Party Animals Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Aaronovitch

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PART I

  COMRADES COME RALLY

  1

  Party Like It’s 1961

  2

  The Party: a Brief Biography

  3

  Party Man and Party Wife

  4

  Party Life

  5

  Family Party

  6

  Going Back to Russia

  PART II

  AND I’LL CRY IF I WANT TO

  7

  Floreat Domus

  8

  How We Got to Be Last

  PART III

  MESSAGE TO THE UNBORN

  Introduction

  9

  Party Spies

  10

  Blind Man’s Buff

  11

  The Referred Patient

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In July 1961, just before David Aaronovitch’s seventh birthday, Yuri Gagarin came to London. The Russian cosmonaut was everything the Aaronovitch family wished for – a popular and handsome embodiment of modern communism.

  But who were they, these ever hopeful, defiant and (had they but known it) historically doomed people? Like a non-magical version of the wizards of J. K. Rowling’s world, they lived secretly with and parallel to the non-communist majority, sometimes persecuted, sometimes ignored, but carrying on their own ways and traditions. Where others went to church they went to Socialist Sunday School, society’s up was their down and its heroes were their villains. Who wanted American TV when you could have Russian movies?

  A memoir of early life among communists, Party Animals first took David Aaronovitch back through his own memories of belief and action. But there was much more to it. He found himself studying the old secret service files, uncovering the unspoken shame and fears that provided the unconscious background to his own existence as a party animal.

  Only then did he begin to understand what had come before – both the obstinate heroism and the monstrous cowardice. And the elements that shape our fondest beliefs.

  About the Author

  David Aaronovitch is an award-winning journalist, who has worked in radio, television and newspapers in the United Kingdom since the early 1980s. He lives in Hampstead, north London, with his wife, three daughters and Kerry Blue the terrier. His first book, Paddling to Jerusalem, won the Madoc prize for travel literature in 2001 and his second, Voodoo Histories, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller.

  ALSO BY DAVID AARONOVITCH

  Paddling to Jerusalem: An Aquatic Tour of Our Small Country

  Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

  For Lavender and Sam. Reunited in this, at least

  Party Animals

  My Family and Other Communists

  DAVID AARONOVITCH

  ‘Who’s going to be interested in any of it, silly boy? It’s about us, it’s between us. It won’t mean a thing to anybody else.’

  Leah Wesker to her son Arnold on his play Chicken Soup with Barley

  PART I

  COMRADES COME RALLY

  1

  Party Like It’s 1961

  Five for the years of the five-year plan

  And four for the four years taken!

  Red Fly the Banners O!

  In the summer of 1961 the Communists of Parliament Hill Fields celebrated. Nellie Rathbone sang to herself as she picked up the milk and the Daily Worker from her doorstep in Makepeace Avenue. Old Andrew Rothstein’s lips lifted the white moustache below his black homburg as he walked down Hillway on his way to the Marx Memorial Library. In the dentist’s surgery in St Albans Road, Rose Uren, the Party orthodontist, gripped the drill a little more lightly and may even have permitted her victims the use of an anaesthetic. Or so I imagine. I was only seven at the time, but my infant sensors could distinguish between primary emotions, and what was going on among the comrades was something close to happiness.

  The cause of this good humour was the visit to Britain of the world’s first cosmonaut (which I wrongly took to be a word created by amalgamating ‘communist’ and ‘astronaut’). Handsome, wholesome Yuri Gagarin was everything a British Communist wanted a Russian to be: the son of a peasant family, a proletarian apprentice in a foundry, then an officer in the Red Air Force. On 12 April 1961, Gagarin had become the first man in space. Bunched up in a tiny capsule called Vostok 1, screwed on to the end of a huge rocket, he had been blasted into the stratosphere – where his smile had been picked up on grainy film – and then he had been almost magically wafted to earth somewhere in the vastness of Soviet Central Asia. It was a triumph for socialism.

  Three months later, on a wet and rather cold British summer’s day, Yuri Gagarin arrived in Manchester. It is said that small children wearing home-made cosmonaut outfits lined the terraced streets to wave to him. He appeared before crowds in Trafford Park and was noisily feted by teenage girls who – weeks earlier – might have been screaming for a coiffed idol with a guitar. Gagarin was sexy – an attribute not often associated with Russia, with its women shot-putters and fleshy General Secretaries. In the Sunday Express the chronicler-cartoonist Giles drew a group of young women in a milk bar, swooning over a picture of the twenty-seven-year-old cosmonaut while their scowling boyfriends looked on. ‘Good night, Elvis Presley,’ one was saying, ‘good night Cliff Richard, come in Yuri Gagarin’.

  He came – Communism came – offering peace and progress, after years of isolation and Cold War. When Gagarin addressed an audience at the office of the foundry workers’ union he was the model of what Communists insisted Communism was all about. ‘Although only one person was aboard the spaceship,’ he said, through his interpreter, ‘it took tens of thousands of people to make it a success. Over seven thousand scientists, workers and engineers just like yourselves were decorated for contributing to the success of the flight.’ Major Gagarin smiled. ‘There is plenty of room for all in outer space,’ he said. ‘I visualise the great day when a Soviet spaceship landing on the moon will disembark a party of scientists, who will join British and American scientists working in observatories in a spirit of peaceful co-operation and competition rather than thinking on military lines.’ The crowd, apparently, stood to applaud. Peace instead of war, progress instead of backwardness, rationality instead of prejudice, planning instead of chaos.

