Party animals, p.12
Party Animals, page 12
Again, Sam was away from home on Party duties for a few days, but seems to have given Lavender some homework to do regarding what Communists called ‘the balance of class forces’ and the circumstances in which an alliance of the British people might come together to topple monopoly capitalism. So, after the love-you/miss-yous, Lavender wrote, as if getting down to business:
Now to your exercise. I should imagine that those sections of the people you mention could be united against the monopolists for various reasons. The technicians and scientists would be frustrated by the halt in technical development, hence their revolt, the petty traders and producers would be ruined, since they have no vast reserves of capital and could not compete with the monopoly capitalists, so their only resource would be to unite with the working class, large numbers of whom would be unemployed. Presented with the socialist picture where ‘the sky’s the limit’ where technical development and expansion is concerned etc what else could they do?
I have no idea whether Lavender was relying for her answers upon books, remembered conversations or had put the issue before some of her own friends. Whichever it was, she knew how to end her answer with a beguiling political naïvety:
I expect this is the most complete example of muddled thinking you’ve ever come across, and I see now I’ve left out the managers. I don’t really see where they come in at all, I shall leave that for you to tell me.
Perhaps Sam, on his return, taught my mother the correct position of the managing classes on the British road to socialism. She, in return, certainly had things she wanted to teach him. In Lavender the genteel and the rebellious contended, just as in the Party the puritanical and the bohemian battled one another. But there was no escaping the fact that aspects of her behaviour, such as her table manners, had been formed among the provincial haute bourgeoisie of the 1930s. My father’s table manners, however, had been based on nothing other than the need to eat and drink what you had been given before someone else took it away. And in this one respect he repelled her, eating with his mouth open, talking with his mouth full and deploying whichever item of cutlery came to hand first.
There is a story in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, concerning Sir Walter Raleigh and his son. They were sitting next to each other at dinner, when the young man started to recount how, that day, he had met a London whore and suggested that they transact some business. No way, she had replied, for she had had sex with his father just half an hour earlier. An astonished and humiliated Sir Walter responded to this massive impertinence by giving his son what my dad always called ‘a clip round the ear’. The son in turn smacked the face of the man on his other side, saying ‘Box about, it will come to my father anon!’
So my mother, not wanting continually to confront my father with his solecisms, instead persistently and sometimes physically corrected those of her children. He couldn’t be shouted at for holding a knife in the wrong hand, but we could, and he would surely get the message. Which, eventually, he did.
I have met Catholics, lapsed and practising, whose childhood experience seems to have been very similar. Some retained an affection and a connection with the faith often beyond any residual belief in God. Their social and familial existence had been defined by their Catholicism, both in their prayer and their partying. Talking to them, I realised they were scarcely aware themselves of how they had been affected by the simple fact of having been raised in the Church of Rome. But something said or implied would tell an ideological Henry Higgins about their past.
Our politics were not the product of overt indoctrination but of imbibing, over the years, all the tenets and preoccupations – spoken and unspoken, conscious and unconscious – of the Party. It wasn’t ‘do as I say’, it was ‘do what seems natural’. My mother, however, always had a keen sense of everyone’s obligations and kept a gimlet eye on whether my siblings and I attended meetings and even ‘socials’. She would take against some of our friends if she thought they were discouraging us from our duties. But this was mostly a pursed lip and slight beetling of the brows.
By the time I was born, a third of the membership of the Party still had parents who were Communists. By the late 1970s these ‘red diaper babies’, as they are known in America, included the deputy editor of the Morning Star, the editor of the theoretical magazine Marxism Today, the editor of the Party’s weekly newsletter, the full-time student organiser and the Secretary and the National Organiser of the Young Communist League.
