Not long after we heard about the Eleven Plus, Mum and Harold started having meetings with someone called Dorothy Diamond, who was a friend of Nan’s. It was Nan who had sent Harold off to find the dinosaur professor in Berlin. I was beginning to enjoy working out these connections.
Later that spring – 1957 – Mum and Harold said to me and Brian, ‘This summer we’re not going camping. We’re going to East Germany. We’re going to a place called Weimar with a group of teachers. It’s been organised by Dorothy. While we’re in Weimar there’ll be trips to all sorts of places, so it’s going to be terrific.’
Back in our bedroom, working through this news, Brian said that Harold had driven a jeep round Berlin during the war, and he’d know the way. Brian was doing German at school and had taught me to say, ‘Ich bin, du bist, er ist, wir sind, Sie sind, sie sind’, so I was pretty sure that I was ready to face most situations.
Once summer came, we boarded a train heading east. Our group included some teachers from Kilburn, among them one called John Holly, who wore a bright blue suit and suede shoes and played the guitar. There was his friend Callaghan, whose beard completely covered his mouth, and Peter Wright, one of Mum and Harold’s old friends who Mum said was amazingly clever – he could even speak Serbo-Croat. Peter put on Shakespeare plays with the boys at Kilburn and the boys also played the women’s parts. We went every year, and when Falstaff lined up Mould and the rest in Henry IV, Part 2, I laughed and laughed till I was crying.
Mum said that the boy who was Shallow spoke the line, ‘We have heard the chimes at Midnight, Master John’ in the most moving way she had ever heard, and she had heard Lawrence Olivier speak it when she and Harold went to the Old Vic. Harold did his take-off of Olivier doing Mercutio: ‘creep into any alderman’s thumb-ring’.
‘Lovely legs,’ Mum said.
Also in the group was Len Goldman. He had a moustache that made him look like Terry Thomas, but when he spoke he sounded like Zeyde. He spent much time looking for puns. Whenever he heard a word that sounded like another word, he just said it. But he never laughed. Someone said they lived in Neasden: ‘Ah, yes’, he said, ‘Paradise, the Garden of Neasden.’
I would sit next to him and say, ‘Len, tell me a joke.’
‘Give me an egg and I’ll crack one,’ he said.
I thought Len was a comedian. Harold said that all his jokes were old ones.
It was only once we got through West Germany that there was any problem with passports. People started standing up and sitting down. Men in uniforms with guns walked along the aisle and back again. There wasn’t a problem with everyone’s passports; it was only Harold’s, again, with his American passport. Was he going to be left behind because he was American and on the wrong side?
‘They’re not going to stamp it,’ Mum said.
Was this good or bad?
Once we arrived at Weimar, they let us stay in an old school. The first thing I noticed was that they kept dishing up fresh cucumber, sliced into a watery, vinegary liquid that I thought was fantastic. The second thing I noticed was that they dished up a dark brown slimy garlic sausage which I also thought was fantastic, though everyone else said it was giving them the squitters. If East Germany is this good, I thought, then Communism is as good as Francis said it was.
The first thing Mum noticed was that she could understand what people were saying. We sat at a table on a cafe terrace, while a man played a tune by rubbing the tops of wine glasses. All around us people were speaking German. With a happy look on her face, Mum said: ‘I can understand what they’re saying!’ This couldn’t be right. It was Harold who spoke German. He was the one who sang German songs like ‘Drum links, zwei, drei!’ But Mum said, ‘For the first few years of my life, we only spoke Yiddish at home. I get what it is they’re saying.’
I don’t think anyone had ever told us exactly that Yiddish was rather like informal, spoken German. I don’t think anyone had ever said exactly that Yiddish was Mum’s first language. Maybe Mum was more surprised by Germany than we were. She became different at that moment, as if she had another person in her head, someone we had never heard of, a girl who could only speak Yiddish.
Once we had settled into the old school, our days quickly fell into a routine. In the morning Mum and Harold went off to ‘sessions’, while Brian and me had to entertain ourselves. After lunch it was ‘visits’, and then after the evening meal, if there wasn’t another outing, different people stood up and started singing and performing. I understood that the ‘sessions’ were mostly about swapping ideas on how to teach. What I didn’t understand was why anyone would want to spend their summer holidays doing that.
