Growing Up In a War (33 page)

Just before the war ended, something occurred that was traumatic not only at the time but for ever afterwards. Advancing American troops, now sweeping through Germany itself, liberated a concentration camp at Buchenwald, near Weimar. It was the first of the extermination camps to be opened, and the revelation of what was inside simply flabbergasted the world: the prisoners like walking skeletons; the mountains of corpses; a whole
organisation
for applying the techniques of mass production to mass murder. People could not take it in: nothing like it had been known before (or, if it had, in the Soviet Union, the reality of it was to remain concealed from most people for a few more years yet). For me, as for the majority of people, the first I saw of it was on newsreels in the cinemas. Never to this day have I been so traumatised by anything I have seen. I could not look at the screen for most of the time. I felt faint, and sick. We had heard rumours of this whispered in our wartime propaganda, but reading scraps in newspapers was one thing, seeing larger-than-life moving pictures of it another.

The revelations of Buchenwald were followed almost immediately by those of Belsen, which was run by sadists who whipped and tortured their victims before killing them (and then made a lampshade out of the skin of one of them). The horror of it was overwhelming, and lay not just in the revelation of the facts but in the uncovering of an abyss. Here were human beings below anything one would have imagined possible, whether in the degradations they could suffer or in those they could inflict. Here was wickedness beyond believing, evil beyond understanding. At the time the experience was like being scalded, scorched, burnt inside oneself beyond endurance; and deep down something was being injured, permanently damaged, permanently altered. For many years I could not bear to talk about it, or read about it, or look again at any of those pictures – I was terrified of anything to do with it touching my mind. It had gone beyond what I could bear. Because I avoided it as much as I could, it was some decades before I realised that my personal experience of all this was widely shared.

The liberation of the concentration camps affected everyone’s attitude to the war. People forget this now, but the truth about those camps was not known until the war’s last few weeks. It brought home to us, in a way nothing else could possibly have
done,
the fact that we had been fighting a regime of unimaginable evil. A tidal wave of moral justification swept over us and lifted us up. Everything we had done – everything we had suffered all these years, and everything we had inflicted on others – was now justified. And the end, when it came only a couple of weeks later, brought an apocalyptic sense of triumph, the triumph of Good over Evil, an attitude all the more exhilarating because it was new.

When the news of victory came, everyone within the widest school community made automatically for the centre, so that we could be together. Then we all trooped in to our daily evening chapel – to find that the hymn, scheduled weeks or months beforehand, began:

The strife is o’er, the battle done,

Now is the victor’s triumph won.

I have never heard such singing. It was not so much singing as roaring from a thousand throats. It was animal-like, primitive, and it made us all delirious. Whether we then did it straight away or the following evening I do not remember, but all the boys swarmed up on to Sharpenhurst Hill, the highest point in our surroundings, and set fire to a condemned hayrick, producing an instant bonfire the size of a house. We made improvised guys of the Nazi leaders and burnt them as spectacularly as we could, and then completed hand-to-hand circles round the mighty blaze and sang our hearts out.

The feeling we had of a new age dawning was carried forward, for me at least, by the general election that followed immediately. In spite of the fact that we were still at war with Japan, once Germany had been defeated Britain’s wartime coalition government dissolved itself. The truth is that, as far as we were concerned,
our
war was pretty well over: we left it to the Americans to deal
with
Japan. So now came my first proper general election, the first one I was old enough to understand and care about.

Although I wanted the Labour Party to win, I was too ignorant to have clearly formulated expectations. People in general seemed to think it self-evident that the Conservatives would win because their leader, Winston Churchill, was idolised by most of the population. I shared in the general adulation, but did not want a Conservative government. And this turned out to be the view of the people as a whole. Not only did the Labour Party win an overall majority for the first time in history, it won by a landslide. The voters themselves were astounded. I was cock-a-hoop. Bernard Levin endangered his life by climbing to the top of Big School and attaching a red flag to its clock tower, thus inducing a life-threatening rage in the headmaster, who was only just restrained by his colleagues from expelling Levin on the spot. I was taken aback by the reaction of most of the adults round me. It was not so much that they did not want a Labour victory as that they were terrified by it. They thought it was going to bring a full-blooded socialist revolution in Britain. I, who actually wanted full-blooded socialism, knew perfectly well that it would mean no such thing; indeed that there would be no real socialism but only a few steps in that direction. Even so, when I expressed my pleasure at this modest prospect people got furious with me. Erskine-Tulloch said to other boys in our year that my attitude was insupportable, and that if I went on any longer about Labour’s victory he was going to beat me up. Rarely have I been so shocked. The thought that in my beloved England someone I knew, an actual friend, would beat me up because of his political opinions was beyond my comprehension. Given the nature of the war we had just been fighting it should not have been, and it was a much-needed revelation.