  Then Gagarin came to London. Every time a Soviet leader or hero visited they would take a big black limousine and go on a pilgrimage to the granite memorial to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. There they would bow, and place flowers in front of the giant leonine head. If you stood on the dustbin by our side gate on Bromwich Avenue and peered over the fence on the afternoon of 14 July, you could see the cars slowly climbing the steep hill towards the entrance 200 yards away.

  At the memorial, standing within a semicircle of local dignitaries and embassy officials, the elegant Major stood to attention and saluted the founder of Communism. And if any of the local comrades thought it was an irony that the capitalists of Britain had connived in the erection of such a large bust of the great anti-capitalist, then I never heard them say so. They lined the streets and I stood on the dustbin and we tried to discern Gagarin and then again, two years later, the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, followed by Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, and Popovich, whom we named a puppy after, as they looked out of the windows of their black cars – the socialist future come at last to pay tribute to the prophetic past.

  On our mantelpieces and at our Communist Party bazaars the space memorabilia, shipped over from the Soviet Union, took up residence. We had a silver-coloured Sputnik – the first satellite, sent into orbit in 1957 – lifting off on a plastic whoosh from the gilt earth. And then after Gagarin’s triumph we added a Vostok rocket, attached by an orbiting wire to a planet, its point of origin marked with ‘CCCP’ – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Sovetsky Soyuz, the ‘socialist eighth of the earth’.

  The wire holding the rocket to its origins was also a metaphor for what attached the orbiting Parliament Hill Fields Communists to Russia, to socialism, to the causes of peace, progress and the international working class. Random post-war tides had deposited them in this semi-urban part of North London, slipped rather comfortably into the gap between Hampstead Heath and Islington. They had come there from Lanark and Edinburgh, from Vienna and Berlin, from Russia and Esher, from jobs on the railways and in universities, and fetched up in London NW5 and N6, with (in those romantic days before digits took over entirely) phone addresses that began Gulliver or Fitzroy and phones that sometimes clicked oddly when they were answered. Among the Tories, Liberals, right-wing Labourites and nothing-much-at-all-folk dwelt the Davises, the Schons, the Kessels, the Frankels, the Whitakers, the Boatmans (or the Boatmen as my mother inevitably called them), the Formans (but not the Formen), the Loefflers, Pete and Elvira Richards, old Irma Petrov and the impoverished Ken Herbert, with his glasses sellotaped together, the lenses thick with dust. And sprinkled among them the senior Party people, the Gollans, Jock and Bridget Nicholson and the Aaronovitches.

  Like other Party children I had – though it took me the first decade of my life to realise it – been born at a 90-degree angle to the rest of society. I simply lived that life, knowing no other, but the Party people around me had chosen at some point to exist like that. So most things the world around us thought were good, we thought were bad. Much we held to be virtuous was considered pernicious by everyone else. For us the churches were sinks of superstition, the royal family was a feudal remnant, the police were oppressors, the Americans were crass warmongers, the army was a tool of imperialism, the management of major companies were exploiters and the press, the BBC and many teachers were purveyors of lies and propaganda. We were indifferent to if not contemptuous of crooners, Hollywood epics and musicals.

  We were overtly anti-war, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-apartheid, anti rent rises, anti-landlord, anti-bomb, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist; anti-neo-colonialist, even. But we weren’t miserable because there were plenty of things we were pro too. We liked trade unions (and the more militant the better), we quietly loved the Soviet Union, were warm to Irish Republicanism, supported national liberation movements from just about anywhere, upped the workers, worked for the cause of peace (or Peace, as I thought of it), enjoyed world cinema and took the collectivist’s odd pleasure in male voice choirs and folk-dancing.

  Much that we cared about seemed exotic or remote to the people around us. At the age of seven I knew, to take a far-flung example, where Guyana was and that the forces of imperialism had displaced the good leader Cheddi Jagan with the wicked Forbes Burnham. It was confusing later to discover that Burnham was black. Black people were good. They were oppressed in America, discriminated against in Britain, shot down in South Africa and butchered in the Congo. In that sense, though we Communists were behind history when it came to democracy and individualism, when it came to race and, I’d say too, to feminism, we were well ahead.

  What I think I understood was that, once – during a war that was only sixteen years gone – we and the British people had been on the same side. United against the Nazis, whose unique brutalities I could find in dreadful photographs in books my parents thought I couldn’t reach. United with the heroic Red Army, who had ‘really’ won the war. We were in communion. But before that war, and after it again, we were almost pariahs. In every war and ‘struggle’ (never ‘a’ struggle, but always ‘the’ struggle) following that glorious moment when the Allies shook hands on the Elbe and Will embraced Sasha we were on the other side.

