Whenever I acquired my file, I was clearly seen as a suspicious character, to be kept out of sensitive areas such as abroad, even after the USSR became Britain’s ally and the Party devoted itself to winning the war. While the war lasted (and indeed from 2 September 1939 until my first postwar visit to Paris in 1946) I never left the soil of Great Britain – the longest unbroken period I have ever spent without crossing some sea or land frontier. Nobody after May 1940 appeared to take an interest in my languages. At one moment I got as far as an interview on the subject in what I took to be a secret service office at the top of Whitehall, but nothing came of it. Reluctantly I got used to the idea that I would have no part in Hitler’s downfall.
What could the officers do who found themselves lumbered with an intellectually overqualified and practically underqualified oddball with minimal gifts for the military life? Since I could drive a car I was called up as a driver, but I did not take to the company’s requisitioned 15-cwt- and 3-ton trucks, or to motorbikes, and soon became merely a pair of unskilled arms. What could be done with such a figure? I was presumably regarded as unpromotable. In the end the 560th Field Company of the Royal Engineers found a way of getting rid of me. I was recommended for transfer to the Army Education Corps, which – since this was a people’s war – was being rapidly expanded. I was sent on the required course to a building behind the jail in Wakefield, taking with me – why should I still remember this so vividly? – Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. There I discovered the enormous superiority of northern fish-and-chips to what I had hitherto been used to, and passed, in the company of another historian and future vice-chancellor of London University.
My transfer came through some time later, in the early autumn of 1941, a few days after we had moved to Hay-on-Wye, on the Welsh borders, near which, exactly fifty years later, I found myself buying the Breconshire cottage in which I write these lines. It may well have saved my life, for in the meantime the unit had been ordered abroad, and we already had our embarkation leave behind us. As usual, I spent it among the bombs in London. Naturally nobody told us where we were bound for, though the Middle East seemed the most likely. But the 15th East Anglian Division, including the 560th Field Company RE, did not set sail for the Middle East, but via Cape Town and Mombasa for Singapore, where they were captured by the Japanese in February 1942. Those who survived spent the next three years building the Burma railway. About a third of them did not. I never saw my mates again. Would I have survived? Who knows. In any case, I did not find out how lucky I was until much later.
II
My army career thus falls into two sharply distinct parts. The first of these, my time with the Royal Engineers, was by far the more interesting. As might be expected, a field company of sappers was a purely working-class unit, except for its few officers. I was the only intellectual in it, indeed almost certainly the only other rank in it who habitually read the news pages of the daily newspaper before or instead of the racing pages. This unusual habit gave me my nickname during the weeks when France collapsed: ‘Diplomatic Sam’. For the first time in my life I found myself a member of the proletariat whose emancipation was to bring freedom to the world, though an uncharacteristic one. To be more precise, I found myself living in the country in which the majority of the British people spent their lives, and which had only a marginal contact with the world of the classes above them. Being called up in Cambridge dramatized the contrast, since for two or three months I lived in both worlds. After duty (i.e. mainly learning the elements of drill on the green turf of Parker’s Piece) I moved from one to the other as I walked to the centre of university Cambridge from the working-class street where the military authorities had quartered me and a barber’s assistant and former hotel porter from Lowestoft called Bert Thirtle, on an elderly widow, Mrs Benstead, We shared what had been the Benstead matrimonial bed which was fortunately a wide one. It was not an ideal introduction to the world of the proletariat, since Thirtle lacked the social reflexes which I found so striking in my otherwise politically disappointing mates, and which explains so much about British trade unionism. Most of my mates saw themselves essentially as civilians who put on uniforms as their dads had done in 1914–18. They saw no special virtue in the martial life or look: civvy street was where they hoped to go back to as soon as possible. But Thirtle had always secretly dreamed of wearing a uniform, although it did not get him far with the girls (any girl was a ‘tart’ in our jargon) he picked up in Petty Cury. His fiancée, a seventeen-year-old who worked in a kitchen, wrote him daily letters and sent parcels containing the local papers, The Wizard , Comic Cuts and American strip cartoons.
In retrospect I am amazed how powerful an instinctive sense or tradition of collective action was in a bunch of young working men, ranging from the unskilled to some apprenticed tradesmen, mostly builders, assembled in the same NAAFI canteen or games room by the accidents of conscription. This struck me less at the time than their wavering uncertainty – and indeed my own – about what we should all do at moments that called for some action, and the general sense of helplessness in the face of authority. And yet, as I read the notes of my diary, what impresses me is the familiarity with the procedures of collective action, the constant, almost intuitive, potential for militancy. They were at home in the ‘public sphere’ of the British working class. Had not someone, during one protest, suggested that we should organize a proper meeting at The Locomotive like a real union, with a table and a bell and a glass of water?
The proletarian experience was novel in other respects. I think it is safe to say that in 1940 few Kingsmen had had occasion to operate a road drill, and I found the experience of doing so tiring but exhilarating. The Sappers were essentially a formation of workers skilled and less skilled, more from general manufacture and the building trades (for a lot of metal workers were in reserved occupations and those needed by the army went into other, more specialized corps) from many parts of Britain – the Black Country, London, Nottingham, a sprinkling from the Northeast and Scotland – but mainly from the eastern counties, since ours was essentially an East Anglian division. A few anomalous Cantab recruits found themselves in its ranks – myself, slightly older friends and acquaintances such as Ian Watt, later a distinguished professor of literature, whose work on the origins of the English novel the student Marxists were already discussing, and slightly younger ones such as the witty graphic satirist, Granta’s cartoonist Ronald Searle. Both returned, marked for life, from Japanese gulags. Ronald, whom I occasionally saw during our common time in the division, was already being discovered by the admirable Kaye Webb, then commissioning editor at Lilliput, a pocket-sized and very hip magazine founded by an emigrant Mitteleuropean, and much appreciated by our generation, who later married him. (She also took a few articles from me during and after the war, until the magazine disappeared.) Meanwhile, he became one of the most successful cartoonists of his time, thanks largely to the invention of St Trinian’s, a girls’ school peopled by the most appalling pupils, inspired, one understood, by the small terror-bringing Japanese of his wartime prison camps.