Growing Up In a War (30 page)

The wartime truce between the parties was broken not only by Victor Gollancz’s pamphlets but by a new left-wing party that was
formed
expressly for that purpose, the Common Wealth Party. It was founded by J.B. Priestley and Sir Richard Acland. When a Conservative MP died, Labour was precluded by the truce from putting up a candidate in the ensuing by-election, so Common Wealth did, with more or less the same policy. I supported them joyfully, and wrote off to them for their literature.

One day Jennings showed me some literature he had obtained from the Young Communist League: junior newspapers, pamphlets, brochures, leaflets – a whole parcel of the stuff, including two membership forms for us to fill in. Neither of us had seen anything like it before, and we fell on it avidly. Most of it was crude, and therefore right up our street. Then I realised that there was one aspect of it that was deeply alien to me. This was the romanticisation of factory life. It cut right across one of the most disturbing experiences I had had, an experience that was still recent.

My mother’s brother Len, who before the war had worked for a tea company in Ceylon, was now in London as personnel manager in a factory. During one of my school holidays he had shown me round his factory, and it was the first time I had ever been in one. I was aghast. It seemed to me the negation of life itself: soul-destroying. Individuals would sit or stand in one place for the whole of each day, at a machine or a conveyor belt, making one single repetitive movement which might be of just an arm or a hand; and they did this every day for literally years. They did it under lighting that was a dim yellow and made their grim surroundings look even more depressing than they were. There was no hint of daylight or bright colour anywhere, and not a breath of fresh air. Yet the people did not seem depressed. When I mentioned this to Len he said they were well paid, and thought of their jobs as good ones that they were pleased to have. One of the groups I had seen had been particularly jolly, and this had depressed me more than anything. They were
women
sitting round a table on which were two heaps, one of little screw tops to go on toothpaste tubes, the other of tiny white caps to go in the screw tops – and this was their job, putting the white caps in the screw tops. They did it by hand with a small instrument at a speed that eluded the eye, and while they were doing it there was a continual babble of conversation among them, a lot of mutual interaction and quite frequent outbursts of laughter. At any moment one or two might be distracted from the group, looking silently down at their work, absorbed in it; but after a while they would look up again and join in. That these women should spend all day every day for years and years putting caps into screw tops overwhelmed me with its appallingness, and yet the most appalling thing of all was that they were happy doing it. It induced in me a feeling of despair. My whole visit to that factory got under my skin in a way that disturbed me. It seemed to me a terrible world in which these people were living, a terrible life they were leading; and I knew that millions of people all over the world were living in the same way. I was actively depressed by it for weeks – and again, after that, whenever I thought about it. I even had one or two nightmares about it. As a young socialist I thought that one of the chief motives of political activity had to be to get human beings out of conditions like that. Yet here in a newspaper that Jennings had got from the Young Communist League was an article holding factory life up as some sort of ideal. Far from representing it as the nightmare it was, it was showing factory life in Russia as an idyll; and the photographs of sunlit factories and handsome workers were like the chorus scenes of happy peasants in some of the operas I was seeing. It was grotesquely false, and it turned my stomach over. I was perplexed. How could any sort of socialist not be against such a spirit-crushing life? How could anyone at all, socialist or not, be in favour of it, except for the factory-owners? I came to the conclusion that this
political
bumf must be produced by journalists sitting in an office somewhere who had never set foot in a factory.

Jennings wanted the two of us to join the Young Communist League. I was not keen, but did not know how to put into words the way I felt. ‘But you agree, don’t you,’ he said, ‘with what they are saying against
x
, and against
y
, and against
z
?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘why don’t we join and see what it’s like? If we don’t like it we can leave. Or you can leave if I still want to stay in.’

