The Golden Notebook

‘It might teach him a lesson,’ said Willi, and his face was ugly as he said it.

I left Willi in the bedroom and stood on the verandah. The mist had thinned to show a faint diffused cold light from a half-obscured sky. Paul was standing a few paces off looking at me. And suddenly all the intoxication and the anger and misery rose in me like a bomb bursting and I didn’t care about anything except being with Paul. I ran down to him and he caught my hand and without a word we both ran, without knowing where we were running or why. We ran along the main road east, slipping and stumbling on the wet puddling tarmac, and swerved off on to a rough grass track that led somewhere, but we didn’t know where. We ran along it, through sandy puddles we never saw, through the faint mist that had come down again. Dark wet trees loomed up on either side, and fell behind and we ran on. Our breath went, and we stumbled off the track into the veld. It was covered with a low invisible leafy growth. We ran a few paces, and fell side by side in each other’s arms in the wet leaves while the rain fell slowly down, and over us low dark clouds sped across the sky, and the moon gleamed out and went, struggling with the dark, so that we were in the dark again. We began to tremble so hard that we laughed, our teeth were clattering together. I was wearing a thin crepe dance dress and nothing else. Paul took off his uniform jacket and put it round me, and we lay down again. Our flesh together was hot, and everything else was wet and cold. Paul, maintaining his poise even now, remarked: ‘I’ve never done this before, darling Anna. Isn’t it clever of me to choose an experienced woman like you?’ Which made me laugh again. We were neither of us at all clever, we were too happy. Hours later the light grew clear above us and the distant sound of Johnnie’s piano at the hotel stopped, and looking up we saw the clouds had swept away and the stars were out. We got up, and remembering where the sound of the piano had come from we walked in what we thought was the direction of the hotel. We walked, stumbling, through scrub and grass, our hands hot together, and the tears and the wet from the grass ran down our faces. We could not find the hotel: the wind must have been blowing the sound of the dance music off course. In the dark we scrambled and climbed and finally we found ourselves on the top of a small kopje. And there was a complete silent blackness for miles around under a grey glitter of stars. We sat together on a wet ledge of granite with our arms around each other, waiting for the light to come. We were so wet and cold and tired we did not talk. We sat cheek to cold cheek and waited.

I have never, in all my life, been so desperately and wildly and painfully happy as I was then. It was so strong I couldn’t believe it. I remember saying to myself, This is it, this is being happy, and at the same time I was appalled because it had come out of so much ugliness and unhappiness. And all the time, down our cold faces, pressed together, the hot tears were running.

A long time later, a red glow came up into the dark in front of us, and the landscape fell away from it, silent, grey, exquisite. The hotel, unfamiliar from this height, appeared half a mile away, and not where we expected it. It was all dark, not a light anywhere. And now we could see that the rock we sat on was at the mouth of a small cave, and the flat rock wall at its back was covered with Bushman paintings. They were fresh and glowing even in this faint light, but badly chipped. All this part of the country was covered with these paintings, but most were ruined because white oafs threw stones at them, not knowing their value. Paul looked at the little coloured figures of men and animals, all cracked and scarred, and said: ‘A fitting commentary to it all, dear Anna, though I’d be hard put to it to find the right words to explain why, in my present state.’ He kissed me, for the last time, and we slowly climbed down through the tangles of sodden grass and leaves. My crepe dress had shrunk in the wet and was above my knees, and this made us laugh, because I could only take tiny steps in it. We walked very slowly along a track to the hotel, and then up to the bedroom block, and there on the verandah sat Mrs Lattimore, crying. The door into the bedroom behind her was half-open, and Mr Lattimore sat on the floor by the door. He was still drunk, and he was saying in a methodical, careful, drunken voice: ‘You whore. You ugly whore. You barren bitch.’ This had happened before, obviously. She lifted her ruin of a face to us, pulling at her lovely red hair with both hands, the tears dropping off her chin. Her dog crouched beside her, whining softly, its head in her lap, and the red feathery tail swept apologetically back and forth across the floor. Mr Lattimore took no notice of us at all. His red ugly eyes were fixed on his wife: ‘You lazy barren whore. You street girl. You dirty bitch.’

Paul left me, and I went into the bedroom. It was dark and stuffy.

Willi said: ‘Where have you been?’

I said: ‘You know where.’

‘Come here.’

I went over to him, and he gripped my wrist and brought me down beside him. I remember lying there and hating him and wondering why the only time I could remember him making love to me with any conviction was when he knew I had just made love to someone else.

That incident finished Willi and me. We never forgave each other for it. We never mentioned it again, but it was always there. And so a ‘sexless’ relationship was ended finally, by sex.

