Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

hesitation, humanitarian or otherwise. ‘This is absurd,’ he wrote, ‘as butlering requires a lifelong experience.’⁸ He could not imagine a non-British Jeeves.

Nevertheless, by continental European standards, Britain was still a rich, technically and economically advanced and well-equipped country, even if for a cash-strapped teenager Paris was unquestionably more enjoyable. Its train and underground seats were upholstered, even in third-class carriages, bumpy paving-stones were not frequent in its city streets and even rural by-roads had tarmac surfaces. Bathrooms and water-closets could be expected in the new, small family homes, each with its own garden, multiplying in their tens of thousands on the outskirts of the big cities in what few as yet recognized as a major building boom. Not only the rich had motor-cars and even most of the poor had radios. On the other hand, material expectations were low and most Britons had not yet poked their heads far outside the realm where income is still spent chiefly on the modest necessities of life, as I discovered when we briefly came to live among the car-owning and cocktail-drinking middle class of Canons Park, Edgware. Britain was a long way from a modern consumer society, especially for its teenagers. Not until the middle fifties and full employment did working teenagers have money to spend, and their parents could dispense with their contributions to the family budget. Fortunately the most readily available luxuries for budding intellectuals were also cheap: the films, performed in increasingly vast palaces and preceded by organs rising from the depths to changing lights, and books, second-hand, paperback – the new sixpenny Penguins – and even given away free by mass circulation newspapers competing to pass the two-million mark. I still have the copy of Bernard Shaw’s Collected Plays acquired by buying six issues of the Labour Party’s Daily Herald, which briefly won this race (and, in the later course of British twentieth-century history, turned into the tabloid Sun, which is unlikely to do its circulation-building by offering its readers classic literature). Even the form of transport that set us free was cheap, for we, or our parents, heeded the advertisements on the back of the London double-deckers: ‘Get off that bus. It will never be yours. Twopence a day will buy you a bicycle.’ And indeed, not many weekly instalments would purchase a bike – in my case a new shiny Rudge-Whitworth for something like five or six pounds. If physical mobility is an essential condition of freedom, the bicycle has probably been the greatest single device for achieving what Marx called the full realization of the possibilities of being human invented since Gutenberg, and the only one without obvious drawbacks. Since cyclists travel at the speed of human reactions and are not insulated behind plate glass from nature’s light, air, sound and smells there was no better way in the 1930s – before the explosion of motor traffic – to explore a middle-sized country with an astonishingly lovely and varied landscape. With bike, tent, Primus stove and the newly invented Mars bar my cousin Ronnie (who pronounced it ‘Marr’, as though it had been French) and I explored large parts of the civilized beauties of southern England and, on one memorable but wintry tour, the more savage ones of North Wales. (Almost sixty years later the memory of those distant Mars-eating cycle rides was revived by the surprising proposal which reached me from the man himself in Las Vegas, Forrest B. Mars, then in his eighties and owner of the largest purely private company in the world, to assist him in explaining his ideas about the world to a wider public. I refused politely. It seems a studious young woman of his acquaintance had suggested this unique collaboration between a textbook example of unreconstructed rock-ribbed private enterprise and a Marxist historian.)

How was an immigrant teenager to come to terms in 1933 with this strange country, which was also his own? In some ways I came to it like Lewis Carroll’s Alice to Wonderland, through a few narrow doors and passages opened by the family, and especially the cousins who were also my best, and indeed my only close, friends.