We were having this discussion on an open-air bench outside the dayroom, overlooking the front lawn, surrounded by pamphlets at our sides, on our laps, on the ground at our feet. I could feel the argument slipping away from me when our housemaster, Snugs Burleigh, came riding along the path on his bike. Seeing the pamphlets, he stopped and asked what they were. When we told him he looked concerned, picked up one or two, and started looking at them. He saw the letter inviting us to join the Young Communist League, and quizzed us about that. It was not clear to me why he was taking so much interest. In the end he told us he would keep all this to read through carefully, and meanwhile we were not to get in touch with the organisation until he had spoken to us again.

After a few days he summoned us to his study. He had come to the conclusion, he said, that this was something for our parents to decide. If they had no objection to our joining the Young Communist League we were free to do so. But we must get their permission first, and show it to him.

The moment we were outside the study door Jennings turned to me and said there was no chance of his getting his mother’s permission. I did not think there was much chance of my getting my father’s, either. Now that the Russians were our allies against Hitler, and it was on the Russian front that the war against Nazism was being decided, he had moved away from the blanket
disapproval
of the Russians into which the Nazi–Soviet Pact had plunged him, and returned to being ambivalent about them. We had even started taking the
Daily Worker
at home as a second newspaper, to get the Russian point of view. (Everyone knew that the British Communist Party and its newspaper were financed by the Russians, and in fact it turned out years later that it had been the Russians who kept the newspaper in existence.) But my father still disapproved of Stalin and his methods: his overriding attitude to communists had become that they said the right things but did the wrong ones, and were not to be trusted. He would have been alarmed at the thought of my getting involved with them at any age, but especially as a child, and he would certainly have talked me out of it. In any case, I was not keen to join. And I would be left with no desire to at all if Jennings were not a member. So we pursued the matter no further. But I had come within a hair’s breadth of joining the Communist Party as a junior member. If Snugs Burleigh had not come along at just that moment I would have done so.

The incident affected Burleigh’s attitude towards me. He took to addressing me as Trotsky; and once when he handed me a letter he said: ‘I knew it must be for you when I saw it had a red stamp on it.’ The masters in general seemed unable to take my left-wingery in their stride, as they ought to have done. Teddy Edwards, whom I loved, once told us to write an essay about our attitude to the British Empire, so naturally I fired off an anti-imperialist salvo in which I said all the standard left-wing things about exploitation. When the essays were handed back, marked out of a hundred, mine had a giant nought underlined several times. Sitting in my desk at the back of the class I was gazing at this with astonishment when Teddy shouted from his dais at the front, over the heads of all the other boys: ‘Yes, Magee, you may well look askance …’ and launched into a tirade that went on for several minutes. Like me, only on the other side, he said all
the
standard things – that the British Empire was the greatest force for good in the modern world because it brought peace and the rule of law to barbarous societies all round the globe, developing their economies and raising their standards to a point where they would be able to cope with democratic self-government, so that we could then leave them to govern themselves; and that no other empire in the history of the world had done this. Over many centuries, he shouted, thousands of boys from this school, including many he had taught personally, had devoted their lives to that cause, going out to live and work in distant parts of the world and giving their all in primitive, unrewarding circumstances. One of the most important things we were being trained in here was a conception of leadership that saw it as a form of service, so that we too could play such a role, in whatever society we chose to live. People who ran all this down, he yelled, were Enemies of the Good, and were not to be listened to. They usually had an agenda of their own that was anti-democratic.

At the end of all this I felt as if I had been chewed up and spat out, but it did not change my views. Fortunately I was not called on to reply: I would not have been able to stand up to Teddy. I began to get used to it, though, for I became the object of a number of such public dressings-down. Lionel Carey, who taught us divinity that year, asked us to write an essay about whichever of the twelve apostles we found the most sympathetic, so naturally I chose Judas Iscariot. It was an act of provocation, of course, but I had a few good debating points to make, and they were fun to write. I managed quite an amusing piece, and was unprepared for the explosion that greeted it in class. Carey too shouted at me in front of everyone, louder than Teddy but not for so long, and he went redder in the face. He said he had not given my essay any mark because he did not know how such an essay
could
be marked, it being beneath consideration. He ended, his voice going almost to a falsetto when it got to the name: ‘This is
Bernard Shaw
sort
of stuff!’ For me there could have been no higher praise: my current idol as a prose writer was the Bernard Shaw of the
Prefaces
– in fact I may well have been imitating him unconsciously.