Next day was Sunday and we assembled just before lunch under the trees by the railway lines. George had been sitting there by himself. He looked old and sad and finished. Jackson had taken his wife and his children and vanished in the night; they were now walking north to Nyasaland. The cottage or shack which had seemed so full of life had been emptied and made derelict overnight. It looked a broken-down little place, standing there empty beyond the paw-paw trees. But Jackson had been in too much of a hurry to take his chickens. There were some guinea-fowl, and some great red laying hens, and a handful of the wiry little birds called kaffir fowls, and a beautiful young cockerel in glistening brown and black feathers, black tail feathers iridescent in the sunlight, scratching at the dirt with his white young claws and crowing loudly. ‘That’s me,’ said George to me, looking at the cockerel, and joking to save his life.

Back in the hotel for lunch, Mrs Boothby came to apologize to Jimmy. She was hurried and nervous, and her eyes were red, but although she could not even look at him without showing distaste, she was genuine enough. Jimmy accepted the apology with eager gratitude. He did not remember what had happened the night before and we never told him. He thought she was apologizing for the incident on the dance floor with George.

Paul said: ‘And what about Jackson?’

She said: ‘Gone and good riddance.’ She said it in a heavy uneven voice, that had an incredulous wondering sound to it. Obviously she was wondering what on earth could have happened to make her dismiss so lightly the faithful family servant of fifteen years. ‘There are plenty of others glad to get his job,’ she said.

We decided to leave the hotel that afternoon, and we never went back. A few days later Paul was killed and Jimmy went off to fly his bombers over Germany. Ted shortly got himself failed as a pilot and Stanley Lett told him he was a fool. Johnnie the pianist continued to play at parties and remained our inarticulate, interested, detached friend.

George tracked down, through the native commissioners, the whereabouts of Jackson. He had taken his family to Nyasaland, left them there, and was now cook at a private house in the city. Sometimes George sent the family money, hoping it would be believed it came from the Boothbys who, he claimed, might be feeling remorse. But why should they? Nothing had happened, as far as they were concerned, that they should be ashamed of.

And that was the end of it all.

That was the material that made Frontiers of War. Of course, the two ‘stories’ have nothing at all in common. I remember very clearly the moment I knew I would write it. I was standing on the steps of the bedroom block of the Mashopi hotel with a cold hard glittering moonlight all around me. Down beyond the eucalyptus trees on the railway lines a goods train had come in and was standing and hissing and clattering off clouds of white steam. Near the train was George’s parked lorry, and behind it the caravan, a brown painted box of a thing that looked like a flimsy packing case. George was in the caravan at that moment with Marie—I had just seen her creep down and climb in. The wet cooling flower-beds smelt strongly of growth. From the dance room came the drumming of Johnnie’s piano. Behind me I could hear the voices of Paul and Jimmy talking to Willi, and Paul’s sudden young laugh. I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkenness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility, of danger, the secret ugly frightening pulse of war itself, of the death that we all wanted, for each other and for ourselves.

[A date, some months later.]

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being ‘objective’. Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.

[The second notebook, the red one (#ulink_700a4da7-698c-55bb-9024-0f6b4d56abbb), had been begun without any hesitations at all. The British Communist Party was written across the first page, underlined twice, and the date, Jan. 3rd, 1950, set underneath:]

Last week, Molly came up at midnight to say that the Party members had been circulated with a form, asking for their history as members, and there was a section asking them to detail their ‘doubts and confusions’. Molly said she had begun to write this, expecting to write a few sentences, had found herself writing ‘a whole thesis—dozens of bloody pages’. She seemed upset with herself. ‘What is it I want—a confessional? Anyway, since I’ve written it, I’m going to send it in.’ I told her she was mad. I said: ‘Supposing the British Communist Party ever gets into power, that document will be in the files, and if they want evidence to hang you, they’ve got it—thousands of times over.’ She gave me her small, almost sour smile—the smile she uses when I say things like this. Molly is not an innocent communist. She said: ‘You’re very cynical.’ I said: ‘You know it’s the truth. Or could be.’ She said: ‘If you think in that way, why are you talking of joining the Party?’ I said: ‘Why do you stay in it, when you think in that way too?’ She smiled again, the sourness gone, ironically, and nodded. Sat a while, thinking and smoking. ‘It’s all very odd, Anna, isn’t it?’ And in the morning she said: ‘I took your advice, I tore it up.’

On the same day I had a telephone call from Comrade John saying that he had heard I was joining the Party, and that ‘Comrade Bill’—responsible for culture—would like to interview me. ‘You don’t have to see him of course, if you don’t feel like it,’ said John hastily, ‘but he said he would be interested to meet the first intellectual prepared to join the Party since the cold war started.’ The sardonic quality of this appealed to me and I said I’d see Comrade Bill. This although I had not, in fact, finally decided to join. One reason not to, that I hate joining anything, which seems to me contemptible. The second reason, that my attitudes towards communism are such that I won’t be able to say anything I believe to be true to any comrade I know, is surely decisive? It seems not, however, for in spite of the fact that I’ve been telling myself for months I couldn’t possibly join an organization that seems to me dishonest, I’ve caught myself over and over again on the verge of the decision to join. And always at the same moments—there are two of them. The first, whenever I meet, for some reason, writers, publishers, etc.—the literary world. It is a world so prissy, maiden-auntish; so class-bound; or, if it’s the commercial side, so blatant, that any contact with it sets me thinking of joining the Party. The other moment is when I see Molly, just rushing off to organize something, full of life and enthusiasm, or when I come up the stairs, and I hear voices from the kitchen—I go in. The atmosphere of friendliness, of people working for a common end. But that’s not enough. I’ll see their Comrade Bill tomorrow and tell him that I’m by temperament, ‘A fellow-traveller,’ and I’ll stay outside.

