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By Root 1739 0

educational enterprises was a jazz record class I organized for a so-called Young Soldiers training unit in deepest Dorset, for which I travelled regularly to Bournemouth to borrow records, and improve my own knowledge from one of them, Charles Fox. Moreover, though I was not formally organized in any Party branch, as far as I recall, there was plenty of politics to discuss, since in 1943 Moscow seemed to put the entire future of the communist movement into question. It dissolved the Communist International. In the same year the Tehran meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill moved Stalin to announce the prospect of a continued postwar collaboration between capitalism and socialism. The Communist Party of the USA was consequently dissolved. The American communist leader Earl Browder announced that ‘Capitalism and Socialism have begun to find a way to peaceful coexistence and collaboration in the same world’ 4 – a proposition no communist would have maintained in public without prior clearance with Stalin – and the British CP based its plans for the future on the assumption that this is what ‘the Tehran line’ meant. Indeed, someone at King Street – I suppose it must have been Emile Burns, the culture commissar at the time – actually asked me to prepare a memorandum for their discussions on the economic possibilities of postwar capitalist–communist development. Loyal and disciplined as we were, not all revolutionaries found these ‘new perspectives’ easy to swallow, even when we could see why it might be sensible to dissolve the Comintern, and had no doubt that socialism was not going to come to the USA in anyone’s lifetime.

And yet, not surprisingly, every day of this existence was a reminder that I was doing nothing to win the war, and that nobody would let me near any job, however modest, where my qualifications and gifts, such as they were, might have been of some use for this purpose. The division to which I was attached prepared to go overseas, but without me. From the cliffs of the Isle of Wight I could see what was clearly the gathering of the invasion fleet for France, while I had nothing better to do than to play the uniformed tourist in Queen Victoria’s camp residence Osborne, and to buy a second-hand copy of Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age in a bookshop. I volunteered to go abroad, but nobody wanted to know. I was sent to Gloucester. As far as the greatest and most decisive crisis in the history of the modern world was concerned, I might as well not have been there.

And yet, although I did not realize it, I was to see something indirectly of the war after all. I was posted to the Military Wing of the City General Hospital, Gloucester, where I acted as a sort of general welfare officer or liaison with civilian bodies offering help. It specialized in serious casualties, increasingly the battle casualties from Normandy, and especially in the treatment of severe burns. It was a place of penicillin, blood and skin transfusions, limbs wrapped in cellophane and men walking around with things like sausages suspended from their faces, dressed in the curiously strident ‘hospital blue’ with the red ties of military patients. It dealt with everybody, even with wounded Germans (one officer explained to me that he had not been a Nazi, but he had given a personal oath of loyalty to the Führer) and Italians (one of them, in bed and reading Strindberg in an Italian translation, talked and talked and would not let me go, though I could barely understand Italian: about Italian officers, Britain and Italy, the future of Italy, the war, anything). We were naturally prouder of our ‘Allies’, whom I recorded in a fortnightly bulletin: the Pole from Torun, who had fought in both armies, deserting from the Germans in Normandy and back there again with the Poles after a night in Edinburgh; and the ward’s showpiece, the little Moroccan, with his thin, high-cheeked Berber face, in bulging hospital blues with a much-unfolded citation for exemplary bravery of ‘le jeune spahi Amor Ben Mohammed’ at Himeimat, who communicated with us via a