‘Easily,’ I said. (At that time a joke in the Party was that the CP might not be able to get anyone elected to the House of Commons but it had no difficulty in attracting lords. There were three communists in the House of Lords, and quite soon there would be Wogan. Another communist aristocrat, Ivor Montague, was in love with Communist China. He introduced table tennis to that vast empire, where it flourishes to this day.)
Tamara wanted to marry Wogan. Understandably. He was probably the handsomest man I have ever known. He had all the virtues of an aristocrat and not one of the vices. He was, but truly, a lovely man, and I’ve never met anyone who didn’t think so. But she was of good communist Russian stock and…‘Of course you should marry him,’ urged this romantic, unable to bear that true love was being thwarted by mere politics.
There was a wedding in a house in North London somewhere. A not very large room, and not many people in it. Wogan was imperturbably affable and kind, Tamara was in a fizz of elation, love, and doubt, and there, too, was Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the British Communist Party. If he was not actually giving Tamara away, he was representing the approval of the proletariat of both countries. He had with him a lieutenant. These two, short stubby men in stiff Sunday-best suits, held their own by force of character in these most improbable circumstances. Who else was there? I can only remember two tall, fair youngsters leaning against a mantelpiece and looking benignly on, shedding charm generally over us all. These were Sally, Rosamond Lehmann’s daughter by Wogan—two beautiful people had produced a girl who is remembered by everyone who ever met her as a rare and lovely creature—and Patrick Kavanagh, the poet and man of letters. They were either already married or about to be. She was to die quite soon and suddenly. Sally and Patrick should, like Wogan and Tamara, have lived happily ever after for many many decades.
I went twice or three times with Peter to visit Wogan and Tamara on their farm. He might have been cut off without a penny by his father, but luckily there must have been a halfpenny or two from somewhere or other. Their life was a dream of Englishness, all affability and kindness, on a gentleman farmer’s farm, and Peter loved going there, and so did I.
Tamara and Wogan used to drive into Cheltenham, a city that could not have known a seditious thought since the Civil War, and sell the Daily Worker on the streets to astonished citizens. I was remembering equally quixotic attempts in Salisbury (Southern Rhodesia) to sell the communist Guardian newspaper around suburbs populated entirely by white kaffir-haters. Their revolutionary duty done, Wogan and Tamara went to their favourite pub, where farm labourers, some their employees, bought the Daily Worker because they liked Wogan.
Wogan had been left an estate in north Italy and decided to divide it up and give it to the peasants who worked it. Very soon they came and begged him to take it back or at least administer it, because they were being cheated by the surrounding landowners. Tamara and Wogan couldn’t see anything funny about this, or about selling the Daily Worker in Cheltenham, or if they did, they weren’t going to admit it.
Another wedding was Arnold and Dusty Wesker’s. All Arnold’s family were there, from well-off businessmen to people still not far from the East End. Dusty’s family were farm workers and small farmers from Norfolk; Arnold used them in his play Roots. There were also actors, directors, and writers from the Royal Court Theatre, a couple of dozen of us. Blond, large, slow, ruddy-faced farm people, quick, dark, dark-eyed Jews, and us, the job lot from the Court, this improbable mix of people sat in three separate parts of a big room, eyeing each other until at the end we all became one soul, united by dancing the hora, around and around, and on and on.
Not all my associates were dedicated to social progress. A visitor from Canada stayed for some weeks. She gave me a yellow silk umbrella, a little graceful umbrella with an ivory handle. It came from an altogether different life. It leaned against the wall in my kitchen, and I thought, If I use that I’ll have to buy different clothes, live in a different kind of flat and certainly in another part of London. The umbrella reminded me of a wonderful short story, in New Writing. It was from that post-war time in London when high-minded refugees from everywhere lived their precarious lives in cold shabby flats and scarcely knew where their next meal was coming from. A certain poet—Hungarian, I think—said to a friend, ‘If you’re going to throw that coat out, give it to me. I’m freezing.’ The coat was elegant, if threadbare. He wore it day and night. His comrades said, ‘We’re not going out with you in that coat; we’ve got our reputations as serious people to consider.’ The poet wore the coat to a publisher’s party, and the publisher’s daughter noticed him. He said to his own girlfriend, ‘Why don’t you buy yourself a new dress?’ She said, ‘Once you loved me for myself. Now you’ve become just another rotten bourgeois.’ He had to get a new job, which he despised, to support a new wardrobe and new friends, and then he moved to a new flat, with the publisher’s daughter. His comrades spoke of him as a lost soul, but he was merely ahead of the times.
