Walking in the Shade (18 page)

The Party often organised marches on weekends to protest about this or that—Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, usually. Peter adored them. Most children did. They were like picnics, family occasions, people ringing each other up to meet, or go to a pub before or after, or discuss CP business en route. I was privately thinking they were a continuation of church picnics. These marches, or ‘demos', whether large or small, were affirmations of togetherness, we are in the right against the whole world. And in those Cold War days people could shout abuse, even throw things at us, confirming our willing martyrdom. Every time the organisers would claim that there were so many hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands, the newspapers would say there had been half that, or even less. The truth lay somewhere between. There was an occasion when we were protesting against reductions in funding for education, the ‘Butler Cuts', and the children marched along gaily, singing, ‘Down with the Buttercups'. The fact that it is so pleasurable to march, demonstrate, protest, even—for some people—riot and fight with the police, is seldom acknowledged. For many people, these ‘demos' were their social life.

In fact, occasions for my revolutionary duty were few. Partly, they were limited to what I could do, with a small child; partly, the Party wasn't going to ask too much of me: ‘intellectuals' were leaving the Party all the time.

Once, I went to lobby at the House of Commons and waited with a couple of miners who had come especially from the Welsh pits to lobby their member of Parliament, an old mate, who had been a miner with them. They sent their card in, and we waited. And waited. A long time; a couple of hours. We became friends. I told them about my experience in the mining town near Doncaster, but they said their conditions were much worse. At last we three stood in the great ornate hall, with its flunkeys, its statues, its grandeur. The Welshman who came to see his old friends, now his constituents, who had voted him there, was affable and a mite embarrassed. He asked after wives and parents. He said he might be coming back home in a month or so. He could spare only a minute now; he had to be in the House. Yes, he agreed that the government policy was…And off he went. The flunkey indicated that we must leave. We stood for a moment, looking around. Then one of the miners said, not bitterly, not angrily, but with the deadly what-can-you-expect, ‘Now that I've seen it, I understand what happens to them when they come up here. Not many could stand up to this'—indicating the marble halls. And then, another: ‘I won't waste my time and money coming again.'

This was the period when the Soviet Union sent circuses, concerts, dancers, to London. The Russian clowns were wonderful; we had—or have—nothing like them. About the treatment of the animals, that is another matter. The concerts, the choirs, the dance troupes, were all distinguished by a certain coy whimsicality, a sentimentality. Monstrous cruelties produce these qualities in the arts. Sentimentality and cruelty are siblings: cruelty often wears a simpering smile. Jonathan Clowes says he was on a bus and saw a discarded magazine with what he thought he recognised as Soviet art. On closer examination, these heroic figures turned out to be in a feature on Nazi art. On another day he was reading the
Daily Worker
, and the painter David Bomberg, who also used the number 36 bus, told him how barbaric the Soviet system was and said he should read Arthur Koestler, particularly
Darkness at Noon
. Jonathan did, but it was the similarity between Soviet and Nazi art that clinched it for him.

A Soviet cute or heroic maiden was indistinguishable from a Nazi maiden. The empty eroticism of a naked youth striving towards the future could be Communist or Nazi. Ditto the banal cheerfulness of heroic soldiers who could not wait to die for their fatherland/motherland. Ditto the fruitful mothers with overflowing breasts. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany went in for military parades with columns of healthy, bouncy-breasted
mädchens
and
devushkas
, all secretly yearning for the touch of Hitler and Stalin. Probably the most horrible thing I have seen on stage was a woman in a Soviet variety show, about forty, stout, ugly, in a short tight dress, being a small girl, coy, arch, sly, writhing with flirtatiousness, lisping baby language. This was what she was, this was no act, and it was because of the power of this unnatural thing, a middle-aged woman being a winsome child, that she was able to earn her living on the stage.

To offset all this communist propaganda, my mother took Peter to the changing of the Guard, to Royal Tournaments, the Tower of London, the Boat Race, museums in South Kensington, and similar wholesome fare.

There were wonderful children's concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Saturday mornings, organised by Sir Robert Mayer. Peter and I went most Saturdays, and Joan sometimes came too. More than once, Benjamin Britten's
Let's Make an Opera
, for children, was put on. Packed audiences of—of course—middle-class children. Well, better some than none. What could children from poor streets or—soon—the council housing estates have made of these tales that have as their matrix the Victorian nursery, nanny, servants, mummy and daddy?

