Cambridge, 12 October 1937
To: The Chief Constable
Sir,
I beg to report that at 7.30 p.m. on the 12th inst. with Detective Constable BRIGSTOCKE, I went to the Town Hall, Cambridge, where we witnessed the exhibition of two films by KINO entitled The Factory Lights and If War Should Come.
The meeting took place under the auspices of no particular organisation, but there was undoubtedly a Communist Party flavour to it.
The former film, The Factory Lights, depicted a number of scenes purporting to have happened during the Revolution in Russia, and the second If War Should Come showed the Soviets’ fighting services in action against an imaginary enemy. In neither film was there anything to which objection could be taken, although these films are under consideration for re-categorisation as banned material in line with previous films distributed by KINO.
The audience numbered approximately 300–350, the majority of whom were strangers to me.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J.W. Denton
Joan is tired. It has been a long afternoon and the light outside has faded. ‘How much longer do you intend to keep me here?’
Ms. Hart glances at the clock. She purses her lips. ‘There’s a lot to get through before Friday.’
Joan looks up at her, suddenly struck by the thought that if the announcement is delayed indefinitely, then it might never come to anything. She might die of natural causes first. ‘But why Friday? It’s not set in stone, is it?’
Ms. Hart does not look at her. She underlines something in her notes, and then repeats the action three times. ‘I’ve already told you that your name is being released on Friday in the House of Commons. If you’re going to present anything in your defence, you must say so before then in order for it to be admissible.’
‘But that’s what I mean, why Friday? Surely the agenda in the House of Commons can be changed.’
‘No, it can’t,’ Ms. Hart says.
‘But—’
‘I’ll ask you again. Would you like us to call a lawyer for you? You’re perfectly entitled to have one. There’s legal aid—’
Joan interrupts with a shake of her head. She is acutely aware that any solicitor she calls is likely to be acquainted with Nick, or will at least know of him. She is not prepared to take that risk. ‘No. You don’t have to keep asking.’
Ms. Hart looks at her, and then glances at the screen behind Joan and raises her shoulders in a small shrug. ‘It’s my job to ask.’ She pauses. ‘All right, let’s get on.’
‘But I would like to know where I’ll be sleeping tonight.’
‘You’ll be allowed home. We’ll take you in the car. As I said before, at present you haven’t been arrested, but there will be restrictions on your freedom until such time as the Home Secretary has considered your case. You’ll be under curfew, of course, and tagged.’
‘Tagged? Like a teenage delinquent?’
There is a pause. ‘No, Mrs. Stanley. Like any person whose whereabouts are of extreme interest to the Security Services. It will only be until Friday.’
‘And then?’
‘Well, that depends, of course.’
‘Of course.’ Joan looks down at her hands, resigning herself to the prospect of further questioning but also allowing herself to feel a tiny bit encouraged that she will be allowed home at the end of the day, albeit tagged. Reluctantly she takes the police report handed to her by Ms. Hart and peers at it through her reading glasses. There is an advertisement stapled to it, a small square of paper—See the Mighty Red Army in Action!—which attempts to entice audiences with promises of mass parachute descents. A KINO Films production, admission 5d, pay at the door.
Ms. Hart is watching her closely. ‘Were you there?’
‘How would I know?’ Joan retorts, her voice raised in exasperation. ‘This was nearly seventy years ago. You can’t possibly expect me to remember whether I was there or not.’
‘So you might have gone?’
‘I said I don’t remember.’
‘But you’re not denying there was a possibility that this was the sort of event you might have been attracted to.’
Joan opens her mouth and closes it again. ‘Everyone went to that sort of thing in those days.’ She stops. There is a flush in her cheeks. She does remember this particular film—how could she have forgotten it?—but it is alarming to see that they might know this too. How could they? How could her presence have left a trace? ‘I really don’t remember. And I don’t understand why it’s so important.’
Ms. Hart looks at Joan. Her expression is concentrated. ‘Was that the first time you met him?’
