Walking in the Shade (17 page)

I shall repeat an essential,
the
essential fact. There are books that can be only for a minority, and no amount of puffing and promotion will change that, but these are the best, and—secretly, quietly and unobtrusively—the most influential, setting a tone and standard for the time.

 

I was now on the invitation list of the Soviet Embassy. On occasions like the Anniversary of the Revolution, Red Army Day, and so forth, there were enormous receptions. I went to about five or six of them. I did not enjoy them. Why did I go, then? A revolutionary duty can be a continuation of the duty parents and grandparents owed to the church. Now I can hear my father's ‘Oh
Lord
, do I have to go?' when my mother wanted to go to the church service at Banket. A comrade: ‘Are you going to the Soviet Embassy, Doris?'

‘I suppose so.'

Inside an ornate room—amazing how the representatives of the insulted and injured have to be housed in glitter and glamour—were waiting for us an inordinate number of Soviet officials. They were nearly all spies, but we did not know that then. There were also Party members and fellow travellers. These included some remarkable people. One was D. J. Bernal, the scientist, who had made original contributions to crystallography and had inspired a generation of students, communist or not, who revered him forever as a teacher. As early as the late 1930s, he was exhorting British communists to comprehend that there was a gap between the arts and the sciences and how damaging it was. This was one of the major themes of communist discussion. There were many debates, lectures, and study groups. I think I even gave a talk myself to the group in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. This idea was later taken up by C. P. Snow, who made it his own. The process is of much wider interest. Again and again, ideas that have been confined to a minority, particularly if it is an attacked and beleaguered one, take wing and permeate a whole culture. Within ten years, phrases born in communism had become part of general currency: concrete steps—we must take concrete steps—intrinsic contradictions, demos, fascists, all the rest of the dreary jargon, could be found in editorials in the
Times
.

J. B. S. Haldane, Naomi Mitchison's brother, wrote pieces for the
Daily Worker
explaining new discoveries in science. It was he who thrilled us all with ‘The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.' I knew people who bought the paper for these articles and read not a word of the rest. Later he went to India, where he educated a generation of Indian scientists. People like these were originals and, like all their kind, shared the characteristic that when they talked about the Soviet Union, every word was rubbish. A question: Do some people need to be identified with a hated minority position in order to flower in other ways? There were colourful characters like the Red Dean, Hewlitt Johnson, who had written a meretricious book called
The Socialist Sixth of the World
and was one of the brightest feathers in the Party's cap, since he was at the heart of the religious Establishment.

No one could say the guests were a boring lot, but I found the atmosphere oppressive. I hated the smugness that went with being in this position—we, the clever minority, supporting the defamed and unjustly attacked defender of the world's working class. But then something happened that put me off going again. A couple of men in military uniform came and said I was to be introduced to a very important visitor from Moscow. They took me, one on each side, to stand in front of a general—I've forgotten his name. Around him were aides I thought of as military staff, but of course they were KGB. He was a squarish, solid man, with eyes like ice, and he was talking entirely in communist jargon: ‘The working class…fascist imperialists…peace fronts…exploited masses…advancing the cause of communism.' I wasn't really listening. What was wrong with me? Was I going to faint? I was cold, and my palms sweated. There was the queerest sensation at the back of my neck—the short hairs there were standing up. I was scared. I was terrified. He was frightening me to death. This has never happened to me since. I think this was where I came closest—touch close—to the murderous horrors of the Soviet Union. I did not discuss the incident with anyone. It was too ‘subjective', as the comrades said about anything not at once explainable. Unfortunately, some of the most important encounters in one's life, changing you, can seem so minor they are hardly worth mentioning. I did not go to one of these big receptions at the Soviet Embassy again.