  When the Iron Curtain descended we were stranded, representative not of allies but of alien lands of moustached and grim men, tanks and hefty, badly dressed women. This isolation was hard, but perpetual opposition is a habit with its own consolations too. It cemented the solidarity of comrades – hardened in adversity, loyal to each other, contra mundum, bloody but unbowed.

  Yet, for all that, any sign of our own respectability was seized upon. And beginning in 1957 after the launch of Sputnik, suddenly we – so poor in every other way – were associated with success. We were Communists and it was Communists who were launching rockets, sending dogs, monkeys and then men into space. They were able to do this because their system, a system of rational planning rather than the chaotic sauve qui peut of capitalism, was allowing human advances such as had never been seen before. Five-Year Plans decided what was needed and who would produce it, so there would be no waste. Planners created whole cities near the fabled Urals dedicated to scientific and technological progress. There was Akademgorodok – the city of scholars. And Magnitogorsk, city of magnets (I supposed).

  Supersonic MiG jets defended Soviet skies, Tupolev airliners whizzed comrade citizens between the steppe-separated Russian cities, jet hydrofoils sped hull-high from port to port, nuclear ice-breakers broke the ice literally and – for us – metaphorically, red-scarved pioneers smiled through summer camps while their parents rested in workers’ rest homes on the sunny Black Sea. In modern, sunlit sanatoria Soviet doctors and nurses treated the sick without distinction between professional, intellectual and proletarian.

  In this updated, uprated version of Babar the Elephant – one of my favourite childhood books – Babar the General Secretary presided over a Celesteville in which everything was new and everything had its own building and its specialised elephant. And when the hewer had hewed his day’s wood and the drawer had drawn her day’s water, they would board an electric tram or take the Metro to the theatre, the opera or the library to be filled up with the best culture the world could offer. ‘Ahh,’ sighed the bolshy shop steward Fred Kite in the 1959 film I’m All Right Jack, ‘Russia! All them corn fields – and ballet in the evening!’ Nothing was too good for the working class.

  After the years of toil and sacrifice real socialism was paying off. The General Secretary was not actually Babar, but the equally paternalistic Nikita Khrushchev, with his smiles, boasts and folksy language. In 1959, when Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, visited Moscow for a much-photographed encounter at the American national exhibition, Mr K told him what the North London comrades all wanted so badly to believe. ‘America has existed for one hundred and fifty years and this’ – Khrushchev gestured at the fridges and TVs, ‘is the level she has reached. We have existed not quite forty-two years and in another seven we will be on the same level as America.’ And then he added, ‘When we catch you up, in passing you by, we will wave to you.’

  Seven years later was 1966. Around that time, when I was eleven years old, a boy asked me what my parents were. I told him they were Communists. ‘Communists?’ he said, disbelievingly, ‘I thought they’d all been shot.’ And I wondered what it would be like to be shot, and so insouciantly, routinely shot, at that. But when I glimpsed Gagarin on his pilgrimage to Highgate, shooting was out and history, as Fidel Castro, the new leader of Cuba, had said, was ‘on our side’. Once again we were the people of the future. We briefly touched the golden face of fashion.

  2

  The Party: a Brief Biography

  The hall rose, thundering. How far they had soared, these Bolsheviki, from a despised and hunted sect less than four months ago, to this supreme place, the helm of great Russia in full tide of insurrection!

  John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World

  ‘The Party’ to anyone who wasn’t in another party – and even to many who were – meant the Communist Party. To be a Liberal, or even a Lab ourite, was usually a mere affiliation and committed the member to as much or as little activity and support as they liked. To be a Communist was different. A Party member was described as ‘card-carrying’ – the real thing, as opposed to the mere fellow traveller or armchair revolutionary. It was a statement of fundamental being and moral seriousness. In this sense it was religious. Like a post-communion Catholic, a Communist really meant to try and live a life of faith.

  What guided Communists in their Great Task was Marxism – or, as they thought of it, scientific socialism. Far from being just a belief or a desire, Marxism they understood to be a way of understanding human society and human history – a system for organising the world in your head. The philosophy of dialectical materialism was to the twentieth-century Marxist what the Quran was to the devout Muslim: the final word on how to comprehend life. And it was a ‘tool’, part magic, part science – like Dr Who’s sonic screwdriver – available to Communists alone.

  The year I caught a glimpse of Gagarin, 1961, the Communist Party of Great Britain turned forty-one – young adulthood in the life of a political party, its members old enough to have children who were old enough to be members. It had been founded in 1920, three years after the Bolshevik revolution and two years after the end of the Great War, as a response to both. A Unity Convention of various small socialist and working-class groups was held that summer in the Cannon Street Hotel, the architect E. M. Barry’s glorious adjunct to Cannon Street station to which T. S. Eliot’s narrator in The Waste Land was invited for luncheon at around that time, by a Mr Eugenides, ‘the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants’. After a day at the doubtless rather bourgeois and expensive hotel the delegates adjourned a mile or so north-west to a socialist hall not far from Old Street, which features in no poem I can find.