And now, again, the tricky question of time: I had been in London for nearly eight years. What’s eight years? I would say now. It’s nothing at all, a mere breath; but I was still living in young-adult time, and it seemed I had been in London for an age, packed and crammed with new people, events, happenings, ideas. I was being urged to go back to Southern Rhodesia by friends there—Mrs. Maasdorp, the Zelters, the comrades generally, but certainly not my brother, with whom I exchanged polite letters—to write articles ‘which told the truth’. I needed to go back, because my Rhodesian years seemed so distant, so cut off from me, and I was dreaming every night, long sad dreams of frontiers and exile and lost landscapes. There were, however, two reasons I couldn’t easily go back. I had no money, and there was Peter, who could hardly be left with the Eichners for as long as I needed. Six weeks. I began with the money. Picture Post, a wonderful magazine, one of the first to use picture reporting, always fighting the proprietor, who was timid, was edited by Tom Hopkinson, who was brave. In the end, cowardice defeated courage. Meantime Picture Post could be relied on. I went to see Tom Hopkinson and asked if Picture Post would pay my travel expenses to Southern Rhodesia. The way I saw it, I was as well equipped for this as anyone. I had been listening to nonsense about Southern Africa ever since I had come, though about South Africa the truth was becoming known—partly, of course, because of people like me. Now there was something called the Federation of Central Africa, which was uniting Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland—both had always been Colonial Office Protectorates, with the interests of the natives paramount—and Southern Rhodesia, which had always been modelled on the iniquitous laws of South Africa. Everyone in Britain, and all the newspapers, including the dear old Guardian, were in love with this federation: there is something about high-minded formulas that the British find irresistible. Only two newspapers, the Tribune and the Daily Worker—both at the extreme left—were pointing out that oil and water could not mix and that ‘unrest’ was inevitable. ‘Unrest’ was already breaking out everywhere in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. As I and some others had foretold. I told Tom Hopkinson that I could travel from person to person in all three territories, friends or contacts, that I would cost his magazine only the airfare, and that I was in a much better position to come up with news than the real journalists. He was cautious, said he thought yes but would let me know. He wrote to say no, he was sorry. What had happened, obviously, was that he checked with the secret services, whose members were bound to be chums of his, because this is true of nearly all the male Establishment, and had been told not only that I was communist—which of course he knew—but that I was dangerous (this was the Cold War). I did not know then that I had been made a Prohibited Immigrant in South Africa and in Southern Rhodesia too. Meanwhile Mervyn* and Jeanne Jones had generously offered (on their own impulse; I had not asked them) to take Peter to be with their own children for six weeks. All I needed was the airfare.
And now I thought things out, carefully and soberly. I wen
t to the Soviet Embassy and asked to see the cultural attaché—another one—and said why didn’t they get some Soviet newspaper to pay for my airfare, treat me as a correspondent? Of course I knew this was an enormity and that I was inviting accusations of Moscow Gold, at the very least. What was outrageous was my casually turning up and inviting them to behave like a Western newspaper, just as if this was normal. Yes, I was finding it funny, enjoying it. But I was also very angry. What I felt was that I had given my own side the chance to employ me, they should have done, so it was their fault. And I knew I would give value for money. I was in an ambiguous relation with these Russians. True, I was a Party member—and they could hardly know how I was thinking seditious thoughts about the Party and that I intended to leave it. But I was not, like James Aldridge, ‘one of theirs’, the Russian formula, still very much in use: So-and-so is ‘one of ours’—nashe. Nashe and therefore good. The Grass Is Singing had been slammed by their reviewers as ‘Freudian’ and revealing a hundred non-communist faults, which I cannot now remember. The short stories were paternalistic and lacked a feeling for the proletariat. The mere fact that I had gone to them without even checking with the Party was proof of a serious lack of revolutionary understanding.
I went ahead with my preparations, trusting to luck. Something like a week before I left, when I was getting panicky, not least because all the comrades were telling me that this had never been done and wouldn’t be done now, I got a cheque from the Narodny Bank for, I think (I’ve forgotten), a thousand pounds. Perhaps it was five hundred pounds. It was a lot of money. I could pay my airfare and a good bit over. On enquiry, by telephone, to the Soviet embassy, I was told the money was for royalties. (The Soviet Union was still pirating my books and never paid royalties—you had to go there and spend the money. Not a few writers did, holidaying on the Black Sea, living like rajahs—or like commissars. I never did this. My feeling was that the publishers should pay writers what was due and not go in for emotional blackmail: ‘You know our terrible difficulties; we feel sure you will be happy to help us by coming here, taking your money in Moscow, and spending it with us.’) There was never any written confirmation that this money was for royalties. When I asked what newspaper I would be writing for, they said I should send the articles to the embassy and they would find a newspaper.
And now my real unforgiveable naivety: It never occurred to me that my articles would be ‘creatively’ translated to make the situation in Central Africa worse than it was. This little tale illustrates why the people dealing with Soviet officialdom all had nervous breakdowns or had to leave the work. First, although the Embassy had been told my trip depended on them I didn’t get the money until the last minute—people organising trips to the Soviet Union often got the visas the night before or even on the morning of departure, guaranteeing maximum anxiety for everyone. Then, I was not formally told for which of my books these royalties were being paid. Writers were never told when their books were published in the Soviet Union. Someone would return from a trip and say, ‘I saw your book for sale in Moscow’—but that was the first I had heard of it. To this day I don’t know which of my books and stories were published there. Then, when I sent in the articles, after my trip (the same as were printed in Tribune here and in left-wing papers in Europe) I was not told what Soviet papers printed them.
