• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1715 0

from the Newnham group of the Communist Party of which I was the political instructor.) They were serious about studying. ‘The Committee wishes all CUSC members success in their Trips (Triposes)’ the Bulletin recorded before the 1937 exams. ‘Let us be as much to the fore on the academic front as on the political.’ 5 Starting with the modern linguists and historians, the club set up ‘faculty’ groups to debate problems of their subjects, and by late 1938 had twelve of them, including even such politically unpromising territories as agriculture, engineering and law.6 On the other hand, contempt for organized sports (but not, of course, for such traditional pursuits of progressive Cambridge as long hikes and mountaineering) was part of CUSC political consciousness. The CUSC gloried in the (frequent) success of socialists or communists at the Union, in drama and journalism – at one moment the presidents of the Union and the ADC (the main dramatic society) and the editor of Granta were all in the Party – but I am not aware that it took much interest in converting any of the university’s celebrated sports stars – admittedly an uphill task – or in the sporting or mountaineering achievements of its own members.

Whatever else the CUSC did, it campaigned: constantly, passionately, and in a spirit of hopeful confidence that surprises me as I look back in old age on my undergraduate years in Cambridge, the years when Europe (but not yet the world) slid into catastrophe.

The briefest headline summary of the politics of Europe in the 1930s shows that, from the point of view of the left, they were a virtually unbroken succession of disasters. Admittedly, as the song ‘Gaudeamus igitur ’ tells us, student days are not a time for depression, but should we not have been a little more desperate? We were not. Unlike the post-1945 anti-nuclear movement, we did not feel ourselves fighting a probably doomed rearguard action against enemies far beyond our reach. We lived from crisis to crisis, organizing like football teams living from match to match, each calling for the best efforts. As far as Cambridge was concerned, we were winning our matches. Each season was better than the last. In a way, the student left shared the university’s remoteness from the national centre, not to mention its traditional self-absorption. In everyday practice, for Cambridge comrades ‘the Party’ and the International meant the Cambridge student Party, for our only regular pre-war contact with the national leadership came through the notably un-authoritarian student organizer Jack Cohen, whose political command we naturally accepted without question, but who was aware that a worker without much formal schooling and who came to the students from Party work in the industrial Northeast, had much to learn about universities.

And yet, could we really forget that our greatest triumph, Spain Week, was won at a time when the Spanish Republic was visibly on its last legs and virtually beyond hope? Moreover, though we constructed scenarios about how war could be avoided by firm collective resistance to Hitler, we did not really believe them. We knew in our bones that a Second World War was coming, and we did not expect to survive it. I remember one bad night in a hotel room, possibly in Lyon, in the middle of the Munich crisis of 1938 – I was returning from a long vac study trip to French North Africa – when the thought that war might break out within days suddenly hit me. The nightmares of mass aerial bombardments and clouds of poison gas, against which, as we had so often warned, there was no protection, would become reality. There was no comparable hysteria in September 1939. The year from Munich to the invasion of Poland had allowed us to get used to the prospect of war.

I think we kept cheerful for three reasons. First, we had only one set of enemies – fascism and those who (like the British government) did not want to resist it. Second, there was an actual battlefield – Spain – and we were on it. Our own hero, the charismatic John Cornford, fell on the Córdoba front on