ODYSSEY OF A LIBERAL,

Memoirs

Freda Utley

Miss Utley's Memoirs begin with her childhood in London focusing on her parents and their friends and intimates within the Fabian Socialist Set including George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Frank Harris, John Burns and T. W. H. Crossland. She describes her education at English and Swiss boarding schools and the cruelties she suffered for being "brainy." At London University she became one of the "Bohemian Left." Tutoring foreigners in English brought her into contact with Bolsheviks whose views swayed her political beliefs and led her to join the Socialist Party. As Secretary of the King's College Socialist Society she met and began an enduring friendship with Bertrand Russell. For a time she resided with his family as tutor to his children. While visiting Russia she met her husband Arcadi Berdischevsky. After their marriage they lived first in England then in Russia until he was arrested and sent to a Siberian concentration camp. Her subsequent flight from Russia and disillusionment with the U.S.S.R. deeply affect her activities and writing.

A most notable chapter is one entitled "Friends in the Village" in which Miss Utley describes her financial poverty but social affluence living in Greenwich Village surrounded by friends such as Dwight MacDonald, Norman Cousins, Max Eastman, Sydney Hook, Norman Thomas, Granville Hicks, and Isaac Don Levine. She poignantly describes her attempts to discover the fate of her husband while struggling to survive by writing for a living. Throughout there are delightful anecdotes about VIPs of the social and political worlds whose company she has always kept, told with the clarity and objectivity of a woman who understands people and politics. Chapter titles are intriguing hints of the author's "odyssey." Some are:

Remembering Russell

Honeymoon in Japan

Russia in Rose

Bertrand Russell and

George Bernard Shaw

My Indian Summer in China

China Experts Then and Now

The End of My Life in Russia

Friends in Greenwich Village

ODYSSEY OF A LIBERAL contains hitherto unpublished correspondence between the author and Shaw and Russell.

WASHINGTON NATIONAL PRESS, INC

128 C STREET. NORTHEAST

WASHINGTON. D C. 20002

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Three decades have passed since I wrote The Dream We Lost* telling the story of my life in Russia in the 30's, and describing the new system of exploitation developed by the Communist totalitarian dictatorship. Since then I have completed my circuit of the political spectrum and learnt that there is all too little difference between the North Pole, where liberal aspirations are blasted by the icy breath of Communist tyranny, and the South Pole where conservatism hardens into reaction or the cold immobility of uncharitableness and fearful concern only for the preservation of possessions, privilege and power.

In now writing my memoirs which cover my life before and after my disillusionment in Russia, I still find no words more relevant to our times and my experience than the quotation from William Morris's Dream of John Ball which I put on the fly leaf of my old book:

I pondered all these things and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat; and when it comes about it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

My life's story is that of the education of a liberal in our time, although it may be that neither my critics to the "Right" or to the "Left" regard me as anything of the sort.

Old political labels have become so confused by passion and prejudice, or so outdated, that they have become irrelevant to our age.

Yet the old landmarks still stand despite the wrongly labeled signposts which confuse and lead astray the generation which has come of age as I overpass the Biblical limit of threescore years and ten.

In writing my memoirs I am not attempting to provide wisdom for the ages, but I hope that in recording my far ranging experience as a participant observer of the history of our times I can contribute something of value to an understanding of the problems of our time. Solutions consonant with liberal aspirations will never be found unless those who strive to make a better world free themselves of the illusions which thrive among those whose personal experience, unlike my own, has been too fortunate for them to appreciate the grim realities of the struggle for survival which is still today man's fate in most regions of the earth.

The belief that we can ourselves create a better world makes life purposeful and worth living—however dim the hope becomes as we grow old. Thus, I suppose I am still a liberal within the original meaning of that much-abused word, although having learned through experience more than is dreamed of in the philosophy of most Western liberals, I no longer share their faith in the inevitability of progress and the perfectibility of man through the creation of a better material environment.

F.U.

Washington, D.C. November 1969

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*John Day, 1940. Subsequently republished in abbreviated form as Lost Illusion in 1947. Reprinted in The Henry Regnery Co.'s Gateway edition of Classics.

iii

CONTENTS

Page

Chapter 1 As The Sparks Fly ............................................................................ 1

Chapter 2 Beginnings ........................................................................................ 6

Chapter 3 Continental Interlude ........................................................................ 15

Chapter 4 My English School ............................................................................ 23

Chapter 5 War Years ......................................................................................... 31

Chapter 6 Travelling Left In Bohemia .............................................................. 43

Chapter 7 Marx, Freud, Love, and the Libido .................................................. 54

Chapter 8 Remembering Russell ....................................................................... 64

Chapter 9 I Take the Plunge .............................................................................. 74

Chapter 10 Russia in Rose .................................................................................. 81

Chapter 11 Off to the East .................................................................................. 87

Chapter 12 Honeymoon in Japan ........................................................................ 97

Chapter 13 Working for the Party ....................................................................... 108

Chapter 14 Interlude With Temple ...................................................................... 114

Epilogue ........................................................................................... 125

Chapter 15 The End of My Life in Russia .......................................................... 128

Chapter 16 Return to the West ............................................................................ 142

Chapter 17 Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw,

The Case of Berdichevsky ............................................................................................152

Chapter 18 Russell in America ........................................................................... 167

Chapter 19 My Indian Summer in China ............................................................. 184

Chapter 20 Portrait of Agnes ............................................................................... 200

Chapter 21 China Experts Then and Now ........................................................... 210

Chapter 22 I Discover America ........................................................................... 220

Chapter 23 Away to the New World .................................................................... 225

Chapter 24 Emigration to America ...................................................................... 234

Chapter 25 Friends in the Village ........................................................................ 244

Chapter 26 Failure of the Dream ......................................................................... 255

Chapter 27 Ordeal of a Premature Anti-Communist ............................................ 270

Chapter 28 Back to an Office Again ................................................................... 280

Chapter 29 The Political World is Also Round ...................................................302

INDEX............................................................................................................................311

Chapter 1

AS THE SPARKS FLY

In my early teens, at boarding school in England, I cut out the word SOPHROSUNE in Greek letters on my pencil box. Why, I cannot now imagine, since this precept, usually translated as meaning moderation, or nothing in excess, was alien to my temperament. Far from observing the Golden Mean, I have spent most of my life recklessly committed to causes I believed in. Since I either became disillusioned or lost interest in these causes when they prevailed or became popular, I have never ridden the tide which, taken at the flood, leads to success. I should have been more prescient had I carved, "Born to trouble as the sparks fly upward" on the bright polished surface of that light colored wooden box which I can still see clearly in the eye of memory, when so much else has been forgotten. Yet in attempting to analyze the motivations which have shaped my life, I realize that in spite of always having been engage, it was the Greek principle of restraint, or balance, which compelled me to throw my weight on the opposite side of the scales when the oppressed became the oppressors, as so often happens in the course of human events.

Although I never heard of James Russell Lowell until I came to America, his lines express the feeling which has consciously or unconsciously motivated my life.

Right forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne . . .

Anatole France, with whose writings I became familiar in early youth, expressed the same idea in his Révolte Des Anges, which ends when Lucifer refuses to lead an assault on heaven by the angels whose fall was due to their compassion for the sufferings of mankind, because he foresees that:

Dieu vancu deviendra Satan: et Satan vanqueur deviendra Dieu. *

Men are men and there is no innate virtue in the oppressed. On the contrary, as Bertrand Russell pointed out long ago when underdog changes places with upper dog he proves to be more ruthless because he has learned, while underneath, to scratch harder in the battle for survival.

Since, either instinctively or by reason of the sense of proportion which is the essence of the classical concept of beauty, I have tended all my life to throw my weight on the weaker side of the scales of power, perhaps I was not so wrong when I carved SOPHROSUNE on my pencil box when I was 14 or 15 years old.

Unfortunately in my personal life and behavior I have paid little heed to Goethe's dictum that the essence of wisdom is to know when to stop. By expressing my views too sharply, or by carrying my arguments to a ruthlessly logical conclusion, I have failed to influence as many people as I might have done had I been more temperate or restrained and less combative. I have alienated some friends and lost potential allies by turning my back upon those, who by their refusal to go all the way with me in a battle against odds, seemed to me to be cowards unwilling to stand up and be counted when they were in

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* God conquered will become Satan; and Satan victorious become God.

reality only displaying greater political sagacity than myself. Yet despite my all or nothing attitude in the heat of controversy, I have found myself unable to remain long in the company of extremists on any side.

One's character, no doubt, is one's fate. But no one knows the extent to which character is determined by heredity or by environment. Nor is it until late in life that one can dimly perceive how the influences of childhood and youth have shaped one's destiny, and continue to determine one's philosophy and behavior until the curtain falls.

These influences in my case were liberal, socialist and free-thinking, strongly colored by the poetry of revolt and liberty and legends, stories and romances of heroism and adventure upon which I fed in childhood; not without a tincture of Gallic realism, but basically English. I was conditioned by the empirical attitude of mind inculcated in me by my father; and my upbringing, despite the absence of religious instruction, was anchored to the basic tenets of the Puritanism which produced the first English radicals in the 17th century, the Pilgrim Fathers who emigrated to New England, and the Nonconformists who founded the British Labor Party two hundred years later.

The environment which shaped me was in many respects different from that of others of my generation but I am a product of the heyday of the liberal era, reared in its faith in infinite progress through freedom from superstition and by means of the scientific discoveries and their technical application which were expected to make man master of his fate. I am, or was, a child of the age of reason - of that new age of faith when it was believed that freed from "the shambles of faith and of fear" a vista of infinite progress would open to mankind.

Thus I was imbued at an early age with a consuming desire for the emancipation of mankind, or for justice, which is perhaps the moral reflection of the desire for harmony and beauty. I believed, thanks to my rationalist upbringing, that mankind requires only freedom from superstition or from the bonds of established religion to acquire the knowledge which, together with release from a narrow regard for material self interest, could lead to heaven on earth. The libertarian values implanted in my mind which have consciously or unconsciously motivated me all my life, were to cause me to recoil in horror from the Soviet dictatorship when I came intimately to know it. It was a passion for the emancipation of mankind, not the blueprint of a planned society nor any mystical yearning to merge myself in a fellowship absolving me of personal responsibility, which both led me into the Communist fold, and caused me to leave it as soon as I learned that it meant submission to the most total tyranny which mankind has ever experienced.

Many of my contemporaries and those who came after me were to follow the Red Star because of an unhappy childhood, or frustrations of one kind or another, or failure to make a place for themselves in the competitive capitalist world. But I came to Communism via Greek history, French Revolutionary literature, and the English nineteenth century poets of freedom-not in revolt against a strict "bourgeois" upbringing, nor on account of failure to make a place for myself in the "capitalist" world, but profoundly influenced by a happy childhood, a socialist father and a continental education. I am perhaps proof of Arnold Toynbee's contention that Communism is a "Western heresy."

When I came to study ancient history my heroes were Pericles, the Gracchi, and Julius Caesar. From an early age I could recite long passages from Shelley, Swinburne and Keats extolling man's eternal striving for freedom, beauty and justice. Swinburne's love poems I rejected as incomprehensible aberrations from the glorification of freedom and the denunciation of tyranny and superstition which I loved. I thrilled to such lines as:

Pride have all men in their fathers that were free before them,

In the warriors that begat us freeborn pride have we;

But the fathers of their spirit, how may men adore them;

With what rapture praise who bade our souls be free.

Sons of Athens born in spirit and truth are all born free men;

Most of all, we, nurtured where the North wind holds his reign.

Children all we sea-folk of the Salaminian seamen,

Sons of they that beat back Persia, we who beat back Spain.*

Today I realize that I ought not to have been so unprepared to learn the facts of political life as might seem from my account of the influences of my childhood and youth.

Like a discordant note or muted theme in the first movement of a symphony, there were other early influences in my life which should have prepared me for the disappointments and disillusionment which awaited me, not only in Soviet Russia but in later years in the Free World. In childhood and youth I had imbibed not only classical and romantic literature and the poems of Shelley and Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and other poets who sang of freedom and inspired belief in the coming of a Golden Age when men would be freed from the chains of superstition and fear. I was also well acquainted with the writings of Shaw and Anatole France, read and enjoyed Voltaire's "Candide" and "Zadig" and was to win a prize at school for an essay on Machiavelli.

If heredity also molds character I must take some account of the combative and adventurous spirit of my father's Viking freebooter ancestors, who settled in Yorkshire before William of Normandy conquered England. Utley is a Danish name derived from the words out-leigh or out-lee, meaning beyond the moor, and there is still a remote small village called Utley in the West Riding where my paternal ancestors were blacksmiths for many generations.

Many of the Utley's had gone a'roving in their time which accounts for the fact that there are far more of them in America than in England.**

My mother, who came from Lancashire where the Celtic strain is strong, was a woman of charm and wit as well as beautiful, and may be partly responsible for the romantic streak in our characters which led my brother to voyage from England to the South Seas in a small sailing boat, while I sought a false Holy Grail in Communist Russia.

In my brother Temple's view, it was our Utley inheritance combined with the romantic stories we had read in childhood which shaped our lives.

Writing to our mother from Suva in the Fiji Islands in 1934 shortly after the birth of my son in Moscow he said:

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* Swinburne Athens.