Meanwhile something else had happened. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union held their Twentieth Congress. No young person now will react to ‘Twentieth Congress of 1956’, but everyone, not only on the Left, interested in politics at all from those times will remember that this was when Khrushchev ‘came clean’ about the crimes of Stalin. The effect of these ‘revelations’ on the faithful was as if the Communist Parties of the world had been blown apart by a bomb. All over the world were people (and there are still a few left) who knew that everything bad said about the Soviet Union was a lie, an invention of the capitalist press, and that communism (of course, there had been ‘mistakes’), headed by the great and good successors of the great Stalin, was the future of the world. Comrades were indignantly refusing to believe the ‘revelations’, saying that Khrushchev was a traitor, he had been bought by the CIA, or that he was exaggerating, or that if what Khrushchev said was true, then someone else, or a clique of conspirators, had been responsible for the crimes and Stalin had never known anything about them.
To write all this in the nineties is not easy. Gone—I hope for ever, but let’s not be too sure—is the climate that made these events possible. I’m writing about mass social psychopathology. I was part of it. But things were not as clear-cut as this all sounds: the edges were blurred. As Arthur Koestler once remarked, every communist had a private agenda of personal beliefs. I was among those few who were disappointed by the Twentieth Congress for opposite reasons. These few knew by then that Stalin’s crimes were a thousand times worse than Khrushchev said. Why was he not telling the whole truth? We—these few who discussed these things privately—believed that though everything the ‘capitalist press’ and the émigrés from the Soviet Union and the by now many refugees from the communist countries of Eastern Europe said was true, there must remain inside the Soviet Union a hidden number of pure souls who would ‘at the right time’ emerge and say, ‘Yes, everything that has been said about us is true, but now we shall put Soviet communism back on the true path.’ If I use the word ‘believe’ here, then it was a half belief, for with every new book about the Soviet Union, or every conversation with someone who had been living there, this belief had faded. Slowly. Losing faith in communism is exactly paralleled by people in love who cannot let their dream of love go. Now I knew that everything I had been clinging on to was nonsense. I cannot say it was a heart blow, for my psychological eggs were not all in that basket and never had been. But I knew people who had invested everything, heart and mind, had made sometimes bitter sacrifices, who had lived only for the golden communist future, and they were breaking down all around me, or suffering violent conversions into their own opposites. These were dramatic: soon there was a joke around the Left that having been a communist was the best possible education for becoming a very successful businessman.
Having shed all faith in the Soviet Union, and in communism, did not mean relinquishing revolution. Implicit was the idea that revolution was necessary to save us all. Hard now to put a term to it, but I would say revolution as a basic tenet of a creed was around for at least another twenty years. Perhaps more. It was implicit: no need to justify or spell it out. Revolution was good. The temporisings of socialism were bad and also despicable symptoms of cowardice, like a belief in God.
It was—is?—part of the structure of our minds and of our thinking. Take South Africa. When I became aware of South Africa politically, I was twenty or so, and it was taken for granted by us that there had to be a bloodbath, a ‘night of the long knives’. Again, this was so much part of how everybody concerned saw things that it needed no explanation. When, in 1992, Mandela and de Klerk agreed and the “inevitable bloodbath” was no longer on the agenda, decades of political belief simply evaporated.
In 1956 I was in a most familiar situation: I could not say what I thought, except to a very few people. I certainly could not say to comrades whose hearts were breaking, who were ill with shock, that what Khrushchev said at the Twentieth Congress was just cowardice: he should have told the whole truth.
Before leaving on my trip I was approached by the Party to ask if the artist Paul Hogarth could go with me. I did not particularly want this, but why not.
About this trip I wrote a short book, called Going Home, and it is there in print if anyone is interested.
I was in the Zelters’* house for a few days, discovering that in England there is always a hard tight little core somewhere near the solar plexus, on the alert to resist cold and damp, and it never really relaxes. The wonderful dry invigorating heat of Salisbury’s altitude began with my bones, then took over the rest of me, and I did not really want to begin work. But I had ar
ranged to stay with Bram Fischer,* in Johannesburg, who had arranged people for me to see and told Paul where he could go to find scenes most visitors never suspected were there. It was the time when South Africa was making a Prohibited Immigrant of any person critical of them, and we were joking that I might find myself put back on the plane that took me to Jan Smuts Airport. And that was what happened. I had told Paul that if I was stopped by the Special Branch, then he was not to know me; but while I was being led off by the policeman he was waving and shouting, Where are you going? I pretended not to know him. Their long experience of safety has made the British incapable of understanding how breeds without the law have to live. There was a joke in Party circles then that if a British communist photographer, journalist, or artist was travelling under the aegis of the Communist Party in any country with a repressive government—let’s say Greece—his progress could be followed by a trail of people arrested and flung into prison: his contacts, the brave people prepared to help him. This trait is by no means dead. On the television you see being interviewed people who have demanded anonymity, for they fear arrest or reprisals. And there they are with an inch or two of geometrical dazzle in the very centre of their faces, ensuring that they will be arrested or even murdered the moment the programme is shown. But journalists and TV programme makers have the right to do as they like.
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