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By Root 1693 0

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