This, finally, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Communist Jews were, of course, anti-Zionists on principle. And yet, whatever my sympathies, antipathies and loyalties, the situation of a Jewish soldier dropped into the middle of a tripartite dispute between Jews, Arabs and the British was filled with too many complications for me. So, for the first time I pulled strings. I telephoned Donald Beves, the Tutor at King’s, saying I wanted to get out of the army to take up my 1939 research studentship. He wrote the necessary letters, saying how indispensable it was for me to return to Cambridge, and they did the trick. On 8 February 1946 I handed in my uniform, though keeping a gas mask case, which turned out to be a useful shoulder bag, received my civvie clothes and fifty-six days’ demobilization leave. At the age of twenty-eight and a half years, I returned to London and to human life.
11
Cold War
I
In 1948 the borders between East and West in Germany became front lines in the Cold War. During the ‘Berlin Crisis’ which began when the Russians cut land communications to that city in early April, and the long months of the subsequent Berlin airlift, East and West were locked into a dangerous and nerve-racking confrontation of forces. Communists in the West, however insignificant, were ‘on the other side’. As far as I was concerned, the Cold War therefore began in May 1948, when the Foreign Office informed me that it was unfortunately unable to confirm my invitation to take part for a second time in the British Control Commission’s course to ‘re-educate’ the Germans. The reasons, it was abundantly obvious, were political. A silent but comprehensive effort to eliminate known Party members from any positions connected with British public life began about that time. While it was neither as hysterical nor as thorough-going as in the USA, where by the mid-1950s communists, or even self-described Marxists, had virtually disappeared from college and university teaching, it was a bad time to be a communist in the intellectual professions. Public policy encouraged discrimination and treated us as potential or actual traitors, and we were deeply suspect to our employers and colleagues. Liberal anti-communism was not new, but in the Cold War, with ample assistance from propaganda financed by the US and British authorities, the loathing of Stalinism and the belief (not shared by the British government1) that the USSR was bent on immediate world conquest gave it a new hysterical edge.
Until then the political temperature, in Britain at least, had been much less overheated. Within the country, Labour now ruled and nobody, certainly not the defeated Conservatives, seriously challenged the far-reaching reforms of the new government. By general agreement, a return to the 1930s was unthinkable or at least unmentionable; the 1945 government enjoyed unquestioned electoral and moral legitimacy, and were, in any case, no more ‘revolutionary’ than the state-directed war effort of the past six years, which had brought the British people a victory that they felt to be profoundly theirs. Internationally, the grand alliance of Britain, the USSR and the USA had won the war, and, diplomats and intelligence services apart, frictions between the wartime allies had not yet erased the consciousness of that common struggle.2 In 1945–7 Communist Parties were represented by ministers in the governments of most belligerent and occupied countries in western Europe as well as non-communist ones in eastern Europe.
Men and women returned from the war, or turned from wartime occupations, to peacetime civilian life – to resume their old careers or plans, or to consider what to do next. Friends, who might not have seen each other for years, met again. Most of them would still be alive, for Britain had had a comparatively easy war, compared to the Russians, the Poles, the Yugoslavs and, of course, the Germans. The 1914 war, still known, and for good reason, as the ‘Great War’, killed one quarter of the Oxford and Cambridge students serving in the forces, but I can think of only five or six out of the 200 or so Cambridge contemporaries I knew or knew of, who did not return from the Second. It was a time of comparing notes and for pre-war communists to ask the question: ‘Are you still in the Party?’ A considerable number of pre-war students no longer were.
I returned from the army first, for about a year, to a curious double existence in London and for several days a week as a research student in Cambridge, but from February 1947 to September 1950 as a full-time Londoner. We lived in Gloucester Crescent, a middle-class sliver on the edge of Camden Town, the westernmost outpost of the vast zone of London’s bombed and as yet totally ungentrified East End, which attracted intellectuals both because it was then still extraordinarily cheap and wonderfully accessible: ten minutes by public transport from the university and the British Museum. (Nobody one knew in those days had a car.) It had not yet become the headquarters of a band of very bright 1950s Oxbridge ex-students (actually, more ‘bridge’ than ‘Ox’) gently satirized in strip-cartoons in broadsheet newspapers when middle-class intellectuals became lifestyle setters in the 1960s. Many of them were friends acquired in Cambridge during the Cold War years. In 1946 Gloucester Crescent was not classy, but, as I wrote in a tender piece on Camden Town commissioned for Lilliput by Kaye Webb (then married to the cartoonist Ronald Searle, just returned from the Japanese gulag), one could just pretend the roar of the lions in Regent’s Park Zoo was audible from there. In 1947 we moved to a far more stylish flat behind an early eighteenth-century façade on the north side of Clapham Common opposite the church where the Clapham Sect had worshipped, a barn with a tower. Outside, I recall seeing my new colleague at Birkbeck College, Nikolaus Pevsner, perambulating the area for his great Buildings of England like an examiner giving marks to the past. Inside I struggled, in the end successfully, with my fellowship-cum-doctoral dissertation and, in the end unsuccessfully, with what I did not quite recognize as the problems of my first marriage. As it happens, fifteen years later I was to move into a Victorian house a few minutes away – the first one I ever lived in as owner and not tenant – with Marlene.
Intellectual communists or fellow-travellers were not yet marginalized. Indeed, when the BBC began transmitting its ground-breaking Third Programme, a pre-war (non-communist) Cambridge historian, Peter Laslett, who acted as a talent-scout for it, introduced me to the elderly, worldly-wise, culture-watching Anna (‘Nyuta’) Kallin, its Russian talks producer, who helped my first, initially stumbling, steps in the world of microphones. (Of course it did not matter much: one spoke at most to only a few tens of thousands.) I did several pieces for her in 1947, including what may well have been the first-ever radio talk in English on Karl Kraus.
Party members as yet had no difficulty in getting academic jobs and several historians (including myself) did so, or could have done. I became a lecturer at Birkbeck College in 1947 though the head of my department was well aware of my politics. (Students reassured him, when he asked whether I was trying to indoctrinate them.) I went to the World Youth Festival in Prague with my then wife, who took time off from her job as a Principal in the Board of Trade, that is to say a member of the tiny policy-making elite of the civil service. She was, of course, also a communist, having rejoined when we married – in those days I would have found it inconceivable to marry a non-Party member – and the senior civil service branch met in our Clapham flat.3 As far as I can remember, she did not at the time suggest that it might be better for her career in the civil service not to go to Prague. Ten years or so later, when I offered to sublet half my flat in Bloomsbury to a friend who had gone from Cambridge into the Treasury, he told me sadly that, given my known politics, he simply could not take the risk.