ourselves stationed on Merseyside during the great German raids on Liverpool and consequently mobilized to clear up among the ruins on the mornings after. (A picture of myself in a tin hat being fed tea at a Liverpool street canteen by friendly ladies may well be my first appearance in a newspaper.) On the other hand, there was no way in which Hitler could get Britain out of the war either. Nor could he simply leave things as they were. In fact, as we now know, the failure to defeat Britain in the west decided him to turn east against the Soviet Union and, in doing so, to make the war winnable again for Britain.
At all events, from the summer of 1940 one thing was clear even to Party members as passionate and devoted as myself: in the army nobody would listen to the official Party line against the war. It made increasingly little sense and, from the moment when the Germans swept into the Balkans in the spring of 1941, it was clear to me (and indeed even to most in the Party leadership) that it made no sense at all. We now know that Stalin became the chief victim of its unrealism, stubbornly and systematically
Both communists and non-communists, therefore, felt the same sense of relief and hope when Hitler invaded the USSR on 22 June 1941. In what was essentially a working-class unit like our company, there was more than relief. Generations brought up during the Cold War are not aware how widely British workers and even Labour leaders before the war had thought of Soviet Russia as in some sense ‘a workers’ state’, as well as the one great power committed to opposing fascism, as it were
III
However little I contributed to Hitler’s downfall or to the world revolution, there was a lot more to be said for serving in the Royal Engineers than in the Army Education Corps. It is far from clear what the traditional army thought of an outfit that claimed to teach soldiers things they did not need to know as soldiers, and to discuss non-military (or any) matters. It was tolerated, because its head, Colonel Archie White, was a professional soldier who had won a VC in his time and because most serving soldiers in the war were undeniably past and future civilians, whose morale required more than the inculcation of regimental loyalty and pride. The army did not like the AEC’s link with the new Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA),which issued regular monthly discussion pamphlets on political subjects, as like as not written by Labour sympathizers. Conservative politicians were later to hold ABCA responsible for the radicalization of the armed forces who, in 1945, massively voted Labour.
This is to overestimate the interest of the bulk of servicemen and women in specifically political literature. ABCA appealed to and aimed at the reading minorities, but did not excite the masses. If any reading-matter shaped the squaddies’ politics, at all events in or within reach of the UK, it was the
Since the army did not quite know what to do with them, AEC sergeant-instructors like me (the lowest rank in the Corps) found themselves in a curious military limbo, rather like military chaplains, except without the officers’ pips and the ritual occasions for which the padre’s presence was mandatory. They were distributed in ones and twos throughout the training camps or base camps, or attached, without any very clear function, to operational formations. We did not really belong to the outfits that were technically responsible for our rations, quarters and pay; nobody troubled us much. We had arms, but they were so irrelevant that, when I was finally demobilized, there was no available mechanism for handing in my rifle. On the other hand, wherever stationed, I had no difficulty finding a place for my typewriter and a few books. I cannot recall that anyone in the Guards Armoured Division, to which I was attached for a while, ever commented on the appearance of a sergeant whose dress and bearing made no serious attempt to live up to the notoriously exigent requirements of the Household Brigade. Nobody but an Education sergeant would have got away with it. At least until we went overseas, the army allowed us to live a life of semi-detachment. I cannot remember how often I went to London from the various places in southern England to which the AEC took me, but in the end – and particularly after I married in the spring of 1943 – I spent practically every weekend there.
So, for practical purposes I increasingly found myself living like a civilian weekend commuter. Indeed, there were times when even my daily life was hard to distinguish from that of civilians, except for the fact that I wore a uniform. Thus in my last eighteen months I lived in Gloucester, billeted on a Mrs Edwards, an agreeable middle- class lady, friend and supporter of past and future Labour MPs in the area, whose sitting room contained a Matisse of medium quality which her financial adviser – evidently a good one – had persuaded her to buy for investment in 1939 for ?900. In the election campaign of 1945 I even canvassed there for the Labour Party, amazed like so many others at the unexpectedly massive support I encountered on the doorsteps. I even found myself, representing the army, addressing the workforce at one of the great aircraft plants along the road from Gloucester to Cheltenham, which were the strongholds of the local CP. I concluded that I was not a natural mass orator.
Nevertheless, London was where I really lived as an adult human being. That is where I had spent all my leaves anyway, in the days of the Blitz of 1940–41, discovering on night-time walks that only a degree of desensitized fatalism (‘it will only hit you if it’s got your name on it’) makes it possible to conduct the usual activities of life under bombardment. That was also where, since I could now get there so often, a less irregular and unpredictable private life became possible. In May 1943 I married Muriel Seaman, whom I had vaguely known as a very attractive LSE communist girl, and who was now working in the Board of Trade. This enables me to say that I was once married to one of the few literal Cockneys (‘born within the sound of Bow bells’), for she was born in the Tower of London, her mother the daughter of a Beefeater (the Wardens of the Tower), her father a sergeant of the Coldstream Guards detachment detailed to guard its treasures. It also helped to clarify my postwar future. As someone married to a full-time senior civil servant, I would have to change my postwar field of research, or face leaving a wife in London while I spent a couple of years in French North Africa. After consulting my old teacher Mounia Postan, now also a temporary civil servant in London, I hit on the history of the Fabian Society, practically all of whose sources were in the metropolis. The subject turned out to be disappointing. But then, so also did my own marriage, like a number of other wartime marriages, although I did not think so at the time. Fortunately, we had no children.
I had met Muriel again through my main London friends, Marjorie, an old flame from the LSE, and her partner, the charming economist Tedy Prager, another old LSE red, who had returned from the temporary exile (Isle of Man, Canada) to which the British government had almost automatically sent so many of the passionately anti-Nazi