On our own, in our room, Brian practised his imitation skills. He did John Holly, the guitar teacher, by sticking his hands in his pockets, throwing his head back and jazz-walking up and down the room, talking loudly about politics and guitar chords. I loved it. He had spotted that Callaghan was a quiet tippler, who always made sure he got more wine. Brian sat very still, narrowed his eyes and leant towards an imaginary waitress with just a hint of lasciviousness, saying in what sounded to me like perfect German: ‘Noch ein Glas Wein, bitte.’ I loved that one too.
Despite spending most of our time by ourselves, we were sometimes interrupted by the Idiom Pest. This was one of the German guys, who carried a notebook where he’d written down idioms he had heard, or thought he had. Then he came looking for us, to ask what the phrase meant and how to use it.
‘Hello, please, young men. Please what is this “getting the dirty hands”?’
‘Well,’ Brian said, ‘you might be mending a car or something and get dirty hands.’
‘No, I am finding that people are saying, “He doesn’t get the dirty hands”.’
‘Yes,’ Brian said, ‘that’s someone who’s got clean hands.’
‘No, the people are saying, “he doesn’t like getting the dirty hands”.’
‘Yes,’ Brian said, ‘no one really likes dirty hands.’
‘Hah, this is true. No one really likes dirty hands.’ He wrote it down. ‘And I can say, “look at him – hah! – he doesn’t like dirty hands!” and this means?’
We looked at each other. It wasn’t easy. This was someone we really would have to avoid.
Later, when we met up with Mum and Dad we told them about the conversation, and they said that we had got it wrong: ‘It’s “he doesn’t like getting his hands dirty”.’
Brian got tetchy about that, because he likes to get things right and he said it wasn’t him who got it wrong, it was the bloke because he said, “getting the dirty hands.’
From then on, even though we tried hard to dodge him, the Idiom Pest went on hunting for us. We’d be eating in the canteen, he would spot us, nip over and sit himself down at our table. ‘Ah, boys, I haff one more question. You have the time to speak with me?’
In the mornings, we kicked a ball about in the schoolyard and played hours of table tennis. The afternoons were better, but there is a limit to the number of houses of famous people that an eleven-year-old can take.
Usually I loved castles, battlements, moats, portcullises, trebuchets, mottes, baileys and keeps. I was determined to make myself a castle expert. Once when we were going around an old English castle, Brian said that they had found talking-tubes in it. He explained that these were tubes that ran through the walls so that people could send messages via them. You spoke some words in at one end and then, a few days later, someone in another part of the castle might come to the end of the talking tube in his tower, pull the cork out and hear the first man’s message from a few days back. What happened, he said, was that a few years ago, archaeologists were digging in the castle and they came across one of these talking-tubes that hadn’t been opened for centuries. They opened it up – pulled out the cork – and out came talk from hundreds of years ago, all in olde Englyshe: ‘Thou hast fain be loath to …’, that sort of thing, Brian said.
The houses we visited in Germany all belonged to the same three people I hadn’t heard of: Goethe, Schiller, and Frederick the Great. They included their birthplaces, town houses, summer houses, winter houses and libraries. Soon one old house started to look like any other old house.
‘This is Belvedere,’ the guide said.
‘Wasn’t the other one called Belvedere?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a bit like they’re all Shakespeare,’ Mum explained.
She started to talk about Goethe and Schiller as ‘G and S’: ‘We’re going on another G and S creep today.’
But when we got back to England she had to say, ‘G and S – but not Gilbert and Sullivan.’ She thought this was funny, in the Mum sort of a way where she would be the only one laughing.
As we moved around I noticed men with guns in the street.
‘They’re Russians,’ Harold said.
There were some longer trips, like the one to Wartburg Castle. Here we climbed hundreds of steps till we got to the room where Martin Luther had sat for hours, translating the Bible into German. Dorothy Diamond translated the guide’s words for us.
‘In this room … Martin Luther saw the devil, and threw ink at him. If you look at the wall, you can still see the ink stain.’
I looked. There was a dark patch on the wall, and some of the plaster was peeling off.
Brian was excited about Luther, because in the school choir he sang Luther’s hymn that begins ‘Ein Feste Burg’. ‘Which means, Mick, “a strong castle”, remember? I taught it to you. And here we are at a strong castle and it’s where Martin Luther was. See? Do you get it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I had learned to say ‘Yes’ so that Brian would think I had got things even if I hadn’t. I hadn’t even got who Martin Luther was. I hadn’t got why translating the Bible was such a big deal nor why the devil would think it was a bad idea. And I hadn’t got why the hymn was about a strong castle, because I didn’t get hymns. I sang them along with everyone else, but what did something like ‘For All the Saints’ actually mean? What, every saint? There were thousands of them, weren’t there?