I went once with Jack to the Czech Embassy and was as bored as I usually am at such affairs. An unlikeable young man stuck to us, kept bringing us drinks, and, when we said we were leaving and would find a taxi, insisted on driving us both back to Church Street. Uninvited, he nevertheless insisted on coming upstairs with us. There, he boasted about rich and powerful friends, invited us to all kinds of parties, tried to wring promises from us to see him again. When he left we joked that no one in his right mind, rich and powerful or not, would voluntarily spend half an hour with this pathetic little name-dropper. His name was Stephen Ward. Later it turned out that he was not only some kind of pimp for the rich and powerful but also involved in espionage. He was Christine Keeler's friend or lover. When he got into bad trouble, the people who had been making use of him dropped him, and he committed suicide. Similarly, you would meet people who had met the fascinating Christine Keeler at dinner parties—‘She's such good value…. She's so witty….She's so clever.' But these admirers did not come to her aid when she needed it.

What else did I do that I would not have done, had I not been a communist? I went to sell the
Daily Worker
and canvass for some council election in a big block of flats. It was daytime. It was women who opened the doors. ‘I leave this kind of thing to my husband.' They invited me in, because they were lonely. Women and children, shut into dingy, meagre, poor rooms—this was well before the explosion of affluence described as ‘You've never had it so good.' At once I was in an only too familiar situation. What they wanted was advice about hire purchases,
*
about child allowances. They did not know what was due them, or how to obtain it. Whereas in Rhodesia, leaving such scenes, I had only to telephone someone: ‘The woman in number 23, she needs…,' now I scarcely knew the rules myself or whom to telephone. I told the Party that these people were not interested in communism; they needed a social worker. I did this only once. Anything to do with the Party was grim, was depressing, and not only because of my being in my usual false position.

I went to Hull University, to lecture on Southern Rhodesia. There were about fifty Nigerian students. Now, that was an experience which taught me a thing or two. They literally could not understand me: that is, take in the fact that a tiny white minority—about 150,000 people—kept in subjugation a million and a half blacks. ‘But why don't they tell them to leave?' ‘Why do they let the white people tell them what to do?' ‘Tell me, please—I do not understand what you are telling us.' I said that Southern Rhodesia had been physically conquered, by force of arms. ‘But we would not allow ourselves to be turned into—what did you call it?—hewers of wood and drawers of water.' I have never had a more uncomprehending audience.

I was asked to speak to the IRA about conditions in Rhodesia—their invitation. About fifteen people, all young men. I learned it was usual for IRA members to be arrested without a warrant, imprisoned without trial, and kept there without being sentenced and without hope of release, except at the whim of the British. The war between the IRA and the British had far older roots than most people think now.

I was asked to put the Party Line on literature to a meeting organised by the Kensington communists. I didn't agree with the Party Line, I never had. But I went—as always—partly out of curiosity. The proposition demanded that Graham Greene must be dismissed as a reactionary. I admired Graham Greene. I was, however, well able to expound the Party Line on literature. Why did I do it? It was, I think, the only time in my life I did this. I began stammering. I have never stammered. I could hardly finish my speech. I did not have to be told by Mrs. Sussman that I had stammered because I did not believe what I was saying. ‘Don't you think', said she, ‘it is time you learned to say no?'

All these activities went on to the accompaniment of commentaries by Mrs. Sussman, by Jack, and, as well, by my mother, who was frantic, sorrowful, bitter, reproachful, and kept saying I should think of the future of my son. When was Jack going to marry me? Why did I run around with communists? Who was this Mrs. Sussman? Why was I prepared to listen to a foreigner and a stranger, and not to her?

Meanwhile there was an undercurrent in the Party—at least in the circles I was in—of talk about the news coming in from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. That is, not the news in the newspapers, which we automatically discounted as lies, but word-of-mouth news. This talk went on in bewildered, frightened voices: the arrests, the disappearances, the prisons, the camps, all summed up by ‘a pity the Revolution didn't take place in a developed country; then none of this would have happened.' The Party—officially—denied that anything was happening, even when Party members went in to see them in ones and twos, or in delegations from branches. ‘Capitalist lies.' Unofficially…that was a different matter. There was a phrase current then: ‘knowing the score'. A bitter acknowledgement. Still not the whole truth; far from it.

The phrase
knowing the score
admitted you into an élite of political sophistication.

