And Is There Honey Still For Tea? (12 page)

18

Sir James Digby

I went up to Trinity to read modern languages in October 1931, and began to learn to know the city which was to play such a huge role, if not in my life as it actually was, then certainly in how I saw my life in my mind. Cambridge – the people I met and the experiences I had as an undergraduate – took on a deep symbolism which seemed to touch and underlie everything that happened to me after my time there. Like many students, I found that a great deal of my time and energy was expended on people and activities outside my formal studies. But I would like to believe that it was not frittered away, as it was with friends who found religion, or alcohol, or some other diversion, during their first lonely weeks as young boys away from home for the first time. As it happened, the academic work necessary for me to take a good degree required relatively little of my time and effort. Languages always came naturally to me. My main language was German, with French a respectable second. The Cambridge degree course was very much geared to literature rather than the mechanics of language. I had been reading Goethe, Schiller, and Thomas Mann at school, and at Cambridge I simply continued where I had left off.

I find it difficult to describe my relationship with the German language. It embarrasses me because it is a relationship I do not understand, even though I have now lived with it for many years; and when I speak of it I am conscious of falling off an intellectual cliff into deep and unfathomable waters. But I have set out to speak truthfully, and because German has had some importance in my life I must do my best. I remember seeing German at home, as a young child. My father was a man of great intellectual curiosity, who read widely. His study contained books on many subjects, some of them scientific, and some of those in German. I think it was the physical attributes of the language which first made it so fascinating to look at, long before I could read a word of it. It was partly the curious Gothic script in which older German books were printed. It was partly the use of the
Umlaut
– my first experience of written accents, which somehow define the structure of a language so well, and which are so sadly lacking in English. It was partly that interesting character which looks like a giant capital B and is used to represent the double S. It was not long before I got hold of a dictionary and started to learn a few words. But it was when the opportunity came to learn German at school that I discovered something which unnerved me then, at the age of twelve, and still unnerves me today when I think about it. My experience of German was not of learning the language, but of
remembering
it. German is a language which becomes easier as you go along. It is difficult at first – for most people – because its word order and its counter-intuitive use of prepositions are very different from English. If you don't grow up speaking the language you have to learn these things. But I already knew about the word order and the prepositions before my teacher taught them, and when I wrote or translated into German I got the grammar right from the very beginning. It was always that way for me. My German is intuitive and ingrained. I can pick it up again to have a conversation or read a newspaper after years of ignoring it, and German phrases often pass through my mind. Some people I try to explain this to say that it is simply a result of being good at languages; or perhaps I read ahead of the lesson in my grammar book. As an explanation of my relationship with German this does not satisfy me. My French is quite good. But I had to
learn
French, and now, when I return to France, it takes two or three days before I hear it properly and return to some degree of fluency.

Once I had settled into my room in the Great Court at Trinity and found my way to Heffers, where I would buy my books, and the modern language block, where I would attend my lectures, I took advantage of some gloriously warm early autumn weather to walk around the city; exploring the other colleges and the backs of the river; feeling the depth of history in the ancient buildings. I drank in the heady atmosphere of the early Michaelmas Term; the incessant frenetic activity of a new academic year; the new, smartly-painted bicycles whizzing past me on the streets with a cheerful ring of the bell; the sense of excitement and promise hanging almost tangibly in the clear autumnal air; the new faces in new undergraduate gowns, standing in groups outside their colleges, talking about themselves far too loudly, to prove to anyone passing by that they had arrived, that they, too, were now of the University, and stood on the brink of dazzling academic careers.

I had been to Cambridge before, of course. I had visited Roger once or twice a year while he was up at Trinity. So I was not seeing the city for the first time. But you see Cambridge in one way when you are a visitor, and in another way when you become a part of it yourself. I was seeing it in this new way for the first time. I was seeing Cambridge, as I would always remember it best: a place where everything was possible; a place where everything that was best about England was deeply rooted and flourished; and a place as yet, for a short time, unaware that its tranquility was soon to be questioned so rudely and so deeply.