It says something to the school’s discredit that nonconformist opinions were publicly lashed and thrashed in this way. The school was supposed to be teaching us to think for ourselves, but in fact the degree of latitude that was accepted by most of the masters was pitifully narrow. A few years later, at university, I came to know people who congratulated themselves on their bravery in outraging convention by wearing burgundy-coloured waistcoats, and Christ’s Hospital’s attitude to diversity of opinion was something like that. Genuine liberalism was looked on as a dangerous form of radicalism that stretched tolerance to its limits. Anything more radical than that was beyond the pale. The school itself embodied classical conservative values: all power flowed downwards, and all structures were hierarchical. Each individual had his place and knew what it was, and was punished if he stepped out of it. The whole system was in thrall to its own past: the reason why most things were done in the way they were was that this was how they had always been done. Each member of it was expected to devote himself to it, and to display attitudes that sustained it. Questioning, criticism and dissent were tolerated in only the most anodyne of forms, and were otherwise taboo. Religion played an important role in all this, and was consciously used to manipulate our beliefs and behaviour in the required ways. The whole institution was essentially tribal. The school’s ancient device expressed its ethos: ‘Fear God, Honour the King, Love the Brotherhood.’ Its traditional toast took the same points in the same order: ‘The Religious, Royal and Ancient Foundation of Christ’s Hospital. May those prosper that love it, and may God increase their number.’

A couple of years after the scenes I have described I came near to being expelled for my beliefs. In chapel, one half of the school
faced
the other across a centre aisle, but when it came to saying the creed, all nine hundred of us (that figure included the masters) turned towards the altar. I decided that I was not going to say the creed, a profession of a belief that I did not hold, so I would not pretend I was doing so by turning towards the altar. When everyone else turned, I stayed facing the front. Immediately, my face stood out, being the only one everybody, indeed anybody, could see. I did this every Sunday for about a year. Later I learned that it had caused consternation among the masters, who were afraid that other boys would follow my example. Several of them said I must be presented with an ultimatum: either turn to the altar or leave the school. None of this reached my ears at the time. Without knowing it, I had been fought for and saved by the master in charge of my special subject, which by then was history. He said that this was mere adolescent rebelliousness on my part and that I would grow out of it; that the staff ought just to let it pass; that I was a certainty to get a scholarship to Oxbridge, and would be penalised for life if I were made to leave the school before that happened. Of course he was right. I came to feel of my own accord that my gesture was a bit of meaningless self-indulgence that was making no difference to anything, so I started turning towards the altar again. No one commented. This was typical of the school: everyone saw what was happening, and everyone carried on as if nothing was happening – a form of behaviour that is looked on all over the world as typically English.

Among the people most outraged by my behaviour, apparently, was the headmaster, who had already got me marked down in capital letters as a member of the awkward squad. He said nothing to me privately, but issued a prolonged and public denunciation of me in his Latin class. In something I had written I made a mistake about one of the plural forms of
quis
, so in class he asked me to decline it aloud. Again I got it wrong. His now-familiar scream rent the air, bouncing back into the classroom off the
walls
and making all the boys sit up astonished. I was astonished too, but this time I managed to take in most of what he was saying, even though it went on for several minutes. As before, the white-hot words came streaming out like molten metal, with no breaks, and one whole leg banging its foot loudly and repeatedly against the floor. One passage went: ‘You’re of no use now, you never were of any use, and you’re never going to be of any use. What will become of you I don’t know. If they nationalise the banks
they
might take you, but otherwise you’re going to end up sleeping on the Embankment …’ The nationalisation of the banks was an obvious reference to my left-wing views.