Some Party kids felt, long afterwards, that they had suffered as a result of their parents’ commitment. In 1997 Children of the Revolution was published in which British Communist offspring told their stories. Co-edited by Gillian Slovo, the book was summarised by its publishers as relating an essentially negative narrative. It explored, they said, ‘how being communist made many children feel isolated from their school mates, and how they were often made to feel secondary to political activity’. Among those interviewed were the Guardian journalist Martin Kettle, whose father Arnold Kettle was a leading Party academic; the comedian Alexei Sayle, the children’s writer Michael Rosen and the Scots poet, Jackie Kay.
Kay and Rosen had both enjoyed their parents’ radicalism, but Kettle in particular felt that his Party upbringing had been bad for him. He felt ‘very, very deeply’ that it had been ‘stifling’. There was, for example, the puritanism of socialist self-denial. ‘You felt,’ he said, that ‘it was wrong to be too concerned about yourself.’ What he was talking about was a Party variant on the ‘how can you leave that on your plate when children are starving in Africa?’ guilt trip. Why should you complain about your own circumstances when people were dying for the cause from the Congo to Alabama? Then there was the phenomenon of the lover of humanity in the abstract, who in real life loathed people.
And for the children of particularly active parents there was the problem of Jellybyism. Readers of Dickens’s Bleak House will recall how Ada and Richard, the wards in the endless Jarndyce legal case, are taken to overnight lodgings in London with a Mrs Jellyby. When they arrive at the Jellyby residence they find a child outside with its head stuck between the railings, and inside a house in total disorder, other children in a rather grimy and neglected state and the lady of the house herself dictating philanthropic letters to Caddy, her oldest daughter. Mrs Jellyby clearly cares more for the children of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha than she does for her own children, or indeed for herself.
Certainly we were poor. By the time I was born Sam had been on a Party full-timer’s pay for a decade. This was supposed to be set at the average worker’s wage, but had slipped over the years. By the mid 1950s it was something like half of what a coal miner earned. George Guy, a worker in the sheet metal industry who went on to become a trade union leader, turned down a big Party job because ‘on the party wage I’d find it difficult to adjust my standard of living’. My mother supplemented Sam’s earnings with part-time clerical work at a doctor’s surgery in Kentish Town. Every now and then her guardian in Worcestershire, now very elderly, would send a small cash sum, or she would get an ironic dividend from a small number of shares that he had bought for her.
This situation was paradoxical. We lived in a semi-detached house in a North London suburb called the Holly Lodge Estate, which my mother had been given. The rooms were full of books collected by both Sam and Lavender. But we had no money. The difficulties faced by my mother in bringing up a family surface regularly in her diaries. In July 1957 she wrote to my father – away at a Party school – that she had made one loaf of bread last four days. This was for a family of four.
In the cold winter of 1960 money for coal ran out and Lavender recorded sitting in the living room in her dead aunt’s fur coat. On one of our grim camping holidays in Devon, when I was just nine, she wrote, we ‘were very short of money, so not much to eat’. It wasn’t until we pitched up at my aunt’s farm a few miles away that any of us ‘growing children’ ate as much as we felt we needed.
I remember this feeling of shortage, of lack of plenitude, very well. Most of the other children in my class at primary school had money for sweets at break-time, but I didn’t. My best friends got two or three times as much pocket money as me. We dressed in cast-off clothes and our house was shabby. One friend came round to tea and then reported back to classmates that we ‘sat around on orange boxes’. I was always asking for things that the other kids had but that my parents couldn’t afford and I can see now that Sam – who worked a sixteen-hour day and most weekends – hated this constant complaining. To him, in one famous phrase used when I was in my early teens, I was ‘mean and grasping’.
This relative poverty had other consequences. As Lavender noted one autumn, when I was diagnosed with pneumonia, ‘David v. poorly all day. Didn’t go to work. 15 shillings down drain!!’ Since there was absolutely no chance of affording any childcare, the onset of more marginal illnesses (like chickenpox or measles) could not be regarded as a reason for taking a day off school. It would simply cost too much. Several times I was sent home from school having arrived with one disease or another, a high temperature, or a cough that you could hear at 100 yards.