The next day.

Interview at King Street, a warren of little offices behind a facade of iron-protected glass. Had not really noticed the place before though I’ve been past it often enough. The protected glass gave me two feelings—one of fear; the world of violence. The other, a feeling of protectiveness—the need to protect an organization that people throw stones at. I went up the narrow stairs thinking of the first feeling: how many people have joined the British CP because, in England, it is difficult to remember the realities of power, of violence; the CP represents to them the realities of naked power that are cloaked in England itself? Comrade Bill turned out to be a very young man, Jewish, spectacled, intelligent, working-class. His attitude towards me brisk and wary, his voice cool, brisk, tinged with contempt. I was interested that, at the contempt, which he was not aware he was showing, I felt in myself the beginnings of a need to apologize, almost a need to stammer. Interview very efficient; he had been told I was ready to join, and although I went to tell him I would not, I found myself accepting the situation. I felt (probably because of his attitude of contempt), well, he’s right, they’re getting on with the job, and I sit around dithering with my conscience. (Though of course, I don’t think he’s right.) Before I left, he remarked, out of the blue, in five years’ time, I suppose you’ll be writing articles in the capitalist press exposing us as monsters, just like ‘all the rest.’ He meant, of course, by ‘all the rest’—intellectuals. Because of the myth in the Party that it’s the intellectuals who drift in and out, when the truth is the turnover is the same in all the classes and groups. I was angry. I was also, and that disarmed me, hurt. I said to him: ‘It’s lucky that I’m an old hand. If I were a raw recruit, I might be disillusioned by your attitude.’ He gave me a long, cool, shrewd look which said: Well, of course I wouldn’t have made that remark if you hadn’t been an old hand. This both pleased me—being back in the fold, so to speak, already entitled to the elaborate ironies and complicities of the initiated; and made me suddenly exhausted. I’d forgotten of course, having been out of the atmosphere so long, the tight, defensive, sarcastic atmosphere of the inner circles. But at the moments when I’ve wanted to join it’s been with a full understanding of the nature of the inner circles. All the communists I know—that is, the ones of any intelligence, have the same attitude towards ‘the centre’—that the Party has been saddled with a group of dead bureaucrats who run it, and that the real work gets done in spite of the centre. Comrade John’s remark for instance, when I first told him I might join: ‘You’re mad. They hate and despise writers who join the Party. They only respect those who don’t.’ ‘They’ being the centre. It was a joke of course, but fairly typical. On the underground, read the evening newspaper. Attack on Soviet Union. What they said about it seemed to me true enough, but the tone—malicious, gloating, triumphant, sickened me, and I felt glad I had joined the Party. Came home to find Molly. She was out, and I spent some hours despondent, wondering why I had joined. She came in and I told her, and said: ‘The funny thing is I was going to say I wouldn’t join but I did.’ She gave her small sourish smile (and this smile is only for politics, never for anything else, there is nothing sour in her nature): ‘I joined in spite of myself too.’ She had never given any hint of this before, was always such a loyalist, that I must have looked surprised. She said: ‘Well now you’re in, I’ll tell you.’ Meaning that to an outsider the truth could not be told. ‘I’ve been around Party circles so long that…’ But even now she couldn’t say straight out ‘that I knew too much to want to join’. She smiled, or grimaced instead. ‘I began working in the Peace thing, because I believed in it. All the rest were members. One day that bitch Ellen asked me why I wasn’t a member. I was flippant about it—a mistake, she was angry. A couple of days later she told me there was a rumour I was an agent, because I wasn’t a member. I suppose she started the rumour. The funny thing is, obviously if I was an agent I’d have joined—but I was so upset, I went off and signed on the dotted line…’ She sat smoking and looking unhappy. Then said again: ‘All very odd, isn’t it?’ And went off to bed.

5th Feb., 1950

It’s as I foresaw, the only discussions I have about politics where I say what I think are with people who have been in the Party and have now left. Their attitude towards me frankly tolerant—a minor aberration, that I joined.