But I did like the idea that this Luther threw ink at the devil and the stain was still there, hundreds of years later.
On another occasion we went to Bach’s house in Eisenach. I knew who Bach was, because Brian was also teaching me about classical music. He played me Beethoven and Mozart symphonies and concertos and got me to look out for the theme, the variations on the theme, and especially the modulations. With Bach, he said it was different. It was fugues.
Bach’s house was full of musical instruments. Dorothy Diamond took me over to one and said, ‘Michael, that is a cembalo. It’s not a harpsichord and it’s not a piano. It’s a cembalo.’ I’ve never seen nor heard of a cembalo since.
One night we went to the opera in Weimar to see The Marriage of Figaro. Before we went, Harold said that there was a bloody marvellous bit when Figaro marches this chap, who’s had his balls chopped off, up and down telling him that he can’t mess about with women anymore. He’s got to go off to the army. And that it was a superb satire on militarism. Then Harold put on his opera voice and sang, ‘One foot …’
‘Does that come when they’re marching up and down?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘that comes at the beginning when Figaro is measuring his wedding bed.’
Brian then explained that it was based on a French play.
‘Will they be singing it in French?’ I asked.
‘No, Italian,’ Harold said.
‘German,’ Brian said.
Then one day Mum said that there was going to be a trip but we couldn’t come on it.
‘Why not?’ we asked.
‘It’s to a concentration camp.’
‘Why can’t we come?’
Mum said that they didn’t know exactly what was there, but she expected it to be so awful and so shocking that we probably wouldn’t be able to cope. They went to Buchenwald and when they came back, Mum looked dreadful.
She couldn’t explain. ‘Terrible things happened there,’ she said. ‘I’ve talked about it before, but this was awful.’
I tried to figure out how awful was this awful. I had been on a school trip to the Tower of London and went into the torture room and saw the thumbscrews, the rack and the iron maiden. Was it as awful as that?
‘Worse’, Mum said.
In the evenings everyone sang songs. Mum and Harold tried translating them for us. They said there was a really terrific German song about Columbus, and when he gets to America all the Indians shout, ‘We are discovered!’
I sang along with the chorus: ‘Viddy viddy vid, boom boom’.
Then there was one where we all had to pretend to be a steam train. A big smiley bloke called Horst taught us this one.
‘It’s in Swabian dialect,’ Harold said, like that was something I needed to know.
I learned to sing the first line, ‘Auf der schwäbsche Eisenbahne …’ and when the chorus came I joined in with everyone in the hall going ‘chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff’.
There was one about a boat on a river that seemed to get faster until we all shouted ‘HEY!’, and another one about a man who shoots a cuckoo, with a chorus that was like a tongue twister that I really loved but couldn’t quite get. ‘Zimzala bim zala bim zala doozala day,’ I sang, but Brian shook his head.
‘If only I could remember all the words to the one about the rabbi who gets drunk,’ Harold said.
John Holly got out his guitar and sang American folk songs, which started a big debate about whether he should have been singing English folk songs.
John Holly said, ‘For Christ’s sake!’
There was a man from Guinea who sang a song that went ‘Everybody like Saturday night’, which Harold said was very political because really they didn’t like Saturday night. I found irony very difficult to understand indeed.
But then, after even more table tennis and quite a lot of clothes fights in our room, Mum and Harold sat us down and said that they had been talking to one of the German delegates and she had two cousins who lived on a farm, and they would be fine about having us to stay for a while. There would be two girls who were Brian’s age and a boy and a girl who were about my age, and maybe it could be like Skenfrith: ‘You could collect eggs. And you like cows, don’t you?’ Mum said.
‘Yes,’ I said, because I did like cows. Ever since Bert Fidler had taught me how to milk a cow and I had been to the Monmouthshire show, I’d been studying them. Just like Brian could tell the difference between the Flying Scotsman and the Royal Scot and the Master Cutler, I could tell the difference between an Ayrshire and a Dairy Shorthorn.
They put us on a tram-train out of Weimar heading to stay with people neither they nor we knew. We weren’t even going to be put up in the same house. We were going to be a mile or so apart. And I couldn’t speak German. Brian had been doing it for three years, and I had heard him talking to people in German. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘the older girls speak English.’
