Party animals, p.27
Party Animals, page 27
Hobsbawm cannot have meant that Party members told themselves all along that Stalin was a murderer, that Tito was traduced, that all those agents, traitors and enemies of socialism were innocent, and that the hyenas of the capitalist press were the tribunes of truth. Because they clearly didn’t. Derek Kartun believed in the guilt of Rajk, even if Hobsbawm did not. So did many, many others.
But when Lavender went to see Harry Pollitt, ‘dealing very clearly and firmly’ with the absurd conspiracy theories about Agent Otto Sling and the murderous Zionist doctors, she came away having heard what she needed to hear. She accepted it because she had to, because anything else would bring the edifice down around her ears. There had to be one Father – Stalin, or the Party – who was steadfast and utterly reliable, and in whom you placed your trust.
The French Marxist historian, Maxime Rodinson, recognised the psychology at work, when writing about how Communists reacted to the Doctors’ Plot. There can be a
visceral need not to renounce a commitment that has illuminated one’s life, given it meaning, and for which many sacrifices have often been made. Hence the reluctance to recognize even the most obvious facts, the desperate para-logical guile to which one resorts in an effort to avoid the required conclusions, the passionate and obstinate blindness with which any idea of any change is rejected, the refusal even to examine any document, any argument, that could imperil the delicate balance one has achieved in one’s inner being.
That is why we couldn’t have Orwell in the house. He was a one-man imperilment of delicate balances. So he became a fifth columnist, a man whose words were automatically to be discounted. They never needed to be read, let alone thought about.
This process of banishment was not purely a product of a time and place. Any of us, I now realise, can do it and most of us will.
Three years after Lavender died I appeared on a BBC programme called My Dad Was a Communist. Various people talked briefly about their experiences of being ‘red diaper’ babies, including Arnold Wesker, the comedian Alexei Sayle and me. It was a slight programme, but mostly affectionate, during the course of which I talked about the bazaars and jumble sales and mentioned Lavender’s reaction to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and – more seriously – the execution of Otto Sling.
A few days later I received a bitterly angry letter from the daughter of a former senior Party figure, now (of all things) an Episcopalian minister in the far north of Scotland. The same age as Sabrina, she had been our babysitter sometimes and I had liked her.
She had, she began, ‘probably experienced a far more intensive party childhood than you’, and then accused those appearing on the programme of ‘betraying their own parents in a way I found quite disloyal’. Our childhoods hadn’t been so bad, she went on (I had never said they were), and ‘at least we were given some guidelines to live by, some form of discipline and something to aim for, unlike so many children today, who don’t really know who they are or where they are going’. She had ‘ended up feeling insulted on behalf of your parents – especially your mother – where was your loyalty?’
The reader will notice that there was no complaint that anything that had been said was untrue. The issues were disloyalty and betrayal. Then came this remarkable passage:
I also thought the reference to Otto Sling was unnecessary. Yes it was a bad event but there were many more and did anyone give a thought to my dear childhood friends Jan and Karel Sling and their mother Marian Slingova/Fagin [sic – actually Fagan] who is still living – they suffered enough without it being dredged up to suit the producers’ ideas. Certainly there were unpleasant things that people tried to brush under the carpet but nothing really has changed.
In the former Daily Worker journalist Alison Macleod’s book she wrote about how a comrade told her much later that in 1951–2 he had gone to see Harry Pollitt and the letter-writer’s father to try and convince them that Otto Sling was innocent. He had come away without succeeding.
The idea that Marian Fagan would have been upset by a reference to her dead husband’s judicial murder, when she wrote an entire book on the subject, is almost an epic in unconscious disingenuousness. Rather, the person who is discomfited to have the affair recalled is the one who – her father dead – carries the most guilt about it. She was angry with me because, if she really allowed herself to think it through, she would be impossibly angry with the parents she loved who stood by and – in public – applauded the hanging of her playmates’ father. I – clumsily, no doubt – momentarily imperilled that delicate balance, which her letter was set on maintaining. A balance she may have taken to God and the Highlands to maintain.
The perspicacious Alison Macleod wrote that, ‘looking back I can see that I insisted on being lied to’. But that means that she both knew and didn’t know. The thing she wanted not to believe was still there – perhaps half a dream, a sudden anger, an unexpected doubt – so she had to try even harder not to know it; until the point where it could no longer not be known. Which for some people arrived too late or never arrived at all.
But this wasn’t and isn’t a human trait confined to politics. It’s also what we do with each other. It’s what Lavender did with Sam and what I did with both of them.
11
The Referred Patient
But you, when at last the time comes
That man can aid his fellow man,
Should think upon us
With leniency.
Bertolt Brecht ‘To Those Who Follow in Our Wake’,
translated by Scott Horton
If my childhood was not much fun it had nothing to do with the Party. Something in our family didn’t quite work and little tended towards joy.