** I knew from my father who, while at college in Manchester, won a money prize for amateurs tracing their ancestry, that in the 17th century four Utley brothers had emigrated to Massachusetts. Since it struck my childhood imagination I also recall that the wife of an Utley who was a cavalryman in Wellington's army had accompanied him on the campaigns in the low countries and crossed rivers hanging on to his horse's tail. After my 1936 book. Japan's Feet of Clay was published in the U.S.A. I received several letters from American Utley's including one from a man who had made a hobby of tracing Utleys and sent me a long list of them. Unfortunately I have lost this but I remember it included the name of an Utley who had been the champion bo\er of the British Navy. In Chicago in 1939 when speaking for the Council of foreign Relations at the invitation of Clifton Utley I was to find rows of Utleys in the telephone book whereas there had been only myself and one other listed in London. At this time I disabused Clifton Utley of the notion that the Utleys stemmed from Wales.

. . . Freda's letter to me was in tone and spirit very sweet. We neither of us quite seem to have found our new world. Moral—do not read your children romantic tales in their infancy. However hard-boiled they may become afterwards, the original taint remains. Tell Freda to teach Jon to lisp the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld as his first primary. Freda at eleven and I at fourteen learned them too late.

The Songs the Syrens sang for us were not the same. I became a "political animal," travelling ever Left in search of the ideal society which never was, or probably can be, on land or sea. Temple came to seek escape from civilization by venturing on perilous seas in a small sailing boat to seek his dream islands in the South Seas. He was to be more fortunate than I although he died young. While I was passing through the Valley of Despair in Russia in the early 30's, Temple had found his Pacific Islands "just as they should be—of an incredible beauty."

Today I find myself wanting to write about my brother before recording my own story. Perhaps because I now begin to understand that Temple and I in the drama of our lives were like strophe and antistrophe-or thesis and antithesis according to the Hegelian philosophy, eventually to be united in a synthesis of understanding.

Both of us were reared in the liberal philosophy of our time and were subject to the same childhood influences. But whereas I was to follow Marx and Lenin's teachings, Temple's views were more akin to Rousseau's and Bakunin's. He came to believe that freedom and happiness are to be found by escaping from modern industrial civilization which, even when it provides material comforts and security, deprives man of the satisfaction of basic needs of his nature. I imagined that a better organization of society could create conditions in which men would be free while voluntarily submitting to the demands of the state intended to ensure justice for all.

Our lives perhaps exemplify the split in the liberal personality between the extremes of anarchy and statism. Temple took the high road and I the low, or vice versa according to one's prejudices, in our life's journey from the "banks of Loch Lomond."

In a later chapter, I shall have more to tell concerning my brother's life and death. Here I only quote, with wonder at Temple's insight, a passage from a letter he wrote when he was 35 years old on the eve of sailing from Colon to the Marquesas Islands.

There is a sort of lethal factor in us Utleys which inhibits success. Both my father who was, and my sister who is much cleverer than I am, always missed it. You see they, who could have got it easily, never quite believed in it. I, who would find its attainment much more difficult, believe in it rather less.

Unlike my brother. I was ambitious. Although I was never able to surmount the "lethal factor" in the Utleys which inhibits us from paying the required price for success, I longed for it. And time was when thanks to my having acquired inordinate confidence in my abilities, thanks to my easy academic successes at school and college, I imagined I would be one of the "movers and shakers" of the world. My faith in human reason, inculcated in me by my upbringing, combined with what Bertrand Russell called my incurable political romanticism, impelled me to continue to believe, even when my views were most unpopular, that if only I could write well enough, I could convince the world of the truth as I saw it.

No doubt one gets what one wants most in life if one tries hard enough, but one cannot have everything. The cost of freedom comes high and one cannot expect to enjoy it, least of all in the world of letters, if one desires fame or security more. Of course, one

always goes on hoping to enjoy both. There have been times when I railed against my fate and considered myself ill-used because the world failed to award me fame, fortune or influence and I found myself reviled for expressing my deepest convictions regardless of the consequences. On one such occasion Edith Hamilton, who died in her 94th year in full possession of her faculties, gently reproved me for feeling sorry for myself following the failure of my 1949 book. The High Cost of Vengeance * to win a wide circulation. "My dear Freda," she said, "don't expect the material rewards of unrighteousness while engaged in the pursuit of truth." Nevertheless I often did, continuing to yearn for the success which I occasionally glimpsed but never quite achieved. Even when one of my books was a success I went off on another quest.

Like my father, I did not "stick to one last," as they express it in North Country England. I dissipated my energies and endeavors in too many directions, wanting to be both scholar and journalist, politician and preacher, crusader for the causes I believed in and seeker for the truth. Desirous of success but unwilling or unable to pay the ultimate price, I could not devote myself to the goddess who, although not the bitch she has been called, demands wholehearted devotion to herself alone.

Thus, I was destined to become a Communist when it was most unpopular to be one, and an anti-Communist during the years when its false promises were generally believed by Western "liberals." Too fast, too soon. The way to success as I have painfully learned, is not to learn too much too soon. It pays to be wrong when everyone else is deluded and woe betide all Cassandras, or anyone else who learns and speaks truth before the public is prepared to listen. The best reputations are gained by those who change their opinions just before the midnight hour when it is usually too late to change the course of human events.

I might have a man's mind-which was the compliment I most relished- but I could always be accused by my opponents or detractors of being too emotional, as perhaps I am, because I am a woman. And in the struggle for existence in which I was to be engaged at an early age, I had to shoulder the financial responsibilities of a man while also meeting the domestic demands of a woman.

Whether or not I ever deserved the following tribute paid me by Pearl Buck in her review of my 1940. The Dream We Lost,** her words are apposite to the struggle all women who strive to overcome the initial disadvantage of not being born men.

This is one of the richest books I have ever read. It is more than an unassailable indictment of Russian Communism. It is a strongly dramatic story and one interesting enough to make a major novel, the story of a brilliant mind, rigorously truthful in its working, though born unhappily in the body of a woman. For even in the best parts of the world a first rate mind is still hampered if it happens to belong to a woman. Nevertheless, this mind was born, and it is to its honor that Freda Utley has simply borne with the disadvantages of being a woman without allowing them to influence her thinking. (Asia. October, 1940)

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* Henry Regnery Co.. Chicago, 1949. ** The John Day Co., 1940.

Chapter 2

BEGINNINGS

Temple and I were both born under our different stars just before the turn of the century, he on June 10, 1895, and I on January 23, 1898, at Number I Kings Bench Walk in the Temple, London. It was exceptional, if not unique, for married couples, much less children, to be permitted to live in those renowned legal chambers and take the air in the beautiful, ancient gardens above the river Thames.

My father, studying for the bar while earning his living as a journalist, had somehow persuaded the authorities to let him continue living in the Temple after his marriage. Although later my parents were to live very comfortably in large houses and luxurious Continental hotels, they remembered those years in cramped quarters, lacking most of the facilities of modern living, as perhaps the best of their lives.

Son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, my father, Willie Herbert Utley. had obtained his education on scholarships from technical secondary school to Owen's College (subsequently renamed Manchester University) where he became an undergraduate at the early age of sixteen. With a voracious appetite for knowledge in every sphere of human questioning and endeavor, my father alternatively or simultaneously studied science and mathematics, languages and the humanities, and thus never obtained an academic degree. But his versatility and wide-ranging knowledge were subsequently to prove of greater advantage to him than any handle to his name when he got to London and started on a successful career in journalism. Thanks to the catholicity of his interests and his literary talent, he was able to write on scientific and economic subjects, as well as on literature, politics, art, drama and music. For instance, when Marconi first demonstrated wireless, he was assigned to Ireland to report this new scientific marvel for a number of newspapers which had no other adequately equipped reporter. Thus, my mother, in London, was one of the first people in the world to receive a radiogram.

My father had secured his first journalistic assignment when he presented himself at the office of the Morning Leader, the leading Liberal newspaper of the time, and was told to sit down and write an editorial on some political topic of the day. Having done this with ease, he was accepted as an editorial writer.

When the Morning Leader subsequently merged with the Evening Star, be became assistant editor and music critic of the Star and Morning Leader. George Bernard Shaw was its drama critic but, according to my mother's recollection, their friendship began while my father was financial editor of Frank Harris' Saturday Review, a journal that helped make Shaw famous as one of its contributors.

Many years after his death, while doing research for my M.A. thesis at the British Museum, I was asked by the oldest of its librarians whether I was the daughter of Willie Herbert Utley. When 1 said I was he told me that my father had at one time translated old English medieval manuscripts in the basement of the British Museum in order to earn money, not only for himself but also to help Bernard Shaw and other impecunious friends of his when they were especially hard up.

G.B.S. and my father were both contributors to Annie Besant's publication. Our Corner, and were friends of Charles Bradlaugh the famous free-thinking M.P. who directed the Hall of Science school on Fleet Street. Here, when he first came to London at the age of l9, Willie Utley lectured on physiography, according to an old prospectus for the session 1886-7 preserved by my mother and still in my possession.

In his teens he had spoken from the same platform as Friedrich Engels in Manchester, as I learned long after his death from documents I saw at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Subsequently, in London, he had taken part in the labor struggles of the late eighties and was arrested with John Burns in Trafalgar Square at a demonstration of the unemployed, although spared from imprisonment on account of his youth. For some months he was acting secretary of the Fabian Society founded by Beatrice and Sidney Webb and, had it not been for my arrival, he would have stood for Parliament in the Socialist interest. But M.P.'s were not paid in those days, and with two children to support he perforce abandoned a political career. Even so, in order to earn enough money for all of us, he was on the staff of both a morning and evening newspaper at the same time, besides contributing to weeklies and engaging in unpaid political activities. Fie worked so hard, slept so little and expended himself so generously that it was not surprising that when I was nine years old, he contracted the tubercular lung infection to which he finally succumbed ten years later.

During my infancy and early childhood my parents had gone through some bad times, as for instance when my father started his own liberal weekly magazine only to have it fold on account of the Boer War: and later, when, after having written the first "Motoring Handbook" published in England. he was compelled before publication to sell the valuable copyright of this future best seller in order to meet a note at the bank he had guaranteed for T.W.H. Crossland, a friend who. like some other well known literary figures, lacked the bourgeois virtue of paying their debts.

Following, or in consequence of these setbacks or disasters, my father turned his talents to financial journalism and business investment advice and started making so much money that my earliest recollections are of life in a big house in Hampstead with servants and governesses, first at 67 Finchley Road and later at 33 St. Johns Wood Park. (Queer that now in my 70's I can still remember the addresses of the houses in which we lived when I was less than ten years old! It is a curious fact that as the shades of the coming night of one's life deepen one retains a better memory of details of the distant past than of more recent events.)

The Utley's would have become really rich had my father's partner, a man called Hannny. been ready to go all out to back my father's conviction that a rubber boom was coming thanks to the invention of the motor car. It was Hannay who supplied the capital for their joint venture in publishing a financial newsletter and investing other peoples money in what is today called a mutual fund but was then frowned on as a "bucket shop."

Notwithstanding the ease with which my father seems to have made money once he set his mind to it, and the affluence which surrounded my childhood as I remember it. I was reared in the socialist beliefs which were to shape my life. A life which was also to be powerfully influenced by the impression made upon me in youth by the tender, passionate and enduring love of my father and mother for one another. Despite the Bohemian world in which I was to take my place in my 20's, I sought to find the same rare and true love which is:

. . . a durable fire,

In the mind ever burning,

Never sick, never dead, never cold.

From itself never turning . . .*

My parents had first met and fallen in love when they were 17 and my father was brought visiting to my grandfather's house by Edward Aveling, Karl Marx's son-in-law and translator. In old age my mother was to recall with pride that Dr. Aveling had introduced my father that first evening as "the most brilliant boy and coming man he knew."

The course of my parents true and life-long love had not run smooth, and they were not married until many years later, mainly because of my grandfather's opposition but also, I surmise, on account of my father's roving, adventurous temperament which led him to spend several years wandering abroad.

My mother's father. Joseph F. Williamson, a prosperous Lancashire manufacturer, was a free-thinker and a republican who was proud to tell that his wife's mother had hidden the famous Chartist leader, Fergus O'Connor, under her bed while pretending to be sick when the police were searching for him. He liked to entertain the prominent or promising radical political "intelligentsia" of his time, but he was far from inclined to believe in the equality of the sexes and was also opposed to any of his daughters (he had seven) marrying an impecunious young man. He had refused to let my mother continue her education to become a doctor, as she passionately desired, and had instead set her to boiling jam in his factory to put such nonsensical ideas out of her head.

After my father came courting following their first meeting, my grandfather ordered my gentle, obedient Williamson grandmother never to leave them alone. They surmounted the obstacle of her presence by my father giving her Ouida's romantic novels to read. These so absorbed her that she paid no attention as they sat together in the parlor of my grandfather's mansion, The Grange, in the Manchester suburb of Stretford, whose gloomy interior I came to know well when I was in my teens.

I narrowly escaped being named "Cigarette" by my mother after the heroine of Ouida's famous book Under Two Flags** about the French Foreign Legion in North Africa, this being one of the novels which so absorbed my grandmother as to leave my teenage future parents free from her chaperonage. Maybe also because my mother was an inveterate smoker, as I, alas, was also to become after I went to live in Russia. She had first acquired a taste for smoking in her teens when promised a complete set of Shakespeare's works by her older brother Len, if she could smoke four cigarettes in succession—a feat she accomplished although it made her sick.