‘Who?’
‘Leo Galich.’
Oh. The sound of his name is like an explosion in her chest. It has been so long since she heard anyone say it out loud. She is aware of Ms. Hart’s pen hovering above her notepad, the small red light on the camera in the corner of the room and the unseen presence of Mr. Adams behind the glass screen, unmoving, listening.
When they arrive, Joan is surprised by how many people are already thronging into the hall. She and Sonya pay their entry fee and are given small scraps of paper in lieu of tickets, but there is no definite seating system. The lights are set low and young men are carrying benches into the hall from a side storage room. There is a drinks stand at the back with a large metal tea urn and rows of mismatched mugs. It is nothing like the cinema in St. Albans, with its velvet seats and feature ceiling that changes from dusky clouds to starry night sky during the course of the programme, and where the whole auditorium is perfumed with Yardley’s Lavender. And very different too from the rarefied atmosphere of the fundraising event they passed on their way out, the bazaar stalls in Peile Hall being set up by the girls under the supervision of Miss Strachey, the college Principal, a long, thin, clever woman with short hair and round glasses who would not know what to make of all this confusion.
Joan and Sonya find seats towards the rear of the hall and Sonya goes to get them a drink before the film starts. Left alone, Joan folds her hands on her lap in an attempt to appear relaxed in this strange environment, and she casts her eyes around, trying to guess which one Sonya’s cousin might be.
It is several minutes before she spots someone whom she is almost certain must be Leo. He has a shock of dark hair that stands out against the bright whiteness of his collar, and the same translucent, almost golden, skin as Sonya, the same dark brown eyes behind the wire-framed spectacles, the same tall, willowy frame. He is standing just in front of the stage, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets so that his jacket bunches slightly. He is with a group of three other men, and he is listening to one of the others intently, his whole body inclined towards the speaker as if he could not bear to miss a single word, and it is this that makes Joan absolutely convinced that this must be him: he has that same impression of energy, or perhaps enthusiasm, that she finds so appealing in Sonya. She watches him from a distance, absently at first and then more deliberately as he tilts his head in response to the other man’s words. How wonderful to be listened to like that, she thinks.
He seems to spot Sonya as she carries the two mugs of tea back to her seat, and he strides towards her. He knows he is being looked at. Not by Joan (although, yes, she is looking at him) but by others in the hall too. Women with handbags clasped on their laps glance up at him as he passes, while a row of girls from the teacher training college in Bedford (she can tell by their textbooks) cross their legs almost in unison, causing a shadow of a smirk to flutter across his face. When he reaches Sonya, they kiss on both cheeks in the European manner. He seems to say something about the fur coat she has borrowed again this evening, running his fingers along the soft arm of it, and Joan waits for Sonya to turn and acknowledge her, but Sonya does not. She says something else and then laughs, spinning away from him and continuing back towards Joan.
‘Was that him?’ Joan asks once Sonya has squeezed along the pew to her seat, her voice sounding tight and not as casual as she’d like.
‘Who?’
‘Your cousin.’
Sonya hands the two mugs of tea to Joan while she takes off the fur coat. ‘Yes. Pretty, isn’t he?’
Joan opens her mouth and closes it again. Yes, she thinks, that is exactly the right description. Admittedly he is not as rugged as Gary Cooper but there is something so smooth about him, so perfectly symmetrical, that it wouldn’t be quite enough to call him handsome. ‘Is he? I didn’t notice.’
‘Well, you’ll have another chance in a second. He’s coming over now.’ Sonya leans back, waiting for him to approach. He slips into the pew in front of them and turns to Joan, holding out his hand for her to take.
‘You must be Joan,’ he says, giving a small bow. ‘I’ve heard all about you.’
Joan feels her cheeks flush and is relieved when Sonya interrupts by batting Leo on the arm with the back of her hand. ‘Why do you always insist on bowing like that? Sometimes I wonder if you’re not the most middle-class person I’ve ever known.’
