By then the English family was reduced. David and Rose Obstbaum, who first landed in London in the 1870s and doubtless acquired the initial H of their name from a Cockney immigration officer, were dead. So were three of their eight children: Lou, a provincial actor, Phil, who followed the family woodworking trade, and my father. (A daughter of David’s first marriage, my aunt Millie Goldberg, had long since moved to America, matriarch of a clan now distributed through the USA and Israel.) A fourth, my uncle Ernest (Aron), who had originally persuaded my father to join him in Egypt where he worked in the Post and Telegraph Service, died not long after our arrival, amid the brass ornaments and anecdotes recalling life in the Orient. He left behind a Catholic Belgian widow, better at earning a living than he, and two attractive girls who were of some interest to the male cousins. Uncle Berkwood (Ike), with a Welsh wife and five children, had long since settled in Chile, though he remained in contact. That left Aunt Cissie (Sarah), a schoolteacher with a husband permanently absent ‘on business’ and Uncle Harry, the unshakeable pillar of the family – if only because he was the only member to earn a steady if modest salary of perhaps £4 a week as a telegraphist in the Post Office, where he remained all his life except for the Great War. He served on the Ypres salient and then, luckily for survival, on the Italian front. A Labour councillor in the London borough of Paddington, he eventually became its first Labour mayor. The Hobsbaums had arrived as a family of poor artisans. The family had advanced beyond its first recorded addresses in White-chapel, Spitalfields and Shoreditch, but not very far. In England they stubbornly remained on the lower slopes of the mountains of society.
Nevertheless, the social universe in which they operated covered a large and representative part of England. It ranged from the classes run by my cousin Rosalie, Cissie’s daughter, in dance and ‘elocution’, that is to say learning to speak with the bourgeois accent, for the daughters of aspiring suburban mothers in Sydenham, to the Labour milieu of councillor Harry Hobsbaum in North Paddington, and the world of self-shaping plebeian intellectuals and would-be artists in which my cousins moved, the world of meetings in Lyons or ABC tea shops, discussion groups, evening classes and that marvellous institution, the free public library and reading room. This was the world for which in 1936 Allen Lane created the first great self-educational paperback series, Penguin, or rather its intellectual section, Pelican Books, and Victor Gollancz his Left Book Club, in which my cousin Ruby (Philip’s son) published the family’s first contribution to left-wing literature, Reuben Osborn’s Freud and Marx.
My introduction to the British scene outside family and school came through this world. It came in part through Cissie’s son Denis, a dark and – within his financial limits – dandyish figure who bit his nails, dropped out of education and from the middle 1930s somehow got by without a clear job in the lower reaches of the worlds of music, theatre and popular entertainment. But chiefly it came through Harry’s son Ronnie, small, physically wiry and very Jewish-looking, who was then still living with his parents in Maida Vale nursing a lifelong passion for the sea, which he satisfied in the navy during the war and as a sailor of small boats on the Blackwater estuary ever since. When I came to England he was working as a dogsbody somewhere in the entrails of the Natural History Museum, home at that time to a varied assortment of grassroots thinkers and quiet bohemians, while he studied nights at the Regent Street Polytechnic to pass the secondary-school examinations. He went on to take a First in economics at the London School of Economics that would allow him the slow climb up the steps of the civil service – clerical, executive – to the heights of the administrative grade in the Ministry of Labour.
I refused all contact with the suburban petty-bourgeoisie, which I naturally regarded with contempt. Since it was in the hands of reformist social democrats, I naturally also found the labour movement as represented by my uncle Harry, and even his somewhat more left-wing son, disappointing, but also puzzling. Unlike the German social democrats, it could not simply be condemned to the flames. For, though Harry was a Labour loyalist who defended the Party against the bitter attacks of the British CP, he shared the general assumption in the British labour movement (other than, perhaps, among those under the direct influence of the Catholic Church) that, say what you like, Soviet Russia was after all a workers’ state. Like most Labour and union activists, he shook his head about communists, but saw them in basically the same game as Labour people. Moreover, I could not deny that, unlike in German social democracy, only a few Labour leaders had sold out to the bourgeoisie in 1931, when the Prime Minister of the 1929 Labour administration, Ramsay Macdonald, and two colleagues, had joined the Tories in a so-called ‘National Government’, which went on to govern the country until the fall of Neville Chamberlain in 1940. How could one regard the passionately anti-Macdonald bulk of the party, reduced to a rump of some fifty in the House of Commons, as class traitors in the same sense?
On the other hand, and in view of the 1926 General Strike, the labour movement simply did not correspond to my ideal vision of ‘the (revolutionary) proletariat’. It was puzzling, for in some ways the British scene was recognizably like the German, shaken by the tremors of the global economic and political earthquake of the world crisis of 1929. Britain’s politics had also been convulsed. There was radicalization on both right and left, including a blackshirted fascist movement which seemed to be a serious national threat for a moment. Nevertheless, though the structure shook a little, it did not seem, and indeed was not, on the verge of collapse. To judge by Britain, the world revolution would clearly take a lot longer than one supposed. Since, according to my diary, I did not expect to reach the age of forty years (at the age of seventeen even this seemed quite far away), perhaps I might not see it. But by this time the Comintern itself was about to discover that there would be no revolution unless the fight against fascism and world war was won first.
III
It may seem strange that I have said hardly anything so far about the institution I attended from the moment I arrived in England until I left it for Cambridge three years later, longer than any of my other schools in any country, namely St Marylebone Grammar School, on the corner of the Marylebone Road and Lisson Grove in central London. It had been my cousin Ronnie’s old school (I followed him by winning its Debating Cup). Like the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium, it no longer exists, though it was destroyed not by enemy bombing, but by the ideology of the 1970s, a bad era for secondary education. It refused the choice it was given – to turn itself into a non-selective ‘comprehensive’ school for all comers or to go private – and was consequently shut down. It gave me as good an education as any available in England in the 1930s and I owe its teachers an incalculable debt of gratitude. But, for reasons that still puzzle me, it contributed surprisingly little to my understanding of England, except the discovery that, unlike the Herren Professoren of Berlin, all teachers at St Marylebone had a sense of humour. (I made a special note of this.) What did not strike me at the time is that in Britain secondary-school masters might have belonged socially but not intellectually to the world of the university. Unlike those who would have taught me in the top forms of German, French or Italian schools, they were only in the rarest of cases researchers, scholars and future academics. They had their being in the separate sphere of schoolmastering.