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By Root 1763 0

physicist he stayed in Cambridge during the war, and was killed in 1941 by the only German bomb to fall on the city. Unlike Ram Nahum (who was known only on the left), Pieter Keunemann, a dashing, witty and remarkably handsome Ceylonese (the island was not yet Sri Lanka) who lived in Pembroke in some style, was a great figure in university society – President of the Union, among other things – not to mention the lucky partner of the ravishing Hedi Simon from Vienna (and Newnham), with whom I vainly fell in love. (After we graduated Pieter and I rented a tiny house together in the now no longer extant Round Church Street a few yards from the house where Ram was to die.) Although both were devoted Party members, I do not think anyone would have predicted that this debonair socialite, who first introduced me to the poems of John Betjeman, would spend most of his later life as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka.

On the other hand, we all expected that the elegant charmer Mohan Kumaramangalam, of Madras, Eton and King’s, also President of the Union, the admired friend of so many of us, would become an important figure in his native India, as indeed he did. As an Indian, Mohan was not, of course, officially in the Party. Nor were the other ‘colonial students’ – overwhelmingly from the Indian subcontinent. I soon found myself working with their special ‘colonial group’, headed, in a sort of local inheritance, by a succession of Trinity historians with a bent for ‘Third World’ history. Unlike their mentors, the young ‘colonial communists’ did not envisage academic life, although that is where one or two ended up. They looked forward to liberation and social revolution in their countries. The two Kingsmen among them did best, for Mohan’s younger contemporary, the modest and selfless Indrajit (‘Sonny’) Gupta, after a succession of jobs as trade union and political leader ended up, in old age, as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India and, for a short spell, as Interior Minister of his country.

The Party was, of course, my primary passion. But even for a 100 per cent communist there was simply too much to do in Cambridge to remain entirely confined to agitation, propaganda and organization, which in any case were not my forte. (In the end I reluctantly realized that the only really desirable career, that of the ‘professional revolutionary’, i.e. the Party functionary, was not for me, and I resigned myself to earning my living in a less uncompromising way.) Of course, everything was political in a sense, though not in the post-1968 sense for which ‘the personal is political’. We felt that what we wanted personally was not of interest to the Party, so long as it did not conflict with the Party line. But it was our duty not only to get good degrees but to bring Marxism into our work, just as politics entered the activities of those who went for acting or undergraduate journalism. Nevertheless, I cannot honestly say that I wrote for, and eventually edited, the student weekly Granta primarily for political reasons; nor that it was ever a journal that had much place for politics. Looking at old numbers today, I must sadly acknowledge that it was not much good as a journal, though my predecessor as editor, Charles Wintour, successfully used it to join Lord Beaverbrook’s stable, eventually editing the London Evening Standard. It was in fact pretty terrible, but we had a marvellous time in its office on Market Square over tea, gossip and jokes, and it gave us a golden opportunity to get free tickets for films: second to editing Granta, being its film editor was the potential contributor’s chief ambition. The film reviews even provided a neutral territory for friends of different politics, such as the young Arthur Schlesinger Jr, whom I met there, then as later a consistent anti-communist New Dealer.

8

Against Fascism and War

Whatever happened in Cambridge in those years was coloured by the knowledge that we lived in a time of crisis. Before Hitler came to power, the modest student radicalization