In fact, that whole general election campaign was an education for me. It shocked me beyond words when Churchill said,
or
implied, that a Labour victory would lead Britain towards being a totalitarian state, and used the word ‘Gestapo’ in this connection. Although I was only fifteen, the nonsense of it was transparent to me, and I did not see why it was not transparent to everyone else – although actually, as things turned out, it was. In this way, and in others, Churchill insulted the intelligence of the electorate, not to mention the personal, barbarous insult to his colleagues in the wartime government. A left-wing newspaper explained that he was talking this vile rubbish because his thinking had come under the influence of a writer called Hayek, in a book called
The Road to Serfdom
, and the paper displayed a photograph of the book’s dust jacket. This was how I first heard of Hayek. For some years afterwards I assumed, without reading him, that he was a demonic writer of black-hearted, reactionary malevolence.

The whole business of choosing a government, and thus choosing the direction in which the country was going to develop from now on, excited me. The time span over which the campaign was stretched was an unusually long one, because we needed to wait for the votes of the servicemen overseas to be collected and brought back to England for counting. During this time I was introduced to electioneering, the cut-and-thrust of party politics, so different from anything that had gone on during the war. The Conservatives based their campaign on an appeal to Churchill’s popularity: he was a historic figure now, hailed all over the world for his great leadership; and it must be obvious, said the Tories, that he was the right man to lead us into the peace. Labour dwelt on the horrors of Conservative rule before the war, when the country had been blighted by mass poverty and mass unemployment. They called for a new and different social order based on public ownership and a welfare state. It was this that captured the public mind. The general feeling, put crudely, was that the people had not fought their way successfully through six years of world war in order to go back to the Bad Old Days. They wanted a Brave
New
World. So not only did the workers in the factories vote Labour: the servicemen did too, and also, decisively, the lower middle class in the modest suburbs.

I was partisan in all this, but my partisanship was chiefly negative. I detested the Conservatives. I was in favour of Labour but cool about them. My coolness was not because I had doubts about their declared beliefs but because I had doubts about the commitment with which they would put them into practice. I had got it firmly into my head that when people came to power in the Labour Party they sold out on the party’s principles, and that leaders of the big trade unions did the same. Now that the Labour movement had itself come to power nationally, my fear was that it would betray the people it was most supposed to help. This fear was reinforced by my father. When I next went to London for the school holidays, and he met me at Victoria station, my first words to him were an expression of delight at the general election result, but his immediate reply was: ‘Yes, provided they stay on the right lines. It’s up to people like Aneurin Bevan and Emmanuel Shinwell to keep them to it. Otherwise they won’t.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

AT THE BEGINNING
and end of each term the school used to hire a private train to take us to and from Victoria: we called it ‘the Housey Special’. As was the general custom in those days, each of us had a trunk which made the journey separately from door to door, collected the day before we travelled and delivered the day after we arrived. This meant that on the journey we were empty-handed – and that was an invitation to misbehave, given that we had a whole train to ourselves. On the last morning of term we made an early start, because many of us would face long connecting journeys from London. House by house we marched down to the station, singing. I always knew there would be a member of my family waiting for me on the platform at Victoria, and hoped it would be my father. From there, in a state of excitement, I would be swept into a different life.