19th August, 1951

Had lunch with John, the first time since I joined the Party. Began talking as I do with my ex-Party friends, frank acknowledgement of what is going on in Soviet Union. John went into automatic defence of the Soviet Union, very irritating. Yet this evening had dinner with Joyce, New Statesman circles, and she started to attack Soviet Union. Instantly I found myself doing that automatic-defence-of-Soviet-Union act, which I can’t stand when other people do it. She went on; I went on. For her, she was in the presence of a communist so she started on certain clichés. I returned them. Twice tried to break the thing, start on a different level, failed—the atmosphere prickling with hostility. This evening Michael dropped in, I told him about this incident with Joyce. Remarked that although she was an old friend, we probably wouldn’t meet again. Although I had changed my mental attitudes about nothing, the fact I had become a Party member, made me, for her, an embodiment of something she had to have certain attitudes towards. And I responded in kind. At which Michael said: ‘Well, what did you expect?’ He was speaking in his role of East European exile, ex-revolutionary, toughened by real political experience, to me in my role as ‘political innocent’. And I replied in that role, producing all sorts of liberal inanities. Fascinating—the roles we play, the way we play parts.

15th Sept., 1951

The case of Jack Briggs. Journalist on The Times. Left it at outbreak of war. At that time, unpolitical. Worked during the war for British intelligence. During this time influenced by communists he met, moved steadily to the left. After the war refused several highly-paid jobs on the conservative newspapers, worked for low salary on left paper. Or-leftish; for when he wanted to write an article on China, that pillar of the left, Rex, put him in a position where he had to resign. No money. At this point, regarded as a communist in the newspaper world, and therefore unemployable, his name comes up in the Hungarian Trial, as British agent conspiring to overthrow communism. Met him by accident, he was desperately depressed—a whispering campaign around the Party and near-Party circles, that he was and had been ‘a capitalist spy’. Treated with suspicion by his friends. A meeting of the writers’ group. We discussed this, decided to approach Bill, to put an end to this revolting campaign. John and I saw Bill, said it was obviously untrue Jack Briggs could ever be an agent, demanded he should do something. Bill affable, pleasant. Said he would ‘make enquiries’, let us know. We let the ‘enquiries’ pass; knowing this meant a discussion higher up the Party. No word from Bill. Weeks passed. Usual technique of Party officials—let things slide, in moments of difficulty. We went to see Bill again. Extremely affable. Said he could do nothing. Why not? ‘Well in matters of this case when there might be doubt…’ John and I angry, demanded of Bill if he, personally, thought it was conceivable Jack could ever have been an agent. Bill hesitated, began on a long, manifestly insincere rationalization, about how it was possible that anyone could be an agent, ‘including me’. With a bright, friendly smile. John and I left, depressed, angry—and with ourselves. We made a point of seeing Jack Briggs personally, and insisting that others did, but the rumours and spiteful gossip continue. Jack Briggs in acute depression, and also completely isolated, from right and left. To add to the irony, three months after his row with Rex about the article on China, which Rex said was ‘communist in tone’, the respectable papers began publishing articles in the same tone, whereupon Rex, the brave man, found it the right time to publish an article on China. He invited Jack Briggs to write it. Jack in an inverted, bitter mood, would not.

This story, with variations more or less melodramatic, is the story of the communist or near-communist intellectual in this particular time.

3rd Jan., 1952

I write very little in this notebook. Why? I see that everything I write is critical of the Party. Yet I am still in it. Molly too.

Three of Michael’s friends hanged yesterday in Prague. He spent the evening talking to me—or rather to himself. He was explaining, first, why it was impossible that these men could be traitors to communism. Then he explained, with much political subtlety, why it was impossible that the Party should frame and hang innocent people; and that these three had perhaps got themselves, without meaning to, into ‘objectively’ anti-revolutionary positions. He talked on and on and on until finally I said we should go to bed. All night he cried in his sleep. I kept jerking awake to find him whimpering, the tears wetting the pillow. In the morning I told him that he had been crying. He was angry—with himself. He went off to work looking an old man, his face lined and grey, giving me an absent nod—he was so far away, locked in his miserable self-questioning. Meanwhile I help with a petition for the Rosenbergs. Impossible to get people to sign it, except Party and near-Party intellectuals. (Not like France. The atmosphere of this country has changed dramatically in the last two or three years, tight, suspicious, frightened. It would take very little to send it off balance into our version of McCarthyism.) I am asked, even by people in the Party, let alone the ‘respectable’ intellectuals, why do I petition on behalf of the Rosenbergs but not on behalf of the people framed in Prague? I find it impossible to reply rationally, except that someone has to organize an appeal for the Rosenbergs. I am disgusted—with myself, with the people who won’t sign for the Rosenbergs, I seem to live in an atmosphere of suspicious disgust. Molly began crying this evening, quite out of the blue—she was sitting on my bed, chatting about her day, then she began crying. In a still, helpless way. It reminded me of something, could not think of what, but of course it was Maryrose, suddenly letting the tears slide down her face sitting in the big room at Mashopi, saying: ‘We believed everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won’t.’ Molly cried like that. Newspapers all over my floor, about the Rosenbergs, about the things in Eastern Europe.