‘By the way,’ Brian added, ‘I don’t think we’re supposed to be doing this. Children from other countries who come to East Germany are supposed to be on special summer camps, Communist Pioneer camps, not just going off to stay with people, so don’t talk about it.’
When we got off the tram-train, Brian said it was the ‘Thuringian Wald’ and I was taken to a little farm where the couple smiled a lot. Meanwhile Brian went off somewhere else. This couple had a boy and a girl who were a bit younger than me and an older girl who was about Brian’s age or older, and who I thought was unbelievably beautiful. I mean filmstar beautiful. She had long blonde hair that swung around, and she tried very hard to speak English.
Her parents showed me my bed: it was in a cupboard in the wall. There weren’t any blankets, just a big bag full of feathers. I had never seen a duvet. Duvets hadn’t happened in England yet. I didn’t know how to go to sleep in a cupboard under a bag of feathers.
The unbelievably beautiful girl came in and sat on the edge of my bed and said she was very happy that I had come. She sat there practising my name: ‘Michael, Michael …’
In the morning she went off, and I played with the younger children in the back garden. They kept saying, ‘Kick me!’ and running off and laughing.
I didn’t get it.
It turned out that they didn’t have any cows, but they did have chickens and I noticed a lot of potato plants.
They served the cucumber just like they had done at the old school in Weimar, so that was great. Then we met up with Brian and the girl from his family. She was unbelievably beautiful too, but in a suave sort of a way – short hair, blonde, glasses, and she spoke really good English. We all went for a walk, and both girls hooked arms with Brian. They walked on ahead, chatting and laughing away, talking in English and German. I ran about with the younger ones behind. We were following a sandy path in a forest somewhere. All I knew was that we were where Brian had said: the Thuringian Wald.
‘Maybe they’re saying “kiss me”,’ Brian said, and the unbelievably beautiful big girls laughed and laughed. Maybe Mum and Harold would go back home, Brian would stay with the unbelievably beautiful girls, I would stay with the kick-me children forever, and we’d become East Germans and go out and walk down long sandy paths in the forest again and again and again. We went up to the top of a mountain to a cafe that looked over a valley. ‘Thuringian Wald,’ Brian said.
We didn’t stay there forever, though. After a few days, we got back on the tram-train to Weimar. Mum and Harold met us. Harold said that when they said goodbye to us, he had turned to Con and said, ‘What have we done?’ but Mum had said we would be OK.
Now it was time to go to Berlin. We were going to go first to Jena and then overnight in a coach along the Autobahn, which, Harold said, bloody Hitler built so that he could rush troops to the border to invade the Soviet Union. I sat up the front of the coach with the driver and watched the lights of the cars and lorries streak past.
In Jena, we were taken to the world’s first planetarium. We sat on wooden chairs and looked up at the dome. Dorothy Diamond explained that the stars we could see were in fact tiny little indentations engraved on to lenses by the world’s greatest glass engravers. Brian was very excited by this and told me a complicated story about the Zeiss camera works. Once there was just Zeiss; then came the war, and Germany was divided into East and West. Though Jena was in the East, the people in the West wanted to have a Zeiss too and there was lots of legal stuff that went on for years, so that now there was Zeiss Ikon and Carl Zeiss.
‘Which one are we at?’
‘Carl Zeiss.’
‘Are they the good Zeiss or the bad Zeiss?’
‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ Brian said.
In Berlin we stayed in a hotel. We had never stayed in a hotel before. It was huge and had red carpets on the floor, and a neon sign outside that said either ‘Hotel Adler’ or ‘Hotel Adlon’. Even after we got back from East Germany there were arguments over which it was. Inside it had a lift with a sliding metal grille door, like the ones in American movies. Or like in the hotel that Emil and the Detectives keep an eye on because Herr Müller is inside with Emil’s money. Harold said they hadn’t changed the carpet from before the war. When we looked out of our room, we could still see where one half of the hotel had been bombed.
That night, Mum explained how the Russians came from the east and when they got to Berlin they fought street by street until they won. Harold said that when he got to Berlin it was flattened and everyone was living in cellars. I imagined him in the army shirt he wore on our camping holidays, walking around bombed-out streets while people peeped up at him from holes in the ground, calling for help: ‘Hey, American! Help, we’ve been bombed.’