Among my precious possessions today is a three volume edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley published in 1881, given to my mother by my father "on her 18th birthday, October 1883."*** Below the inscription "To Emily Williamson by W.H.U." penned in beautiful script in India ink, my father wrote:

A vous mes pensees

Pensées aussi a moi.

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*Anonymous 16th Century poem included in the "Oxford Book of English Verse."

** Stein & Day. N.Y., 1966.

***John Slark, London, 1881. "The Text Carefully Revised, with Notes and A Memoir by William Michael Rossetti. Dedicated to Edward John Trelawny, Who loved Shelley, Traced out his corpse, and Snatched from the fire the heart of hearts, This Edition of the imperishable poems is by permission most respectfully dedicated."

Determined to pursue her vocation if only in the secondary role of a nurse, mother eventually ran away to London to become a probationer at St. Thomas Hospital. Meanwhile, my father, despite his love for her. had gone off to Greece to be tutor to the son of a wealthy family on the Island of Andros. Here, as he told me in my childhood, he walked down marble steps to swim in the warm Aegean Sea, and had on one occasion almost been drowned because of his short-sightedness, having lost sight of land one evening when he swam too far out.

Subsequently he had wandered all over the Balkans, learning to speak Turkish as well as Greek and earning his living in diverse ways, mainly as a free lance journalist. His adventures in Eastern Europe were no doubt the equivalent of my brother's voyages in the South Seas many years later. But he had eventually been pulled back to England by his love for my mother.

My mother was exceptionally attractive-indeed. quite beautiful to judge from her photographs and she had many suitors. But she waited for my father in the confident belief that he would eventually come back to her from his roaming abroad. All of which sounds like a 19th century romance but is true. They loved each other passionately and cherished one another all their lives, in poverty as in prosperity, in sickness and in health, until parted by death. During my father's last long illness prior to his death in 1918, she nursed him devotedly in conditions of extreme poverty in a two-room cottage in Cornwall which was so primitive that she had to fetch water with a bucket from a well and cook on a wood stove. But she never let drudgery or poverty get her down. She was still lovely in middle age, slim and supple all her life, and managed somehow to look elegant whatever her circumstances. She was loyal and loving and never reproached my father for their fall from affluence to penury during the last years of his life although, as I came to realize when I grew up, she had little fundamental understanding or sympathy for the ideas which I inherited from him.

She was all woman-more concerned with human relations than with ideas; passionate and charming, unselfish but demanding, jealously possessive in her love for both my father and my brother, but also ready to make any sacrifice for them without complaint.

We could not have been more different. Not only was I never beautiful, I scorned to be feminine. I wished I were a boy and have always felt most flattered when told I have a man's mind. Nevertheless, it was no doubt mainly due to my mother's influence that I was to reject second best substitutes for love. I waited long to find my own true love because I dreamed of the perfect union which my mother and father enjoyed. I could not accept any substitute for the rare love of my parents which had illumined my childhood. Puritan or romantic, or a combination of both. I was to reject the easy fly-by-night liaisons of my contemporaries in the Bohemian world in which I took my place in London in the 20's.

My father's love for my mother was as constant as her's for him. They were lovers in every sense of the word in middle age as in youth. I possess none of the letters she wrote him, but have several which he wrote to her both in their years of prosperity before the 1914 war and during the disastrous years which followed before he died, destitute in Cornwall, in January 1918. Writing, on October 27, 1911 from our home at Ken Court, Tatstield to mother visiting my sick grandmother in Manchester, he tells her how "dreary" life was without her and that "In my loneliness last night. I thought I would play the claviole but we could not find the piano key anywhere. My dearie I love you alone and utterly and life is not life when you are away. Goodnight sweetheart. Ever your true lover, Willie."

Other passages in my father's letters recall the dimly remembered days of my childhood and early teens when, incredible as it now seems, we lived in such comfort that two servants did not suffice. "I am putting an advertisement in the Globe for a man and wife," he writes, "because, Florence does not want to be a parlor maid and the girl who wrote wants only a housemaid's place."

Florence, whose kind, ugly face and tall angular figure I still remember, was our loyal "retainer," more friend than servant. When bad times came she wanted to continue working for us without wages and offered her own savings to my parents to help out. Back in 1912, she was busy bottling plums and pickling cauliflowers and cucumbers and enjoying herself generally. Recalling the distant days of our prosperity before the 1914 war. Temple was to write on June 3, 1934 from Suva, after the birth of my son in Moscow:

My Dear Mother and Grandmother.

Queer to think of you as the hitter, for I see you more as the Mother I remember, carousing with Lockoff and Madame von Kloekner at Arosa. or drinking Chartreuse- French, pre-expulsion of the monks- at Ken Court. Christmas, 1912. Those days when we were young and rich. when property was so secure that people laid down wine cellars and the 'lower orders knew their places'. Little did you think that twenty-two years later you would be grandmother to a little revolutionary in Moscow. It is a pity Dada cannot see the joke, it would have stirred his sense of irony. Well, dear, you have had a life; but really, on the whole, it must have been good. I don't think that at the age of sixty-nine I will be having a little revolutionary grandchild, in what capital shall I suggest? - say. Chicago.

Even in her old age in America Mother was to remain charming and attractive. In 1941 when she was in her seventies George Calverton shortly before his death wrote to her from the offices of The Modern Quarterly in the Village;

Dear Emmie:

Just a little note to say I hope you are feeling well and spreading your radiant personality over Westport.

I've missed you, those minxish eyes of yours, that fine clear English speech, and your infectious laugh, lovely as the song of wind in gentle spring.

Other friends in America, still alive, recall Emmie Utley's beautiful voice and the exquisite diction of her speech which was the more remarkable since her father had denied her the education he could easily have afforded to give her.

In my late teens I came to know my Williamson grandfather as a tall, handsome patriarch who bullied the two of his daughters who had not married but had devoted their lives to looking after their parents. He had cut off my mother without even the proverbial shilling when she married my father. But years afterwards when my father was prosperous and we lived at Ken Court my grandfather had been glad to let my mother nurse grandmother in our home for six months during her fatal illness. When she died, my grandfather did not even offer to pay the medical and funeral expenses. A decade later when my father was dying of tuberculosis in poverty, my grandfather grudgingly allowed my parents ten shillings a week-no doubt well content that he had proved so right in having opposed my mother's marriage to a man who ended his life as he began, in poverty.

Following my father's death in January 1918, my grandfather was to cut off even the pittance he had allowed my mother during the last year of my father's illness, leaving me to support her while my brother was lighting in Mesopotamia.

I remember my mother's mother as a small, shrunken old lady with scanty white hair covered by a lace cap, clear blue eyes, a delicately tinted complexion and a tremulous smile, her hands folded in her lap as she sat in our garden at Ken Court with a rug over her knees. She was a sweet and gentle person who let her husband dominate her to such an extent that she had never dared to stand up to him even in order to help their daughters.

My Utley grandmother, whom I knew only from her portrait, must have been a forceful and ambitious woman. She had done everything possible to help my father surmount the handicap of poverty to secure an education. She had succeeded in spurring my Utley grandfather into raising himself from the status of contented blacksmith in Yorkshire into the ranks of die lower middle class by securing for him the management of a small hotel in Manchester.

She had failed to make him a successful inn-keeper and had died comparatively young. leaving her husband to become my father's pensioner: but she must have had the satisfaction of knowing that her talented and energetic son would fulfill her ambitions. I imagine that it is from her that I inherited the drive, as also other unfeminine qualities and defects that have both helped and hurt me during the course of my life.

My father's father, although poor and improvident, was a most happy man, loved by his wife and son. He may have been a financial burden and a failure but he contributed to their lives, love and gaiety and enjoyment of music and art.

He remains in my childhood memories as a hale and hearty, rosy cheeked and white haired, cheerful old man. His main interest in life had always been playing the violin and painting pictures of no artistic value, which no doubt afforded him the pleasure of satisfying his creative impulses.

He was so robust and healthy that he had never taken to his bed in illness until he died in his 80's in full possession of his faculties. No doubt, I have owed to him and our Yorkshire yeomen ancestors the vigor, energy and good health I have enjoyed for most of my life. My brother, who like my father, developed tuberculosis and died young, may have derived from our Utley grandfather the sanguine temperament which, as Temple used to say, contrasted with his pessimistic philosophy.

My Utley grandfather gave me a violin when I was a child and insisted that I should learn to play it and he also endeavored to teach me to draw and paint. Although I was never really musical I tried hard and was most happy when chosen in my teens to play in the school orchestra at my English boarding school.

I also tried my hand at painting and wrote romantic plays which my brother and our friends acted, rigged out in homemade costumes. These plays of mine usually had tragic endings, as did the one we performed while staying at the Hotel Grison at Arosa in Switzerland, in which all the main characters ended up dead on the stage. I was furious when Temple made comedy out of my tragedy by getting up before the curtain fell to sound the hearts of the other "corpses" with a stethoscope.

As I write, memories revive of days when my imagination and interests were unconfined by experience or too great preoccupation with politics. When, although I already had a "social conscience" awakened by my father's teachings. I could indulge my romantic imagination and enjoy all the wonder of the world.

Somewhere along the line of my ancestry or environment, I acquired a Puritan streak

which made me take life all too seriously, in contrast to my brother who enjoyed all the pleasures and joys life offered, but who could also laugh in the face of danger or adversity. Temple never experienced the brief religious phase I went through, perhaps induced by one of my governesses at the age of seven or eight, when I prayed every night on my knees beside my bed without, as I imagined, anyone knowing. But my reason, or the logical thought developed by my upbringing soon reasserted itself, bringing my very short "age of faith" to an end. I remember going to discuss it all with my father, telling him that I realized that a just God would not punish man for doing the evil which his Creator must foresee he would do if He were omniscient as well as omnipotent. And if God were not just, he was not God; i.e., did not exist.

As I dimly remember, my father explained his agnostic philosophy in simple terms by saying that if told there was a tiger on the roof he would go up and find out. But no one could verify the existence of a God in heaven.

I wrote stories or fairy tales from an early age and can recollect the main outline of one whose hero was called Cass. Maybe I derived his name from the French verb casser — to break - for my story started by telling how his mother and father, realizing that their children, if they lived, would surely sin and go to hell, killed them all in infancy. But ' baby Cass, having willfully knocked over and smashed his cup of milk, thus already committing a sin, was permitted to live. This is all I remember of Cass's story. A psychologist could no doubt find all sorts of interesting explanations for my remembering even this much.

It was perhaps because he wanted to save me from premature preoccupation with sin and death and religion that my father gave me Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to read. I was so enthralled by the lyrical beauty of Fitzgerald's rendering of the Persian poet's verses that, when eleven years old, I learnt them by heart- nor have I ever forgotten them entirely. Like the poems of Shelley and Swinburne which enchanted me later. I can still recite verse upon verse of the Rubaiyat from memory.

Recently I became acquainted with Omar Abou Riche, a famous modern Arab poet who was Syria's Ambassador to Washington in 1962. When I asked him whether any of his poems had been translated into English or French, he replied, "yes," but went on to remark that very few translations of poems are worth reading, the great exception being Fitzgerald's rendering of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat which, he said, is not properly speaking a translation, but a free rendering of the spirit and meaning of the original.

As I learnt only then from Omar Abou Riche, it was Swinburne, my favorite poet, who acquainted Fitzgerald with the works of the great Omar and induced him to give the Western world knowledge of the Rubaiyat in verses as immortal as the original Persian text.

Perhaps it is no accident but kismet the Arab word for fate-which, by bringing me recently in contact with new friends from the ancient but reborn Middle Fast, has helped to revive memories of my childhood and youth when the Greco-Roman heritage we share with the Arabs colored and inspired my imagination.

Since he died before my twentieth birthday and long before I learned the facts of political life through experience, I do not know whether it was disillusionment or his love for my mother and desire to give her and their children a good life, which caused my father to devote his talents to making money soon after I was born. But it is clear to me from my memories of him and from the fragmented record of his life, which is all I possess, that like William Morris he was in revolt as much against the sordid ugliness of industrial civilization as against the iniquities of the "Capitalist System" of his time.

He loved music and poetry and beautiful things; was a connoisseur of wines; spoke several foreign languages fluently; loved to swim and sail, and enjoyed driving fast cars although this made my mother very nervous. In general, he had a great zest for living, and reveled in the athletic, as well as the intellectual pleasures of life. My earliest recollection of him is of a slim, trim man of medium height with broad shoulders, fine soft golden hair brushed back from a high wide forehead: clear blue eyes behind gold-rimmed pince-nez glasses perched on an aquiline nose above a reddish drooping moustache partially concealing a full lipped smiling mouth with prominent front teeth. And my happiest memories are of summer holidays in Sussex or Devonshire when Temple and I swam with him and he taught us to row and sail small boats.

I cannot remember ever having not known how to swim and read, but can recall being forbidden by my mother to read in bed, lest I "ruin my eyes" an injunction which I cannot have paid much attention to because I have a distinct memory of lying in bed. early in the morning, reading a "Told To The Children" illustrated version of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare.

Among the illustrations I can still dimly see Rosalind and Touchstone in the Forest of Arden. Perhaps because Rosalind, disguised as a boy and behaving like one, in contrast to the womanly Ceilia who aroused my contempt, appealed to me who during my childhood longed to have been born a boy.

