incident: The six of us were trailing through the gallery, when I was left behind in a room by myself, looking at a picture I liked. The attendant came up to me and whispered, ‘I love you. I must marry you. Take me to England.’ He was desperate, pleading; he clutched my arm and said, ‘Please, please, tell them you love me, take me with you.’ And then in came the interpreter to retrieve her charge from this dangerous straying from the flock, and the little attendant – he was old, or so I thought then, thin, sad, all anguished dark eyes – quickly pointed to a picture as if explaining it to me. His eyes followed me as I went out; there went his chance of escape from his life, intolerable for some reason I would never know. When I told Jack about this later, he said, with that mix of bitterness, pain, anger, that was his characteristic, ‘Poor bastard, poor little bastard.’ And then, ‘Well, why not marry him. But don’t imagine you’ll get rid of him so quickly.’ Jack had married a girl in Czechoslovakia to rescue her from the Nazis, in a scheme organized by the Party, but afterwards she was difficult about divorcing him. At last she agreed to meet him, and he reproached her: ‘I was doing you a good turn, and you’ve given me so much trouble.’ She said to him, with bitterness, ‘But you didn’t even take me out to lunch after the wedding. I’ll never forgive you.’
‘Just think,’ said Jack. ‘If I had the foresight I’d have given her a rose, or some flowers, and saved myself all this trouble.’ This was a reference to an early very famous Soviet story. Sentiment at weddings had been banned, and a pair of young lovers, like all Soviet couples then, went through the minimalist registry office ceremony. Despite their allegiance to Soviet principles, they felt sad, bleak, deprived. Someone gave them flowers: a defiant gesture. Everyone felt better.
As soon as we reached London, the six of us became a unit again. This was because of the press conference. It is truly impossible to re-create the snarling, hating atmosphere of the Cold War. We were confronted by journalists who hated us so much they could scarcely be polite. They demanded to be told ‘the truth’. The inevitable reaction was that we defended, where we could; Naomi and Douglas too. If they hated us, we hated them. This was by no means the only time in my life I have reflected that journalists can be their own worst enemy.
After that I refused invitations to go on Peace or Cultural Delegations – it was the beginning of the era of delegations to all the communist countries. I remember invitations to China, Chile, Cuba, others. Writers considered sympathetic, or at least not hostile, to communism were always being invited. The trouble is not that you fall for the official Party Line but that you like the people you meet, become one with them in sympathetic imagination, identify with their sufferings. This must be a version of what happens when terrorists capture hostages, who soon become one with their hosts, by osmosis. The communist governments always used the prestige of their visitors to impress their captive populations, but the said populations were in fact too wise to be impressed. Debates about whether one should or should not go to oppressive countries as official visitors went on then, go on now. When I went to China for the British Council in 1993, with Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd, Western journalists who operated in the East approached me to say I was wrong to go. But some Chinese, in London including one who had been in Tiananmen Square, did not understand when asked if I should go. ‘Why should you not go?’
‘Because the people will think we admire the Chinese government.’
‘No one will think that. But it is important for the writers and intellectuals to see writers from the West. They feel isolated.’
No sooner had I got back to London than I was sent my Party card and approached by John Sommerfield to join the Communist Party Writers’ Group. By now I was regretting my impulse to join the Party. I did know it was a neurotic decision, for it was characterized by that dragging helpless feeling, as if I had been drugged or hypnotized – like getting married the first time because the war drums were beating, or having babies when I had decided not to – pulled by the nose like a fish on a line. Going to the Soviet Union had stirred up emotions much deeper than the political. My thoughts and my emotions were at odds. I was a long way off seeing, as I do now, that ‘supporting the Soviet Union was only a continuation of early childhood feelings – war, the understanding of suffering, identification with pain: the knowledge of good and evil. I only knew that here was a deeply buried thing which was riding me like a nightmare.
What I was thinking – attempts at cool objectivity – was something else. I told an ex-Party friend of mine this experience: On parting with Oksana, so poor, so hardworking, with so few clothes or trinkets, I wanted to give her a little gilt-mesh bracelet, from Egypt. It was nothing much. She went pale with … could that be terror? Surely not. She stammered out frantic fearful refusals. What was that all about? I asked my expert friend, who said with the furious impatience we use for people who are still in positions we have just outgrown – he had only very recently left the Party – ‘Don’t be so naive. If she was seen with that bracelet, she would be accused by the KGB – who were of course instructing her every day – of taking bribes from the decadent evil Western capitalist world. It could get her sent to a labour camp.’
And why was it so many of the writers we met insisted on talking about the royal family? They went on and on: how interested they were in our Queen, such a good institution – for Britain, of course, not for them – and how much they admired us. Why on earth should writers in the Soviet Union care about the British royal family? ‘Obviously,’ was the reply, ‘they could not say openly how much they hate communism. They said it indirectly, hoping you would have the gumption to understand.’
The Writers’ Group was about to fall apart under the weight of its contradictions. Ah, with what nostalgia I use that old jargon … but how useful were those contradictions, always on our lips, while we tried to keep hold of the roller coaster of those days.
Remarkable people, they were. First, John Sommerfield. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War and written a book, Volunteer in Spain, describing various actions he had taken part in. It was dedicated to John Comford, his friend, who had died there. He had also written good short stories, Survivors. He was a tall, lean man, pipe-smoking, who would allow to fall from unsmiling lips surreal diagnoses of the world he lived in, while his eyes insisted he was deeply serious. A comic. He knew everything about English pubs, had written a book about them. It was he who took me to the Soho clubs, saying that their great days were over, the war had been their heyday. He was married to Molly Moss, the painter. Like everyone else then, they had no money. They bought for a couple of hundred pounds a little Victorian house in Mansfield Road, NW3, and filled it full of her paintings, and Victorian furniture and bric-a-brac which could be bought for a few shillings because everything Victorian was unfashionable. This cherished little treasure house, a jewel box of a house, was pulled down with hundreds of others in those great days for architecture, the sixties, and replaced with some of the ugliest blocks of flats in London. During one hard winter, when the Sommerfields were broke, their big tomcat caught pigeons for them, which they stewed, giving him half of what he caught.
The meetings were held in my room because, since I had a child, it was hard for me to go out. Also because I had informed John Sommerfield that I loathed meetings and had had enough of them to last my life. He said. In that case we’ll come to you and you can’t get out of it. John had said that when you joined the CP it was a good principle to say that there was something you couldn’t do, like taking buses or being out at night. Why? To let them know they couldn’t put anything over on you. ‘But no, you cannot say you won’t go to the meetings.’ Them? The Party, King Street.
All the writers shared this attitude to King Street, not much different in spirit from David Low’s cartoon trade-union horse, a great lump of obstinate stupidity. The loyalty that they could not feel for ‘the Party’ was deflected to the Soviet Union, which of course could not be anything like as stupid as King Street.
Montagu Slater was a smallish, quick, lively, clever man, and many-sided. He had done the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. He was under pressure, because he had written a book about the Kenyan war, then at its height, exposing the machinations and dirty tricks of the British government against Jomo Kenyatta, and was being reviled by the newspapers: ‘What can you expect from a communist?’ Everything