Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  Even the victors in the July election were so surprised by the sheer scale of their triumph that there was a kind of hush before the celebration. Trade union delegates, gathered in drafty northern hotels, watched in silence as figures displayed on giant screens went up and up. The final results: 393 seats to Labour, 213 to the Conservatives. A report in the Manchester Guardian: “The thunder on the Left changed to lightning as the election results flashed out Labour’s victory. The only slow-motion today was in the rather stunned way people at first took it all . . . Through it all Mr. Attlee remained calm and discreet. He looked a little tired.”2

  A genuinely radical program came with an outward show of modesty. The most famous note of triumphalism only came a year later, when Hartley Shawcross, one of the chief prosecutors at Nuremberg and a far more glamorous figure than his party leader, told Parliament: “We are the masters at the moment and shall be for some considerable time.”3 That this instance of crowing was held against him for the rest of his life shows how careful the new guard was about not looking too proud.

  After the election, the Guardian carried a comment from the United States: “Queer that England should go Socialist when America is getting rid of the New Dealers and going right back to the Centre.”4

  There were other interesting reactions from abroad. In Palestine, Jews rejoiced because Labour was thought to be more pro-Zionist than the Tories. The Greek royalists were shaken, but the embattled left was jubilant, hoping in vain for a change in its own fortunes. The Soviet news announced the Labour victory without comment. General Franco’s fascist government in Spain expected a break in diplomatic relations. And in India, the ex-premier of Bengal, a Muslim grandee named Sir Khwaja Nazimuddin, observed: “It appears the British electorate has thrown overboard the one person who saved them from annihilation, and this has taken place even before the war is over.”5

  Perhaps it is true what a French politician said at the time, that ingratitude is the characteristic of a strong people. Actually, Churchill was still revered. The impossible ideal for many voters might have been a Labour government with Churchill as prime minister. But as the political correspondent of the Guardian said: “The country has preferred to do without Mr Churchill rather than to have him at the price of having the Tories too.” The Tory party “is not merely condemned for its past: it is rejected because it has no message for the times. Great Britain, like the Continent, is clearly straining after a new order.”

  Churchill himself was a little dazed by it all, but took his defeat in relatively good humor. His wife, Clementine, perhaps hoping to see more of her husband at home, had told him it may well turn out to be a blessing in disguise. To which Churchill responded: “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.” He had wanted the national coalition government of the war years to continue, at least until the defeat of Japan. In fact, since he was never very keen on party politics (he changed parties twice), he probably felt more comfortable presiding over a national government than one consisting of a single party. But, according to Harold Nicolson, the diarist and diplomat who lost his seat in the election, Churchill didn’t complain. He showed a “calm, stoical resignation—coupled with a shaft of amusement that fate could play so dramatic a trick, and a faint admiration for the electorate’s show of independence.”6

  Some of Churchill’s colleagues in the Conservative Party were more understanding of their opponents than my grandmother was. Harold Macmillan, who must have sensed the mood in the British Army, wrote in his memoir that given the tremendous difficulties of rebuilding the nation, “it may well be that by a sound instinct the British people felt that it would be wiser for a government of the Left to be in control.”7 He added, however, that many people had been persuaded during the war that “immediately the struggle was over there would follow a kind of automatic utopia.” The socialist state, under British leadership, they thought, in Macmillan’s reading, “would bring about unexampled prosperity in a world of universal peace.”8 Such naïve idealism may have been in the air. But the notion that Churchill’s Britain had passed, and the time had come for a more equitable society, could not be dismissed simply as a pipe dream. What Macmillan was perhaps reluctant to acknowledge was the resentment felt by people who had done most of the heavy work towards men of his own class.

  This didn’t escape the notice of Harold Nicolson. In the unmistakable tones of a different kind of class peevishness, Nicolson noted in his diary on May 27 that people felt “in a vague and muddled way, that all the sacrifices to which they have been exposed . . . are all the fault of ‘them’ . . . By a totally illogical process of reasoning, they believe ‘they’ mean the upper classes, or the Conservatives. Class feeling and class resentment are very strong.”9

  But was it so illogical to feel that things could not go back to what they had once been, to the “normal” state of class deference, the natural acceptance of privileges or the lack thereof, of being excluded by birth from enjoying the benefits of a decent education, a solid house, or proper medical care? Much has been written after the war about the solidarity of people linked at a time of national peril, of the good-natured “London-can-take-it” British bulldog spirit, when everyone mucked in together. But those same leveling experiences had also created a new sense of entitlement, where the old inequalities would no longer do. That was the British version of Never Again.

  The American critic Edmund Wilson attended a Labour Party meeting in an industrial town of narrow coal-dark row houses. He watched Harold Laski, the party chairman and Marxist academic, make a speech on a gray afternoon to grimly attentive men and women dressed in worn-out army surplus clothes and ill-fitting “demob” suits. Laski reminded his audience that Winston Churchill was “in favor of the traditional Britain, with a few measures of practical construction.” But in the “traditional Britain,” he would have them know, only 1 percent of the population had owned 50 percent of the wealth, and only 1 percent of army officers came from working-class families.