‘How many times must I tell you?’ Leo says, talking to Sonya but still looking at Joan, ‘I am a socialist, not an anarchist. We must keep some decorum.’
There is a sudden burst of noise as the volume of the sound amplifiers is turned up too high, and then adjusted back down. The screen flickers. ‘Oh look, Leo, it’s starting.’ Sonya tugs at his arm, impatient for him to move out of the way.
Leo glances at her and nods, but instead of moving out of the way he leans further towards Joan so that Sonya is momentarily excluded from the conversation. His sudden proximity, the nearness of him, causes her to wonder if she is having a small heart attack. ‘I hope you find it interesting. You must tell me what you think afterwards, if my cousin will allow it.’
‘Of course,’ she says, managing to compose herself sufficiently to lower her eyes a little so that she can look up at him through her mascara-dusted lashes, but he does not stay to appreciate this performance. Instead he turns to pat Sonya abruptly on the shoulder and then strides back to his place at the front of the hall.
The evening begins with a rendition of ‘The Red Flag’ which is accompanied by clapping. Once the action begins, it takes Joan a short while to work out that there are actually seven or eight main characters (Joan cannot be altogether certain) played by only three actors with varying degrees of facial hair and accented speech by which they are intended to be distinguishable from one another. It is called The Factory Lights, and seems to have a mildly scandalous plot about a woman who is obliged to share a small apartment with two men as a result of a housing shortage in an industrial town in Russia.
Halfway through, the reel runs out and the screen glares white. There is a moment of silence while the second reel is fitted into the projector.
‘Well?’ Sonya leans in and asks Joan in a loud whisper.
Joan hesitates. What is there to say about it? That it’s the worst film she’s ever seen and she much prefers Bright Eyes? That she hopes Gary Cooper will turn up in the second half? ‘It’s interesting.’
Sonya laughs. ‘That’s what my uncle taught me to say when I didn’t like something.’
Joan starts to protest, but just then the music blares to announce the start of the second half and Sonya sits back, seemingly unconcerned by Joan’s response. But what else could she have said? There is no romance, no adventure. She knows she cannot say this to Leo if he comes over to seek her opinion at the end as promised. She must find something more substantial to say to him, something insightful and intelligent.
The second film is shorter and follows almost immediately from the first after another reel change. It begins with a Red Army air drop over Germany in which hundreds of men parachute from aeroplanes like flying ants, and then use sticks to invade a series of German tanks, battering down their opponents with a violence that causes Joan to look away. Near the end of the film, one character turns to another and says: ‘It’s not really fair, is it, this battle?’
‘What do you mean?’ the other says. ‘That we have sticks and they have tanks?’
The first man shakes his head, and the music softens, pauses, and then builds up gently behind him as he speaks. ‘Would you hit a blind man? We may not have tanks, but at least we know what we’re fighting for.’
The camera sweeps backwards as the two men embrace, and there is a burst of percussion to accompany the rush of credits which confirms Joan’s suspicions that the acting company was understaffed, and the audience breaks into applause. Joan joins in, not wishing to appear impolite.
There is a buzz of conversation around them as everyone discusses various aspects of the films. What was intended by this scene or that? Was the flower on the factory floor a metaphor for hope or for crushed individualism? Joan listens, and feels chided by these overheard conversations. She did not even notice the flower. She turns to Sonya. ‘I’m not sure I understood all the references.’
Sonya laughs. ‘It’s always like that to begin with. It’ll be easier next time,’ she adds, casting around for Leo. She spots him standing at the front of the room, talking to a slender girl in a black coat wearing a pillbox hat over her blonde curls.
‘Who’s he talking to?’
Sonya narrows her eyes in an amused smile. ‘So you did notice this time?’
