II
The Britain I came to in 1933 was utterly different in almost every way from the country in which I write this at the start of the new century. The history of the island in the twentieth century divides sharply into two halves – to put it in a phrase, before and after the simultaneous shocks of Suez and rock and roll. Almost every generalization about the country to which I came in 1933 ceases to apply after 1956, even the notorious inefficiency of the British system of domestic heating and – one of its consequences – the impenetrable Dickensian fog which, until 1953, still occasionally forced London to a standstill. Britain was no longer a major empire or a world power, and after Suez nobody believed that it was. Popular culture compensated by creating sagas of British heroism and eventual victory against the Germans in the Second World War. In 1933 people thought about the Great War not as a heroic memory, but as a graveyard. However, everyone knew that a larger area of the world map than ever before was coloured pink, and that we were the only global empire, even if intelligent imperialists recognized that our grasp was already much more restricted than our reach. But British skins were still white. In 1933 black and brown faces were far easier to find on the streets of Paris than London and, except for Veeraswamy’s in the West End, the Indian restaurant was still virtually absent. Indeed, foreigners of any kind were rare, since Britain was not a centre of international tourism, which was in any case still tiny by present standards.
Only Hitler and the war were to bring into Britain a modest number of the sort of middle-class continentals whose reactions the Hungarian George Mikes has described fondly in the little book How to be an Alien . Contrary to the native myth, the country did its best to exclude refugees but, unlike Mikes, the next generation of Hungarian immigrants, the refugees of 1956–7, would no longer have thought of describing Britain as a country where hot-water bottles took the place of sex. It was the 1950s that revolutionized the sexual and social mores of the British young. In the 1930s the idea of London as the international city of style, fun and promiscuity (as in the ‘Swinging London’ of the 1960s) was inconceivable. For heterosexual males the action was in Paris or the French Riviera, for homosexual ones – at least until Hitler came – in Berlin. For women the public scope was more limited either way.
Britain in 1933 was still a self-contained island where life was lived by unwritten but compelling rules, rituals and invented traditions: mostly class rules or gender rules, but also virtually universal ones, usually linked to royalty. The national anthem was played at the end of every performance in theatres and cinemas and people stood for it before they went home. Wherever you were, you did not talk during the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day, 11 November. The ‘right’ kind of accent bonded together the upper classes (but not parvenus who could thus be recognized) and ensured deferential behaviour from the lower orders, class-conscious or not, at least in public.
In the 1930s these things were obvious. But, of course, they were not expected to apply on the other side of the seas which separated us from the foreigners. Britain was insular in every sense. When an upper-middle-class Jewish refugee doctor applied for admission to Britain as a potential domestic servant (the only option available) and offered to work as a butler, the British Passport Control officer in Paris refused him without a moment’s 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.