  As Wilson listened to Laski talking about the blessings of socialist government, he noticed an elderly woman (who may have looked older than she actually was), staring at the speaker with a hungry intensity that reminded him of other pale and gaunt Europeans who seemed different from the poor in times of peace, as though they belonged to a peculiar “breed with ravenous eyes like an animal’s” that saw “only with appetites that were simple and stringent.” And there, “erect before this woman and all her silent companions,” stood Laski, “slight, bespectacled, high-browed, making them promises which could perhaps not always be realized,” and “talking to some degree the mere cant of politics.” And yet “he held to his post by some tension that magnetized and turned him toward that craning grey-faced chicken-eyed woman.”10

  In Greece, Wilson had the chance to mingle with British army men. Somewhat to his surprise, he found a peculiar animus among the common soldiers, not just against their officers, but against Churchill himself. One man “expressed himself very strongly on the subject of Churchill’s cigar.” Whenever British soldiers met their American counterparts, they couldn’t but notice how much better the GIs were being treated by their officers. In Delphi, of all places, Wilson detected “the almost complete class line-up, on the issue of the Churchill government, between the English officers and the English troops.” He “found no English soldier who had not voted for Labour and only one officer who had.”11

  This observation is impossible to disprove, but there may have been a slight element of projection here; Edmund Wilson was himself rather sensitive to the subtle and unsubtle ways by which the English express superior status, towards Americans as much as to the lower ranks. In fact, the shifts in British society cannot be entirely explained by class warfare. Wilson got only part of the story. Noel Annan, a senior military intelligence officer in 1945 and later provost of King’s College, Cambridge, among other grand positions, was typical in almost every respect of the English haute bo
urgeoisie, except perhaps for his strong intellectual interests. He voted Labour in 1945, as did quite a few other young officers. Annan relates why in his memoir. It wasn’t that he didn’t admire Churchill; he simply “doubted whether [Churchill] understood what the country needed after the war.”12

  Another reason, aside from class feeling, why the war changed social and political attitudes was that people were becoming better educated. The British wartime government had put much effort into cultural improvement. The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) organized classical music concerts and theater performances in factories, church halls, and air-raid shelters. Debates and education programs were set up for the intellectual elevation of the troops abroad. In Cairo, where many soldiers were stationed, a mock parliament was formed by leftist servicemen in 1943 to discuss politics, in the words of one airman, “as though we were living in the yearned-for peace . . .”13

  Some Conservatives found this development profoundly disturbing. The MP for Penryn and Falmouth wrote a letter to Churchill’s parliamentary secretary: “I am more and more suspicious of the way this lecturing to and education of the forces racket is run . . . for the love of Mike do something about it, unless you want to have the creatures coming back all pansy-pink.”14

  Cyril Connolly, an old Etonian esthete with Francophile tastes, started his literary journal Horizon in 1940, determined to keep the flames of art and culture going even as—in his phrase—the lights were dimming over Europe. Soldiers and sailors were encouraged to subscribe at heavily reduced rates. Connolly too believed it was time to climb down from his high-minded perch and bring culture to the people. Horizon found its way into a surprising number of khaki backpacks. In June 1945 Connolly wrote an article explaining why he voted Labour. It was not because Labour politicians supported the arts more readily than Tories. The contrary was more often true. But he voted Labour because every human being should be entitled to a civilized life: “To make England a happy country, there must be a leveling up which socialism alone will provide.”15

  One of the most curious films made in wartime Britain, or at any time really, was A Canterbury Tale, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, one a conservative English genius, the other a Jewish Anglophile born in Hungary. Too odd to be well received when the movie first came out in 1944, A Canterbury Tale tells us a great deal about the yearnings of that time, which were spiritual as much as political. An English soldier and an American GI find themselves thrown together by chance with a young English woman in rural Kent. The woman, a shopgirl from London, is accosted at night by a mysterious stranger known as the “glue man,” who is in the habit of secretly tipping pots of glue over women’s hair. It doesn’t take them long to unmask the glue man as a highly cultivated local gentleman farmer and magistrate. His aim, it turns out, was to stop young women from wasting their time going out with soldiers instead of immersing themselves in the glories of English history and the English countryside. All four characters end up in Canterbury, as modern-day pilgrims, each receiving a kind of personal blessing.

  The glue man might easily be seen as a crazy pervert. Yet, though undoubtedly eccentric, he is also an idealistic, almost saintly figure, trying in his peculiar way to articulate why England is worth fighting for. The film shows an idea of England, particularly of rural England, that is intensely patriotic, and romantic, a Tory version of Blood and Soil, perhaps, except that it dissolves the traditional barriers of class. When the young woman tells the glue man that she was never accepted by her fiancé’s parents because they were of good family and she was just a shopgirl, he answers that such categories mean nothing any more in “the new England,” which in the movie is a metaphysical place, its landscape a source of spiritual feeling. That would be like an earthquake, says the young woman. We are in an earthquake, the glue man replies. This earthquake, to the glue man, was more than just social or political; it was a religious epiphany in the green fields of England.