Apart from shortsightedness my eyes have never troubled me. Mother used to insist that I take off my glasses in company in order to look pretty. She also insisted on putting my straight hair in curl papers at night. I remember an evening when she reproached me for having caused a quarrel between her and my father- a most unusual occurrence—because I had appealed to him to stop her forcing me to endure this discomfort. Also my father telling me in an endeavor to use his influence to support my mother' "Il faut souffrir pour etre belle," and myself in tears in a tantrum yelling "I don't want to be beautiful." which of course was not true. But my reaction to my mother's emphasis on my handicaps: shortsightedness and straight hair, as against her perfect sight and lovely naturally curly hair was, of course, to pretend that I was not interested in my appearance. At that early time perhaps I really did not care, being far more concerned in keeping up with my brother in sports and studies in spite of being a girl and younger.

Temple, two and a half years older than I, received a letter on his 18th birthday which conveys some idea of our father's personality and philosophy.

From our home at Ken Court, Tatsfield Surrey to Temple at Trinity Hall, Cambridge on June 9, 1913. he wrote:

My dear Boy.

May this, your eighteenth birthday, be a happy one. not because of anything material that may come to you upon it, but because you feel that you are making progress toward the responsibilities of manhood, because you feel your own powers developing within you, because your inward vision is embracing a wider view of the two worlds, the one which is inside and the one which is outside yourself. You are practically a man already, though for me always my dear boy, and I am happy to see you developing your own personality and being yourself. Whatever may come to you in the future, whether it be of good or ill, this is the greatest of all, to be yourself and no copy of anyone else at all times under all conditions. But for one's own satisfaction it is necessary

that the self you are shall be such a self as you can be proud of yourself to yourself, not to other people. "Il faut cultiver son jardin" is the French phrase. The garden to be proud of is the garden that produces beautiful flowers, abundance of fruit, a sufficiency of humble necessary vegetables (without which you won't be able to cultivate your garden) and the fewest possible weeds. Alas! there is no garden quite free from weeds. The mistake is to take them for beautiful flowers and it is a mistake quite easy to make both for young and old. It is also a good exercise in philosophy, ethic and aesthetic, to examine what is a weed, what a beautiful flower and what a choice fruit.

I have every confidence in you, dear boy, and in your future. I won't say to you: "think high thoughts," but rather: "Think deep and wide thoughts and do clean deeds." Cleanliness is far above Godliness.

So long, old man. I shall be glad to see you at home again. It seems a very long time since you went away.

Chapter 3

CONTINENTAL INTERLUDE

My brother's and my upbringing was unusual; mine in particular, since as a child I attended the same boy's school as Temple: Peterborough Lodge on Finchley Road in Hampstead. The headmaster's daughter, Cynthia Linford, and I were the only girl pupils. I don't know how her Father had been persuaded to take me but it was Temple who had insisted that I enjoy the same advantages as himself. As I remember, or was told later, he had found I was being very poorly taught at my girls' school: "Memorizing the names of headlands on the West Coast of Scotland when she doesn't know what a headland is," had been his indignant comment.

When I was nine years old my father, who had contracted tuberculosis, was ordered to Switzerland and we all went with him to Arosa. There and in Italy for two years, we children had a wonderful time skating, skiing, and bobsledding in winter, climbing mountains and swimming in the lakes and sea in summer. We spent part of each spring and summer on the Italian lakes and Riviera, where we "discovered" Portofino, as yet barely known to tourists. There the fishermen's wives and daughters sat outside their whitewashed houses on steep narrow streets in the bright sunlight making the exquisite laces my mother loved to buy. Also there was San Frutuosa, lost little town approachable only by sea. One glorious summer we spent two months in Corsica travelling about that wild, romantic island in a horse-drawn carriage, but spending most of the time at Ajaccio where Temple and I swam naked on a deserted beach to which we walked along a road lined by marble tombs.

Rapallo, Santa Margharita and Sestri Levanti. Genoa and Milan, Pisa and Livorno, Lugano, Como and Lake Maggiore; driving by carriage and walking long stretches over the Simplon Pass from Domedossela, whose hotel had. I thought, the unique name "Run to the Post" (courir a la Paste) but actually must have been Couriers of the Mail.

Bright unforgotten distant years of my most happy childhood spent in some of the loveliest places in the world, giving Temple and me lasting memories of beauty to carry with us the rest of our lives.

We attended no schools but were taught for an hour or two a day in winter by an old German-Swiss tutor in Arosa. Our father spending his days on a chaise lounge on the veranda was always there to answer our questions and impart knowledge which we could never have obtained from a formal education. We read books and we listened and learned from the talks and discussions of our parents with friends and acquaintances from many lands in the cosmopolitan atmosphere in which my multilingual internationally minded father fitted so well. Since we were never repressed but only taught good manners Temple and I had no inhibitions to make us feel awkward or shy and speechless in the presence of our elders.

Unforgettable among my father's friends in Arosa were Herr Lockhoff, a jovial Dutch artist and the dainty fair and smiling Baroness von Klockner from Dresden, who herself resembled one of that city's famous porcelain statuettes. Lockhoff whose

tuberculosis was incurable was to die soon after we returned to England. Irene von Klockner lived long but disappeared without trace in the senseless Anglo-American bombing of the open city of Dresden in 1944 which burned alive more civilians than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Just before the Second World War. Mother and I were to meet her for the last time in London.

In late summer Temple and I climbed quite high mountains alone with a Swiss guide, once reaching the peak of the Aguille de Tour, ten thousand feet above sea level. In winter, besides skiing and skating and playing ice hockey, we took part with adults in the two and a half mile races on our bobsled named Mephistopheles, clad in white wool jerseys with red flannel devils on our chests and caps. Temple sometimes steered, but we won our notable victories when piloted by Mrs. Moreland, the sporting wife of a New Zealand doctor, with Temple and me as crew and a man called Bray as the "break." I still have in my possession a silver beaker inscribed with our names on the memorable occasion when, in 1909, we won the Lucy Challenge Cup, to the amused surprise, friendly applause or outrage of the competing adult teams.

I cannot have made much, if any. contribution as "crew" to our triumphs, far out as I see myself leaning in an old photo as we rushed around the most dangerous corner of the course; or by energetically throwing my slight weight backward and forward to help accelerate speed on the straight. It was probably due to my brother's insistence that I was permitted to participate in these races which actually filled me with a dread I never admitted to Temple, whose belief that anything he could do. I could do, too, spurred me on.

Writing to me a quarter of a century later from the Fiji Islands to congratulate me on the birth of my son in Moscow, Temple recalled my "winning that ice-axe for me" at Champex, where I had outraced the Swiss girls who competed in the two mile race around the Lake.

When my father was sufficiently cured to return to England Temple and I were left at school on the Lake of Geneva. The original intention had been to leave only Temple, but as usual I wanted to do whatever he did. As I recall, at Sestri Levanti on the Italian Riviera in 1909, I had become more and more restless, so that one evening after the usual happy day swimming and basking in the sun, I solemnly informed my parents that it was high time for me to go to school and start studying. Maybe it was the first stirrings of what my brother used to call my "Puritan conscience." Or perhaps it was simply because the joyful, easy, carefree life we children had for so long enjoyed had begun to pall. As Swinburne wrote in Temple's favorite poem, Faustine, "To feed a while on honeycomb is sweet," but man tires of the repetition of accepted rhyme.

So, when eleven and a half years old, I became a pupil at La Combe, Rolle on the Lake of Geneva, with my brother at school half a mile away across the fields at the Chateau de Rosey. By special dispensation I had the run of this school where I went for fencing lessons as well as to visit my brother.

The first summer of our separation from our parents I spent three weeks with Temple and the boys of his school in the Swiss Alps, dressed in boy's clothes and climbing the same mountains as teenage youths. Mixing with English, German, French, Swiss, Italian, and other nationalities, soon learning to speak French fluently and German fairly well, I was little aware of national barriers. I acquired an international outlook which neither my father's influence nor theoretical socialist teaching alone could have given me.

So long ago and far away and yet so well remembered, the two years I spent at school in French Switzerland were one of the happiest periods of my life.

At first I was the only English girl at La Combe and later one of two. I was also the youngest. The majority of the pupils were German girls in their middle or late teens "finishing" their education by studying the French language, literature and culture. The atmosphere was not unlike that of my home environment; studious, tolerant, kindly and with equal emphasis on study and physical fitness. We skated in winter, swam and rowed on the Lake of Geneva in summer; bicycled and went for long walks, picked narcissi in the fields near Montreux on spring expeditions to such historic sites as the Chateau de Chillon. For a fortnight each year the whole school moved to the Alps, where we climbed mountains and trod the lovely green valleys studded with flowers between the mountain peaks, picking Edelwiss on the few occasions we found this rare flower and chanting French songs. Indelibly imprinted on my mind is a vision of the glories of an Alpine sunset as I stood shyly among my new companions somewhere in the mountains, on the first evening of this happy holiday tentatively attempting to join in the singing.

Sport at La Combe was regarded as a pleasure, not a duty, and study—really hard study—was expected of us all ensured mainly by pride in achievement. Most of the girls came from middle-class German Rheinland and Ruhr families which had made sacrifices to give them their year or two of "finishing school" in Switzerland. In contrast to the English school where I went later, it was considered shameful at La Combe not to work hard and take advantage of the opportunity afforded us to learn all we could from teachers who loved to teach and whom one hated to disappoint.

The headmistress of La Combe, Mademoiselle Marthe Dédie, was a cousin of Monsieur Henri Carnal, the headmaster of my brother's school, and everyone expected them to marry. A handsome woman, I remember her best for the marvel of her long, lustrous and luxuriant black hair which reached almost to her feet and which she braided in thick coils in a crown on top of her head. Perhaps she was too strong-minded and independent for Monsieur Henri who was himself as handsome as a movie star and eventually married an American heiress.

The Chateau de Rosey in later years was to become a favorite school for gilded youth from all over the world, including the present Shah of Iran and other royal personages, besides sons of wealthy American families. In my day it had only one American pupil, a youth of about seventeen whose name I have forgotten, but whom I remembered because of the various troubles he got me into. He took me riding in his newly acquired automobile and promptly ran us into a stone wall. On another occasion he so outraged me by kissing me that I seized his best Panama hat and doused it in the fountain in the Chateau de Rosey courtyard. Once he induced me by the bribe of a carton of Nestle's Swiss chocolate bars to carry a note from him to one of the girls at my school.

This shameful episode is the more inexcusable because, when Temple and I were first left at school in Switzerland, our parents arranged credit for us at the grocery store in Rolle. Unlike Temple, I had refused this opportunity to buy chocolates or anything else, not wishing to enjoy special privileges denied to the other girls at my school. Yet in my second year I succumbed to the lure of a dozen large chocolate bars as the price for delivering a love note, or maybe an invitation to an assignation, to one of my classmates from a rich, young American. I never really liked him but he tempted me and I fell.

This incident is one of the most painful recollections of my childhood because of the feeling of guilt it gave me for long afterwards. I realized that I had betrayed the trust reposed in me by Madamoiselle Marthe who, because my brother was there, permitted me, unlike the other girls at La Combe, to visit the Chateau de Rosey whenever I wished.

My favorite among Temple's classmates was Jimmy Reiss, an intelligent witty and

sophisticated Jewish boy from Manchester who was to remain my friend for many years. I still have a photo of him in a Chateau de Rosey performance of "Le Chapeau dePaille d'Italie" -a musical farce, two lines from which I was to remember all my life when enjoying myself too much. "Mon cher mais c'est atroce/Nous faisons rouses Les jours la noce." Which roughly translated means: My dear it's terrible, we're having a ball every day!

A decade and a half after our school days in Rolle, I was tempted to marry Jimmy because I was very fond of him and he was well-to-do, while I by that time was exceedingly poor. Temple used to say how nice it would be to have a brother-in-law with a wine cellar, and Jimmy and I had much in common. But in the 20's in London I had not given up my hope of romantic love. Besides, Jimmy seemed too "bourgeois" for me much as I enjoyed his company. He never did marry and probably had grave reservations in courting me since he thoroughly enjoyed his foot-loose life. But he was to give me help and comfort when I returned from Russia in 1936 with my political hopes and personal life alike shattered.

La Combe today, although still a more modest establishment than the Chateau de Rosey, has likewise become a fashionable modern school, as I found when I briefly revisited it in 1953 when driving through Switzerland from Germany to Italy with my son. The bedrooms now have running water and there are plenty of bathrooms, whereas in my day we each of us took our turn once a week for a hot bath in a cold outhouse. But the same solidly constructed, cream-colored, two-story, many windowed building still stands looking out upon the same distant view of the Lake of Geneva shimmering in the sunlight. The same sentier leads along the railroad line to the Chateau de Rosey along which I trod or bicycled so often.

There is the same tinkling of pianos in practice rooms; the same calm, studious atmosphere; the same lovely gardens shaded by ancient trees; the same flagstoned terrace in front of the main building where we sat in late afternoon embroidering or stitching as we listened to reading aloud of French classic literature. And, no doubt, there is the same curriculum demanding the same conscientious study and endeavor as in the days of my childhood, when we walked up and down in the early morning in the open air learning our grammar lessons from Larousse or memorizing French prose pieces, before classes began.

