation?8
But Ephraim Feuerlicht (1913–79), whom we all knew by his Party name Franz Marek, was lucky. The liberation of Paris saved him. He had been a leading figure in the French Communist Party’s MOI (Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée) organization, under the Czech Artur London (later victim of the Stalinist trials), whose Spaniards, Jews, Italians, Poles and others played such a disproportionately large and heroic part in the armed Resistance in France. (Those whose image of Jews under fascism is that of eternal victims, should remember the fighting record of socialist and communist Jews, from the 7,000 who fought in the International Brigades to the MOI and their equivalents in other occupied countries.) Among other things Franz was in charge of work with the German troops themselves. He did not talk about those times, except once to our son Andy, then about ten, who wanted to know what sort of things you did in the Resistance. He said that mostly you kept out of the way of the people who wanted to arrest you, but that he had had a few narrow escapes. Born in Przemysl, which is today in the Ukraine, brought up in the deepest poverty in interwar Vienna – Franz claimed that he never had a new jacket and trousers until he became a professional revolutionary – he became politicized as a Zionist at the age of fifteen, but converted to communism from the most Marxist of the Zionist groups, the Hashomer Hazair, though he did not join the Communist Party until after the Austrian civil war of 1934. Not surprisingly, it was the immediate consequence of a few months spent wandering round pre-Hitler Germany in 1931–2. He became a professional almost from the start, having demonstrated what were clearly exceptional abilities for clandestine work to the comrade sent to instruct the Austrians in the unaccustomed situation of illegality. Though he insists that the secret of such work was punctuality and pedantry about details, in short, the strict bolshevik ‘rules of conspiracy’, as a man in his early twenties he enjoyed the romantic side of the work. He liked to recall that he occupied what had once been the office of Dimitrov in the ninth district – Vienna had always been the International’s centre for the Balkans. Soon he was setting up a Vienna office for the Romanian CP (all 300 of them) and organizing its participation in the forthcoming Seventh World Congress, before being promoted to head the ‘Apparat’ of the illegal Austrian Party – communications, safe houses, frontier crossings, and the provision and distribution of literature – and later its entire agit-prop activities. No doubt it was this that brought him to Paris after the Anschluss.
He returned to Austria after the war as a member of the Austrian CP’s Political Bureau, wrote a brief and luminous book on France, and edited the Party’s theoretical journal. In 1968 he briefly succeeded in decoupling the Austrian CP from the USSR after condemning its invasion of Czechoslovakia, but Moscow soon reasserted itself. Marek was expelled, but continued as editor of an independent left-wing monthly the Wiener Tagebuch and (together with myself and some others) planner and editor – his only regular income now came from it – of Giulio Einaudi’s ambitious Storia del Marxismo. He fell to a long-awaited heart attack in the summer of 1979. He died a communist. The Italian Communist Party was represented at his funeral. What he left at his death, give or take a few books, could be packed into two suitcases.
A man of strong, lucid intelligence and remarkable learning, he could have been a thinker, a writer, an eminent academic. But he had chosen not to interpret the world but to change it. Had he lived in a larger country and in other times, he might have been a major political figure in a humanized communism. He continued on this road to the end, resisting the temptations of a post-political refuge in literature or graduate seminar. In his way, he was a hero of our times, which were and are bad times.
II
I have so far written about communists outside power. What about the Party members I have known who faced the very different situation in communist regimes, where it brought not persecution but privilege? They were not outsiders but insiders, not opposers but rulers, often of countries most of whose inhabitants did not like them. The police was not their enemy but their agency. And for them glorious future after the revolution was not a dream but now.
They did not have the advantage, which maintained our morale, of enemies who could be fought with conviction and a clear conscience: capitalism, imperialism, nuclear annihilation. Unlike us, they could not avoid responsibility for what was being done in the name of communism in their countries, including the injustices. This is what made the Khrushchev Report of 1956 especially traumatic for them. ‘If ‘‘the laws of history’’ could no longer take the blame for these terrors, but Stalin as a person, then what about our own co-responsibility?’ wrote an exiled Czech reform-communist of my acquaintance. 9 He had been in the public prosecution service in the 1950s.
In my lifetime there were three generations of such communists who had crossed this threshold of power: the pre-Stalinist ‘old bolsheviks’, few of whom survived the 1930s and none of whom I knew; those who made or experienced the great change – the interwar and resistance generations of communists; and those who grew up under the regimes which collapsed in 1989. There is nothing to be said about the last of these. By the time they joined what was a public elite, they knew the rules of the game by which their countries lived. Nor is there anything I can say about the Soviet Union. I have real personal acquaintance with only one member of the Soviet generation, though he was not a Russian but a second-generation foreign communist brought up in the USSR before returning to his own country, the late Tibor Szamuely of Hungary.