Joan flushes and shakes her head to protest. ‘I was just . . . I meant, I didn’t think we should interrupt if—’
‘It’s all right. I’m only teasing. I don’t know who she is.’ She buttons the fur coat up at the throat and then flicks it out over her shoulders so that it flows out like a cape. It is wildly inappropriate for the occasion but nobody seems to notice. Perhaps it is the headscarf that tones it down, giving it a touch of the Siberian to counter all that mink glamour. ‘Nobody important, don’t worry.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
Sonya waves her hand to dismiss Joan’s protestations. ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here before Leo corners us. I’m hungry.’
Joan doesn’t mention this excursion when she writes home the following morning. She thinks of mentioning it to her father who would undoubtedly be interested, but it would be odd to send a letter addressed only to him, and she is wary of inciting her mother’s suspicions, Soviet propaganda films being likely to fall into the category of things that would garner disapproval. She writes instead of other news, of hockey games and her part in the Freshers’ play, and mentions how pleased her supervisor had been with her first essay. She writes a separate note to Lally in which she draws a picture of the college kitten and adopts a mock-serious tone—‘I hope the newts in the school pond are quite well’—and then she folds them into an envelope to post on her way to the science faculty.
She is already late for her first lecture. The pavements are busy today, thronging with people. Everything is breezy and bright. Three girls whom Joan recognises from the sherry party are sitting on a bench on the wide part of the bridge on Silver Street as Joan hurries past, each of them knitting purple scarves. KNIT FOR SPAIN, the banner above them reads. The girls are talking and laughing as they knit and Joan slows her pace a little, thinking that perhaps this is something she might do. She knows that the British government has declared itself officially neutral in Spain, but it cannot be a bad thing to send scarves and socks to people who need them, even if it is against government policy. An older man stops to drop some coins into their collection tin.
As she walks on, she hears someone call out her name and she looks around, taking a step out to the side and into the road as she does so. And then, so quickly that she does not have time to register the exact order of events, there is a pummelling against the side of her body, as if someone is punching her in the stomach and sides, and then her arms are up around her head and the road is jolting beneath her as her body crumples to the ground.
‘Another step, young lady, and you’d have been done for.’
The voice is close to her head and there is something familiar about the accent even though it is hard to place. She feels a hand on her neck, and allows herself to be shuffled up to a sitting position. The concrete wall of the bridge on the far side of the pavement is dazzlingly white and her body feels sore. She looks at her rescuer, and realises why his voice is so familiar. It is Leo. Up close, he is even more beautiful than she remembers.
‘What happened?’ she asks.
‘You stepped out in front of a bicycle.’ He grins. ‘The cyclist probably came off worse though.’
‘Oh no!’ she exclaims, glancing around. A little way down the road she sees a pale-haired man tugging a bicycle over to the kerb. He is rubbing his head with one hand and holding a cloth cap in the other. He straightens his jacket, unwinds his scarf and then reties it. The chain is dangling from the back wheel of his bike and the handlebars are no longer properly aligned.
‘Is he hurt?’
The man turns and nods at Leo, who makes an apologetic gesture with his hands in response.
‘He’s all right.’ Leo grins. He picks up her satchel and then holds out his hand to her. ‘Come on, then.’
Joan hesitates. She takes hold of Leo’s proffered hand and allows him to help her to her feet. Her legs feel weak and shaky, and there is a fizz of heat along her spine. She holds his hand for a little longer than necessary, and then she looks him up and down and smiles.
He accompanies her to the science faculty. It is only a short walk along the narrow pavement next to Queen’s College and then a shortcut along Botolph Lane. Joan’s body is still stinging from the impact and her head feels light, but on the whole, she considers that she hasn’t come off too badly. ‘I’m sorry for causing such a fuss,’ she says as they start to walk. ‘I don’t know why I stepped out without looking.’
Leo looks at her, his eyes narrowing a little as he does. ‘Well, if I hadn’t called out to you it would never have happened. And I wanted to find you anyway. I only turned away for a minute yesterday and when I looked back you’d both vanished. Like two pumpkins in a fairy tale.’