I can still recite the opening passage of the piece by Alphonse Daudet which begins; "Les chevres de Monsieur Seguin s'en allez tous dans la montagne,'" telling the tale of the beautiful little white goat who, despite the love and care lavished on her, was eventually gobbled up by a wolf because like Monsieur Seguin's other goats she would not stay in his lush pastures but sought adventure in the mountains.

So unchanging, widespread and influential are the disciplines of French education and the patterns of French culture that, in Algeria in September 1963, driving in the countryside where goats abound and conversing with my young Arab Moslem chauffeur, I started to quote the above passage and found that he, too, had learned by heart the same Daudet story about Monsieur Seguin's beloved little white goat!

Our places in school each week were determined by the "Dictée" which started classes. By my second year I was often at the top, and always near the head of the class, being able to take French dictation almost without spelling mistakes. I had perforce learned French fast since during my first year there was only one other girl who spoke English. Her name was Gretel Muthmann and her mother was an Englishwoman who had married a German velvet manufacturer from Crefeld in the Ruhr. Gretel helped me and cherished

me like an older sister and we have remained close friends until today, in spite of the two wars which split our worlds into contending halves, and in which she suffered both physical and mental anguish.

Whenever I now cross the Atlantic to Europe I visit Gretel, my oldest friend in all the world. During the Second World War she lost her husband and was twice bombed out of her home in Cologne where she practiced as a dentist. After taking refuge with relatives in East Germany she fled before the Red Army with her teenage daughter who was wounded by machine gun fire from an American plane. At the Elbe, in 1945, like so many other thousands of German women and children seeking escape from the Communist terror, they had waited in vain for permission from the U.S. Army to cross over. Luckier than most, thanks to being able to claim kinship with relatives in England, Gretel and her young daughter were eventually permitted to cross over the Elbe to safety. And her English relatives helped them with food packages to survive the hunger years which followed during the Allied Occupation.

Gretel's daughter, Liligret, is today the only woman musician in one of West Germany's most famous orchestras. Gretel herself is slowly dying from an incurable disease, having been finally laid low after her long and gallant fight to survive the vicissitudes of her life.* Today I remember her best in the role of Cyrano de Bergerac as performed at La Combe before an audience which included the staff and boys of my brother's school, the townsfolk of Rolle and leading representatives of the landed aristocracy of the vicinity. Gretel gave a superb and unforgettable performance as the swashbuckling Gascon hero of Rostand's famous play, shocking some of her audience by her fluent colloquial use of French swearwords which she added to the text. The play was not in any case one calculated to uphold the chaste principles of a school for young daughters of the respectable middle classes. Gretel, carried away by her exuberant interpretation of her role, and fortified by champagne, made it even less suitable. But she brought the house down in roars of applause.

It is not possible to remember what one was like in childhood. Nor are the memories of old friends reliable since they are prejudiced in one's favor. But perhaps one's best aspirations are mirrored in what one would like to believe is true according to their recollections. When visiting Gretel in Braunschweig in 1960 I asked her to help me understand myself and the course of my life by telling me what kind of a child I was. She said: "Even as a little girl, you seemed to me to be motivated by a passion for justice." Which reply, I realize, may be due not so much to Gretel's recollection of me at La Combe, as to the books I have written.

Gretel was not the only friend of my childhood days in Switzerland whom I still know, or with whom I have renewed contact in recent years. Following the publication of The High Cost of Vengeance** in the U.S. in 1940 and in Germany two years later I received many letters from Germany thanking me for having written this book in which I pleaded for justice and mercy for the defeated Germans and argued that only the Communists would profit from the dismantlement of German industry. Among the hundreds of letters I received from Germany several said: "You must be the Freda Utley we once knew at La Combe." Thus, forty years afterwards, I renewed contact with German friends of my childhood.

Best of all was to receive word from Madmoiselle Marthe Dédie, already in her eighties,

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* Gretel, whose married name was Mohr, died after the type was set for this book.

** The Henry Regnery Co. Chicago, Noelke Verlag. Hamburg.

congratulating me on the publication of The High Cost of Vengeance, and telling me she was proud that I had been one of her pupils when I was a child.

On the other side of the ledger, I was attacked and smeared as "pro-German" or even as an apologist for the Nazis, by most "liberal" and even some conservative publications in America. It was then considered outrageous to insist that the Germans were no more inherently wicked or aggressive than other peoples, nations or races. I, with my experience of the kindness of my schoolmates at La Combe could not believe in the myth of German beastliness, and I knew too much history to accept the thesis of Germany's especial aggressiveness.

Peter Blake, himself of German Jewish origin, (and today editor of Architectural Forum in New York) gave me much consolation when he wrote in Don Levine's Plain Talk: "It is said that cruelty is the result of fear; perhaps Freda Utley's great compassion is the result of her courage."

I should like to think this is true but in fact my compassion for the Germans arose from my own experience. Having myself not so long before lived under the shadow of terror in Stalin's Russia, I understood how dreadful had been the situation of the Germans under Hitler. Unlike most Americans or English I knew that the subjects of a totalitarian state cannot revolt, without outside help, and that the Germans during the war had had no choice but to fight for their country under the Nazi regime, or submit to Communist conquest. "There but for the Grace of God go I" was a precept I could never forget after my experiences of the terrible compulsions exerted on its subjects by the modern totalitarian state.

In 1952 and subsequent years when again visiting Germany, I found some of the dimly remembered friends of my childhood in comfortable circumstances, while others had barely survived the Nazi era, the war, and its aftermath. But our class of 1911 still managed to meet, occasionally, at some place on the Rhine. Moving spirit of these reunions, until she died in 1959, was the fair haired, blue-eyed and still comely Liselotte Euler, from Bielefeld, who had written in my "Birthday Book":

Tout change dans ce monde

Vie, plaisir, climat

Seul, mon amitié pour toi

Ne Changera pas.

Liselotte's son, at the age of sixteen, had been mobilized during the last months of the war and taken prisoner by the French, who sent him to do forced labor in the Lorraine coal mines where he was overworked and underfed for two years before being set at liberty. Visiting her together with my Prussian friend, Count Joachim Kalckreuth who had for four years been a starved prisoner of the Russians in worse conditions, we both vainly tried to persuade Liselotte's son that he should adhere to the West. He repeated the German equivalent of the American expression, "I've had it. Don't talk to me about democracy, or try to tell me there can be anything worse than being a prisoner of the French."

In contrast to Liselotte's bitter young son, there was Else Wollstein-Stolberg, who had been my companion at weekly riding lessons in Geneva, and who being Jewish, had suffered terribly during the war. She and her non-Jewish husband, who stuck by her, had survived, thanks to peasants, who hid them in a "fowl house," to use her own English description of their refuge. I was deeply moved when Else thanked me for having written The High Cost of Vengeance and glad to learn that her husband had been reinstated in the important job in the Cologne Municipality from which he had been ousted by the Nazis.

I was in my thirteenth year when, in 1911, I left La Combe to return to England. The four years I had spent on the Continent at an impressionable age were to have a lasting influence on my outlook. They were golden years of happy memories of a time when the world had seemed a most friendly place and I was little aware of national barriers created by ignorance, pride and prejudice. Never in the future would it be possible for me to think that my own country, or any other country, was the repository of all virtues, or to believe that "my country right or wrong" is an admirable sentiment. "Menschen sind menschen," as the Germans say-meaning that humanity the whole world over is much of a muchness. In short, my "Continental Interlude" had for good or ill given me an international outlook for the rest of my life. Like Tom Paine, who said, "Where liberty is not, there is my country," I came in later years to identify myself with those struggling for freedom and justice anywhere or everywhere on the globe.

No doubt I was spoilt at La Combe. Not only because I was a precocious child among teenagers and for most of the time the only English girl. There was also the fact that my parents were then rich, or seemed to be so, since my father spent his money as easily as he then made it. No other parents in those days came to visit their children in Switzerland in an automobile driven across the continent. As Gretel has told me, my handsome father and my beautiful mother dressed to perfection, made a terrific impact on La Combe, which gave me a special status of which I was totally unaware.

I remember only that the special privilege I asked for, by cable to my parents during my first days at La Combe, was that I should not be compelled to consume soup or drink wine at dinner!

How strange this sounds today when I like nothing better than wine with my meals! In those days on the continent half a century ago the purity of water was not taken for granted even in Switzerland, and wine, or wine and water, was the customary drink for young and old.

My father and mother, besides ensuring my freedom from alcohol later interfered with the disciplines of La Combe by objecting to the system which was so effective in forcing us all to learn French. This system seemed abhorrent to my liberal parents because it entailed "spying" and "denunciation." There were some dozen "billets" which one passed on to anyone one heard speaking their native tongue - meaning generally German but in my case English. Anyone in possession of one of these tokens at mid-day dinner time was kept in to write in full every conjugation of a French verb - which task, including I, thou, you and it as well as we and they in every tense, took most of the afternoon.

My parents' moral objections to this most efficacious system for forcing us all to learn French eventually persuaded Mademoiselle Dédie to abandon it for a short time during my last year. Instead of a hectic scramble to get rid of the "billets" before noon, we were put on an honors system of reward. Once a week, anyone who could get up and say "Je jure devans tout le monde"-swear to the world - that she had not spoken anything but French for the past seven days, received a cheap paper copy of some masterpiece of French literature. By this time French had become almost my native tongue so that it was all too easy for me to collect a book every week, thus acquiring a small library of French classics. The rules were therefore changed in my case to ensure that I should speak German, which I spoke very imperfectly. This created such confusion that the new system was abandoned before I went home to England.

Temple had not been as happy at the Chateau de Rosey as I at La Combe. He had come "to hate the food, the cold and the discomfort" and with the departure of Jimmy

Chapter 4

MY ENGLISH SCHOOL

The plunge from Switzerland into the frigid, unkind and alien atmosphere of an expensive English boarding school no doubt helped to lay the psychological foundations for the militant communism which, a decade later, was to supplant the vague academic socialism of my early youth.

Prior's Field, Godalming, Surrey, had been founded by Julia Huxley, granddaughter of the renowned Dr. Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby, niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, wife of Leonard, son of the famous Thomas Huxley, and mother of Aldous and Julian Huxley of future fame.* Mrs. Huxley was dead, but her school headed by Mrs. Burton Brown, had been selected by my parents on the confident assumption that it would provide as congenial an atmosphere as La Combe, where I had been educated beyond my years while uninstructed in several basic subjects. Instead, it proved to be no better than a British "public school" for boys.

There was no "fagging" nor infliction of corporal punishment by seniors on juniors, nor hazing of the weak by the strong. Instead there was mental, or perhaps one should call it social, bullying equally effective in enforcing conformity. Such offenses as studying hard, showing originality in dress or any peculiarity of speech or behavior, were punished by mockery or contempt and, worst of all, the loneliness which comes from alienation from the community, particularly hard to bear when one is homesick. Realizing I was having a bad time my parents offered to remove me during my first year, but, thinking that Prior's Field was typical of English schools, I saw no point in this and decided that I must endure it.

I was handicapped from the start by my slightly foreign accent as well as by my un-English upbringing. My "r's" were French "r's" and I recall my acute embarrassment when made to stand up to say "stirrup" over and over again, unable to pronounce it in an English accent while the whole class laughed.

Other disadvantages due to my lopsided education abroad had to be overcome. At La Combe there had been no mathematics classes, only optional bookkeeping courses for older girls. So although I had a wide-ranging acquaintance with French and English literature and considerable knowledge of European and ancient history, when it came to arithmetic I did not even know what LCM (Lowest Common Multiple) or HFC (Highest Common Factor) meant. And with regard to geometry and algebra, I had to start from scratch. Since I also knew no Latin, I was assigned during my first term to the lowest form with the youngest girls in the school.

Because I had acquired the habit of study, and was blessed with an excellent memory, I quickly caught up and rapidly advanced from class to class winning more prizes than anyone else, and arriving ahead of my time at the sixth, or top form.

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*ln Ronald W. Clark's, book. The Huxleys, McGraw Hill 1968. there are many pages about Prior's Field where Aldous Huxley was a pupil when seven years old together with the original six girls.

My scholastic achievements counted for less than nothing in the opinion of my classmates, who gave me the nickname of "Brainy," in no complimentary sense. After I was chosen for the tennis and swimming teams which competed with other schools I was tolerated, if never fully accepted, as a member of Prior Field's "ruling class." But I continued to be a non-conformist. I won a prize for botany because collecting specimens of wild flowers enabled me to go for walks and escape playing cricket. La Crosse, which was played in winter, I enjoyed, but I only made the second team. I had from the first refused to wear a black or brown ribbon to bind up my hair, preferring a colored one to match the smocks which we wore over the regulation white blouses and skirts into which we changed each evening from our daytime grey tunics.

Accustomed at La Combe to associate with girls older than myself on terms of equality, I had no inkling of my social misdemeanor when, at the beginning of my residence at Prior's Field, I talked at length with two older girls sitting together on the "horse" in the gym at a Saturday night dance. This "horse" I should explain, was a leather upholstered contraption above which we vaulted with varying degrees of success during our daily mid-morning's gymnasium exercises which included climbing up bars and ropes besides marching and running in step. All of which muscle-building and posture exercises were one of the best sides of the curriculum.