He was a very bright, squat, ugly and witty historian, nephew of one of the most eminent figures in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, who had been brought up in the USSR, where his father was executed and his mother deported. He himself, after almost starving in the siege of Leningrad, claimed also to have had the usual spell in a camp during the dictator’s final lunacies. He returned to Hungary after Stalin’s death, cynical, but officially communist, and Party secretary in the university history faculty, where his line was ultra-hard, but somehow no students or colleagues were expelled or penalized. However, when I first met him in London in about 1959 he made a beeline for the most anti-communist contacts. Like so many central European Jews, he was a passionate anglophile. Perhaps he was already preparing to jump ship as a freedom-lover, which he did a few years later, becoming an anti-communist publicist for Conservative publications and a close friend of the writer and drinker Kingsley Amis, equally reactionary and funnier but notably less intelligent. In spite of what he must have regarded as my illusions we liked one another and got on extremely well. It was through him that I first went to Hungary in 1960, though, as a high official – I think he was then vice-rector of the university – he was not pleased at my insistence on visiting the great Marxist philosopher George Lukács, who had recently been allowed by the Russians to return to Budapest. Lukács had been seized and exiled after the 1956 revolution and now sat in his apartment above the Danube once again like an ancient high priest in civilian clothes, smoking Havana cigars. It was in Tibor’s flat that I had the memorable Christmas dinner with the master spy. It was to our flat in Bloomsbury that he chose to come directly from the airport with wife and children
1. Three sisters Grün: (left to right) Mimi, Nelly, Gretl (Vienna, 1912)
2. Three brothers Hobsbaum: (left to right) Percy, Ernest, Sidney (Vienna, early 1920s)
3. Nelly and Percy Hobsbaum in Egypt, c. 1917
4. Second mother: Aunt Gretl (England, c. 1934)
5. Mother, Nancy, cousin Peter, EH outside alpine TB sanatorium (Austria, 1930)
6. Camping in England with Ronnie Hobsbaum (1935)
7. School-leaving photograph (sans EH) of my class at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium (Berlin, 1936)
8. Paris 1936: the Popular Front government celebrates Bastille Day. EH (top right) and uncle Sidney (centre) on French Socialist Party newsreel truck
9. Paris 1937: world student conference with Spanish Civil War posters. EH (seated) interpreting
10. Red Cambridge: James Klugman (top row, centre of window) with Cambridge helpers and international delegates to Congress of World Student Assembly (Paris, August 1939). To his right are Pieter Keuneman (Sri Lanka) and P. N. Haksar (India)
11. Red Cambridge: the photo of John Cornford (Cambridge 1915–Spain 1936) which stood on so many of our mantelpieces
12. Moscow 1954: British Communist historians’ delegation under portraits of Stalin and Lenin. (left side, left to right) Christopher Hill, A. L. Morton, interpreter, EH
13. USSR 1954: historians at Zagorsk. (second left to right ) Hill, Morton, interpreter, EH
14. Italy: Rome 1958. Speaking at a conference on Gramsci Studies
15. Italy: Genoa 1997. Eightieth birthday cake, modelling theatre where the occasion was celebrated and the author’s book. Inscription: ‘The century is short but sweet. Birthday wishes’
16. Italy: Mantua 2000. Reading the leftwing daily Il Manifesto.
when he had finally arranged (via a posting to Ghana) to get the whole family out of socialism for good.
It was not the horrors of socialism that had finally driven him out, but excess of cynicism. For, though he was received in Britain as a victim of Soviet repression, in fact he had taken no part in the 1956 revolution. Indeed, after its defeat he reestablished the Party unit at the university. Szamuely’s career therefore advanced rapidly in the next years. Unfortunately in the course of those years, under the benevolent eye of the Kadar government, the sympathizers with the 1956 movement, that is to say the bulk of communist intellectuals and academics, quietly re-established their positions. The career of the Soviet collaborator who had risen so steeply after 1956 went into a decline. But, of course, he had no doubt been as contemptuous of the illusions of the 1956 revolutionaries as of the Soviet regime. Taking another step away from the Party world of my youth, in subsequent years I successfully resisted the temptation to say anything in public about the 1956 record of the great freedom-lover. It was more than the reluctance to score what would have been, after all, no more than a passing political debating point at the cost of embarrassing a personal friend. Marlene and I recognized that there was a principle here: there are times when a line must be drawn between personal relations and political views. And yet, excellent company, charming and witty as he was, we and the Szamuelys drifted apart. Perhaps private and public lives are not as separable as all that.
Czechs, East Germans and Hungarian academics were the Party members in the Soviet bloc I saw most of. Of the major political figures of the regimes I met only one or two briefly, notably Andras Hegedüs, the last Hungarian premier under Rakosi, who recycled himself as an academic sociologist after 1956, travelled, protected dissidents but said little, though allowing it to be understood that the quality of the Party leadership had declined after his day. None of my friends was a Party figure, although Ivan Berend turned down the offer to become a minister of education in his country, Hungary. He was and is a superb historian, President of his country’s Academy of Sciences under communism, whose merits were recognized, after the end of communism, by election as President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. Almost all the Czechs I knew, some of whom dated back to the pre-war English emigration, became supporters of the Prague Spring of 1968, and some, such as my friend Antonin Liehm, played a notable part in it as editor of the leading cultural-political journal of the time, Literarny listy. We first met not through politics but as jazz-lovers at a Prague festival, but jazz, like the rehabilitation of Kafka, was an oppositional activity in the run-up to 1968, though I am not aware of any political background to the publication of my The Jazz Scene, the only one of my books translated into Czech under communism. After 1968 the Party reformers were either forced into emigration or into window-cleaning, coal-heaving or similar activities, if not old enough to be pensioners. Some, like Edward Goldstücker, a major figure in the Prague Spring as President of the Writers’ Union, had already been jailed for years in the Stalinist persecution of the early 1950s. (We saw him in 1996 in Prague shortly before his death: the authorities of the new Czechoslovakia had denied him the status of one persecuted by communism.) They lost their country for good for, when communism ended, nobody wanted them any more.