We went out in the coach one day and the driver took us to where Hitler’s bunker was. You could see what looked like a giant piece of concrete cake sticking out of the ground. ‘It was hit by a bomb,’ Brian said, ‘but the concrete was so strong, all it did was tip it up. That’s what you can see there.’
‘What happened to Hitler?’
‘Shhh.’
One time we stood on the corner of somewhere that was so flattened from the war, it looked like it wasn’t anywhere. We went with an older woman who was kind to Brian and me; she had been the link with Dorothy Diamond from the East German end. She said that where we were standing was called ‘Unter den Linden’.
We stood there for a bit and then she said, ‘Hitler loved linden trees.’
‘Did he?’ I said.
We walked on and I noticed that Mum and Harold were having a whopping great whisper-argument. I could see that Mum was angry and upset, while Harold was hissing something like, ‘Not now.’
After a while the old lady went off to look after some of the rest of the party and I asked Mum and Harold what was the matter. Mum said, ‘I don’t bloody want to know whether Hitler bloody liked bloody linden trees or not. What does she think she’s doing telling us that?’
Harold said, ‘There’s no need to say anything.’
Mum said, ‘I want to say something.’
‘What are you going to say? That you don’t like it that she told us that Hitler liked linden trees?’
‘Doesn’t it matter to you?’
‘Sure it matters.’
‘It matters, so it matters.’
That night a big, big scandal blew up. John Holly and Len Goldman disappeared. Dorothy Diamond was furious. This wasn’t allowed.
‘Where have they gone?’ I asked.
Mum said, ‘The story is that they’ve gone off with women.’
‘Which women?’ Brian said.
‘The Russian one,’ Mum said, ‘and I think she’s got a sister.’
Dorothy Diamond called a meeting and they discussed John Holly, Len Goldman and the Russian women. The question was whether they would come back soon, later, tomorrow or never. The general view was that they would come back soon and it was no problem. The meeting broke up.
They didn’t come back soon or later. They came back the next day, strolling into the hotel. Dorothy Diamond said she wanted to talk to them. As far as I could make out, they took no notice of anything she said. (I think Len Goldman married the woman he met and they lived together for nearly fifty years. I once bumped into them at the Tate Gallery, and I told him I’d read his letters in the Guardian.)
Then we went to Stalinallee.
Stalinallee was something very special, they said. This big new street was where the very best things that the German Democratic Republic was producing could be bought. When we got there I thought the tallest buildings looked like the one near where Nancy and Jimmy worked – Senate House, the London University library. Or like the Shell-Mex building on the Thames that you could see from the South Bank.
On Stalinallee they bought six smoky wine glasses with the money Harold had earned by helping Professor Lamprecht write English textbooks for German children. We had been to his flat, and Harold had chosen some English stories and helped with the exercises and questions. On the way back to the hotel, Harold had said that Lamprecht gave him the creeps. He reckoned Lamprecht was trying to use him to get out of East Germany.
‘Can’t he just leave East Germany if he wants to?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Mum said.
After the visit to Stalinallee it was finally time to go home. We got the train back to England, and on the way an enormous row broke out. John Holly blurted out that Stalinallee looked like a public toilet. If that was socialism, he didn’t want it. People started shouting and poking their fingers at one another, and it all got nasty. There was a lot of exasperated sighing and shrugging and bloody this and bloody that. A kind woman called Rose Betts had a little cry about it.
When we all went our separate ways at Liverpool Street station, some people didn’t even say goodbye to each other.
I loved the smoky glasses. Mum put me in charge of them. I thought they were beautiful and chic, like Juliette Gréco, the suave French cabaret singer. You could swan about holding a long cigarette holder with glasses like that. When people came over, I would give Mum a little ‘Shall I get out the smoky glasses from Stalinallee?’ look. As each one broke I became more upset. By the time I left home there was only one or two left. By the time my father came to move house, I looked in the cupboard and there were none.
That September I started at Brian’s school. This was going to be a big thing.
Harold and Connie called me and Brian into the front room. ‘We’ve got something very important to tell you,’ Harold said.
We sat down.
‘Connie and I have decided to leave the Communist Party.’
I looked at Brian. He looked like this was a big thing, too. Was it? If so, how big?
‘Is it because you didn’t like East Germany?’ I said.
‘No,’ Harold said, ‘it’s got nothing to do with that. It has to do with internal democracy.’