My sins against the social code, at first unconscious, became deliberate. The spirit of rebellion was awakened in me as I opposed the social hierarchy and the conventions of my school. In later life the girls of Prior's Field came to symbolize for me the "imperialist British bourgeoisie:" class conscious, insensitive, sublimely self-assured, scornful of learning, and confident in their divine right to order the universe.

The profound changes brought about by two World Wars and England's loss of her Empire have since my day transformed the atmosphere of English private schools, as also the composition and outlook of English ruling circles. But, "the Establishment" as it is now called, endures.

I made some friends but they were either rebels like myself or passive non-conformists, or victims of 'the system,' whom I tried to help or protect after I had myself achieved the status of a prefect. One among the former was Margaret Waley, cousin of Arthur Waley, the famous sinologist whose translations of Chinese poems are widely known. Margaret, however, was one of those rare characters who are impervious to their environment. She walked alone and did not care whether she was popular or not, whereas I yearned to be liked and appreciated, although unable to make the concessions necessary for social acceptability.

Among other friends there was Nora Buchan-Sydserf - an unforgettable name - who, being Scotch, was better educated than most English girls, and had an amused contempt for the "sassenach" hierarchy which ran our school. Small and wiry with beautiful long, naturally curly golden hair and bright blue eyes, Nora's appearance was marred by a brace on her front teeth, prominently displayed as she laughed in unconfined enjoyment of her mimicry of the silly pretensions of the "tyrants" who dominated our lives. Tough, intelligent and witty, and still alive today, she was one of those who, in Voltaire's phrase, see life as comedy because they think, instead of as the tragedy it seems to those who mainly feel.

Another well remembered friend, with whom I have kept some contact over the years, was Dorothea Bluet from Buenos Aires. A short, fat girl with mousey straight hair and pale round face with no pretensions to beauty except for large sparkling black eyes, she was to marry a rich rancher and is today a happy grandmother in the Argentine. Neither

"brainy" nor athletic, Dorothea was amiable and full of fun and uninhibited either by her teenage roly poly figure or her inferior status as "colonial" British. I can still see her in my mind's eye, dumpy, small body shaking with laughter, white teeth gleaming, eyes twinkling and moon face crinkled with mirth as our small group sat on the grass in a secluded corner of the playing fields on the edge of the woods sheltering violets, bluebells and primroses, in Surrey in the springtime after lunch. Here we played the "truth" game, asking each other searching, embarrassing questions which one was honor bound to answer unequivocally.

Others I remember are the older girls who befriended me during my first year at Prior's Field, Beata Crook and Phyllis Vickers. Beata who looked rather Rossettish inspired me to make such efforts in my attempts to play the violin that I became a minor member of the school orchestra - an achievement which filled me with greater pride than my success in classes, although each time I played my heart palpitated with the dread engendered by my consciousness of my inadequacies as a musician.

Phyllis, after a brilliant career at Cambridge University became a Factory Inspector in the Labor Ministry and was a most helpful friend in my days of poverty in London during the 1914 war.

I was on good terms with Margaret Huxley, sister of Julian and Aldous. I remember her brothers only as young men who, on the rare occasions when they spent a weekend at the school from which they derived their income, sat in state at the headmistress' table at Sunday dinner.

As I write and call to mind these and others who were my friends at Prior's Field, I wonder whether my years there were really as unhappy as I used to think.

During my last year I even became friendly with the girl we called "Carrots," a tall superbly built redhead with a freckled face, snubnose, bright blue eyes and engaging smile displaying perfect teeth, who was both the all round athletic champion and head girl. Her name was Mary Cooper, and I had originally hated her as the "boss" of the school and embodiment of all I most disliked at Prior's Field. Carrots, whose leadership I had for long defied, was extremely nice to me after the descent of my parents from affluence to penury. This is perhaps not so strange because today I can appreciate the virtues as well as the defects of the erstwhile British ruling class. As my brother Temple was to write two decades later from Suva, despite our being "intellectuals" we both liked "the barbarian English from the best schools."

Let me not forget in recalling my school impressions of half a century ago, my tennis partner, Marjorie Clemence Dane. A tall, sturdy blond girl with few, if any, intellectual or political interests, but with a good brain and a headstrong and romantic temperament, she was to become my close friend years later in London.

The only child of a "widow of high degree" - at least in her mother's own estimation-Marjorie had never met the "lower classes" until I stayed with her one summer in Sidmouth in Devonshire in the early Twenties. Accustomed from childhood to fishing and sailing whenever I could, I naturally made friends with the local fishermen, and Marjorie and I spent many a night "mackerel drifting." and helping to haul in the nets at dawn.

To me this was just the kind of sea-going holiday I had enjoyed in childhood. But to Marjorie it was romance. She fell in love with a fisherman who was squat and dark and muscular and almost ugly except for his large, black, long-lashed eyes - inherited perhaps from some Spanish ancestor cast upon the Western shore of England after the defeat of the Armada.

"Ern" Jenkins was not very bright and his political opinions of the day depended on whether he had just read the Conservative "Daily Mail" or the Labor "Daily Herald." He was far less interesting and attractive than "Stan" Harris who could neither read nor write but who had opinions he had thought out for himself, and whose physique was that of a legendary Norseman or Greek God. Stan was married to a wonderful girl called Kathie who was pretty and witty and well educated and who never let the hardships of a fisherman's wife get her down. They had a charming child called Peggy and theirs was a happy, life-long love. Both of them recur often in my story since they became and remained dear friends long after Marjorie and Ern had parted.

Marjorie's mother called in the Bishop of London to try to stop the marriage and took her on a sea voyage round the world on a luxury liner to cure her of her infatuation. It was all in vain. Although, as my brother observed at the time, if Marjorie's mother had not skimped on this voyage and had taken her on a P. & O. instead of a Japanese boat, she might have met a man who would have made her forget poor Ern.

Marjorie had £ 500 a year of her own - a not inconsiderable income in those days. She could afford to play at the simple life in a comfortably appointed cottage in Sidmouth after she married Ern. He, unfortunately, had all the "petty bourgeois" prejudices of the respectable British working class and this ruined their marriage. Marjorie had fallen in love not so much with him as with his way of life. But as soon as they were man and wife, he stopped her going out fishing with him at night, insisted on her wearing a hat and stop wearing shorts or slacks, and in general made her life so dull that she yearned to return to London.

Eventually they divorced with Ern keeping the house and being paid quite a bit of "alimony." Marjorie later married my college friend, Robert Ryan, a clever, sensitive and poetical Irishman in delicate health. This proved to be a most happy marriage, but he died soon after.

I owe much to Prior's Field. Not only did my experience there temper and steel me to resist and defy the powers which at all times and places in all societies endeavor to enforce conformity by one means or another. The teaching was also excellent. The trouble was that neither the headmistress nor the staff, with the exception of the games mistress, had much influence outside the classroom.

History, which was my favorite subject, was particularly well taught. At Prior's Field in my early teens I learned more history, ancient, medieval and modern, than most American college students. We were also given some understanding of political realities and the facts of power, so conspicuous by their absence in liberal academic circles today. For instance, it was impressed on me that Magna Carta which in later centuries came to be the Great Charter of English freedom, was nothing of the sort in 1215, at Runnymede. It marked instead, as I learnt at Prior's Field, the success of the feudal aristocracy in wresting back from a cruel and foolish king its own special privileges- then called "liberties" - curtailed by Norman kings seeking to establish a strong central government ensuring law and order and the protection of the weak against the strong. It was not until many centuries later that Magna Carta was transformed into a charter of liberties for all Englishmen. (In parentheses, I must here remark that a minor lesson impressed on me at Prior's Field is never to mix Latin and English by calling the Great Charter Magna Charta - a mistake so general that typists or typographers almost always get it wrong.)

History as taught in most American schools and colleges only briefly scans, or passes over as dark ages of little or no interest to the modern world, the millenium between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Rennaissance and Reformation. This general ignorance

of medieval history seems to me the main reason why Americans in general, despite their good will and desire to help, fail to appreciate the problems of government in "underdeveloped" or backward countries. "Democracy" in such countries almost inevitably entails giving a free hand to the rich and powerful, just as in Thirteenth Century England, Magna Carta meant restoring to the Barons their "liberty" to oppress their vassals and serfs without fear of the Crown oppressing them or bringing them to justice.

Many years after, lessons I learned at Prior's Field, and subsequently at London University, enabled me to realize that China in the aftermath of the war against Japan was at about the same stage of political development as England and France in the Middle Ages, when the great need was for a strong government to enforce law and order and defend the country against its external enemies.

It seemed to me absurd and self-defeating for America to demand "democratic" government in China, when the real need was for an effective administration able to curb the centrifugal forces and enforce reforms. As I wrote in my 1947 book. Last Chance in China:*

To call the Kuomintang Government "Fascist" is the very reverse of the truth. Its powers are not limitless but far too limited. In war it lacks entirely the simian efficiency of the Nazi, Japanese and Soviet States. It interferes with the individual too little, not too much. Its sins of omission are far greater than its sins of commission. Its gravest fault is the ineffectiveness of its administration, and its failure to force through necessary reforms. It is too soft, not too hard.

Naturally, my political realism in writing that "an economically and politically backward country such as China requires an authoritative administration," called down on me the opprobrium of American "liberals" who accused me of a preference for tyranny even while they themselves were equating willingness to collaborate with Communists as the hallmark of a "democrat."

Owing to this confusion or the ignorance of most Americans of history prior to 1776, we "lost" China. This is a later story which I tell in my 1951 book The China Story.** Here I have digressed to show that in spite of my own foolishness in drifting into the Communist camp in the late Twenties, I never quite forgot fundamental historical lessons learned half a century ago at Prior's Field.

On the other side of the ledger, so to speak, I remember a talk given to us in 1913 by Mrs. Burton Brown, in which she compared Lloyd George's reforms with those of the Gracchi who had been murdered for their attempt to remedy social and economic injustice and thus 'save the Republic' Conservatives who fail to see the need for change and the remedy of abuses pave the way for dictators who abolish all our liberties.

"B.B.," as we called our headmistress, was a great teacher and a scholar who related the lessons of the past to the present. She was a liberal in the true and original meaning of that much abused word, but also a realist without illusions concerning the facts of power and the basic motives of men, ancient, medieval or modern.

Few among her pupils appreciated her great qualities or liked her much. She was a big, heavy, majestic woman with a rugged masculine countenance, thick eyebrows and heavy jowels, who inspired awe, not affection. She was too remote to know how little effect

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* Bobbs-Merrill. Indianapolis, 1947.

** Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1951.

either her teachings or her personality and high-minded precepts had on the conduct of her pupils. We were all afraid of her, and it was with a beating heart that we obeyed a summons to her book-lined, chintz-curtained study whose French windows looked out on a garden glorious in early summer with deep blue delphiniums and other brilliant flowers. Even I, one of her favorite pupils, vividly recollect that to be called to B.B.'s study in the early morning made my heart palpitate with nameless dread.

B.B.'s daughter, Beatrice (whose shortened name of Bice we pronounced bitch) was a thin-lipped spinster with an artificial smile who was actively disliked for what we instinctively recognized as only a veneer of sweetness, light and charity covering her lack of warmth and humanity, and the conceit which then as now is the besetting sin of class conscious liberal intellectuals.

"Bice" gave me individual instruction in Greek to enable me to acquire sufficient knowledge within a year to pass the Cambridge "Little Go." She spent most of the time trying to inspire me with a vision of Socrates in the false image of a non-conformist parson. The fact that I actually passed Cambridge University's entrance examination at the age of sixteen, in Greek as well as Latin, was due to my excellent memory. I memorized the English translation of Plato's Apologia and Zenophon's Anabasis, and learned just enough Greek to recognize which passages had been given for translation. However, I owe it to "Bice" that I learned by heart some lines from Plato's account of the death of Socrates in the original Greek, which I can still recite by rote.

My knowledge of Latin, unlike my Greek, was not synthetic. I really learned Latin at Prior's Field, thanks mainly to our Classics teacher. Miss Richards. She was a neat, small, reserved woman with a well-developed sense of humor who never curried popularity, or like the games mistress and some others, sought to stimulate endeavor by arousing inordinate affection - a "pash" to use our word for the unhealthy, adolescent adoration of pupil for mistress in our exclusively feminine society. I remember Miss Richards although I have forgotten the names and faces of other mistresses at Prior's Field, because she was an inspired teacher who could make even Latin grammar and composition interesting, and the reading of Roman poetry and prose an absorbing pleasure instead of a chore.

I can no longer read it with ease, but my good grounding in Latin syntax and logic, and the clarity of expression required by the exigencies of the Latin tongue, together with my earlier French education, taught me to endeavor to express my thoughts succinctly and logically instead of taking refuge in the verbosity and ambiguity, or mushiness, which in our day and age enables many writers to hedge on their convictions. I do not pretend that my writings have measured up to classical standards, but I have always endeavored to express my meaning clearly and unequivocally.

Long before I went to Prior's Field my thoughts and aspirations had been colored by Greek and Roman myths, legends and history.

One of the first books Temple and I read was an abridged version of Chapman's translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, with illustrations by Flaxman copied from Greek vases. The garden of the Hesperides, the siege of Troy, the wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas, the battles of Marathon and Salamis - the whole beauty and wonder of Greek myth, legend and history, had given me visions from childhood of a lovely land of marble temples and sunlit seas where men first dispelled the mists of superstition, ignorance and fear.

