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By Root 1653 0

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.

In my case, the end of the war even brought a brief relaxation of anti-communism. The British government, having totally refused to employ my knowledge of German for any purposes whatever during my six years in the army, now found it useful. In 1947 I was asked, presumably via some pre-war Cambridge acquaintance now in the Foreign Office, to help in ‘re-educating’ the Germans in what had once been an imperial hunting-lodge on the Lüneburger Heide in North Germany, a few kilometres from the zonal border with the East, to and from which the railway