During Freshers' Week at the start of term, the various University Clubs and Societies – the ones that were open to general membership without special invitation – set out their stalls in different colleges and trawled for members. The Union, the political societies, the Christian Union, and a host of sporting societies, from rowing and rugby to cricket and golf, were much in evidence. But I had already decided how my time should be spent when I was not immersed in German literature. Actually, it was more or less decided for me. I had by now acquired a national reputation as a junior chess player. I had won the British boys' championship twice just before leaving school and, by dint of winning my county championship, qualified once for the senior British championship; though I had an unaccustomed attack of nerves in my first appearance in that lofty arena, played too aggressively, and did not fare as well as I had hoped. Nonetheless, I had made a good start as a chess player, and I had crossed swords with the likes of Hugh Alexander, who represented the cream of British chess at that time. As it happened, I saw Hugh briefly at the chess club stall in St Catharine's when I went to sign up. As the child of an Anglo-Irish union, Hugh is a man of enormous charm with a perennial twinkle in his eyes. He is also a brilliant mathematician and had just graduated from King's as I came up to Trinity. He had known Roger socially, and they had obviously got on well. He was staying on to do research for another year. We chatted for a few moments as I signed up to play chess for the University.

* * *

I had not intended to join any other clubs, but the recent political events changed that. I have mentioned that, as a northern family, we had seen the ravages of the previous several years at first hand. The country had never fully recovered from the Great War. We owed a war debt to America of almost a billion pounds, which was already overdue; our foreign investment had been wiped out; our coal and cotton export markets had disappeared; our international trade was atrophying; the sympathetic markets of the great Dominions were less inviting as their governments took more and more control of their home affairs. It seemed to matter little what party was in power. Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald seemed equally inadequate to the task, and perhaps in truth it was a task too demanding for any politician. The North was the heartland of the industrial economy, and it was all but in ruins. Looking back, I think that, but for the Second War, it might never have recovered. All the families we were close to on the estate and in the surrounding county had suffered from the worsening economic conditions. The Government seemed oblivious to the effects of poverty and hunger, and seemed to be governing in the interests of the capitalists. As a family, we felt embarrassed and distressed. We were landowners and employers. People thought of us as naturally allied to the Conservative capitalist machine. But my father had no sympathy with the Government's policies; with its obstinate refusal to see that the economy could never recover until the people who created the wealth by means of their labour were lifted out of their misery, and had some reason to feel positively towards their country. My father's views were well known locally and we never felt threatened, even during times of unrest. While the people of the North were rightly angry, they were never unjust. They knew where the blame lay. But my parents felt these things deeply, and their feelings naturally rubbed off on Roger and on me.

There were periods of hope. For ten days in May 1926, the General Strike offered the Government the opportunity to acknowledge the suffering caused by its policy of cutting wages and devaluing the pound, in the hope of jolting the export trade back to life. But Baldwin's administration chose to ignore the opportunity, and chose instead to grind the miners into submission by force, inflicting a disastrous defeat on the Trade Union movement. By 1928, all women over the age of 21 were eligible to vote, which gave the Labour Party a renewed impetus, and the Party returned to power in 1929. But in the same year came the Great Wall Street crash, and here, the Great Depression. As I was preparing to go up to Trinity, our international trade had declined by 50 per cent; our industrial input by over 30 per cent. Unemployment was fast approaching three million, and there were areas in the North where it reached 70 per cent. A general election was to be held on the 27th October 1931, just three weeks or so after I arrived in Cambridge. It was a disaster.

Since 1929, Ramsay MacDonald had presided over a Labour Party split by his conviction that it was necessary to curb wages and public spending – seen by most Labour voters as the natural policy of Baldwin's Conservative Party and the source of their troubles. Paralysed by the rift, the Government became increasingly dysfunctional. MacDonald broke away and purported to found a ‘National Labour' party, which operated in coalition with the Conservative and Liberal Parties as a Government of National Unity, an uneasy alliance claimed to be necessary to restoring the economy in the interests of national survival. But he was regarded within his own party as a traitor. As one of the founding fathers of the Labour Party, he had betrayed his followers. Only two of his Labour ministerial colleagues agreed to participate in the coalition government. MacDonald himself was expelled from the Labour Party but, at the election, the National Government was returned to power with a huge majority, winning 470 seats in the House of Commons. The Labour Party, of which Arthur Henderson had hurriedly assumed command, was in total disarray and was all but wiped out. It lost 80 per cent of its seats and seemed spent as a force in government. The Liberal Party, similarly, had been overwhelmed by the Conservatives.

A day or two after joining the chess club I joined the Cambridge University Socialist Society which, even then, was considerably to the left of the Labour Party. Some of its members were openly Marxist. I did not mind that. Something needed to be done. Apart from the election, there were already whispered fears about certain political trends in Europe, about the eventual rise of what the Society's activists were calling Fascism. At the first meeting I attended I had my first long conversation with another linguist in my year, from Trinity Hall. We had nodded and said ‘hello' in hall and in lectures from time to time, but had not really spoken until our first CUSS meeting. I liked him immediately. We went for a couple of pints after the meeting, and found we had much in common. Like me, he came from a well-to-do family and had a father who was no stranger to the corridors of power. Indeed, his father had been Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons and leader of the Independent Liberals after the 1918 election. But he seemed unaffected by his family background, except perhaps for a natural self-deprecation and some lack of self-confidence. He was modest and unassuming and had a friendly face. Like me, he felt for the victims of the economic crisis and believed that changes must be made. His name was Donald Maclean.

