When I met Eric Hobsbawm he was a groovy single man about town, much in demand socially, as he was known to be good company. He was an offbeat academic and very friendly with his students, teaching history in the evenings at Birkbeck College. As well as writing history books, he was a journalist on all manner of subjects, writing reviews and articles, including a jazz column in the New Statesman. For this, he had to hang out in clubs in Soho, including strip bars, and he acquired a pseudonym, Francis Newton, to make sure his students only asked him questions about history. He had been a member of the Communist Party since his schoolboy days in Berlin in 1931.
My brother Walter now had a wife, Dorothy Morgan. They were already raising a family, living in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and I spent a fair amount of my spare time with them. Dorothy was a mature student at Birkbeck College and Eric was her supervisor. Walter and Dorothy gave a dinner party, and ‘Walter’s sister’ and ‘Dorothy’s supervisor’ were both invited. That’s how Eric and I met. I think the chemistry between us was there right from the beginning. Neither of us could recollect any of the other guests present, though they were definitely there. Eric had a beautiful tenor speaking voice I was attracted to, and his eyes hardly left me, even when he was engaged in conversation with other guests.
Something definitely changed in me after that evening in November 1961. I remember being bothered that Eric had said he was going off on a trip soon. I was living temporarily in my brother Victor’s flat in Mansfield Street, London W1. He’d gone away on a journey and had lent me his gorgeous place until he returned. I shared it with two girlfriends and we decided to organise a dinner party (my idea), each of us inviting a male friend.
While I have a vague recollection of that evening, it is a different memory that still stays with me: I was the first of us to telephone the other, and Eric was very enthusiastic about accepting the invitation. Yes indeed, he was free to come to the dinner in a week’s time, but wanted to know what I was doing now this very minute. I dodged that word now. This was the early sixties, when nice girls would feel it was too fast to doing something like go along with him to help buy groceries for his flat as a first date. Had it been in the 1970s, after seeing those engaging Woody Allen films, I might have easily have accepted.
The fact is, he was supposed to be in Cuba with a group of intellectuals at a conference also attended by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. He was looking forward to talking with the other travellers, particularly the activist and writer Arnold Kettle and the theatre director Joan Littlewood. But there was a fault on the plane discovered at Prague and they had to return to London. Eric felt very fed up about his wasted time, about his empty diary and at having no provisions at home. At the exact moment when he gloomily stepped into his flat, I telephoned. It was a lucky start. The stars were aligned. Eric’s aborted trip to Cuba did take place in the new year.
When Vic returned from his travels, I moved back into my Paddington Street attic flat over a fishmonger’s (now a boutique), and Eric and I began to see each other quite often. What did we do? Like millions of others, we talked about ourselves, and being forty-five and twenty-nine, there was plenty to say. Eric had even been married! Goodness me. His classes were three evenings a week and the other evenings we often tried to meet, going out to supper, cinema, concerts and so on, until simply, ‘Your place or mine?’
Eric introduced me to an architect, Martin Frishman and his mother Margaret, a painter. We became firm friends and his mother painted a picture of my father and later another one of Eric. Both were traditional and beautiful large oil portraits. Unlike La Bohème, this was my introduction to haute bohème. Martin’s large studio flat was in Belgravia, and the previous tenant had been Noel Coward. Martin told me that the difference between bohemians and other people was that bohemians wash their dishes before they eat rather than after. Many of Eric’s friends were artists like these.
I wanted to introduce Eric to my cousin Peter Nettl, with whom I had always got on very well and who sometimes invited me on family holidays and business trips. I remember good times in Sardinia and Cairo with them. Peter had left academia to become a businessman, and had written a very fine biography of Rosa Luxemburg, the activist murdered by anti-communist paramilitaries in Germany in 1919. He was thrilled that I was going out with Eric. I gave a small dinner party in my flat at which Peter commented on Eric’s telling way of carving a roast leg of lamb. He insisted that despite his fluent German, Eric would be a useless spy, as all would know he could not be anything but an Englishman. Eric, Peter and I could not remain friends for life because, to our perpetual horror, Peter was killed in a Northwest Airlines’ plane crash some years later in America. His wife Marietta and three others survived the crash. Their daughter Andrea, now a true culture vulture and a Wagnerian, is and has been my friend since she was seven years old.