But, until I came to Prior's Field I had no more than a romantic vision of the glory that was Greece or of the lasting contribution made by Rome to the foundations of Western civilization.

Thanks to Mrs. Burton Brown, I also acquired some appreciation of the connection between art and religion, politics and philosophy, truth and beauty. One evening a week in the winter and spring terms, "B.B." lectured to us on Greek, Roman, and Renaissance art. Her lectures were illustrated by slides, and although I can recollect little of what she said, I can still visualize some of the photographs of temples, statues and pictures shown to us on the screen. Mrs. Burton Brown gave me the small measure of understanding of art of which I am capable, together with a deep and enduring appreciation of the Greek genius and its lasting influence.

Temple always said that my artistic tastes depended on my political and ethical values, meaning that I had no pure aesthetic appreciation of art. Which is no doubt true and explains why I have no appreciation of most 'modern art' which to me conveys only confusion. Seeking and admiring clarity of thought and expression, I can see no sense in pictures without meaning, or whose meaning is deliberately obscured.

The classical influences of my childhood and youth stayed with me all my life. For some twenty years, until her death in 1963 at the age of 93, I was privileged to count Edith Hamilton among my friends. This outstanding American classical scholar comforted and encouraged me in Washington decades after I was a child at Prior's Field when I was cast down by the failure of my best books. She chided me gently, saying that if one is determined to "witness to the truth" as one sees it, it is inconsistent to yearn for the fruits of the transitory success which come to those who seek popularity. "The excellent becomes the permanent," she wrote, quoting Aristotle, in her inscription to me in one of her last books.

Edith Hamilton also tried to instruct me as to how to get my views heard by a wiser presentation than was my wont.

Mrs. Burton Brown's lectures on history and art compensated for much else lacking at Prior's Field. Now that I am much older than she was when I listened to her with rapt attention, I recognize my debt to her teaching and can forgive her for having failed me at a critical period in my life.

I was one of her favored pupils, not because she had affection for me, but on account of my scholastic record. I won more prizes each year for proficiency in more subjects than anyone else. I even won a prize for Divinity, although I was a free thinker, exempted from church attendance. I acquired a leather bound volume of Meredith's poems, which I still possess, for general knowledge of the Bible, in April 1913, when I was fifteen years old and in class VB. (Lower Fifth) The following term, summer 1913, I won the school "Essay" prize for a dissertation on Machiavelli. This time the book given me was Cary's translation of Dante's "Inferno," which was a more fitting choice as my reward than Meredith's "Poems" may seem as a Divinity prize. In my essay on Machiavelli, I argued that there was not really such a disparity as generally supposed between the Florentine's advice to tyrants, as expressed in his "Prince," and his eulogy of Republican Virtues in his "Commentaries on Livy"- the Roman classical historian. As I saw it, when fifteen years old, men are usually ready to condone, or even approve, actions taken by their state or country which they condemn when taken by an individual, so that what seemed admirable "virtue" in the Romans was regarded as wickedness in an individual Italian prince.

I wish I still had this old essay of mine. All I can now remember is its main argument that Machiavelli's precepts for Princes - his description of how tyrants maintain their power, which came to be called "Machiavellian,"-was not different in essence to the precepts and practices of the Roman Republic or modern nation states.

Mrs. Burton Brown, expecting that I would reflect glory on Prior's Field by future academic achievements at Cambridge University, gave me special facilities for study. She lent me books and during my last year installed me in a room of my own in the hospital annex where I could read late or early instead of being subject to school rules. But in the end she let me down so badly that she did more to awaken my budding revolutionary outlook than anyone else in my early life.

When the war came in 1914, my father was ruined. I was sixteen and had just passed the entrance examination to Cambridge University. Mrs. Burton Brown, confident that I would win laurels for Prior's Field, gave me a year's free schooling. I began working for the Cambridge "Higher Local," an additional examination which women candidates were also required to pass, but it soon became clear that I should not be able to take advantage of the scholarship which I was almost certain to secure, because my father would be unable to contribute anything to my support. Instead of arranging for me to go to London University—where, as I learned years later, I could have obtained a scholarship sufficient to enable me to continue my studies—"B.B." cast me off, as no longer of any interest or value to Prior's Field. Nor did she let me down gently.

She made it brutally clear to me that my presence at Prior's Field was no longer desired, and caused me acute shame by letting it be known that I was at school free because my parents could no longer afford to pay my fees. When I passed the Cambridge "Higher Local" with flying colors "B.B." reserved her congratulations for the girl who had passed with lower marks but had the financial means to continue her education.

Today, six decades later, I remember the shock and disillusionment of the discovery that Mrs. Burton Brown had never had any personal regard for me, having all along been concerned only with the academic laurels I was expected to win for her school. After I was precluded, on account of poverty, from being of any value to Prior's Field, she cast me off without compunction or compassion.

Thus in the summer of 1915, I left school with few regrets and some bitterness, thanks to the personal experience which taught me that the social system could fling one into poverty from security, and prevent one from continuing one's education whatever the proof of one's mental qualifications.

Chapter 5

WAR YEARS

My departure from Prior's Field in August 1915 marked the end of my jeunesse dorée. I was plunged from affluence and security into poverty and a hard struggle for existence. Nor was the transition made by slow and easy stages. It was more like the abrupt expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden they had failed sufficiently to appreciate.

My last year at school had been darkened by the money worries of my parents. We had pawned my silver and ivory-fitted monogrammed dressing case to pay my fare back to school and provide me with a little pocket money for my last term. But I had continued to live in comfort, eat well, study and play games as also to believe that my father's financial difficulties were only temporary. I still expected to get to college. But after I came "home" to find we no longer had one, my great expectations faded fast.

My parents were now almost without resources and my father was beginning to succumb to the tubercular infection which had been only partially cured in Switzerland. His precariously restored health depended on his continuing to live in the country which he could no longer afford to do. Our beautiful house and garden at Ken Court had been given up. our furniture sold, and the proceeds used to pay off business debts. Mother's jewels and furs, if not already sold or pawned, were gradually being disposed of to pay for groceries and the rent of the furnished lodgings in Hampstead where we now lived. My brother, who had enlisted in the army in August 1914 after a year at Cambridge had by now received a Commission in the Connaught Rangers and was soon to be fighting in France.

I was seventeen years old when I left school and was flung upon my own resources to earn a living. The only way open seemed to become a governess in the old tradition of decayed, or decaying gentlewomen. First, for a few months, I stayed in my Williamson grandfather's house, where my mother and father, together or separately, briefly took refuge.

Grandfather was looked after by my two maiden aunts, Flossie and Nelly. I remember Flossie as a thin emaciated woman with huge cavernous dark eyes below a high, pale forehead surmounted by abundant plaited braids of silver streaked dark brown hair. Her smile was beautiful but her nervous fingers clutching mine aroused aversion instead of love and made me want to escape from her bedside. She was a typical unselfish and self-sacrificing Victorian spinster who let herself be bullied by my tyrannical Grandfather, a tall, majestic handsome old man with a long white beard and hawk-nosed face who could have served as a model for one of the formidable and self righteous prophets of the Old Testament.

Flossie had inherited some money from their elder brother Len, and during the last destitute years of my father's life it was she who kept the wolf from our door. Besides providing my parents with 10 shillings a week from her own small income, she occasionally managed to extract a few pounds from my Uncle Ted, who was carrying on

the family business. She also induced my grandfather to make us some small loans, all of which were carefully recorded in his will as debt against anything my mother should inherit from him.

My Aunt Nelly, baby of the family, was vivacious, vain and pretty with a trim figure, curly dark hair and sparkling eyes, fun-loving, dainty and elegantly dressed. She ought to have married well and been happy. Frustrated by my selfish grandfather whose daughters were expected to devote themselves to serving him, she had sublimated her longing for a husband and a home of her own, into a passion for cleaning and polishing and keeping things orderly and tidy. Nelly liked to sing and the only amusement I remember in the large dark living room was striving to strum the piano and sing with her in tune. Both of my mother's spinster sisters adored my Uncle Ted, youngest child and only surviving son of my Grandfather's nine children, whose occasional visits and many children supplied the main comfort and joy of the barren lives of my aunts.

My favorite aunt was Fia who, after marrying a not much good husband called Arthur Daggett, had become a successful saleswoman in women's lingerie in London. Mother, although letting Fia help us out with gifts of clothes and food, did not really like this energetic aunt of mine, who in appearance most closely resembled my Williamson Grandfather and had inherited his business sense. To me, she now stands out as the only one of my many aunts with whom I had a certain affinity because she had the guts to battle the world despite the handicap of being a woman. She was fond of me and gave me lots of beautiful underwear and nightgowns as a trousseau when I went off to Moscow in 1928 to live with Arcadi without benefit of clergy.

The oldest of Mother's six sisters, Bessie, was plump and prosperous and exceedingly respectable and conventional. Her eldest son Tom, a tall, heavy set, amiable young man, flirted with me, flattered me and occasionally took me out to dine and dance, bringing a little gayety into my life during this dull and dolorous period of my teens.

There was also Maudie, the black sheep, or whatever the equivalent term is for a female. The widow of an actor, she had three beautiful children and little visible means of subsistence besides the charity of her sisters until her daughter Doris became a show girl.

Lastly there was Minnie, a professional invalid who spent her life in bed expecting everybody to be sorry for her and provided with a generous allowance by my grandfather. Indeed my bevy of aunts ran the whole gamut of Victorian and Edwardian female types.

I should explain how it came about that my father was ruined and unable to restore our family fortunes.

Shortly before the war he had invested all his capital in an agency for Austro-Daimler cars - precursors of today's universally known Mercedes Benz automobiles. The Balkan war had hit the agency hard and the 1914 war finished it. He would no doubt have recovered from this misadventure, as from others in the past, had his tubercular trouble not been revived and aggravated by worry and London fog.

My father's hobby was mathematics and his bedside reading the Differential Calculus. He had become absorbed in the discovery, or mathematical working out, of a new curve making possible the construction of a rotary pump without the usual valves and springs. This "Utley Curve" as it came to be called could have made our fortune had it not been for the War. As my father now painfully discovered, no new, unproven invention could secure either government backing or private financing in England at that time.

After the war, when my father was dead, although Temple and I with great difficulty managed to keep up the patent payments for some years, we eventually lost out and my father's invention profited only others.

In a printed prospectus issued by the Kitson Engineering Company, which developed my father's invention and put it on the market in the Twenties, the KITSON-UTLEY ROTARY PUMPS were shown to "derive their superiority over other pumps from the Utley Curve," which "is not a circle but its shape is such that both edges of the blade or impeller maintain contact with the curve continuously when the rotor is rotated and the sliding movement of the blade through the rotor is uniform for each degree of rotation. These Pumps have neither valves nor springs, consequently they work for long periods without repairs."

Arthur Kitson, as far as I know, derived as little benefit from the Utley Curve as the Utleys. A dynamic and successful American engineer and businessman, his main interest was currency reform and abolition of the gold standard. He was a "Douglasite," if anyone still remembers them. This is probably the reason why he failed to make money for himself or for us and lost control of the Kitson-Utley Pump through bankruptcy. I have a dim recollection that my mother received two hundred pounds from Arthur Kitson as a down payment but that was all we ever got. For many years, however, we were to retain, if no longer the dream of revival of the Utley fortunes, the hope that Mother would eventually receive some income from my father's invention.

My letters to Mother through the years contain frequent references to "the pump" -accounts of interviews with lawyers when we expected to be able to sue with success to obtain payment of royalties from those who had acquired the design of the "Utley Pump;" fleeting offers of settlement which never materialized; the recurring difficulty of raising the money to retain our patent rights. We finally lost out because we did not have the financial resources needed to fight. My father's old solicitor friend, J. J. Edwards, at 28 Sackville Street, who helped us without charging a fee, was either just too old or too lacking in experience in this field of law to protect our patent rights.

Life in my Grandfather's gloomy mansion, where he was eventually to die in his nineties, soon proved as unendurable to me as to my parents. I found a job teaching, which paid me enough to rent a small furnished room of my own and to buy a modicum of food and some badly needed clothes. I lived largely on bread, margarine and marmalade. Fortunately, one of my school friends, Sybil Hesse, lived not far off in the pleasant suburb of Didsbury and I was always welcome at her parents' home to spend a night or a weekend-have some fun playing games, enjoying good food and beautiful surroundings. I had befriended Sybil at school when she was having a hard time on account of her shyness and the fact that she enjoyed an egg at breakfast by special request of her parents who thought she was delicate. Her parents, with typical Jewish generosity, offered me a home in their house if my Grandfather would pay my fees to study at Manchester University. My Grandfather, now in his eighties, refused, not having changed since the days when he had denied my mother the education he could easily have afforded to give her. Sybil, whose parents in 1915 changed their name from Hesse to Hescott on account of the hostility during the 1914 war against anyone with a German name, has remained my dear and loyal friend although nowadays when we meet in England we have little in common besides the memory of times shared in our distant youth. In London in the twenties, I emancipated her from her wealthy Christian-Jewish bourgeois environment, and the domination of her beautiful and imperious mother, by getting her a job with the League of Nations in Geneva. There she blossomed out, made many friends and enjoyed herself immensely before getting married - inevitably, perhaps, to a prosperous Jewish businessman despite her longing to break away from her original environment.