It was one of those moments – and there were plenty of them – when my father sounded utterly convincing, even interesting, but made no sense at all to me. Worse, it looked as if for everyone else in the room he was making perfect sense. Internal democracy, eh? Fair enough. What was internal democracy?
I should say that there hadn’t only been the arguments about whether Stalinallee looked like a public toilet. There was the Twentieth Party Congress explosion, and of course there had been Hungary. The way these had played out in our house and with people like the Kaufmans, the Flowers and the Aprahamians was like this:
When it leaked out that Khrushchev had said terrible things about Stalin at the recent Party Congress, Mum and Harold shook their heads and looked fed up. They were unhappy that they had read about it in the Observer rather than the Daily Worker. For years one of their Sunday pleasures was to read what Victor Zorza, the Observer’s Kremlinologist, wrote about the Soviet Union, and to dismiss what Zorza had written as meshugas (nonsense). But this time, clearly, Khrushchev’s speech wasn’t meshugas and they knew it. Still, as a party member you didn’t want to find this out from the Observer because, as Harold pointed out to me many years later, ‘We couldn’t admit that things were going wrong. We didn’t want to give an inch to the “buggers-are-we’’ [bourgeoisie].’
If there were arguments between them and their friends, I didn’t hear them. I’m guessing there were, particularly between Harold and Peggy Aprahamian. She was always the most loyal, the most certain that it was all working out a treat in the Soviet Union and that Communism was just round the corner in Britain.
Then there was Hungary.
What started as a student revolt on 23 October 1956 turned into a nationwide revolution, until it was crushed by Russian tanks the following month. The Hungarian government collapsed and a network of workers’ councils took over, promising free elections. At first it seemed the Soviet Union was going to stay out of it, but then a major Soviet force invaded. Over 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops were killed, and over 200,000 Hungarians fled as refugees. A Soviet-friendly regime was installed and from the outside, by January, it was back to first base.
This historic moment was the nearest that Mum and Harold came to holding different political views. Harold thought that it was OK for the tanks to go in, because he bought the line that the Hungarian uprising was a CIA plot. I got the feeling that Mum didn’t agree.
These events caused division between my parents and some of their friends. Harold’s great friend and mentor, Brian Pearce, who had lived with us for two or three years between 1952 and 1955, left the Party as a result of events in Hungary. Harold never spoke to him again. This was ‘Big Brian’, as we called him, who had put all his books in the little scullery room next to the shop downstairs. He answered every question that I or little Brian ever asked him. And if he couldn’t answer it, he got down one of his volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica and had us look it up. One Christmas Big Brian gave me The Merry Pranks of Till Eulenspiegel, and as far as I was concerned it was one of the greatest books ever written.
But now, he was no longer welcome in our house. And the only reason we were given was that ‘it was a matter of internal democracy’. Now, my parents were going to leave the Party too, and, as Brian and I sat there, I started to wonder what was going to happen to the Communist camping and all the Communist friends. Were we going to still see them?
We did. Most of them also left the Party. Some of them drifted off later, and some stayed for as long as there was a Party to stay in. We remained friends with all of them. Just about.
The twenty or so years our parents were ‘in the Party’ – from the age of sixteen or seventeen until their late thirties (that is, from 1936 to 1957), marked them for the rest of their lives. For years, I had hundreds of conversations with both of them about history, culture, politics – past and present, personal and global. Over time, their attitudes to the Soviet Union, the British Communist Party, individual Communists and Communist friends changed: one moment defensive, another moment regretful, then bewildered, sometimes grateful, often angry. In the end it would boil down to those moments, back in the myth, when their own skins depended on Communists defending them. Yet they were yearning for something bigger and more universal than freedom for Jews alone: it was the liberation of all humankind they were after. At that moment in their late teenage lives, as they heard about what the fascists were doing in Spain and Germany, and then when the bombs were dropping on London and the stories of the camps were coming out, the fate of everything started to depend incredibly but appropriately, in an awful way, on the great showdown at Stalingrad. And this is why they made their choice and stuck with it for so long.
So when they chose to leave, at that moment in 1957 it felt to them as if they were betraying the very reason why they were alive – even though they had come to the difficult conclusion that this was no longer the road to a better society.
But, as they told us, they hadn’t left over whether there was bad stuff in the Soviet Union. They left over ‘internal democracy’. And so, in all those hundreds of conversations, did I ever get to understand what that meant?