19

Within a short time I settled into a routine, one which will always represent the quintessential Cambridge day I remember. Getting up early, rushing through the communal baths and back to one's room to get dressed – sports jacket and slacks, shirt and tie; off to breakfast in hall; back to the room, grab the gown, books and notebooks, and off to lectures. Lectures were public events attended by large audiences, and provided little opportunity to ask questions or explore the subject in detail. But in the afternoons, after lunch in hall, there would be less formal supervisions in college, at which we would meet with a Fellow in small groups of three or four. I loved supervisions because you could challenge what the Fellow said, put forward your own ideas, have an exchange of views. Looking back now, I am sure the Fellows must have been constantly amused, if not irritated, by our pretentiousness and unjustified self-importance; our intellectual musings as yet unaffected by any emotional depth, any real contact with life.

After supervisions, there was tea, and then study, until it was time for a drink in the Junior Common Room. The day ended with dinner in hall wearing jackets, ties and gowns, followed by a walk or a pint or two in a nearby hostelry. Sometimes, the pint or two had an exciting ending. The beer sometimes gave rise to a certain lack of discipline in the wearing of gowns, as all undergraduates were obliged to do after dark when out of college. The Proctor, whose job it was to enforce the University's many arcane regulations, employed ‘Bulldogs', disconcertingly fit young men dressed in the style of college porters, with formal dark jackets, striped trousers and bowler hats, who had been known to outrun members of the University's athletics team. If caught gownless before you reached the safety of college, you were liable to a fine of three shillings and fourpence. I confess that I had to pay up a number of times during my time at Trinity.

At weekends we were expected to do a certain amount of work, but there was no shortage of ways to enjoy one's leisure time. On Saturday afternoons in the Michaelmas Term, which grew progressively colder as the term progressed, some of us would make our way to Grange Road to watch the University rugby team play matches in the build-up to the Varsity Match at Twickenham in December. I had not quite lost my interest in the strategic aspects of rugby, though I had no intention of playing again, and Roger and I were regulars at Twickenham for the big game throughout his time at Cambridge and mine. There were long walks out to Grantchester, and at least one excursion by train to Ely to marvel at its glorious cathedral. Whenever Roger was in London, and had time to spare, I would go in by train to meet him for an early dinner, rushing back hoping to return to college, if possible, before the porters closed the college gates for the night and it became necessary to find some less orthodox way of gaining access to one's room.

In many ways, the informal talks with friends, either in the pubs, or in one's room – often late into the night – were as much a part of one's education as lectures or supervisions. Making friends from different backgrounds exposed me to many aspects of life I would never have dreamed of otherwise, and I heard views expressed which would never even have occurred to me. I spent a number of such late nights with Donald. Although in some ways a shy young man who did not speak a great deal in supervisions, he had vast depths of understanding and feeling, particularly when the conversation turned to socialism, as it usually did before too long. It was Donald who persuaded me to embark with him on the lengthy and laborious task of reading
Das Kapital
in the original. We justified this to our supervisor, Dr Munday, as an exercise in tackling a difficult technical work in German. Dr Munday was far too conservative to approve of Marx, and in any case scorned his German as prosaic and devoid of interest. But Marx's use of the language was not our main concern. We read it with fascination. Donald was completely captivated. There was much in it that I very much wanted to believe in. There was a vacuum somewhere inside me; I had been conscious of it ever since the day when, at a very young age, I had decided – with some regret, because I genuinely liked the man – that the Rev Mr Norman Jarrett had failed to persuade me that the Church of England held the keys to the secrets of life. The inevitable march of history, the inevitable victory of the proletariat in the inevitable class struggle, held a strong attraction for me. They struck a chord because of what I had seen, and what my father had taught me, earlier in my life. On account of this inspiring prediction of the ultimate triumph of social justice, I could forgive Marx many things, including his obvious naïveté, his flawed economics, and even his prosaic German. Like the Bible, I concluded, it did no good to examine
Das Kapital
in great depth. You found too many absurdities, too many inconsistencies. What mattered was what it stood for. It was a symbol rather than a book. And a symbol was something I needed in my life.