future of Italy, the war, anything). We were naturally prouder of our ‘Allies’, whom I recorded in a fortnightly bulletin: the Pole from Torun, who had fought in both armies, deserting from the Germans in Normandy and back there again with the Poles after a night in Edinburgh; and the ward’s showpiece, the little Moroccan, with his thin, high-cheeked Berber face, in bulging hospital blues with a much-unfolded citation for exemplary bravery of ‘
It was a place of disaster. And yet, the most extraordinary thing about this place of blood was that in it a death surprised us. It was a place of hope, rather than tragedy. Let me quote what I wrote at the time:
The unexpectedness of seeing people with only half a face and others rescued from burning tanks, has now passed. Occasionally someone comes in whose mutilation is a shade more gruesome, and we hold our breath when we turn to him, for fear our face might give away our shocked repulsion. We can now reflect at leisure that this is how Marsyas looked when Apollo had finished with him; or how unstable the balance of human beauty is, when the absence of a lower jaw will completely unhinge it.
The reason for this callousness is that mutilation is no longer an irrevocable tragedy. Those who come here know, in general, that they will leave in the end as, approximately, human beings. It may – it will, in fact – take them months or even years. The process of completing them, a delicate living sculpture, will take dozens of operations and they will pass through stages when they will look absurd and ridiculous, which may even be worse than looking horrific. But they have hope. What faces them is no longer an eternity shut away in some home, but human life. They lie in saline baths because they have no skin, and joke with one another because they know they will get some. They walk round the ward with faces striped like zebras and pedicles dangling like sausages from their cheeks.
It is only in a hospital such as this that one begins to realize the meaning of Hope.
And not only hope for the body. As the end of the war, and certain victory, drew nearer, hope for the future was in the air. Here are two news items from the bulletin I published for the Military Wing.
I used to be in agricultural work, but my feet are gone, and I can’t do it any longer. Mr Pitts asked me what I wanted to do and I said, having been a motor-mechanic in the Army, how about it? So I’m going to a training school in Bristol … to polish up my i.c. engines, 45/ a week if I live at home, and I’m not forced to stick to the job … I think this plan for setting disabled soldiers on the road is pretty good.
And again: ‘The ABCA Discussion on Friday will be opened by Sgt. Owen RA of Hut 9 who will give his idea of ‘‘How I’d set about rebuilding’’.’ And Sgt Owen, a foreman bricklayer and once TUC delegate for his union, wondered whether ‘any other men in Building have any ideas to bring forward’. The end of the war was near, there would be a General Election (some wards actually asked for the voting forms before they had been distributed) and things would be different. Who did not share this belief in 1944 and 1945, even if the first of our worries after the end of the war was naturally when we would get demobilized?
It was mine too. Pointless as my military service was, while the war lasted it was both normal and necessary. I had no complaints. Once the war was over, as far as I could see, every day in the army was a day wasted. As the summer of 1945 turned to autumn and then to winter, I was approaching the end of my sixth year in uniform, but the army showed no sign of wishing to get rid of me. On the contrary. Early in 1946, to my utter astonishment, it proposed to send me, attached to, of all things, an airborne unit, to, of all places, Palestine. The army seemed to think being sent to fight Jews or Arabs was a compensation for not being sent to fight Germans.
This, finally, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Communist Jews were, of course, anti-Zionists on principle. And yet, whatever my sympathies, antipathies and loyalties, the situation of a Jewish soldier dropped into the middle of a tripartite dispute between Jews, Arabs and the British was filled with too many complications for me. So, for the first time I pulled strings. I telephoned Donald Beves, the Tutor at King’s, saying I wanted to get out of the army to take up my 1939 research studentship. He wrote the necessary letters, saying how indispensable it was for me to return to Cambridge, and they did the trick. On 8 February 1946 I handed in my uniform, though keeping a gas mask case, which turned out to be a useful shoulder bag, received my civvie clothes and fifty-six days’ demobilization leave. At the age of twenty-eight and a half years, I returned to London and to human life.
11
Cold War
I
In 1948 the borders between East and West in Germany became front lines in the Cold War. During the ‘Berlin Crisis’ which began when the Russians cut land communications to that city in early April, and the long months of the subsequent Berlin airlift, East and West were locked into a dangerous and nerve-racking confrontation of forces. Communists in the West, however insignificant, were ‘on the other side’. As far as I was concerned, the Cold War therefore began in May 1948, when the Foreign Office informed me that it was unfortunately unable to confirm my invitation to take part for a second time in the British Control Commission’s course to ‘re-educate’ the Germans. The reasons, it was abundantly obvious, were political. A silent but comprehensive effort to eliminate known Party members from any positions connected with British public life began about that time. While it was neither as hysterical nor as thorough-going as in the USA, where by the mid-1950s communists, or even self-described Marxists, had virtually disappeared from college and university teaching, it was a bad time to be a communist in the intellectual professions. Public policy encouraged discrimination and treated us as potential or actual traitors, and we were deeply suspect to our employers and colleagues. Liberal anti-communism was not new, but in the Cold War, with ample assistance from propaganda financed by the US and British authorities, the loathing of Stalinism and the belief (not shared by the British government1) that the USSR was bent on immediate world conquest gave it a new hysterical edge.
Until then the political temperature, in Britain at least, had been much less overheated. Within the country, Labour now ruled and nobody, certainly not the defeated Conservatives, seriously challenged the far-reaching reforms of the new government. By general agreement, a return to the 1930s was unthinkable or at least unmentionable; the 1945 government enjoyed unquestioned electoral and moral legitimacy, and were, in any case, no more ‘revolutionary’ than the state-directed war effort of the past six years, which had brought the British people a victory that they felt to be profoundly
Men and women returned from the war, or turned from wartime occupations, to peacetime civilian life – to resume their old careers or plans, or to consider what to do next. Friends, who might not have seen each other for years, met again. Most of them would still be alive, for Britain had had a comparatively easy war, compared to the Russians, the Poles, the Yugoslavs and, of course, the Germans. The 1914 war, still known, and for good reason, as the ‘Great War’, killed one quarter of the Oxford and Cambridge students serving in the forces, but I can think of only five or six out of the 200 or so Cambridge contemporaries I knew or knew of, who did not return from the Second. It was a time of comparing notes and for pre-war communists to ask the question: ‘Are you still in the Party?’ A considerable number of pre-war students no longer were.
I returned from the army first, for about a year, to a curious double existence in London and for several days a week as a research student in Cambridge, but from February 1947 to September 1950 as a full-time Londoner. We lived in Gloucester Crescent, a middle-class sliver on the edge of Camden Town, the westernmost outpost of the