On one or two occasions, Harold said something about the branches within the party not being able to talk to other branches. Or was it that the District wasn’t allowed to talk to the branches? It wasn’t easy to follow exactly what he was saying. He clearly didn’t like talking about it.
Another of the folks at the ‘Institute’ once offered a different theory. She said that by the time all those issues to do with the Communist Party came up, Harold and Connie were on a different route already: the freedoms they were talking about at work were coming more and more into conflict with what was being said in the Communist Party. They couldn’t embrace both.
For years, this thing about internal democracy didn’t really bother me (why would it? I didn’t ever join, and they never re-joined); but a few years ago I started to wonder about this time in their lives, and in my and Brian’s. Because it changed everything, didn’t it? For one thing, what happened immediately was that an ever-widening group of people started to flow in and out of our home, all of whom came from outside the Party. The atmosphere changed.
So I started to nose around those years, 1956–57, hoping to find some mention of the defection of Harold and Connie Rosen in the records. I found that whatever was happening inside the Communist Party at that time was only partly a result of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Hungary wasn’t the whole story.
Rather, a group of people had started to wonder if the problem with the Communist Party in Britain wasn’t just the immediate matter of its views on the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or even Stalin; it lay in how the Party itself was organised. They wondered how the Party could develop ideas and analyse what was going on in the world, while at the same time having freedom of discussion, the freedom of members to share what they thought. How could it be a place that encouraged discussion, while at the same time – and here’s the trickiest part for any organisation, left, centre or right – deciding on policy and sticking to it in the face of opposition? This group believed that democracy could be guaranteed in the way policies ran upwards from branches to leaders. The members should be able to raise the question of how those leaders were chosen and – just as important – were changed. Small wonder Harold hadn’t tried to explain this stuff to Brian and me. Most adults find such things unutterably boring to discuss, let alone a fifteen- and an eleven-year-old.
What happened in 1956 and ’57 was that a group of people came up with some ideas about how a party calling itself ‘Communist’ could do things differently. They envisaged a new system that would do away with a leadership committee that never changed. It would put an end to the semi-secret, mysterious ‘Political Committee’ that seemed to decide things without telling anyone else. This new policy would allow people to have alternative ‘positions’ on things, and branches to talk to branches. The group pointed out that the organisation they had had so far (the Communist Party of Great Britain) had developed in a very different historical place and time: in pre-First World War Russia, rather than 1950s Britain. These members – including my parents – believed another kind of organisation was needed.
Who were the dissenters? At the heart of this group was none other than the historian who I read in the sixth form and at university in order to understand how Tudor society evolved into the great upheavals of the English Civil War (or Revolution): Christopher Hill.
As I looked closely at who said what to whom and how the Party went on to reject what the Christopher Hill group said, I made a note of how many of the people deciding these things were paid Party workers. It was their jobs that were under threat. The Communist Party paid them to act within a structure that the Hill group were attacking, and those same paid members sat on a committee that decided that what the Hill group said was wrong! Well, they weren’t going to give the thumbs-up to a report that said their jobs shouldn’t exist, were they? They weren’t going to vote themselves out of the door.
I wonder if Harold and Mum were aware of all that. They might have been wrestling with these discussions as we were packing to go to East Germany, or as I was getting ready to go to secondary school, right up to the moment they called Brian and me into the front room for the chat. A few years later, Harold would regale me with stories of rigged committees for school exam boards, university academic boards or government curriculum bodies, where people who know how to run committees arrange it so that the committees produce the ‘right’ results. Surely he would have spotted that the Communist Party was doing just that?
But there’s a farcical element, too, which I think they both would have noticed. Once Christopher Hill’s little group had been seen off (and the Party had bled even more members than the thousands who quit over Hungary), the remaining leaders and committees congratulated themselves on the correctness of their position. They trumpeted the growing number of signs in that year – that month, even – showing socialism was just around the corner, and stressed the crucial importance of their own role in building it. Given that the organisation was by then tiny, I felt distinctly reminded of that moment when the King of Lilliput brags and boasts and threatens Gulliver, while sitting in his hand.
And yet these Lilliputians were strutting about in the shadow of what Khrushchev himself had announced from the podium of the Twentieth Party Congress: the terror of the Stalin era. It felt absurd and grotesque … tiny little puppet clowns, sitting on podiums congratulating themselves for bringing us to the verge of socialism.
Did Mum and Harold see it that way?