Lavender’s most Jellybyesque quality was that, despite our poverty, if she got a windfall from her shares, she would give a large part of it to one of the myriad ‘fighting funds’ that the Party, the Daily Worker or various international campaigns were continually running. Among her papers after her death I found a letter from John Gollan, written at a time when we were absolutely on our uppers, thanking her for her ‘incredibly generous contribution’ but wondering whether she could afford it. He knew well, through Elsie, that she couldn’t. My guess would be that shares in BP or some other multinational had just paid off, and that her conscience (and, possibly, her sense of mischief) required that the money be ploughed back into destroying the power of organisations like BP.
So there we were: books, elevated discussion, decent house, no money. Anthony Trollope would have recognised us without any difficulty. On account of Lavender’s country upbringing of ponies and pets, we were never without a dog, though our dogs – male and female – were not neutered, often escaped from the garden and became notorious in the neighbourhood either for being on heat or for siring multitudes of puppies. We also maintained, at any given time, at least a couple of gerbils, hamsters (our cat, a great eater of hamsters, was not replaced when she died), rats or budgerigars.
We would have been short of money even if we hadn’t maintained a minor menagerie. But some of our hardship was offset by the peculiar nature of what would doubtless now be called ‘the Communist community’. There was always, for example, a ‘Party builder’ who would do jobs more cheaply for comrades than for other people. (Not necessarily better, however, as Lavender discovered when the task of shoring up the collapsing garden shed led, mysteriously, to the destruction of her beloved honeysuckle.) There was a Party carpenter, a Party accountant, a Party plumber, (as we have seen) a Party dentist and several Party doctors. There were Party babysitters, and employer Party people might give preference when finding part-time work to employee Party people. There were even Party hotels, campsites and guest houses scattered around the country, sometimes even in places that one might want to visit. One year, when I was five, we got a free holiday to Bulgaria, allocated to the families of Party officials. We travelled there and back by train. It was my first trip abroad, and I didn’t make another for six years.
In the mid ’60s Sabrina became the first member of our family – probably for several generations even on her mother’s side – to go to university. She went to read biochemistry at Salford and found lodgings with a Party family, the Susses. Henry Suss was a clothing worker, a union official, and had taken part in the mass trespasses on Kinder Scout. He was also a lover of Shakespeare, and the Communist candidate for the seat of Swinton and Pendlebury.
Three or four years later, when Sam went up to study at Oxford he lodged with the Dunmans. Helen Muspratt Dunman was a professional photographer who had joined the Party in 1936 after visiting Russia to take photographs of life on the Volga. Her husband, Jack, also a Communist candidate, was an activist on behalf of agricultural workers and a friend of Wogan Philipps.
Party people, then, were our normality. The way they behaved, what they talked and argued about, seemed everyday to us. Unlike Martin Kettle, I find it hard to regret the eccentricities of a life on the far Left. For example, one of the very earliest entries in Lavender’s diaries, written in the second week of January 1963, tells of her first experience of what was soon to become known as the Sino-Soviet split. ‘Startling statement in the Daily Worker on Communist International Unity,’ she wrote: ‘Tobins all of a twitter.’
Or two years later when a comrade who was an architect dropped by to give free advice about some refurbishing. ‘Colin came to look at the kitchen and stayed and stayed [i.e. overstayed, in Lavender’s view] to discuss political economy, surplus value etc. He and Sam disagreed over socialist planning.’ Someone comes to look at the appliances and ends up arguing about the socialist state’s capacity to match supply and demand. This seems to me not a poor heritage, but an oddly rich one.
6
Going Back to Russia
Long live our Soviet motherland,
Built by the people’s mighty hand.
Long live our people, united and free.
Strong in our friendship tried by fire.
Long may our crimson flag inspire,
Shining in glory for all men to see.