What Peter enjoyed most of all was Naomi Mitchison's place in Scotland, where we went three or four times. This large house on the Mull of Kintyre had been bought by Naomi during the war, as a refuge for the family. At Easter and at Christmas, and in the summers, it was full of people. Naomi's sons were doctors and scientists, and their wives were all remarkable in their own right. They all invited friends. The famous divide in the culture between science and the arts did not exist here, because Naomi's friends, writers and journalists from London and from Edinburgh, came, and politicians too, since Dick Mitchison was one. Naomi had begun her association with Botswana, where she soon became adopted as a Mother of a tribe, and so there were Africans. The local fishermen—Naomi owned a fishing boat—and town councillors mingled with guests from London. Naomi has not been given her due as a hostess, for surely this was an unusual achievement, mixing and matching so many different kinds of people. Above all, there were children of all ages, since this was a fecund clan. These days I meet people in their forties, their fifties, who say that the holidays in Carradale House were magical, the best times in their childhoods. How could this not be so? The enormous house, full of rooms and nooks and corners and turrets; the soft, mild airs of West Scotland, which might suddenly begin to rage and roar, buffeting and whining through all those chimneys; the miles of heather and fields, where they could run and play unsupervised and safe; the beaches and the waves of the Mull of Kintyre, just down a short road. There could be thirty or forty people tucked into the house somewhere, or into annexes. The atmosphere was boisterous, noisy, not only because of the children. In the evenings, astonished foreigners might find all these eminent people playing ‘Murder' or ‘Postman's Knock', like children. The next minute there was chess, or a noisy game of Scrabble. Voices were often loud, and sharp. The daughters were jealous of Naomi, their exuberant and uninhibited and clever mother, and were bitchy. I would think, Well, if you don't get on with your mother, why don't you leave, as I did, instead of making use of all the amenities and then giving her such a hard time? But I was seeing the beginning of a new era, when children criticise, bitch—but stay.

‘Am I really as awful as they say I am? Tell me—no, tell me what you think.'

‘Of course you aren't, Naomi.'

‘If I'm only half as bad as they say I am, then I must be the biggest monster in the world.'

‘Oh, take no notice. It's just mother-and-daughter stuff—you know, happy families.'

‘Sons are best,' she would say. But I think she longed for a nice amenable friendly daughter. She treated me like one. She was kind, generous, curious about my doings, hungry for female gossip—which was not my style—and full of good advice, which I listened to with the kind of patience I should have achieved with my mother. Yes, I was indeed aware of the ironies of the situation.

She relied for support on her sons. But this was a clan, and when it was threatened from outside, they closed ranks. Once, the daughter of an eminent American scientist, who had fallen in love with a Mitchison son, was mournfully and tearfully present: the clan had decided against her. I had not seen such cruel, cold exclusion since I had left school. This all went on unconsciously, I think, like a cuttlefish expelling clouds of ink. The thing was, I had never known a clan before. All these people as individuals were charming. But I was giving thanks that I had not been part of a large family.

An incident: Naomi asked me to take a certain inarticulate young scientist for a walk. ‘And for goodness' sake, get him to say
something
—his tongue will atrophy.' His name was James Watson. For about three hours we walked about over the hills and through the heather, while I chatted away, my mother's daughter: one should know how to put people at their ease. At the end of it, exhausted, wanting only to escape, I at last heard human speech. ‘The trouble is, you see, that there is only one other person in the world I can talk to.' I reported this to Naomi, and we agreed that it was as dandified a remark as we could remember, even from a very young man. Quite soon he and Francis Crick would lay bare the structure of DNA.

An incident: Staying for a night or two is Freddie Ayer, the philosopher. He is with his American mistress, soon to be his wife. She comes down to breakfast wearing a scarlet flannel nightgown trimmed with white broderie anglaise lace. Her style and dash overwhelm the dowdy scene—the rest of us being snuggled into layers of wool. The United States, in those days, was continually and in a thousand ways inspiring envy and emulation.

If the talk one overheard about science, or took part in about politics, was irresistible, the same could not be said about literature.