I loved London with an immoderate love. I was happy enough at school, but I took for granted that London was the hub of the universe. To me the most exciting part of it was the West End, with its crowded streets and department stores, theatres and concerts, parks, greasy-spoon restaurants and second-hand bookshops. And to these there had to be added one or two more local pleasures, such as the cinemas in Palmers Green and the billiard hall at Southgate. All this was lived against a background of my parents and sister in Arnos Grove, plus the rest of my family in Southgate, and the Tillsons at Potters Bar. The whole of it was
bound
together by London’s buses and tubes, the tube above all. And it was mine. (During or not long after this period a novel came out called
London Belongs to Me
, and that was how I felt.) Not a single one of these things had any counterpart at Christ’s Hospital. When the school had been in London it had famously been part of the warp and woof of London’s life; but now that it was in the Sussex countryside it might just as well have been on Mars.

One of the keenest of my pleasures, now that I was so full-bloodedly political, was to go to Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon, to Speakers’ Corner. One often reads mistaken references to the speakers as being at Hyde Park Corner, but Speakers’ Corner is at the other end of Park Lane, by Marble Arch. It is a child’s picture-book illustration of free speech. Spread across a large asphalted open space there would in those days be anything between six and a dozen speakers addressing different audiences simultaneously, each far enough away from the others to be heard by his listeners, and each raised above his crowd by a makeshift podium that he and his organisation had brought with them, a collapsible platform constructed on the same principle as a stepladder. The audiences could be of widely differing sizes, ranging from almost none to several hundred. There were all the time people arriving and leaving, or wandering from one crowd to another to sample the different speakers, so there was perpetual coming and going. The speakers were on two main subjects: politics and religion. I never took much notice of the religious ones, so I never knew much about them – they seemed to be mostly of an evangelical cast. The political groups were mainly fringe parties of the Left, and that suited me to the ground. One or two of the speakers represented no one but themselves, but these were nearly always cranky and uninteresting, and seldom lasted for long – though there was one who was outstandingly entertaining, a little man who invariably wore a black suit and a wide-brimmed black
hat,
and sold a regularly produced, privately printed sheet of articles written by himself called
The Black Hat
, price one penny. He was Bonar Thompson, a Swiftian of the left, a socialist cynic convinced that all political parties, not least those represented by the speakers round him, were corrupted by inescapable, universal, gross and ridiculous human failings, such that nothing could ever be expected of them or anybody else. Of course, he implied, we all knew how society ought to be run, but it could never be like that because of the hopeless folly and absurdity of human beings, which would never change. I spent hours listening to him. I was too much of an idealist to believe him, but I found him endlessly amusing, and learnt more from him than I realised at the time.

As far as the fringe parties were concerned, each one thought all the others were wrong. But among them there was one speaker who, by common consent, was supreme as an orator, a man called Tony Turner. He spoke for the Socialist Party of Great Britain, an organisation of immaculate socialist purity that had existed since the early twentieth century without ever acquiring more than a thousand members. It was fortunate in having a rich patron, and it brought out a well-produced paper, the
Socialist Standard
; but Tony Turner remained the only member of the party of whom anyone outside it had heard. To this day I think of him not just as the best open-air speaker I have heard but as in a class by himself. This is not a judgement peculiar to me. Many have expressed it. Bernard Levin, one of them, told me that when he was a student at the London School of Economics he used to listen regularly to Tony Turner, who on weekdays would address the lunchtime office workers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Bernard was spellbound by him as by no speaker before or after. Turner was in his late twenties then; small, and with an unusual face, having been born in New Zealand as the illegitimate child of a Maori and a housemaid from England. He had a normal European skin colour with half-Maori features. His mother had returned to
England
with him and brought him up in poverty in the Old Kent Road, where eventually she married a Mr Turner. Tony joined the navy for seven years at the age of fourteen, and it was the navy that gave him his education, a good one, ranging from Far Eastern travel to the mathematics required for navigation. He grew into an intelligent, disciplined, forceful personality. He was not ill-looking, and women found him unusually attractive. More than three decades later, when I was a Labour MP, he and I became friends – I stayed with him at his home in Nairobi, where he spent the second half of his life, and travelled all over Kenya with him; and we used to meet whenever he came to London. When he died he left me his library – and there I found the intellectual substructure of all those speeches I had stood listening to as a schoolboy. At that time, though, I would not have dreamt that he and I would ever know one another, and I looked up to him as something of a hero.