Sam was rarely at home and, when he was, his attention was not given easily or willingly to his children. He didn’t read to us or play games with us and an outing with him would be to one of his Party offices where we’d sit, Owen and I, at a table and draw or read. If Sam was in the house in the evening his main desire seemed to be that we children should go to bed. Wrongly I thought that this was a drive prompted by an officious (if remote) concern for our well-being. Later I discovered that it had another cause.
Most of what we now call ‘parenting’ was done by Lavender, and she was fed up a lot of the time. There was no money, her attempts to earn some from part-time jobs were undermined by the constant series of illnesses we all seem to have suffered from, and she had to deal with three children – two of them boys very close in age.
Lavender operated at a constant low level of crossness with flare-ups of anger, minor violence and spite, and – even more occasionally – small episodes of hilarity and enjoyment. When I was nine we watched a BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre, and I recall thinking even then that being confined with my mother was sometimes like being up there in the attic with the first Mrs Rochester. However, holidays were even more purgatorial. At least at home, if the weather was good enough, you could escape Thornfield Hall to the Heath, or the garden, or to your friend’s house. But on holiday you were cribbed with the family – surly father, neurotic mother, bored brother, semi-detached sister.
I think Sam might have liked me had he taken the time. He might have identified with me. My mother, however, preferred my brother Owen. As soon as I was articulate, my exaggerated notion of what I thought was fair was made more alienating by a precocious capacity to argue the case. Lavender admired and hated this prodigious verbosity. Her way of dealing with it was to know my weak, emotional points, my tendency to become enraged, and to play on them. The slightest sign of rage was held to invalidate any argument. After a while the safest way of dealing with the depressed family was to withdraw from it.
I wasn’t hated, or neglected, or starved or regularly beaten. Now, with children of my own, I see the sad truth that Sam and Lavender didn’t seem to get anything out of having me for a son. I was supposedly the brightest kid in school, but that appeared to give them no great pleasure. I read anything and everything. I was interested in the world, and yet the main thing about me was that I was a problem. My ‘jealousy’ of my younger brother was a constant feature of their conversation concerning me and the main accusation made to my face. And it was partly true. Though in fact we shared a solidarity in the evening bedroom that they never really understood (as adults rarely understand what is going on between siblings), nevertheless the quarrels between us and the fact that I was the oldest created a dynamic in which I ended up resenting Owen and looked for signs that he was indeed preferred. Then I would behave badly and so I became the imagined grit in the family clockwork.
What anchored me before adolescence and tempered my loneliness was the fact that I loved my primary school, liked the teachers and had a best friend there who was loyal to me and to whom I was loyal in return. But then the time came to leave, put on blazer and tie and go to secondary school.
Easily the nearest was 400 yards away, and was next to the girls’ school where Sabrina had gone. It was a slightly old-fashioned school where rugby, not football, was played and had a reputation for a ’50s academicism. It was where my best friend and some of my other classmates, including another Party child, went.
But William Ellis was a grammar school and organisations like the Campaign for Advancement of State Education (of which Lavender was a member) were now actively promoting the cause of comprehensives. It wasn’t just a matter of thinking that the division between grammar and secondary modern schools, to be decided by selection at age eleven, was pernicious (it was indeed, as Sam had discovered in 1930), but also of believing that the new comprehensives represented something better in themselves. Everybody would benefit. So, somehow it was decided that I would want to be part of this new movement. When it was put like that, my ten-year-old self was attracted by the idea.
The process of deciding which of the local comprehensives I should go to is obscure to me now. I didn’t attend the closest, which was co-educational (rare in those days) but fetched up being admitted to a large boys’ comprehensive school located a mile and half away from my home, among a series of council estates between Camden Road and Brecknock Road, and not far from Holloway Prison. There had very recently been a celebrated cell of Party teachers at Holloway County (blazer motto ‘Persequere’ – which gave us the unwanted nickname of the ‘Percy Queers’), but the year I arrived they all left. Not one of my primary schoolmates went to Holloway.
At Holloway there was a core of committed teachers, part of the school was housed in a relatively new building, and the institution’s ambition could be seen in its mounting of school musicals and concerts at an extraordinarily high level. The head of music, a considerable force, even managed to create a fund for a school organ, whose sad, disused pipes I saw in the school when I visited it thirty years later.
The classes were ‘streamed’ for ability (though no one actually told us this). In the first year I came top in almost all the subjects, and made friends readily enough, though only two of them lived within walking distance. But after that it all began to fall apart.
Eleven-year-old boys are biddable; thirteen-year-old boys are mad. Whatever the teachers tried to do, the overwhelming peer culture at the school was hostile to study. Football and fighting, messing about, disrupting class, seeing how quickly you could get a supply teacher to leave the room in tears – all these became more important than the learning being done.