The Hungarians I got to know best, too young for pre-war politics or resistance – Ivan Berend and his long-time collaborator George Ranki both returned from the Nazi camps in 1945 to high school – were reform communists, except for the brilliant Peter Hanak, young star of Hungarian Marxist history in 1955, insurgent in the revolution of 1956, and strongly anti-communist afterwards. But the post-’56 mood in Hungary was both modestly reformist and tolerant, even of some dissidence. Of all Party regimes Hungary probably came closest to normal intellectual life under communism, perhaps largely thanks to its wealth of intellectual talent, which it reinforced by good relations with its western émigrés. Some of its most remarkable non-political minds rejected emigration even in the worst times, such as the mathematical genius Erdös, who insisted on maintaining his Hungarian passport while also insisting on travelling round the world’s mathematics departments, never staying in any place for more than a few months, carrying all his worldly possessions with him in his suitcase. He managed this extraordinary and perhaps unique achievement by a private citizen at the height of the Cold War, thanks to the unanimous support of the international mafia of mathematicians. When, unable to talk number theory with him, I asked him, on an agreeable evening in Cambridge, why he wanted the permanent right to go back to Budapest, he said: ‘Is good mathematical atmosphere.’ Hungary, of course, was the only part of central Europe that had not lost most of its Jews.
In some countries of ‘real socialism’, as for instance Poland, it was possible to avoid the Party in one’s dealings with colleagues and friends. Not so in the German Democratic Republic where nothing was outside its supervision, certainly not the contacts of its citizens with foreign communists. Moreover, there was no scope for dissidence there or even doubt about the line that came down from the commanding heights. In some ways, and not least for linguistic reasons, I therefore found it easiest to discover there what Party membership meant under socialism.
East German communists, at least those within my knowledge, were and most remained believers, whether old KPD cadres from before 1933; youthful enthusiasts who joined in the ruined landscape of 1945 to build a new future, such as Fritz Klein, son of the editor-in-chief of one of the Weimar Republic’s most respected Conservative newspapers; second-generation communists such as my friend Siegfried Bünger, son of a worker from rural Mecklenburg; or Gerhard Schilfert, converted as a Soviet prisoner-of war, a man incapable of being other than sincerely convinced by and loyal to authority, old or new. (All these were historians.) In a way, they selected themselves. Those who could not stand the heat got out of the kitchen, which was really quite easy until the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
I had little direct contact with the Old Guard, except with the Kuczynskis and, through my friend the painter Georg Eisler, with his admired father Hanns, partner of Brecht and official state composer of the GDR, whom I met in the unproletarian ambiance of the Waldorf Hotel. Hanns had abandoned his wife and son, whose exile had taken them from Vienna via Moscow and Manchester back to Vienna. A more recent wife, Lou, he lost to another communist veteran from Moscow, the brilliant and romantic charmer Ernst Fischer, son of a Habsburg general and postwar star of Austrian culture and the Austrian CP until it expelled him after the Prague Spring. I owe an intellectual debt to Fischer, acknowledged in my Age of Revolution. All remained in friendly contact, as Fischer did with his first wife, a handsome aristocratic girl from Bohemia who became a Soviet agent, whose revolutionary credentials went back to the German communist insurrection of 1921. The Leipzig-Viennese Eislers were almost the quintessential Comintern family. Aunt Elfriede (known to history as Ruth Fischer) had been the young communist believer in free love who moved Lenin to his criticism of casual sex (‘the glass of water theory’). Some years later, she emerged as part of the ultra-left leadership of the KPD before disappearing into expulsion and exile having picked the wrong side in Soviet and Comintern politics. She reappeared after the war in the USA, among other things as a denouncer of her brother Gerhart Eisler. He, also a defeated (but more moderate) leader of the KPD, had become a Comintern agent of importance in China, the USA and elsewhere. He was expelled from the USA, jumping ship en route in Britain, and returned to East Germany where, during the mania of late Stalinism, he was – or so it is claimed – cast as a potential and no doubt in due course self-confessed traitor in a show trial. Fortunately the East German regime, though occupied by the Soviet forces, never joined this murderous Stalinist fashion, though it is rarely given credit for such restraint. Gerhart Eisler spent the rest of his life in politically minor jobs in the GD R, such as head of the broadcasting services, gently fending off his nephew’s questions about his past. Had he written his memoirs, which he refused to do, they would have been as meaningless as those of most diplomats: his generation did not talk. Hollywood, where he spent his exile, suited Hanns, the musician, fat, witty, cynical, and far better at succeeding there than his partner Brecht, but he went back none the less and wrote the new state’s national anthem. One can hardly accuse them of having many illusions about the reality of Comintern communism, the USSR and least of all the GDR. They stayed, controlled and harassed by a rigid political hierarchy to whom they were from time to time denounced by rivals and ambitious juniors, constantly watched, even as they were publicly honoured, by the largest permanent policing system ever operated in a modern state, the Stasi. But they stayed.