A great deal has been said about the financial corruption in high-level Communist circles in Britain but I think money was the least of it. They prided themselves, the top brass—and all the Party members would boast—that these officials' pay was never more than the average working man's wage. Did they take handouts from the Soviet Union that there was no record of? No one could say they lived luxuriously. Trips to the Soviet Union and other communist countries there certainly were, but these wouldn't be thought of as perks, I am sure, more as visits to their alma mater. No, it's power—that's the drug, that's the lure. Having inside information, having the ear of the powerful, knowing the score. It is my belief that a lot of people stayed communists, long past the time when they should have left, because of belonging to this élite privileged to know the score. The need to belong to an élite is surely one of the most basic needs of all. Aristocracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Garrick Club, secret societies—it is all the same.

About then I met my aunt Margaret, my mother's brother's widow, and her sister. This was my mother's world, another élite, the upper middle class, the one she admired and wanted me to be part of. Yet she had never liked her sister-in-law. It wasn't that I disliked them, these two conventionally dressed ladies, with their careful hats, their gloves, their fox stoles. It was a world I had nothing to do with. Even to come near it was like being threatened with prison. I felt I had turned my back on it years before, yet now my mother was urging me to take my place in it, among ‘nice people'.

I did try and meet my father's brother Harry. It was he who had left his wife, Dolly, after thirty years or so of marriage, saying he had stuck out an empty marriage for the sake of their child and had found at last the love of his life. She was, said the family, ‘a red-haired hussy'. If you are red-haired, among ‘nice people', the epithet is always imminent. She was—they said—a barmaid. She wasn't, but a red-haired hussy of a barmaid was too good to resist. My father, who had never liked his brother, found at last something to admire and pleaded for him, but it was no good. I wrote to my uncle Harry, said I was not like the rest of the family, could we meet? He did not reply. I tried again—no. His daughter, Joan, came to see me and spent an hour reviling her father. I did ask if he didn't deserve some credit for sticking out decades of a bad marriage for her sake. I did not want to see her again.

In fact, I did not see many people, and those I did were mostly for the sake of the child. This is true of most mothers with small children.

For instance, the Bulgarian Embassy held a weekly folk-dancing evening. I took Peter. Many parents who were not communists went because of their children.

In a garden on the canal known as Little Venice, now very smart, then dingy and run down, there were held ceilidhs, where Ewan MacColl sang, and there was the usual extraordinary mix of people to be found in Communist Party cultural circles. The house belonged to Honor Tracy, an upper-class young woman whose education had destined her for a very different life, and her husband, Alex McCrindle, who was Jock in
Dick Barton, Special Agent
, a radio series of immense popularity. There were people from the worlds of radio, music, and nascent television, and, of course, women with children. Most of them were communists, but none of them were communists ten years later, except for Alex. And Ewan MacColl, the communist troubadour and bard.

I found these occasions pretty dispiriting, all these people doing Scottish folk dances, often in a cold drizzle.

At Guy Fawkes, and on any occasion that gave an excuse for them, there were bonfires on the bomb sites, and the parents with their children came from all the streets around. I contrasted these occasions, with their air of amiable amateurishness, with the great Walpurgis Night bonfires I had seen on the bomb sites in Hamburg.

My initiations into the hardihood of the British in the realms of cold were many. Basil Davidson
*
invited Peter and me to his cottage in Essex. There was Marion, his wife, and his three children, and the cottage had one electric heater in it, with a single bar, and most often it was not on. Their attitude was that it was summer, and therefore one didn't need extra heat. Mine was that it was freezing. We all wore carapaces of jerseys, and I, for one, wore a blanket. Then they said, We need some fresh air, and we got into the car, drove to a hillside where the wind swept in melancholy blasts. We must find a sheltered spot, they cried. This was done, a mild hollow, where the wind blew no less, carrying sharp stinging raindrops. There we huddled, eating sandwiches and drinking tea out of flasks. ‘Mad,' I was saying to myself. ‘These people are mad.' But now I don't think so, and find cold rain no reason to stop me walking, and am just as mad myself.