  The socialism of Clement Attlee would seem to be far removed from Powell and Pressburger’s Tory romanticism. Attlee, a quiet pipe-smoking solicitor’s son, was not a romantic in any sense. Yet his politics weren’t as far removed from A Canterbury Tale as all that. British socialism had strong Christian antecedents, steeped in the improving traditions of the Victorian age, with aesthetic links through arts and crafts to the idea of a pristine rural England. “Jerusalem,” William Blake’s hymn to “England’s green and pleasant land” among the “dark satanic mills,” is an expression of patriotic religiosity, of Christ turning England into a version of heaven. Blake was a dissenter. His hymn was often sung on working-class marches against their oppressors. Socialist Britain was sometimes referred to as the New Jerusalem. The spirit of the Powell-Pressburger movie, set in the sun-dappled fields of Kent and ending in Canterbury Cathedral, is strikingly similar to Blake’s vision.

  In the month leading up to the July election, Churchill and Attlee laid out their very different patriotic visions of England. Churchill tried to land the first blows by accusing the Labour Party of being in thrall to foreign notions “abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.” He growled that this “Continental conception of human society called Socialism, or, in its more violent form, Communism” would inevitably lead to a police state; that a socialist government would “have to fall back on some form of Gestapo.” This would never work “here, in old England, in Great Britain, in this glorious island . . . the cradle and citadel of free democracy.” For the British, said Churchill in the rousing tones of his finest wartime speeches, “do not like to be regimented and ordered about . . .”16

  Regimentation was all very well in times of national peril, Churchill went on: “We all submit to being ordered about to save our country.” But once the war is over, proud Britons would cast off those self-imposed shackles and burdens and “quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.”

  This was Churchill’s laissez-faire notion of the green and pleasant land. It misfired badly. For once, now that peace was at hand, Churchill was tone-deaf to the sentiments of his people. There was “a good deal of bewilderment” among British soldiers abroad, according to the Guardian: “The transformation of Mr Churchill, the national leader, into the Churchill of the ‘Labour Party Gestapo’ speech has puzzled men everywhere.”17

  In response, Attlee, too, accused his opponent of taking his ideas from dubious foreign sources, in Churchill’s case a Viennese economist named Friedrich Hayek who had left his native country in the 1930s and blamed Continental totalitarianism on the follies of central planning. Churchill had been reading Hayek’s seminal book, The Road to Serfdom. “I shall not waste my time,” said Attlee in his radio broadcast, “on this theoretical stuff which is merely a second-hand version of the academic views of an Austrian professor . . .”

  Where Churchill saw the abolition of wartime planning and controls as the quickest route to those sunny English fields, Attlee believed that wartime controls should be extended to build the New Jerusalem. The common good should not be left in the hands of private individuals, out to swell their personal profits. Indeed, he argued, “the war has been won by the efforts of all our people, who, with very few exceptions, put the nation first and their private and sectional interests a long way second . . . Why should we suppose that we can attain our aims in peace—food, clothing, homes, education, leisure, social security and full employment for all—by putting private interests first?”18

  Attlee, like so many Europeans of his time, put his faith in government planning. This was more than an opportunistic exploitation of conditions made necessary by war. Distrust of liberal economics, blamed for the booms and busts and high unemployment rates that caused so much political turbulence in the 1930s, had existed for many decades, on the right as well as the left. Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s first minister of economics, was a pl
anner who believed in a state-directed economy as much as Attlee. In East Asia, so did the Japanese “reform bureaucrats,” more national socialists than social democrats, who cooperated with the Imperial Army to wipe out Western-style capitalism. Planning the perfect society was one of the twentieth century’s great faiths.

  Plans for a makeover of Britain had already been devised in the early years of the war. The Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services calling for a National Health Service and full employment was published in 1942. A system of secondary education for all was outlined in a paper published in 1943. Social insurance followed in 1944, and a document on housing policy in 1945. But the overwhelming popular mandate to carry these plans out came in July 1945, when not only Britain but much of Europe was exhausted, virtually bankrupt, and in ruins, the perfect landscape for dreams of doing everything over.

  • • •

  THE WORD FOR NEW JERUSALEM in France was “progressisme.” Left-wing ideals, infused with a great deal of patriotism, inspired former members of the resistance just as they had British socialists. Communists, social democrats, even many Gaullists, did not fight Vichy and the Germans only for the love of the traditional douce France. They had political ideals for which so many of them gave their lives, and wanted them to be implemented after the war, preferably by the ex-resisters themselves. The National Council of the Resistance, dominated by the left, was designed to be a kind of government-in-waiting.

  This is how Stéphane Hessel, a young Jewish résistant who had survived the Gestapo’s torture and Buchenwald, remembered it sixty-six years later: “In 1945, after a horrendous drama, the members of the National Council of the Resistance dedicated themselves to an ambitious resurrection.” The Council, in words that echoed Attlee’s program exactly, proposed “a rational organization of the economy that makes sure private interests are subordinated to the common good.” New plans would have to be made to ensure universal social insurance. Coal, gas, the big banks, electricity would be nationalized. All this, Hessel recalled, to “emancipate the common good from the dictatorship created in the image of fascist states.”19