The Rosenbergs electrocuted. Felt sick at night. This morning I woke asking myself: why should I feel like this about the Rosenbergs, and only feel helpless and depressed about the frame-ups in communist countries? The answer an ironical one. I feel responsible for what happens in the West, but not at all for what happens over there. And yet I am in the Party. I said something like this to Molly, and she replied, very brisk and efficient (she’s in the middle of a hard organizing job): ‘All right, I know, but I’m busy.’

Koestler. Something he said sticks in my mind—that any communist in the West who stayed in the Party after a certain date did so on the basis of a private myth. Something like that. So I demand of myself, what is my private myth? That while most of the criticisms of the Soviet Union are true, there must be a body of people biding their time there, waiting to reverse the present process back to real socialism. I had not formulated it so clearly before. Of course there is no Party member I could say this to, though it’s the sort of discussion I have with ex-Party people. Suppose that all the Party people I know have similarly incommunicable private myths, all different? I asked Molly. She snapped: ‘What are you reading that swine Koestler for?’ This remark is so far from her usual level of talk, political or otherwise, I was surprised, tried to discuss it with her. But she’s very busy. When she’s on an organizing job (she is doing a big exhibition of art from Eastern Europe) she’s too immersed in it to be interested. She’s in another role altogether. It occurred to me today, that when I talk to Molly about politics, I never know what person is going to reply—the dry, wise, ironical political woman, or the Party fanatic who sounds, literally, quite maniacal. And I have these two personalities myself. For instance, met Editor Rex in the street. That was last week. After the greetings were exchanged, I saw a spiteful, critical look coming on to his face, and I knew it was going to be a crack about the Party. And I knew if he made one, I’d defend it. I couldn’t bear to hear him, being spiteful, or myself, being stupid. So I made an excuse and left him. The trouble is, what you don’t realize when you join the Party, soon you meet no one but communists or people who have been communists who can talk without that awful dilettantish spite. One becomes isolated. That’s why I shall leave the Party, of course.

I see that I wrote yesterday, I would leave the Party. I wonder when, and on what issue?

Had dinner with John. We meet rarely—always on the verge of political disagreement. At the end of the dinner, he said: ‘The reason why we don’t leave the Party is that we can’t bear to say good-bye to our ideals for a better world.’ Trite enough. And interesting because it implies he believes, and that I must, only the Communist Party can better the world. Yet we neither of us believe any such thing. But above all, this remark struck me because it contradicted everything he had been saying previously. (I had been arguing that the Prague affair was obviously a frame-up and he was saying that while the Party made ‘mistakes’ it was incapable of being so deliberately cynical.) I came home thinking that somewhere at the back of my mind when I joined the Party was a need for wholeness, for an end to the split, divided, unsatisfactory way we all live. Yet joining the Party intensified the split—not the business of belonging to an organization whose every tenet, on paper, anyway, contradicts the ideas of the society we live in; but something much deeper than that. Or at any rate, more difficult to understand. I tried to think about it, my brain kept swimming into blankness, I got confused and exhausted. Michael came in, very late. I told him what I was trying to think out. After all he’s a witch-doctor, a soul-curer. He looked at me, very dry and ironic, and remarked: ‘My dear Anna, the human soul, sitting in a kitchen, or for that matter, in a double bed, is quite complicated enough, we don’t understand the first thing about it. Yet you’re sitting there worrying because you can’t make sense of the human soul in the middle of a world revolution?’ And so I left it, and I was glad to, but I was nevertheless feeling guilty because I was so happy not to think about it.

I went to visit Berlin with Michael. He in search of old friends, dispersed in the war, might be anywhere. ‘Dead, I expect,’ he said in his new tone of voice, which is flat with a determination not to feel. Dates from the Prague trial, this voice. East Berlin terrifying place, bleak, grey, ruinous, but above all the atmosphere, the lack of freedom like an invisible poison continually spreading everywhere. The most significant incident this one: Michael ran into some people he knew from before the war. They greeted him with hostility—so that Michael, having run forward, to attract their attention, saw their hostile faces and shrank into himself. It was because they knew he had been friendly with the hanged men in Prague, or three of them. They were traitors, so that meant he was a traitor too. He tried, very quiet and courteous, to talk. They were like a group of dogs, or animals, facing outward, pressing against each other for support against fear. I’ve never experienced anything like that, the fear and hate on their faces. One of them, a woman with flaming angry eyes, said: ‘What are you doing, comrade, wearing that expensive suit?’ Michael’s clothes are always off the peg, he spends nothing on clothes. He said: ‘But Irene, it’s the cheapest suit I could buy in London.’ Her face snapped shut into suspicion, she glanced at her companions, then a sort of triumph. She said: ‘Why do you come here, spreading that capitalist poison? We know you are in rags and there are no consumer goods.’ Michael was at first stunned, then he said, still with irony, that even Lenin had understood the possibility that a newly-established communist society might suffer from a shortage of consumer goods. Whereas England which, ‘as I think you know, Irene,’ is a very solid capitalist society, is quite well-equipped with consumer goods. She gave a sort of grimace of fury, or hatred. Then she turned on her heel and went off, and her companions went with her. All Michael said was: ‘That used to be an intelligent woman.’ Later he made jokes about it, sounding tired and depressed. He said for instance: ‘Imagine, Anna, that all those heroic communists have died to create a society where Comrade Irene can spit at me for wearing a very slightly better suit than her husband has.’