Eric was often away, either abroad or at universities around the country, mainly giving papers for seminars. Absences seemed to make the heart grow fonder and our merry dating life continued for almost a year. However, there was a glitch. Eric had won a very generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to travel around Latin America for three months to continue his research into ‘primitive rebels’, a concept that he had used as the title for his second book, but was still investigating. Suddenly this sharpened our minds; to avoid the shock of such a very long separation, things ought to move swiftly between us.
Our relationship was known to Walter and Dorothy, but not as yet to my parents. The person I confided in was Gretl Lenz, who was a very special cousin and also my mother’s best friend. Gretl had always played a crucial role in all our lives since we were little in the old Vienna days, and she was very often amongst us, always living nearby; we all loved her and never wanted her to go home to her difficult husband and dachshunds, but she did. I suppose Gretl’s name must have been chosen because her brother’s middle name was Hans – maybe a touch of Austrian humour. She did not have children, but was very family minded and close to her high-flying international lawyer brother and his very English wife Barbara and, above all, their beloved daughter Patsy, who has always been a close cousin. Gretl’s wisdom was always spot on and quick. I took Eric to meet her first. They got on famously and she paved the way for us.
One evening I accompanied Eric to the George Shearing jazz quintet at the Royal Festival Hall, which he was covering for the New Statesman. He said something very unromantic like, ‘I think we should take out our diaries and find time for a wedding before I have to leave.’ That was the proposal and there was certainly no bent knee. It was, however, not so simple, because a register office had to be booked at least three weeks in advance for a wedding. That was a shame, and the only way we could arrange it was to go on our two-week honeymoon first, have our wedding second, and Eric would leave for his research trip third. For the honeymoon we had decided on Bulgaria, straight to Sofia via Vienna, which included a night at the opera, and then on to the small, charming resort Golden Sands on the Black Sea. Eric was delighted to see some people there reading Pushkin out loud to one another in the square.
More or less as soon as we got back in October 1962, we married at Marylebone register office. Martin Frishman was our best man and a reception followed at my parents’ house. The next day we went on a short second honeymoon. Vic had gracefully lent us his car for the weekend and we drove to Castle Combe in Wiltshire. Eric told me how scared he was of marriage. He snobbishly connected it with having boring holidays in a caravan by the seaside.
Five days after our return to London, Eric was off. Before embarking, a man at the airport asked, ‘Is your father also going to Buenos Aires?’ It made me laugh. I had not yet started on Eric’s wardrobe and that unflattering greenish coloured coat (ugh!) made him look as old as Methuselah.
Leaping ahead nearly half a century, I can tell you another man who must have been there at the airport. He was from MI5, where it was discovered that Eric’s research trip was sponsored by the American Rockefeller Foundation. They sent this man to spy on Eric, presumably for his US contacts. All of this was revealed in a fascinating article by Frances Stonor Saunders in the London Review of Books3 when Eric’s MI5 file became viewable in 2015. Eric had so much wanted to see his MI5 file, but permission was always refused. Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today and also an intimate family friend, accompanied me to view the files when they were released. It certainly made dispiriting reading. It seems the spooks disliked Eric intensely. They didn’t approve of his looks or his clothes, and there were a few anti-Semitic remarks. More than that, I think they hated him because they had not been able to find anything on him. And that, quite simply, was because there was nothing to find. What did they expect? Surely an open member of the Communist Party, who wore this proudly on his sleeve, would hardly be a spy. But they went on digging.
All throughout our two honeymoons and one wedding, we were in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the US and Russia on the brink of war. It was just beginning to settle, but Eric’s last words to me before he flew off were, ‘Should things go wrong and war does break out, then buy a one-way ticket to Argentina. There is enough money in the bank and I’ll meet you in Buenos Aires.’
OH! Heart pumping, I had not reckoned with that. Did I really know my man well enough? But life had fallen into my lap, and I was just going to live it. I think that was how I felt.
3 April 2015, vol. 37, no. 7.