In one way the peculiar situation of the GDR made it easier. The East German regime suffered from the patent fact that it had no legitimacy, initially almost no support, and would have never in its lifetime won a freely contested election. The successor to the SED (Socialist Unity Party) has probably more genuine popular support today than when the old regime totted up the habitual 98 per cent of votes. To this extent East German communists were still, speaking globally, in embattled opposition, especially under the threat and temptation of their overpowering neighbour, the vastly larger Federal Republic. This justified measures which would otherwise have horrified communists, even allowing for their Party’s rejection of liberal democracy. One remembers Brecht’s bitter wisecrack about government dissolving the people and electing another. On that very occasion, 17 June 1953, my friend Fritz Klein, a devoted communist of twenty-nine, supported the Soviet intervention after the great workers’ revolt, because he thought the regime socially more just and politically more reliably anti-fascist than the Federal Republic. Similarly, in 1961 he supported the building of the Berlin Wall. ‘My view then,’ he writes, ‘was that it had to be accepted as the lesser evil, faced with the inevitable alternative: to abandon the still legitimate experiment of building a new society.’10 The most they could hope for was that the socialist society they were constructing would work and eventually win over the people. Without doubt the best and most intelligent East German Party members were both critics of the system and remained hopeful reformers to the end. But they were powerless. It was, of course, easier for Party members to abdicate their judgement and play it by the book (that is, at the top, ask for advice from Moscow) or simply do whatever the Party told them had to be done. And the Party was run by old hardliners from before 1933 or their successors of the next generation.
The passions of the Cold War have presented the East European regimes as gigantic systems of terror and gulags. In fact, after the years of blood and iron under Stalin (who was in two minds whether he wanted a GDR at all), the GDR’s system of justice and repression, leaving aside the victims of the Berlin Wall, has been well described authoritatively by a Harvard historian as ‘continuously shabby but relatively unsanguinary’.11 It was a monstrous all-embracing bureaucracy which did not terrorize but rather constantly chivvied, rewarded and punished its subjects. The new society they were building was not a bad society: work and careers for all, universal education open at all levels, health, social security and pensions, holidays in a firmly structured community of good people doing a honest day’s work, the best of high culture accessible to the people, open-air leisure and sports, no class distinctions. At its best it settled down into – Charles Maier’s words again – something between ‘socialism and Gemütlichkeit’, or a ‘Biedermeier collectivism’.12 The drawback, apart from the fact, unconcealable from its citizens, that it was far worse off than West Germany, was that it was imposed on its citizens by a system of superior authority, as by strict nineteenth-century parents on recalcitrant or at least unwilling minors. They had no control over their lives. They were not free. Since West German television was generally accessible the constant presence of compulsion and censorship was evident and resented. Nevertheless, as long as it looked permanent, it was tolerable enough.
All this affected Party members as much as, perhaps more than, the rest. Their conversations were not only recorded by rivals or the omnipresent Stasi informers, but, if deemed unacceptable, brought demands for public self-criticism or demotion by dour but unconvincing functionaries from the self-contained ghetto of the national rulers, rigidly laying down the line. Dissidents were worried rather than harried into conformity. In the worst cases, they were nagged or extruded to the West, like Wolf Biermann, whom I remember visiting with Georg Eisler, in his room in a back court of East Berlin where he sang the protest songs that had already made him famous.
Most Party members in the GDR, and almost certainly most Party intellectuals, believed in some kind of socialism to the end. It is hard to find among them, as among Soviet emigrants, reform communists who had become 100 per cent pro-American cold warriors. But they were increasingly downhearted. When did communists begin to suspect – or to believe – that the ‘really existing’ socialist economy, clearly inferior to the capitalist one, was not working at all?
Markus Wolf, the head of GDR espionage, a man of visibly impressive ability, whom I got to know when a Dutch TV station organized a conversation between him and myself on the Cold War, told me that he had come to the conclusion in the late 1970s that the GDR system would not work. Even so, in the last moments of the GDR he came out publicly as a communist reformer – an unusual stance for an intelligence chief. In 1980 the Hungarian Janos Kornai’s book The Economics of Shortage already provided the classical analysis of the self-contradictory operations of Soviet-style economies. In the 1980s, a decade when these economies were visibly running down (unlike the post-Mao Chinese economy), communists in the Soviet bloc countries with elbow-room – Poland and Hungary – were already, it was clear, preparing for a shift. The hard-line regimes in Prague and Berlin had nothing to rely on except the potential intervention of the Soviet army, which was no longer on the cards since Gorbachev had taken over in the USSR. In Eastern Europe as in the West, Communist Parties were decomposing. Soon the Soviet Union itself would decompose. An historical epoch was ending. What was left of the old international communist movement lay beached like a whale on a shore from which the waters had withdrawn.
Late in the 1980s, almost at the end, an East German dramatist wrote a play called The Knights of the Round Table. What is their future? wonders Lancelot. ‘The people outside don’t want to know any more about the grail and the round table … They no longer believe in our justice and our dream … For the people the knights of the round table are a pile of fools, idiots and criminals.’ Does he himself still believe in the grail? ‘I don’t know,’ says Lancelot. ‘I can’t answer the question. I can’t say yes or no …’ No, they may never find the grail. But is not King Arthur right when he says that what is essential is not the grail but the quest for it? ‘If we give up on the grail, we give up on ourselves.’ Only on ourselves? Can humanity live without the ideals of freedom and justice, or without those who devote their lives to them? Or perhaps even without the memory of those who did so in the twentieth century?