Stalin died today. Molly and I sat in the kitchen, upset. I kept saying, ‘We are being inconsistent, we ought to be pleased. We’ve been saying for months he ought to be dead.’ She said: ‘Oh, I don’t know, Anna, perhaps he never knew about all the terrible things that were happening.’ Then she laughed and said: ‘The real reason we’re upset is that we’re scared stiff. Better the evils we know.’ ‘Well, things can’t be worse.’ ‘Why not? We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better? Why should they? Sometimes I think we’re moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who’s to stop it—us?’ When Michael came in later, I told him what Molly had said—about Stalin’s not knowing; because I thought how odd it was we all have this need for the great man, and create him over and over again in the face of all the evidence. Michael looked tired and grim. To my surprise he said: ‘Well, it might be true, mightn’t it? That’s the point—anything might be true anywhere, there’s never any way of really knowing the truth about anything. Anything is possible—everything’s so crazy, anything at all’s possible.’

His face looked disintegrated and flushed as he said this. His voice toneless, as it is these days. Later he said: ‘Well, we are pleased he is dead. But when I was young and politically active, he was a great man for me. He was a great man for all of us.’ Then he tried to laugh, and he said: ‘After all, there’s nothing wrong, in itself, in wanting there to be great men in the world.’ Then he put his hand over his eyes in a new gesture, shielding his eyes, as if the light hurt him. He said: ‘I’ve got a headache, let’s go to bed, shall we?’ In bed we didn’t make love, we lay quietly side by side, not talking. He was crying in his sleep, I had to wake him out of a bad dream.