The national anthem of the USSR
Above all there was Russia. The one thing that anyone else knew about Communists, and that Communists knew about themselves, was their affinity with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
But first, Greece and other places… Lavender, for example, was far more concerned with Greece. And it was not just a passing whim, either. At some point in the ’50s she had become acquainted with a woman called Betty Ambatielos. Betty had once been Betty Bartlett. In 1940, in Cardiff, she met Tony Ambatielos, the craggy-looking Secretary of the Greek Seamen’s Union. When the Germans invaded his homeland a year later, Tony escaped to Britain and married Betty. On the liberation of Greece Mr and Mrs Ambatielos moved back.
What followed is a largely forgotten and bloody part of modern European history. For four years in Greece there was a civil war between the Left and the Communists on one side, and the monarchists and conservatives – backed by Britain – on the other. In 1947 Tony, a Communist, was arrested along with a number of other union leaders, tried and given a life sentence. Two years later – the Civil War over and lost – Betty decided that her campaign for his release would be more effective if waged from Britain. So she returned and became a central figure in the League for Democracy in Greece – whose pamphlets and posters were a recurrent feature of my childhood.
In 1963, Queen Frederica of Greece came on a visit to London, basing herself in Claridge’s. Tony was still in prison and Betty – a woman with a determined jaw but a sudden sunrise of a smile – organised a twenty-four-hour vigil on the pavement outside, in which Lavender took part. Perhaps I did too.
It was as a result of this demonstration that one of the most celebrated scandals of the 1960s took place. On 11 July a plainclothes detective sergeant called Harold Challenor arrested a pacifist artist called Donald Rooum. While arresting Rooum, Challenor said to his prisoner, ‘You’re fucking nicked, my beauty. Boo the Queen, would you?’ and hit him on the head. Back at the police station Challenor then added a half-brick to the small pile of Rooum’s possessions with the words, ‘There you are, me old darling. Carrying an offensive weapon. You can get two years for that.’ In that era courts generally accepted police evidence as beyond contradiction, but Rooum had the rare foresight to get his jacket forensically tested, and when no trace of brick dust was found, Challenor’s account collapsed. And so did some of the popular assumptions of post-war Britain.
Whether or not I stood outside Claridge’s, certainly in April that year I had been present in a large hall in London – a theatre, I think – when Manolis Glezos, a Greek Communist hero, was welcomed to London on his release from prison. Glezos, a wonderfully handsome man with a dashing moustache, had risked death in 1941 by pulling down the swastika flying over the Acropolis and putting a Greek flag in its place.
Nearly half a century later the broadcaster John Humphrys went to Athens to cover the Greek economic crisis for the BBC radio programme, Today. While there he interviewed an elderly man who was campaigning against the austerity measures being implemented by the beleaguered government. It was Glezos and I was suddenly back in that hall.
Tony Ambatielos was released in 1964, re-imprisoned by the Colonels in 1967, released again in 1974, and with every turn we celebrated or campaigned according to the latest news. The year 1968 found me, aged thirteen, collecting money for Greek political prisoners like Tony outside cinemas showing the Costa-Gavras film, Z, the lightly fictionalised account of the murder five years earlier of a leftist Greek politician, Grigoris Lambrakis. Thunderously scored by the Greek socialist composer, Mikis Theodorakis, whose music was a backdrop to my early adolescence, the film unspooled the progression from unpunished murder to the infliction of justice on a series of right-wing army officers.
In 1975, a year after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus had led to the fall of the Colonels, I hitch-hiked to democratic Greece, taking with me a gift from Lavender for a Greek woman called Vasiliki, the wife of a formerly imprisoned trade unionist, with whom she’d been corresponding for years and to whom she had been sending small sums of money. Vasiliki’s small flat was in a working-class area of Athens, and when I arrived, out of the blue, she was mortified that she had nothing to give me in return. Rather desperately she picked up a knick-knack – a Giacometti-thin ancient Greek on a chariot – from her mantelpiece and insisted that I take it. Vasiliki couldn’t have known how much it was valued: my mother kept it in the bathroom (where she necessarily saw it several times a day) until she died.