10
War
I
I arrived back in England just in time for the war to start. We had expected it. We, or at least I, had even feared it, though no longer in 1939. This time we knew we were already in it. Within a minute of the prime minister’s old, dry voice declaring war, we had heard the wavy sound of the sirens, which to this day brings back the memory of nocturnal bombs to any human being who lived through the Second World War in cities. We were even surrounded by the visible landscape of aerial warfare, the corrugated iron of shelters, the barrage balloons tethered like herds of silver cows in the sky. It was too late to be afraid. But what the outbreak of war meant for most young men of my generation was a sudden suspension of the future. For a few weeks or months we floated between the plans and prospects of our pre-war lives and an unknown destiny in uniform. For the moment life had to be provisional, or even improvised. None more so than my own.
Until my return to England I had not really come to terms with the implications of the family’s emigration. I now discovered myself not only without a known future for an unpredictable period, but also without a clearly discernible present, unanchored and alone. The family home was gone, and so was the family. Outside Cambridge I had nowhere in particular to go, though I would not be short of comrades and friends to put me up, and I was always welcomed in the only available household of London relatives, the ever-reliable Uncle Harry’s. I had no girlfriend. In fact, for the next three years, when I came to London I lived a nomadic sort of existence sleeping in spare beds or on the floors of various flats in Belsize Park, Bloomsbury or Kilburn. From the moment I got called up, my only permanent base was in a few crates of books, papers and other belongings which the head porter of King’s allowed me to store in a shed. I packed them after my call-up. I thought of them reemerging after the war, with luck, like a Rip van Winkle whose life had stopped in 1939 and who now had to get used to a new world. What world?
The war had begun to empty Cambridge. As the former staff of Granta had already dispersed, I asked the printers to close the journal down for the duration, thus formally burying an essential component of pre-war Cambridge. Research on my proposed topic of French North Africa was now pointless, though I went through the motions, background reading, hitchhiking to the British Museum when necessary and when the snowdrifts of an unusually freezing winter made it possible.
What is more, since the line-change of the autumn of 1939, it was not the war we had expected, in the cause for which the Party had prepared us. Moscow reversed the line which the Comintern and all European Parties had pursued since 1935 and had continued to pursue after the outbreak of war, until the message from Moscow came through. Harry Pollitt’s refusal to accept the change demonstrated that the leadership of the British Party was openly split on the issue. Moreover, the line that the war had ceased to be anti-fascist in any sense, and that Britain and France were as bad as Nazi Germany, made neither emotional nor intellectual sense. We accepted the new line, of course. Was it not the essence of ‘democratic centralism’ to stop arguing once a decision had been reached, whether or not you were personally in agreement? And the highest decision had obviously been taken. Unlike the crisis of 1956 (see chapter 12) most Party members – even the student intellectuals – seemed unshaken by the Moscow decision, though several drifted out in the next two years. I am unable to remember or to reconstruct what I thought at the time, but a diary I kept for the first few months of my army service in 1940 makes it clear that I had no reservations about the new line. Fortunately the phoney war, the behaviour of the French government, which immediately banned the Communist Party, and the behaviour of both French and British governments after the outbreak of the Soviets’ winter war against Finland made it a lot easier for us to swallow the line that the western powers as imperialists were, if anything, more interested in defeating communism than in fighting Hitler. I remember arguing this point, walking on the lawn in the Provost’s garden in King’s with a sympathetic sceptic, the mathematical economist David Champernowne. After all, while all seemed quiet, if not somnolent, on the western front, the only plans of the British government for action envisaged sending western troops across Scandinavia to help the Finns. Indeed, one of the comrades, the enthusiasic public school boy and boxing half-blue J. O. N. (‘Mouse’) Vickers – he actually looked more like a large weasel than a mouse, thin, quick and mobile – was due to be sent there with his unit when the Russso-Finnish war ended. For communist intellectuals Finland was a lifeline. I wrote a pamphlet on the subject at the time with Raymond Williams, the future writer, critic and guru of the left, then a new, militant and obviously high-flying recruit to the student Party. Alas, it has been lost in the course of the alarums and excursions of the century. I have been unable to rediscover a copy. And then, in February 1940, I was at last called up.
The best way of summing up my personal experience of the Second World War is to say that it took six and a half years out of my life, six of them in the British army. I had neither a ‘good war’ nor a ‘bad war’, but an empty war. I did nothing of significance in it, and was not asked to. Those were the least satisfactory years in my life.
Although I was clearly not the military type, and still less a potential commander of men, the main reason why I wasted my country’s time and my own during most of my twenties was almost certainly political. I had, after all, some qualifications relevant to a war against Nazi Germany; not least a native knowledge of German. Moreover, as a rather bright history student at King’s, whose intelligence veterans of the First World War were given the responsibility of recruiting for the future staff of Bletchley, and which sent seventeen of its dons there, it is inconceivable that my name would not have crossed the mind of one of these. It is true that I lacked at least one conventionally accepted qualification for intelligence work, namely doing the Times crossword puzzle. As a central European I had never grown up with it, nor did it interest me. It is also true that I did not rate highly on the other traditional qualification, the one that had got my uncle Sidney into codebreaking in the First World War, namely chess. I was an enthusiastic but very far from distinguished player. Still, had I not been quite so public and prominent a bolshevik as an undergraduate, I rather think that I would not simply have been left in Cambridge to await the decisions of the East Anglian call-up authorities.