By-election. North London. Candidates—Conservative, Labour, Communist. A Labour seat, but with a reduced majority from the previous election. As usual, long discussions in CP circles about whether it is right to split the Labour vote. I’ve been in on several of them. These discussions have the same pattern. No, we don’t want to split the vote; it’s essential to have Labour in, rather than a Tory. But on the other hand, if we believe in CP policy, we must try to get our candidate in. Yet we know there’s no hope of getting a CP candidate in. This impasse remains until emissary from Centre comes in to say that it’s wrong to see the CP as a kind of ginger group, that’s just defeatism, we have to fight the election as if we were convinced we were going to win it. (But we know we aren’t going to win it.) So the fighting speech by the man from Centre, while it inspires everyone to work hard, does not resolve the basic dilemma. On the three occasions I watched this happen, the doubts and confusions were solved by—a joke. Oh yes, very important in politics, that joke. This joke made by the man from Centre himself: It’s all right, comrades, we are going to lose our deposit, we aren’t going to win enough votes to split the Labour vote. Much relieved laughter, and the meeting splits up. This joke, completely contradicting everything in official policy, in fact sums up how everyone feels. I went up to canvass, three afternoons. Campaign HO in the house of a comrade living in the area; campaign organized by the ubiquitous Bill, who lives in the constituency. A dozen or so housewives, free to canvass in the afternoons—the men come in at night. Everyone knew each other, the atmosphere I find so wonderful—of people working together for a common end. Bill, a brilliant organizer, everything worked out to the last detail. Cups of tea and discussion about how things were going before we went out to canvass. This is a working-class area. ‘Strong support for the Party around here,’ said one woman, with pride. Am given two dozen cards, with the names of people who have already been canvassed, marked ‘doubtful’. My job to see them again, and talk them into voting for the CP. As I leave the campaign HQ, discussion about the right way to dress for canvassing—most of these women much better dressed than the women of the area. ‘I don’t think it’s right to dress differently than usual,’ says one woman, ‘it’s a kind of cheating.’ ‘Yes, but if you turn up at the door too posh, they get on the defensive.’ Comrade Bill, laughing and good-natured—the same energetic good-nature as Molly, when she’s absorbed in detailed work, says: ‘What matters is to get results.’ The two women chide him for being dishonest. ‘We’ve got to be honest in everything we do, because otherwise they won’t trust us.’ The names I am given are of people scattered over a wide area of working streets. A very ugly area of uniform, small, poor houses. A main station half a mile away, shedding thick smoke all around. Dark clouds, low and thick, and the smoke drifting up to join them. The first house has a cracked fading door. Mrs C, in a sagging wool dress and apron, a worn-down woman. She has two small boys, well-dressed and kept. I say I am from the CP; she nods. I say: ‘I understand you are undecided whether to vote for us?’ She says: ‘I’ve got nothing against you.’ She’s not hostile, but polite. She says: ‘The lady who came last week left a book.’ (A pamphlet.) Finally she says: ‘But we’ve always voted Labour, dear.’ I mark the card Labour, crossing out the ‘doubtful’, and go on. The next, a Cypriot. This house even poorer, a young man looking harassed, a pretty dark girl, a new baby. Scarcely any furniture. New in England. It emerges that the point they are ‘doubtful’ about is whether they are entitled to the vote at all. I explain that they are. Both very good-natured, but wanting me to leave, the baby is crying, an atmosphere of pressure and harassment. The man says he doesn’t mind the communists but he doesn’t like the Russians. My feeling is they won’t trouble to vote, but I leave the card ‘doubtful’ and go on to the next. A well-kept house, with a crowd of teddy-boys outside. Wolf-whistles and friendly jibes as I arrive. I disturb the housewife, who is pregnant and has been lying down. Before letting me in, she complains to her son that he said he was going to the shops for her. He says he will go later: a nice-looking, tough, well-dressed boy of sixteen or so—all the children in the area well-dressed, even when their parents are not. ‘What do you want?’ she says to me. ‘I’m from the CP’—and explain. She says: ‘Yes, we’ve had you before.’ Polite, but indifferent. After a discussion during which it’s hard to get her to agree or disagree with anything, she says her husband has always voted Labour, and she does what her husband says. As I leave she shouts at her son, but he drifts off with a group of his friends, grinning. She yells at him. But this scene has a feeling of good-nature about it: she doesn’t really expect him to go shopping for her, but shouts at him on principle, while he expects her to shout at him, and doesn’t really mind. At the next house, the woman at once and eagerly offers a cup of tea, says she likes elections, ‘people keep dropping in for a bit of a talk.’ In short, she’s lonely. She talks on and on about her personal problems on a dragging, listless harassed note. (Of the houses I visited this was the one which seemed to me to contain the real trouble, real misery.) She said she had three small children, was bored, wanted to go back to work, her husband wouldn’t let her. She talked and talked and talked, obsessively, I was there nearly three hours, couldn’t leave. When I finally asked her if she was voting for the CP, she said: ‘Yes, if you like, dear’—which I’m sure she had said to all the canvassers. She added that her husband always voted Labour. I changed the ‘doubtful’ to Labour, and went on. At about ten that night I went back, with all the cards but three changed to Labour, and handed them in to Comrade Bill. I said: ‘We have some pretty optimistic canvassers.’ He flicked the cards over, without comment, replaced them in their boxes, and remarked loudly for the benefit of other canvassers coming in: ‘There’s real support for our policy, we’ll get our candidate in yet.’ I canvassed three afternoons in all, the other two not ‘doubtfuls’ but going into houses for the first time. Found two CP voters, both Party members, the rest all Labour. Five lonely women going mad quietly by themselves, in spite of husband and children or rather because of them. The quality they all had: self-doubt. A guilt because they were not happy. The phrase they all used: ‘There must be something wrong with me.’ Back in the campaign HQ I mentioned these women to the woman in charge for the afternoon. She said: ‘Yes, wherever I go canvassing, I get the heeby-jeebies. This country’s full of women going mad all by themselves.’ A pause, then she added, with a slight aggressiveness, the other side of the self-doubt, the guilt shown by the women I’d talked to: ‘Well, I used to be the same until I joined the Party and got myself a purpose in life.’ I’ve been thinking about this—the truth is, these women interest me much more than the election campaign. Election Day: Labour in, reduced majority. Communist Candidate loses deposit. Joke. (In campaign HQ Maker of joke, Comrade Bill.) ‘If we’d got another two thousand votes, the Labour majority would have been on a knife-edge. Every cloud has a silver lining.’

Jean Barker. Wife of minor Party official. Aged thirty-four. Small, dark, plump. Rather plain. Husband patronizes her. She wears permanently, a look of strained, enquiring good-nature. Comes around collecting Party dues. A born talker, never stops talking, but the most interesting kind of talker there is, she never knows what she is going to say until it is out of her mouth, so that she is continually blushing, catching herself up short, explaining just what it is she has meant, or laughing nervously. Or she stops with a puzzled frown in the middle of a sentence, as if to say: ‘Surely I don’t think that?’ So while she talks she has the appearance of someone listening. She has started a novel, says she hasn’t got time to finish it. I have not yet met one Party member, anywhere, who has not written, half-written, or is not planning to write a novel, short stories, or a play. I find this an extraordinary fact, though I don’t understand it. Because of her verbal incontinence, which shocks people, or makes them laugh, she is developing the personality of a clown, or a licensed humorist. She has no sense of humour at all. But when she hears some remark she makes that surprises her, she knows from experience that people will laugh, or be upset, so she laughs herself, in a puzzled nervous way, then hurries on. She has three children. She and her husband very ambitious for them, goad them through school, to get scholarships. Children carefully educated in the Party ‘line’, conditions in Russia, etc. They have the defensive closed-in look with strangers of people knowing themselves to be in a minority. With communists, they tend to show off their Party know-how, while their parents look on, proud.