By then the English family was reduced. David and Rose Obstbaum, who first landed in London in the 1870s and doubtless acquired the initial H of their name from a Cockney immigration officer, were dead. So were three of their eight children: Lou, a provincial actor, Phil, who followed the family woodworking trade, and my father. (A daughter of David’s first marriage, my aunt Millie Goldberg, had long since moved to America, matriarch of a clan now distributed through the USA and Israel.) A fourth, my uncle Ernest (Aron), who had originally persuaded my father to join him in Egypt where he worked in the Post and Telegraph Service, died not long after our arrival, amid the brass ornaments and anecdotes recalling life in the Orient. He left behind a Catholic Belgian widow, better at earning a living than he, and two attractive girls who were of some interest to the male cousins. Uncle Berkwood (Ike), with a Welsh wife and five children, had long since settled in Chile, though he remained in contact. That left Aunt Cissie (Sarah), a schoolteacher with a husband permanently absent ‘on business’ and Uncle Harry, the unshakeable pillar of the family – if only because he was the only member to earn a steady if modest salary of perhaps ?4 a week as a telegraphist in the Post Office, where he remained all his life except for the Great War. He served on the Ypres salient and then, luckily for survival, on the Italian front. A Labour councillor in the London borough of Paddington, he eventually became its first Labour mayor. The Hobsbaums had arrived as a family of poor artisans. The family had advanced beyond its first recorded addresses in White-chapel, Spitalfields and Shoreditch, but not very far. In England they stubbornly remained on the lower slopes of the mountains of society.

Nevertheless, the social universe in which they operated covered a large and representative part of England. It ranged from the classes run by my cousin Rosalie, Cissie’s daughter, in dance and ‘elocution’, that is to say learning to speak with the bourgeois accent, for the daughters of aspiring suburban mothers in Sydenham, to the Labour milieu of councillor Harry Hobsbaum in North Paddington, and the world of self-shaping plebeian intellectuals and would-be artists in which my cousins moved, the world of meetings in Lyons or ABC tea shops, discussion groups, evening classes and that marvellous institution, the free public library and reading room. This was the world for which in 1936 Allen Lane created the first great self-educational paperback series, Penguin, or rather its intellectual section, Pelican Books, and Victor Gollancz his Left Book Club, in which my cousin Ruby (Philip’s son) published the family’s first contribution to left-wing literature, Reuben Osborn’s Freud and Marx.

My introduction to the British scene outside family and school came through this world. It came in part through Cissie’s son Denis, a dark and – within his financial limits – dandyish figure who bit his nails, dropped out of education and from the middle 1930s somehow got by without a clear job in the lower reaches of the worlds of music, theatre and popular entertainment. But chiefly it came through Harry’s son Ronnie, small, physically wiry and very Jewish-looking, who was then still living with his parents in Maida Vale nursing a lifelong passion for the sea, which he satisfied in the navy during the war and as a sailor of small boats on the Blackwater estuary ever since. When I came to England he was working as a dogsbody somewhere in the entrails of the Natural History Museum, home at that time to a varied assortment of grassroots thinkers and quiet bohemians, while he studied nights at the Regent Street Polytechnic to pass the secondary-school examinations. He went on to take a First in economics at the London School of Economics that would allow him the slow climb up the steps of the civil service – clerical, executive – to the heights of the administrative grade in the Ministry of Labour.

I refused all contact with the suburban petty-bourgeoisie, which I naturally regarded with contempt. Since it was in the hands of reformist social democrats, I naturally also found the labour movement as represented by my uncle Harry, and even his somewhat more left-wing son, disappointing, but also puzzling. Unlike the German social democrats, it could not simply be condemned to the flames. For, though Harry was a Labour loyalist who defended the Party against the bitter attacks of the British CP, he shared the general assumption in the British labour movement (other than, perhaps, among those under the direct influence of the Catholic Church) that, say what you like, Soviet Russia was after all a workers’ state. Like most Labour and union activists, he shook his head about communists, but saw them in basically the same game as Labour people. Moreover, I could not deny that, unlike in German social democracy, only a few Labour leaders had sold out to the bourgeoisie in 1931, when the Prime Minister of the 1929 Labour administration, Ramsay Macdonald, and two colleagues, had joined the Tories in a so- called ‘National Government’, which went on to govern the country until the fall of Neville Chamberlain in 1940. How could one regard the passionately anti-Macdonald bulk of the party, reduced to a rump of some fifty in the House of Commons, as class traitors in the same sense?

On the other hand, and in view of the 1926 General Strike, the labour movement simply did not correspond to my ideal vision of ‘the (revolutionary) proletariat’. It was puzzling, for in some ways the British scene was recognizably like the German, shaken by the tremors of the global economic and political earthquake of the world