On the other hand, the official view that someone of such obvious and recent continental provenance and background could not, in spite of his and his father’s passports, be a 100 per cent real Englishman, may well have played some part. (Such a sentiment was far from uncommon in the Cambridge of the 1930s and was shared perhaps by my supervisors.) After all, plenty of Party members did serve in intelligence during the war, including some who made no secret of their membership. Certainly my nomination a few weeks after call-up for what turned out to be a divisional cipher course (two officers, seven NCOs, three other ranks) was aborted for this reason. ‘Nothing personal, but your mother was not British,’ said the captain as he told me to take the next train from Norwich back to Cambridge. ‘Of course you’re against the system now, but naturally there’s always a bit of sympathy for the country your mother belonged to. It’s natural. You see that, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘I mean I have no national prejudices. It’s all the same to me what the nations do, so long as they behave themselves, which the Germans aren’t doing now.’ I agreed. He promised to recommend me for an interpreter’s job. Nothing further was ever heard about it. Curiously enough, my memory completely wiped out this episode, although I recorded it at the time.
Did I already have an intelligence file when I was at Cambridge? There is no way of knowing. I had certainly acquired one by the middle of 1942, when a friendly sergeant in Field Security told me that I was supposed to be watched. It is possible that I acquired one in 1940 shortly after I was called up, for as a good communist I made arrangements to stay in contact with the Party, which meant that when in London, I met Robbie (R. W. Robson), a sallow, lined, hard-smoking working-class full-time cadre since the early 1920s, in one of those small, dusty, second-hand-looking offices up a dark staircase in WC1 or WC2, in which such people were to be found. These were very likely bugged by Security.
Whenever I acquired my file, I was clearly seen as a suspicious character, to be kept out of sensitive areas such as abroad, even after the USSR became Britain’s ally and the Party devoted itself to winning the war. While the war lasted (and indeed from 2 September 1939 until my first postwar visit to Paris in 1946) I never left the soil of Great Britain – the longest unbroken period I have ever spent without crossing some sea or land frontier. Nobody after May 1940 appeared to take an interest in my languages. At one moment I got as far as an interview on the subject in what I took to be a secret service office at the top of Whitehall, but nothing came of it. Reluctantly I got used to the idea that I would have no part in Hitler’s downfall.
What could the officers do who found themselves lumbered with an intellectually overqualified and practically underqualified oddball with minimal gifts for the military life? Since I could drive a car I was called up as a driver, but I did not take to the company’s requisitioned 15-cwt- and 3-ton trucks, or to motorbikes, and soon became merely a pair of unskilled arms. What could be done with such a figure? I was presumably regarded as unpromotable. In the end the 560th Field Company of the Royal Engineers found a way of getting rid of me. I was recommended for transfer to the Army Education Corps, which – since this was a people’s war – was being rapidly expanded. I was sent on the required course to a building behind the jail in Wakefield, taking with me – why should I still remember this so vividly? – Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. There I discovered the enormous superiority of northern fish-and-chips to what I had hitherto been used to, and passed, in the company of another historian and future vice-chancellor of London University.
My transfer came through some time later, in the early autumn of 1941, a few days after we had moved to Hay-on-Wye, on the Welsh borders, near which, exactly fifty years later, I found myself buying the Breconshire cottage in which I write these lines. It may well have saved my life, for in the meantime the unit had been ordered abroad, and we already had our embarkation leave behind us. As usual, I spent it among the bombs in London. Naturally nobody told us where we were bound for, though the Middle East seemed the most likely. But the 15th East Anglian Division, including the 560th Field Company RE, did not set sail for the Middle East, but via Cape Town and Mombasa for Singapore, where they were captured by the Japanese in February 1942. Those who survived spent the next three years building the Burma railway. About a third of them did not. I never saw my mates again. Would I have survived? Who knows. In any case, I did not find out how lucky I was until much later.
II
My army career thus falls into two sharply distinct parts. The first of these, my time with the Royal Engineers, was by far the more interesting. As might be expected, a field company of sappers was a purely working-class unit, except for its few officers. I was the only intellectual in it, indeed almost certainly the only other rank in it who habitually read the news pages of the daily newspaper before or instead of the racing pages. This unusual habit gave me my nickname during the weeks when France collapsed: ‘Diplomatic Sam’. For the first time in my life I found myself a member of the proletariat whose emancipation was to bring freedom to the world, though an uncharacteristic one. To be more precise, I found myself living in the country in which the majority of the British people spent their lives, and which had only a marginal contact with the world of the classes above them. Being called up in Cambridge dramatized the contrast, since for two or three months I lived in both worlds. After duty (i.e. mainly learning the elements of drill on the green turf of Parker’s Piece) I moved from one to the other as I walked to the centre of university Cambridge from the working-class street where the military authorities had quartered me and a barber’s assistant and former hotel porter from Lowestoft called Bert Thirtle, on an elderly widow, Mrs Benstead, We shared what had been the Benstead matrimonial bed which was fortunately a wide one. It was not an ideal introduction to the world of the proletariat, since Thirtle lacked the social reflexes which I found so striking in my otherwise politically disappointing mates, and which explains so much about British trade unionism. Most of my mates saw themselves essentially as civilians who put on uniforms as their dads had done in 1914–18. They saw no special virtue in the martial life or look: civvy street was where they hoped to go back to as soon as possible. But Thirtle had always secretly dreamed of wearing a uniform, although it did not get him far with the girls (any girl was a ‘tart’ in our jargon) he picked up in Petty Cury. His fiancée, a seventeen-year-old who worked in a kitchen, wrote him daily letters and sent parcels containing the local papers, The Wizard , Comic Cuts and American strip cartoons.