Jean works as a manager of a canteen. Long hours. Keeps her flat and her children and herself very well. Secretary of local Party branch. She is dissatisfied with herself. ‘I’m not doing enough, I mean the Party’s not enough, I get fed up, just paper work, like an office, doesn’t mean anything.’ Laughs, nervously. ‘George—’ (her husband) ‘says that’s the incorrect attitude, but I don’t see why I should always have to bow down. I mean, they’re wrong often enough, aren’t they?’ Laughs, ‘I decided to do something worthwhile for a change.’ Laughs. ‘I mean something different. After all, even the leading comrades are talking about sectarianism, aren’t they…well of course the leading comrades should be the first to say it…’ Laughs. ‘Though that’s not what seems to happen…anyway, I decided to do something useful for a change.’ Laughs. ‘I mean, something different. So now I have a class of backward children on Saturday afternoons. I used to be a teacher, you know. I coach them. No, not Party children, just ordinary children.’ Laughs. ‘Fifteen of them. It’s hard work. George says I’d be better occupied making Party members, but I wanted to do something really useful…’ And so on. The Communist Party is largely composed of people who aren’t really political at all, but who have a powerful sense of service. And then there are those who are lonely, and the Party is their family. The poet, Paul, who got drunk last week and said he was sick and disgusted with the Party, but he joined it in 1935, and if he left it, he’d be leaving ‘his whole life’.

[The yellow notebook (#ulink_f9da3846-c054-5934-8c45-3ae9f47be83a) looked like the manuscript of a novel, for it was called The Shadow of the Third. It certainly began like a novel:]

Julia’s voice came loud up the stairs: ‘Ella, aren’t you going to the party? Are you going to use the bath? If not, I will.’ Ella did not answer. For one thing, she was sitting on her son’s bed, waiting for him to drop off to sleep. For another, she had decided not to go to the party, and did not want to argue with Julia. Soon she made a cautious movement off the bed, but at once Michael’s eyes opened, and he said: ‘What party? Are you going to it?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘go to sleep.’ His eyes sealed themselves, the lashes quivered and lay still. Even asleep he was formidable, a square-built, tough four-year-old. In the shaded light his sandy hair, his lashes, even a tiny down on his bare forearm gleamed gold. His skin was brown and faintly glistening from the summer. Ella quietly turned off the lights—waited; went to the door—waited; slipped out—waited. No sound. Julia came brisk up the stairs, enquiring in her jolly off-hand voice: ‘Well, are you going?’ ‘Shhhh, Michael’s just off to sleep.’ Julia lowered her voice and said: ‘Go and have your bath now. I want to wallow in peace when you’re gone.’ ‘But I said I’m not going,’ said Ella, slightly irritable.

‘Why not?’ said Julia, going into the large room of the flat. There were two rooms and a kitchen, all rather small and low-ceilinged, being right under the roof. This was Julia’s house, and Ella lived in it, with her son Michael, in these three rooms. The larger room had a recessed bed, books, some prints. It was bright and light, rather ordinary, or anonymous. Ella had not attempted to impose her own taste on it. Some inhibition stopped her: this was Julia’s house, Julia’s furniture; somewhere in the future lay her own taste. It was something like this that she felt. But she enjoyed living here and had no plans for moving out. Ella went after Julia and said: ‘I don’t feel like it.’ ‘You never feel like it,’ said Julia. She was squatting in an armchair sizes too big for the room, smoking. Julia was plump, stocky, vital, energetic, Jewish. She was an actress. She had never made much of being an actress. She played small parts, competently. They were, as she complained, of two kinds: ‘Stock working-class comic, and stock working-class pathetic.’ She was beginning to work for television. She was deeply dissatisfied with herself.

When she said: ‘You never feel like it,’ it was a complaint partly against Ella, and partly against herself. She always felt like going out, could never refuse an invitation. She would say that even when she despised some role she was playing, hated the play, and wished she had nothing to do with it, she nevertheless enjoyed what she called ‘flaunting her personality around’. She loved rehearsals, theatre shop and small talk and malice.

Ella worked for a women’s magazine. She had done articles on dress and cosmetics, and of the getting-and-keeping-a-man kind, for three years, hating the work. She was not good at it. She would have been sacked if she had not been a friend of the woman editor. Recently she had been doing work she liked much better. The magazine had introduced a medical column. It was written by a doctor. But every week several hundred letters came in and half of them had nothing to do with medicine, and were of such a personal nature that they had to be answered privately. Ella handled these letters. Also she had written half a dozen short stories which she herself described satirically as ‘sensitive and feminine’, and which both she and Julia said were the kind of stories they most disliked. And she had written part of a novel. In short, on the face of it there was no reason for Julia to envy Ella. But she did.