We were madder too because attitudes to authority were now changing very quickly. The summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love in San Francisco. There were beautiful girls there, people who did not wear ties or get told off because their kaftans were dirty, and documentaries on the television told us about communes in Haight-Ashbury and raised questions about the youth of today. Communes sounded marvellous. A group of Ilford mods in a band called the Small Faces captured it precisely. The BBC was persuaded that the words did not mean what they transparently did mean and ‘Itchycoo Park’ was played on Radio 1 (established that year) and performed on Top of the Pops. I remember hearing it on the radio of our school coach as it trundled homeward from an improving Nature Studies field trip.
*
The lead singer Steve Marriott was only seven years older than me. And even if you weren’t quite sure what getting ‘high’ was, you certainly understood the idea of bunking off school because it was a waste of time. It was an illustration of how things were changing in ways that did not much help teachers or parents.
There were plenty of mods but no hippies at Holloway. Though the lovely family of my nearest ‘friend’ took me fishing once and to a point-to-point meeting, his way of settling arguments with a punch in the face unsettled me. Then, sensing that fighting was not my forte, his younger brother also punched me in the face. That was enough.
Isolated at school, I hung out with some old primary school friends who lived nearby. Together we met girls. My first girlfriend’s parents were a pair of Tory bohemians. He was an Australian picture-frame maker with an Antipodean attitude towards individualism. She was a minor artist of the practical ‘sell to live’ school. And as far as she was concerned it was common sense that people had different aptitudes and that if they were, say, clever, they’d go to clever college. And stupid people would go to the stupid place. She was my first Social Darwinist.
Young as I was, their flat – ten minutes away – was a refuge to me. They liked my loquacity and I didn’t have to accept their politics to accept their help. Gradually they told me what I half knew, which was that I wanted to leave Holloway and that if I wanted to, I should. I became more openly rebellious at school.
Soon my teachers became alarmed at my alienation. I think the proximate cause of their alarm was an essay for my English teacher and form master which more or less repeated some of the pithier observations of the Australian frame-maker. The teacher’s diagnosis, which was shared with me, was that they were facing a classic problem of the bright child who wasn’t (in the language of the time) being ‘stretched’, and who might be happier somewhere more academic. However, just in case something else was going on in my psyche they called in an educational psychologist.
When my mother died in 2005, as well as her diaries I inherited some of her books. One was an unprepossessing red trade paperback with a Dutch sculpture of a family on the cover, whose author was given as A. C. Robin Skynner, MB, MRC Psych, DPM. Published thirty years earlier, it was called One Flesh, Separate Persons: Principles of Family and Marital Psychotherapy.
I knew of Robin Skynner in two ways. First, by reputation from his famous collaboration with the actor and comedian John Cleese, which had made Skynner something of a colour supplement psycho-celeb. Together they had written two books: Families and How to Survive Them and Life and How to Survive It, the first of which sold over 350,000 copies in the anglophone world. The success of these titles helped the book I inherited to remain constantly in print.
The second way in which I knew Skynner was that I was in the book. We all were. After sixteen chapters of theory and its application, the seventeenth chapter of One Flesh (to me, an interestingly repulsive title) was entitled ‘Outline of a Family and Marital Treatment’. It is a case history of a family therapy, recorded, the introduction says, with the family’s permission. ‘Needless to say,’ Skynner found it necessary to say, ‘the identity of the family has been thoroughly disguised.’ Perhaps more pertinently, the family did not give its permission. Sam and Lavender did, and that is different, but it’s the kind of difference you never notice until you are the subject. I have no real complaint about it. How could I? I’m writing this, after all.
The book had been published in 1976, which, as we will see, was ironic in itself. But the history of the family therapy it recorded over thirty-two pages had begun in the autumn of 1967 and ended seventeen sessions later in January 1969.
Skynner’s account began with a dramatis personae under the heading of FAMILY STRUCTURE. We were:
A middle class intelligent family with a bias towards an intellectual approach to problems. Both parents in their early forties.
Father – a teacher in a practical subject at a polytechnic school, devoting himself more fully to his work than was in the family’s interest, and perhaps somewhat disappointed that he was not teaching at an academic level.
Mother – had a part-time job as a book-keeper.
Mary – aged 18, a daughter by mother’s previous marriage, was away at a university at the time of the series of interviews.
Matthew – aged 14, the referred patient.
Mark – aged 11.
Luke – aged two.
In our real world Sam had just gone up to Oxford to study, Sabrina was twenty-one, I was thirteen, Owen eleven and Ben was three. I kept no youthful diary that year, and can recall only moments and episodes. But for the year of therapy I can now cross-reference those recollections with Skynner’s account (which apart from names, occupations and ages was completely undisguised) and with Lavender’s own diaries, including her cryptic comments on the sessions herself. It creates a 3-D picture of a time long gone.
The background to our therapy, according to Skynner, was that I (or, rather, the doppelgänging Matthew) had been ‘failing to work anywhere near his capacity. The teachers felt he should be transferred to a more academic environment. Father said to be opposed because of strong egalitarian principles. Mother didn’t want him transferred because of younger brother attending the same school. The boy is said to be extremely argumentative and arrogant.’