In retrospect I am amazed how powerful an instinctive sense or tradition of collective action was in a bunch of young working men, ranging from the unskilled to some apprenticed tradesmen, mostly builders, assembled in the same NAAFI canteen or games room by the accidents of conscription. This struck me less at the time than their wavering uncertainty – and indeed my own – about what we should all do at moments that called for some action, and the general sense of helplessness in the face of authority. And yet, as I read the notes of my diary, what impresses me is the familiarity with the procedures of collective action, the constant, almost intuitive, potential for militancy. They were at home in the ‘public sphere’ of the British working class. Had not someone, during one protest, suggested that we should organize a proper meeting at The Locomotive like a real union, with a table and a bell and a glass of water?
The proletarian experience was novel in other respects. I think it is safe to say that in 1940 few Kingsmen had had occasion to operate a road drill, and I found the experience of doing so tiring but exhilarating. The Sappers were essentially a formation of workers skilled and less skilled, more from general manufacture and the building trades (for a lot of metal workers were in reserved occupations and those needed by the army went into other, more specialized corps) from many parts of Britain – the Black Country, London, Nottingham, a sprinkling from the Northeast and Scotland – but mainly from the eastern counties, since ours was essentially an East Anglian division. A few anomalous Cantab recruits found themselves in its ranks – myself, slightly older friends and acquaintances such as Ian Watt, later a distinguished professor of literature, whose work on the origins of the English novel the student Marxists were already discussing, and slightly younger ones such as the witty graphic satirist, Granta’s cartoonist Ronald Searle. Both returned, marked for life, from Japanese gulags. Ronald, whom I occasionally saw during our common time in the division, was already being discovered by the admirable Kaye Webb, then commissioning editor at Lilliput, a pocket-sized and very hip magazine founded by an emigrant Mitteleuropean, and much appreciated by our generation, who later married him. (She also took a few articles from me during and after the war, until the magazine disappeared.) Meanwhile, he became one of the most successful cartoonists of his time, thanks largely to the invention of St Trinian’s, a girls’ school peopled by the most appalling pupils, inspired, one understood, by the small terror-bringing Japanese of his wartime prison camps.
By and large in my days as a Sapper I lived among workers – overwhelmingly English workers – and in doing so acquired a permanent, if often exasperated, admiration for their uprightness, their distrust of bullshit, their sense of class, comradeship and mutual help. They were good people. I know that communists are supposed to believe in the virtues of the proletariat, but I was relieved to find myself doing so in practice as well as in theory.
Then Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark and the war really began. As soon as the Germans – we could hardly believe it – began to overrun the Low Countries, the 560th Field Company had something real to do. For anything up to fourteen hours a day, virtually isolated from the civilian life of Norfolk which went on around us, we improvised defences for East Anglia against a potential invasion. We shifted sandbags, revetted the walls of giant anti-tank trenches round the town that were being dug ahead of us by a civilian excavator, inexperienced, clumsy and above all utterly unconvinced that the ditch would stop any tanks, especially since there were no anti-tank guns or anything else, but our main work was mine-laying and attaching explosive charges to bridges, ready to blow them in case of need. As spring turned into summer, we had absolutely miraculous weather for this work. I can still feel the wonderful elation of climbing (a bit nervously) up the sides of the girders of the great bridge across Breydon Water, just outside Great Yarmouth, to work on the high span between blue sky and salt water, the (deceptive) sense of power that comes from the routine handling of explosives, fuses and detonators. I can remember the holiday idleness of lazing in small detachments of three or four posted to some remote lock or bridge with a tent and 200 lb of explosives, waiting for the invaders. What would we have done, had they come? We were raw, without military experience or even arms: in addition to our clumsy Lee-Enfield rifles the company had exactly six Lewis guns with which to keep enemy aircraft at bay. We would not have made an impressive first line of defence against the Wehrmacht.
The lads’ reaction to the German invasion of Denmark and Norway was a confident indignation. Gloom, depression and even defeatism had been the mood by the time they invaded the Low Countries, in the middle of the political crisis that finally threw out Neville Chamberlain. ‘What kind of English soldiers are you?’ said the company Irishman, Mick Flanigan, surrounded by barrack-room talk about how much better the German army obviously was than ours, and what things might be like under a German government. Chamberlain’s fall cheered them up again, for he had obviously been a major cause of the general depression. Patently the new Churchill government was welcomed by our company. (I noted at the time how strange it was that the heroes of the British workers were Churchill, Duff Cooper and Eden, ‘aristocrats, not even demagogues’.)
Discouragement grew again in the next few weeks of backbreaking physical work and virtually complete isolation in our camps. Whatever the effect on civilians of Churchill’s famous radio addresses, the one on ‘We shall fight on the beaches’, including presumably those of Norfolk, was given at a time when we could not have heard it. Indeed, at the time I described the mood of the lads as ‘terrible’. We were working all hours of day and night, virtually confined to barracks and workplace (‘our biggest entertainment,’ I wrote, ‘is going to have the weekly shower’), without explanation, recognition or appreciation and, above all, ordered about, anonymous and inferior. Middle-class recruits dreamed of getting to the front where ‘they’d forget about blanco and polishing cap-badges and we’d all be in it together’. Most of my mates simply concluded: ‘This is no life for a human being. If the war finishes, OK. I want to get out of this and back into civvy street.’ Did they mean it? Plainly they did not, as their reaction to the fall of France on 17 June was witness.