‘Oh,
silly
old Dostoyevsky,' you'd hear. ‘Boring old Tolstoy.' There was only one poet, Auden. Yeats? Oh, poor old Yeats. Eliot? Poor old Eliot. Hopkins? Who's he? I thought this was just another little sample of the British philistinism I was encountering so often, but later I understood that here I was tapping some buried layer of past literary culture, a deposit. Sometime in the twenties or the thirties, in some corner of the literary world, or briefly in all of it, a wave of opinions worked their way across, and they were all saying, Auden is the only poet, poor old Eliot, poor old Yeats.

Philistinism is endemic in Britain, and most particularly in London. As I write, the favourite pastime at the dinner tables is to recite—with pride—the list of great books you haven't read and have no intention of reading. A major newspaper, the
Independent
, has a weekly feature, ‘All You Need to Know About the Books You Meant to Read,' where the plot of, let's say,
War and Peace
is briefly given. (What, can't you take a joke?) It is all too easy to imagine the triumphant smile of the man writing these little résumés, reducing some masterpiece to the level of an answer in a school examination.

Sometime in the seventies I wrote a humorous piece for the
Spectator
where I used quotes from Meredith
(The Ordeal of Richard Feverel)
and—I think—D. H. Lawrence to show how certain of their purple passages could have come out of any popular romance. This was taken as denigration, and at once in came the letters rubbishing the great. Goethe? How German! Cervantes? What a bore—a favourite epithet. Stendhal? Oh, what tedium! The slightest excuse, and in they rush, these dogs who cannot wait to tear the body of literature to pieces.

Rebecca West, a clever and cultivated woman, said that all of Goethe's philosophy amounted to ‘Ain't Nature grand'. And there it is, the authentic grunt from the swamp.

What the British—no, the English—like best are small, circumscribed novels, preferably about the nuances of class or social behaviour.

I said to Naomi that she and her family had an instinctive preference for the second-rate—meaning in literature. It is amazing what rudeness colonials and lesser breeds without the law can get away with: we don't know any better. There was a sad day when I realised that I could no longer get away with it: I and my tongue had to learn to prefer silence.

Why did I go to Carradale when I didn't much enjoy it? Because of the child, of course.

It was the Mitchisons all together as a clan that I disliked, but met separately, that was a different thing. I used to meet Naomi for lunch at her club in Cavendish Square. What I enjoyed about her was the vitality, the exuberance, of her enjoyment of life, and her lack of hypocrisy as she told me the latest instalment in her love life. Naomi had been sent by her father, the great scientist John Scott Haldane, to the Dragon School in Oxford. It was a boys' school, and she was the only girl. I think this probably set the course for her love life. Aged sixteen, when, as she said, ‘I was still at school with my hair down my back,' they affianced her to Dick Mitchison, a handsome young soldier. She hardly knew him. Their marriage, I thought, was the essence of good sense and civilised behaviour. She had her love adventures, and he at least one longlasting love. These two were the best of friends. A good many people watched this marriage, admiring it, and young people particularly saw it as good. I remember a conversation at Carradale between two girls, both resisting marriage. ‘But there has always been this kind of marriage; nothing new about it.'

‘Yes, but it is all in the open. No hypocrisy, no lies.' For, being so young, hypocrisy and lies were the worst of the bad things they saw when surveying the adult world.

Of the people I went with to the Soviet Union, Naomi was the one I saw most and for longest—over years. I met A. E. Coppard and his wife several times. He was less and less at home in a world increasingly commercial and rushed. He was a countryman, a man for villages, fields, woods, long rambles. A vanished world…I did not see Douglas Young again but heard of him through Naomi. Sometimes I had lunch with Arnold Kettle, but he was never able to sever himself from the Party. Richard Mason I did see. He lived with his wife, Felicity, just down the road in Chelsea. Felicity was a truly beautiful woman, as befits a Muse, for she saw her role as the inspirer of genius. Before Richard there had been one or two, but as soon as she saw him, she knew what would be her destiny, and his, and informed him accordingly. She decided that a little house in Chelsea and a quiet life were what he needed to create. Every morning she made him go upstairs, while she kept from him the telephone, the results of the doorbell, visitors, or any manifestations of ordinary life. This is of course what many writers dream of, not least myself, when much beset by care, but for Richard it certainly was not the recipe. I was present at a painful and very funny evening with several guests, all of whom had been following this drama to its inevitable end with sympathetic curiosity, when Richard told Felicity what it was he needed, and she told him what she was determined he should have. ‘What I want is to go to some exotic place, and there I will fall in love with a coloured girl. She must be poor or ill or something like that. Then I will write my next book.'