Joan laughs. ‘Or princesses,’ she corrects him, surprised that Leo would make a reference like that. He seems too serious to be interested in fairy tales, too distracted by those heavy red books he is carrying under his arm to have much time for fanciful narratives.
But it turns out that Leo Galich has a thing about fairy tales. He likes them. He tells her that they remind him of home, of the clear mirrored lake beside his family’s old summer house in Russia before they moved to Germany, of the wide fields spread out like a floor under the great ceiling of sky. Grain and birdsong and too-hot summers followed by knee-deep winters. It is impossible to be Russian, he tells her, and not have a thing about fairy tales.
‘Communism,’ he continues, after a long period of unspoken thought, ‘now there’s a fairy tale. The whole of the Russian revolution was built on a fairy tale.’
‘I thought it was because of the war. And not enough bread.’
Leo hesitates at this interruption, and she notices the crooked whiteness of his teeth as he replies. ‘That as well.’
‘So those heavy books you’re carrying are just a decoy, are they?’ Joan asks. ‘They look serious but they’re really full of pumpkins and princesses.’
Leo frowns and then sees that she is joking and gives a short laugh of surprise. He looks at her, his head tilted as he seems to appraise her. ‘Sonya said you were different from the others,’ he says at last, breaking the silence.
‘Did she?’ Joan asks, flattered to hear this indirect compliment.
He nods, and gestures towards the books he is carrying. ‘They’re documents of numbers actually. Not very interesting reading, unless you know what you’re looking for.’
‘And what are you looking for?’
He glances at her. ‘Proof.’
‘Proof?’
‘That it works.’
‘Communism?’
‘Yes. Or at least, that the Soviet system works.’
Joan looks up at him in surprise. ‘And does it?’
‘Put it this way, Soviet Russia is the only state in the world to offer full employment. There are no pockets of chronic unemployment like you find in Jarrow or South Wales. The British government claims that unemployment is nothing more than a minor blip in the system, a temporary malfunction of the markets. But that’s not true.’
He stops, taking Joan’s arm and turning her to look at him. She feels the warmth of his fingers against her skin, and she has to bite her lip to force herself to concentrate on what he is saying. ‘Well, if it’s not that, what is it caused by?’
Leo nods, evidently pleased with the question. ‘Short-sightedness. Marx showed years ago that unemployment is an inevitable by-product of capitalism, but it suits the government to allow it to happen. It’s a way of allowing the market to right itself without them having to make any effort.’
‘So do you think Britain should be doing what America’s doing? A sort of British New Deal with public works projects?’
Leo shakes his head. He taps the books under his arm. ‘If a society is properly planned and organised there will never be any unemployment. Every person will be able to contribute. No waste, no surplus. I mean, just look at the figures. Industrial production in the USSR is six and a half times greater this year than it was in 1928. Capital accumulation is nine times as great. The numbers are little short of miraculous. And it’s all because the whole Soviet system was planned in advance on an industrial scale.’ He grins. ‘It works. It’s a fairy tale.’
Joan glances up at him, wondering how Stalin fits into this picture of social perfection. ‘And no fairy tale would be complete without a wolf. Is that it?’
‘That’s a separate point. The wolf isn’t really necessary to the story. The system just has to be shown to work first.’
‘So he could be left out of the sequel?’
Leo smiles although his expression does not give anything away. ‘Potentially, yes,’ he says, and then falls silent. They are approaching the science faculty now, and the sudden awkwardness that has arisen is alleviated by the sound of an aeroplane droning above them. They both glance upwards, but the noise is too loud for conversation.
Leo looks at Joan and grins. ‘Do you know the Russian word for aeroplane?’ he asks once it has passed.
‘No.’
‘Samolet. It means ‘magic carpet.’ Don’t you think that’s a wonderful description?’
Joan smiles. As he speaks she gazes up at him, noticing that the bright skin around his eyes appears almost luminous, and for a brief moment she finds herself wondering if his whole body glows like that.