I heard the news on a trip to a nearby pub from our post by the small bridge we were guarding on the table-flat road to Great Yarmouth. None of us had any doubt about what it meant. Britain was now alone. Let me transcribe what I wrote a few hours later in my diary:
‘Who was responsible?’ Half an hour after the radio announcement the English are already asking the question. In the pub where I heard the news, in the car that gave me a lift back to the bridge, in the tent with the two mates. Only one answer: it was old Chamberlain. The unanimous view: whoever is guilty must pay for it somehow. It’s something, even if it should turn out to be just a passing impulse …
A car stops at our bridge. I’d guess the driver, specs and false teeth, is a commercial traveller. ‘Have you heard the news on the radio?’ I say, ‘Yes, we have.’ ‘Bad, bad,’ says the man shaking his head. ‘Bloody bad, terrible.’ Then he drives on. We call after him, ‘Thanks, anyroad’ and go back to lying on the bank in the long grass and talking things over, slowly and in dismay.
The other two cannot believe it.
Not only could my mates not grasp what had happened. They could neither take in nor even imagine that this might mean the end of the war or making peace with Hitler. (Actually, reading my own immediate reactions to the fall of France, and in spite of the official Party line since September 1939, neither could I. A victory for Hitler was not what we had had in mind.) They could envisage defeat at the end of a fighting war – nothing was easier in June 1940. It was also clear to anyone near the East Anglian coast that, if Hitler invaded, as everyone expected him to, there was nothing much to stop him. What they could not envisage was not going on with the war, even though it was plain to anyone with a sense of political realities (even one reduced to an occasional sight of the Daily Telegraph on the East Anglian marsh), that Britain’s situation was desperate. This feeling that Britain was not defeated yet, that it was natural to go on with the war, was what Winston Churchill put into words for them, though with a tone of heroic defiance which, pretty certainly, none of my mates felt. He spoke for a British people of ordinary folk, such as those of the 560th Field Company, who (unlike many of the better-informed) simply could not imagine that Britain might give up.
As we now know, in the words of Hitler’s Chief of General Staff, General Halder, ‘the Fuhrer is greatly puzzled by England’s persistent unwillingness to make peace’, since he believed himself to be offering ‘reasonable’ terms. 1 At this point he saw no advantage in invading and occupying Britain which (to quote Halder again) ‘would not be of any benefit to Germany. German blood would be shed to accomplish something that would benefit only Japan, the United States and others.’ In effect, Hitler offered to let Britain keep her empire as what Churchill, writing to Roosevelt, correctly described as ‘a vassal state of the Hitler empire’.2 In the 1990s a school of young Conservative historians argued that Britain should have accepted these terms. If Lord Halifax and the powerful peace party in the 1940 Conservative Party had prevailed it is not impossible – indeed, it is not unlikely – that the bulk of Britons would have gone along with them, as the bulk of Frenchmen went along with Marshal Petain. Yet nobody who now remembers that extraordinary moment in our history could believe that the defeatists had a real chance of prevailing. They were seen not as the peace-bringers but as the ‘guilty men’ who had brought the country to this pass. Confident in this massive popular backing, Churchill and the Labour ministers were able to hold their own.
We knew none of this – neither of the peace party in Churchill’s government (though the left suspected there was one), nor of Hitler’s offers and hesitations. Luckily in August 1940 Hitler began the mass aerial attack on Britain, which became the nightly bombing of London in early September. From being a people that went on with the war because we could not think of anything else to do, we became a people conscious of our own heroism. All of us, even the ones not directly affected, could identify with the men and women who continued with everyday life under the bombs. We would not have put it in Churchill’s bombastic terms ourselves (‘This was their finest hour’), but there was considerable satisfaction in standing up to Hitler alone.
But how were we to go on? There was not the slightest chance of returning to the continent within the foreseeable future, let alone winning the war. Between the Battle of Britain and the time the East Anglian division was sent to its doom, we moved across vast stretches of Britain, from Norfolk to Perthshire, from the Scottish Borders to the Welsh Marches, but during this entire period nothing that the 560th Field Company did appeared to its members to have any bearing on fighting the war against Germany, except the time in 1941 when we found ourselves stationed on Merseyside during the great German raids on Liverpool and consequently mobilized to clear up among the ruins on the mornings after. (A picture of myself in a tin hat being fed tea at a Liverpool street canteen by friendly ladies may well be my first appearance in a newspaper.) On the other hand, there was no way in which Hitler could get Britain out of the war either. Nor could he simply leave things as they were. In fact, as we now know, the failure to defeat Britain in the west decided him to turn east against the Soviet Union and, in doing so, to make the war winnable again for Britain.
At all events, from the summer of 1940 one thing was clear even to Party members as passionate and devoted as myself: in the army nobody would listen to the official Party line against the war. It made increasingly little sense and, from the moment when the Germans swept into the Balkans in the spring of 1941, it was clear to me (and indeed even to most in the Party leadership) that it made no sense at all. We now know that Stalin became the chief victim of its unrealism, stubbornly and systematically refusing to accept the accumulation of detailed and utterly reliable evidence of Hitler’s plan to attack the USSR, even after the Germans had crossed its borders. The probability of Hitler’s attack on Russia had been so great that even the British Party appears to have expected it by early June 1941, worried only about Winston Churchill’s reaction to it.3
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