Donald laughed out loud, and at once said, ‘Then, come along with me. I’m off to the Young Socialist Summer School.’
‘But I’m expected at home.’
‘Ring them. Come on.’ And he was already on his way to the tea-room where there would be a phone.
James remembered that Donald always assumed everything was easy, and so for him it was. To ring home and say, I’ll not be home this weekend, was for himself a big deal, something to think about, plan, steel himself for, consider the ifs and buts, but here he was at the telephone, while a waitress smiled at the two youths, Donald grinning encouragement. He said to his mother, ‘Will it be all right if you don’t see me till Monday evening?’
‘Yes, of course, dear.’
He knew she thought he should get about more, make friends, but it had needed Donald. The two got on a train returning to where James had just come from, but now, instead of the dismal-ness of, Oh God, another day pen-pushing, they were off on an adventure.
So began the wondrous summer of I938 that changed everything for James. That weekend summer school for which Donald wangled his attendance - it was booked out, but James knew the organisers - was about the war in Spain, but as far as James was concerned it could have been about the conditions of tin-miners in South America (a later lecture). He was dazzled by this largesse of new ideas, faces, friends. He slept in a dormitory of a college that catered for summer courses and schools, and ate in the dining-room, with young men and women from all over the country, in a cheerful argumentative atmosphere that accommodated every conceivable shade of left-wing opinion. Defining one’s exact nuance on everything from Spain to vegetarianism was an essential duty to oneself. The weekend after it was the pacifists, where Donald was speaking to provide opposition. For Donald was a communist. ‘But I’m not a joiner, I’m with them in spirit.’ He felt it his responsibility to combat wrong-thinking everywhere. I us duty was politics, but his pleasure was literature, particularly poetry, so James found himself at a weekend of ‘Poetry as a Weapon in the Struggle’, and another of ‘Modern Poetry’, then ‘The Romantic Poets as Precursors of Revolution!’ He heard Stephen Spender speak in London and recite his own poetry in Cheltenham. And so the summer went on, ‘The Communist Party for Freedom! “American Literature’, which meant Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Lillian H oilman, meant Waiting for Liffy, and Studs Lonigan. ‘Whither the British Empire?’ ‘India’s Right to Self- Government’. And it was not just weekends. After his day at the business college he would join Donald somewhere for an evening’s lecture or debate, or study group. He was going home to pick up clean clothes, have a bath and tell his mother where he had been. She listened all interest, and there was no end to her questions. A year ago he would have been irritated and evaded her, hut he was beginning to understand the indigence of her emotional life and was learning patience. His father listened -James had to suppose - but did not comment more than a grunt or a snort at what he disagreed with.
James seemed to be meeting only vivid personalities who made him feel lack-lustre and timid, and the girls were unlike any he had known, talkative, free with their often alarming opinions, and with their kisses too: he was at first surprised they did not mind his approaches to them and even teased him for his hesitations. Easy with kisses, but parsimonious with everything else: this reassured him for he certainly did not believe in Free Love, the subject of one of the debates. He was not only living in a dream of companionship and quick friendships, but above all he was seeing himself in ways that surprised, shocked or shamed him. Chance remarks, overheard, a sentence or two from a lecture on ‘The Fascist Threat to Europe’ or ‘The Working Conditions of Miners’ left him with ears throbbing with what he had heard: for they seemed sensitised to hear words that might have been designed for him personally.
At a pacifist weekend he had his childhood put into perspective as neatly as in a cartoon: ‘The soldiers from the Great War, they either can’t stop talking about it, they’re obsessed …’ ‘Like my Dad’ came from the floor, ‘… or they won’t talk about it at all’ - ‘Like my father,’ contributed another.
James’s father, a survivor of the Trenches, wounded at the Somme, was one who never opened his mouth. Not about the war, and not much about anything. A large man, a rock, with shoulders and hands surely too powerful for what he did - he was in the office of an engineering firm - he could sit silent from the beginning of a meal to its end. Most evenings he went to the pub, to meet his mates, and James had often seen them, all old soldiers, sitting in a group around the fire, not saying much. James had grown up with silence. His mother could not talk if his father didn’t, but once, going home for a weekend for the sake of good feeling, he saw her at a social that followed the summer fete, animated, flushed, a glass of sherry being generously replenished by Mr Butler, the local vet, and … was she flirting? Actually flirting with him? Surely not; it was just that James had not really noticed her as a woman that could talk ten to the dozen and laugh. ‘I’m a bit tipsy,’ she remarked, walking home, her flush of social animation already gone.
He did remember through his childhood sometimes being secretly ashamed of his mother’s animation at public occasions, so unlike was she to herself at home. But now he thought, My God. being married to my father, to be married to a man who never speaks unless you put a question direct, and not even then! And she’s not like him, she’s good fun, she’s … but this was his mother, and an impulse of violent pity suppressed thoughts that were unbecoming about one’s mother. What she must have suffered all these years: for that matter, what had he suffered, the silent child of a man who had known such horrors in the Trenches that he could be himself only with other soldiers from that old war.
This uncomfortable view of himself and his family was only a beginning. He learned at ‘The English Class Structure’ that Donald was middle class and he lower middle class. What had he been doing at the same school as Donald, then? He had got a scholarship, that was it, though he hadn’t thought about it much before. His mother had wangled the scholarship, writing letters and then pulling strings, wearing her best dress. He knew now his mother had good taste, in simple dark dresses and her little string of real pearls, where other women were in loud florals and too much jewellery. She had impressed - well, who? - with the urgency of her son going to a good school. His mother was a cut above his father, so he could see now. He had been in a daze and a dream about all this sort of thing until Donald had woken him up.
He went home with Donald for a weekend and found a large house crammed with family and friends. Two brothers, older; two sisters, younger; a noisy fun -loving lot. The mother and the father argued - in his home it would be called quarrelling - about everything. The father was a member of the Labour Parry, the mother a pacifist, the children called themselves communists. Long loud abundant meals; James thought of the frugal decent meals his mother cooked, with the Sunday joint as high point of the week; but it was a small joint, for it wasn’t right to waste money. In Donald’s home a large ham stood always ready on the sideboard, with a fruit cake, and bread, and a slab of cheese and a pile of yellow butter. They played games in the evenings. The two girls had boyfriends and were teased, not very nicely, thought James, but his ideas were changing and he wondered if it was right to be shocked. Surely he was shocked too often?
‘Good to have you home, son,’ said his father, on the weekend when James attended the Sunday joint (two potatoes each and a spoon of peas), and this so surprised both son and mother they exchanged glances. What could have got into the old man? (His father was not yet fifty.)
‘And so you’re getting into politics, are you?’
‘Well, I’m listening, mostly.’