In 1916 I left Manchester to take a job as a resident governess in Hampshire where I

coached a boy called Ian for his private school entrance examination. There I lived very comfortably but was bored and lonely, so that early in 1917 I was glad to become a clerk at the War Office in London at a starting salary of only 35 shillings a week. This enabled me to be re-united with Mother and Dada in the small house they had managed to rent in the suburb of Lewisham and furnished with little besides beds, a few chairs, and packing cases which served as kitchen, dining and writing tables. My memories of this short interlude with my parents are few. The most vivid one is of a night when having got water heated for a bath, the air raid warning sounded and the lights went out. This did not mean much or any danger in those days and I did not abandon the rare luxury of wallowing in hot water by candlelight to go down to the cellar.

I also recall, I know not why, waiting for my father to board a bus in Whitehall after he had told me how nice I looked in the new thin, dark blue Voile dress I had just bought for ten shillings, out of the first money I earned at the War Office. When so much else of far greater importance has been forgotten, I can still see in my mind's eye the texture, color and form of that dress as well as remember how little it cost.

With shame I also recall the irritation I all too frequently showed at home at Dada's coughing. I must have realized that he could not help it, but I could not help wanting to escape from the sound of it. He was a very sick man endeavoring by the utmost use of his will power to overcome the disease that incapacitated him.

My father's gallant spirit shines through in the letters he wrote during the 1914 war while he was in London vainly endeavoring to market his invention and Mother was enduring the cold charity of her father's home. They are replete with assurances that "the outlook is very promising." Old friends or former colleagues, now Members of Parliament or in important government positions, are giving him introductions and backing, leaving little doubt that he will "get a good job either in the Inventions Bureau or in Munitions." In June 1915 while I was still at Prior's Field, he wrote to Mother:

Dearest:

I am feeling very much better and my voice is very much better too, so do not feel uneasy about me. I am resting thoroughly, going to bed early, not smoking, drinking no whiskey, taking my eggs and Horlick. In fact doing all I ought to do and nothing I ought not. I am really better, dear, coughing less and feeling stronger ....

My darling, I am unhappy that I have made your life so miserable. I cannot be happy until I have got life straight again for all of us and it is hard to do so as things are, but I will do my best.

I love you, dearie, now as always ....

If only I were well and strong again, things would soon go right. As it is, bear with me and know that I think all day long of your courage and your devotion to me.

Goodnight, sweet.

Ever your true lover,

Willie

Although my father's friends among "the high and mighty" did little more than give him introductions which led only to unfulfilled promises, he, like my brother, aroused affection among all those among whom he dwelt.

While his wealthy friends such as Reeves Smith, managing director of the Savoy Hotel Company, and his fashionable wife "Maudie," did no more than occasionally invite him to dinner at the Berkeley where they lived, the landlady of his Hampstead lodging house

on Crossfield Road was so generous and kind that she charged him no more than it cost her for the meals she provided.

In spite of his illness, my father had written, "a number of letters to everybody I could think of who could possibly help" and had "some nice letters back." Sir Sidney Oliver, Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, had replied saying he would see what he could do to help. "The fact is, however," my father wrote:

You never saw anything like the confusion and chaos there is in all the Government offices I have been into. Everybody seemed to be running up and down doing nothing, nobody ever knows where anybody else is or what they are doing. One day one man is doing one job in one department and the next day he is in some other department doing something else. It is heart-rending to see so much muddle and to think of the men at the front dependent on such an organization. I don't think much of Lloyd George's management of the Munitions job. Everybody tells me it is the same thing all up and down the country—muddle and mess everywhere, five men doing one man's job in one place and in a few places one man doing the work of ten men. The Inventions Bureau itself seems to be overstaffed - that is, they have too many men there already, but they are most of them totally unfit for the job. The Secretary practically told me so himself, and said I was just the sort of man he would like to have there. The difficulty was to make room for me. Anyway it is evidently only by hammering again and again at different doors that one can hope to get in. The difficulty is that I have not much strength to do the hammering with, especially when the weather is so beastly as it has been this week.

By 1917 my father's spirits had begun to flag as his health deteriorated at an ever faster pace, and his hopes of either a job or the adoption of his invention by the Munitions Board sank to zero. But he was as ever more concerned with my mother's unhappiness in Manchester than with his own "tiredness" and "the cold East wind" which had compelled him to rest at home.

Now that I have for many years been a citizen of the United States, and for years before a foreign resident in this generous country, I realize that it must seem incomprehensible to most Americans that neither my father's wealthy friends nor those whom he had helped in former years, gave us any material assistance in those days of adversity. It was not in the British temperament or tradition to give or receive "charity." You kept "a stiff upper lip" and starved or died quietly.

Former friends of my parents would occasionally invite us to a luxurious lunch or dinner - but none of them ever thought of helping us financially. Perhaps this was also our own fault since my parents pride forbade their asking or taking help from well-to-do friends.

At the time, all this seemed natural. The contrast with America, which I came to know many years later and where I have experienced great kindness and generosity, is so striking that for all her faults, the United States will always remain my chosen country.

My father's health continued to deteriorate and we knew he would soon die unless he went to live in the country. My school friend, Phyllis Vickers, lent us her family's summer cottage in South Cornwall where the mild climate offered hope of preserving his life. When my father and mother went there in the fall of 1917 I was left in charge of their few remaining salable possessions consisting of some rare books. I remember going off

during my lunch hour at the War Office to sell a vellum-bound edition of the original text of Burton's Arabian Nights while Zeppelins were hovering over London. The policeman at the side entrance warned me to stay under cover and when I refused, told me that my blood would be on my own head. Of course, there was little real danger. It was child's play as compared with the bombings of World War Two. In any case, I was too intent on meeting the book dealer who would enable me to send some desperately needed money to my parents to heed the friendly advice of the Bobby outside the War Office. It is a measure of my preoccupation during the war with pressing family cares that I remember this incident so clearly, but have forgotten the immediate impact made upon me by the Bolshevik Revolution which occurred at about this time.

Temple, unaware of quite how bad things were with us, was enjoying the war as he enjoyed all life's experiences.

After being wounded on the Somme in 1916 he was sent to Mesopotamia in command of a draft of the Connaught Rangers. Writing to us from the Durban Club in Natal in June, 1917, before sailing further East, he told us that his long stopover at the Cape had been "one of the best times of my whole life, which you know is saying a lot." He had seen in the newspapers that the 16th division, in which he had fought in France, had gone "over the top at the Messines ridge show," and hoped we had sent him the casualty list. "I wish I had been there," he wrote from Durban, "really and truly I do." He had been "lazing about aboard ship, lying in the tropic sun" while his friends had gone to their death and it had made him feel "absolutely mad at the time."

"It is so funny," he wrote, "how I always get soft and easy times shoved on me against my will-yet this has been a wonderful time. This is a lovely country and I am coming back here sometime. How my wretched draft can still sigh for England is beyond me. India is even more fascinating we are told. I do not think I could ever stop wandering now. I always had a tendency that way, and the sort of life that has been thrown at me has developed it beyond all bounds. I think I had better become a naturalized gypsy.

"You know I was complaining when last at home that I was getting old and slightly tired. All that feeling has died away and I have recovered that old primitive joie de vivre. Life is a good game played quickly. Incidentally I must quote you some verses of Robert Service I have just come across:

This out of all shall remain They have lived and have tossed So much of the game shall be gain Though the gold of the dice has been lost.*

"Shall we adopt this as a family motto?"

***

The death of my father in January, 1918, brought me the first great grief of my life. I had loved him dearly, and thought him the most wonderful person in the world - wise, tolerant, kind, never ill-tempered, and until the last absorbed in the course of history rather than in himself. Arriving in Cornwall on leave from my job at the War Office in London I saw him choke to death as his exhausted heart could no longer pump blood through his diseased lungs. The night before he died, when half conscious, he pronounced his own epitaph, saying: "I, Willie Utley, born Skipton in Craven - just missed being great."

He had missed becoming great, or even successful, because he used or dissipated his

_____________

*Identify.

exceptional intelligence, talents and energies in too many endeavors; or perhaps because he loved life too much and had savored it too fully to pursue only one objective. Before he died he murmured Shakespeare's lines about the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, and said he was curious to know whether he had been right in thinking that death is nothingness.

Among the cherished letters which my mother preserved through the years there is one from Temple dated December 1, 1917 from Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers now called Iraq, written in pencil on sweat stained green paper, a few months before my father's death which contains passages which express better than anything I can write today, an epitaph on the life of my father and mother as well as Temple's sanguine temperament:

Really though, Mother, horrid as things are now, don't you think that taking yours and Dada's life as a whole, you have had more of the good things of life than the average? You have had some real joyous times. You have had some most wretched times, but adding them together, is not every moment of pain canceled by a moment of pleasure, and a surplus of pleasure left? That is more than can be said of most people's lives.

At the bottom of your heart, would you not sooner have had your life and your present condition, than say the life of Mrs. Reeves Smith. Dada and you have played high, won greatly and lost greatly. You might have played low and won little, and lost little. You were greater than that though.

Do hang on both of you. You mean more to me perhaps than you imagine. You are the only permanent thing in my existence. The only two human beings I care a fig for. I have a great many pals, but of all who have been killed, not one has made me drink a whiskey more or less to their memory. For all my buck and bravado, home, which means no country, but you and Dada, is a great deal to me. You see you are the only home I shall ever have, for I am quite convinced that I must never marry. First, because I would make a wretched husband; secondly because all women that attract me physically would make most wretched wives. Moreover, I value my freedom and my solitude too much. And as I live my life I could not afford to give any hostages to fortune. So please remember that you are the only thing without myself, without you I would become a complete egoist.

I think I will shut off the self-revealing emotional stuff now. The entire population of the Cornish village where my father died came to his funeral. Many of them had done all they could to help my mother while she nursed him in the two-room cottage which had been their last refuge. Some had fetched water for her from the pump across the road; others had carried groceries from the nearest shops several miles away, or brought gifts of cooked food. And when I arrived at midnight from London two or three days before he died, I was met at the nearest railroad station and accompanied on the three-mile uphill walk in moonlight to the lonely cottage where my parents lived.

The pastor whose last services my father, still an agnostic, had rejected, blessed his grave. We had no money for a tombstone, and in any case this seemed as unimportant to me as it would have seemed to him. He had been born in obscurity in Yorkshire and lies

in an unmarked grave in Cornwall, but he lived a full life and left to his children an abiding memory of a man who, even though he "missed being great" had the quality of greatness.

My Williamson grandfather, who had grudgingly allowed my mother ten shillings a week during the last year of my father's life, cut off even this pittance after he died. I brought mother to London where we lived in a small cold water flat on the £2.10.0 that I was by then earning.

With a rent of sixteen shillings a week and war prices for food we had a hard time. I used to walk to work to save two pence in bus fare, and eat a meager lunch most days at "Sebastian's" in Soho where a substantial ham sandwich cost only six pence and a cup of good coffee only a penny or two. I greatly appreciated the boon afforded to my young appetite by Mrs. Williams Ellis, who worked under me at the War Office and provided sandwiches of bread and jam in mid-afternoon with tea. She was comparatively rich, being a "grass widow" with an allowance from her officer husband. She was, no doubt, a lady of very easy virtue, but she was generous and kind, and sufficiently competent in her work for me not to feel that I was being bribed by jam and bread to cover up for her.

I was starved for other things than food during this period of my life. I could not afford pretty clothes and I had few opportunities to enjoy myself. Mrs. Ellis invited me to parties where the company she kept may have been rather vulgar and was certainly not intellectual, but was jolly and kind. I spent Armistice night with her and her friends in gay and riotous fashion but in those days I was very abstemious and unlike the others ended up sober.

My first "romance," if it can be called anything of the kind since it never got beyond the stage of lunches and dinners, holding hands and a few kisses, was with an Indian Army officer called Farrell. By this time I was a section head with a semi-private office and he frequently came visiting for the ostensible purpose of consulting me on questions of payment to officers of the Indian Army who came under the jurisdiction of my section of "Finance 2." Captain Fan-ell was a tall slim, black-haired, violet-eyed, beguiling Irishman who in his courting used the gambit of having a wife who misunderstood him. Thanks partly to the warnings of Mrs. Ellis, who was as wise in the ways of men as I was ignorant, I failed to succumb to his charm although I was greatly attracted to him. He was good for my morale at a time when I was lonely and poor and out of my element and had no confidence at all in my feminine allure.

My last recollection of the debonair Captain Farrell who could well have been the hero - or villain - of a Kipling story or a Ouida novel, is his "Indian Gift" of a gold wrist-watch. After having delighted me with this wonderful present prior to returning overseas, he took it back a day or two later, telling me that his wife had found out about it and raised hell. Today, I wonder whether the real reason for his strange behaviour was my failure to "fall"—in other words, be seduced. Which episode recalls to me a story my father liked to tell about his bachelor days. His "laundress," as the Temple charwomen were called, had come to him one day with a woebegone face and said: "Sir, you have seen my pretty daughter?"

"Yes and a nice attractive girl she is."

"Well Sir, a terrible thing has happened; she has fallen and I don't know what to do."

After my father had commiserated with her, she remarked with a Juliet's nurse smirk: "She would fall again for a trifle, Sir."

In later years I often recalled this story because it seemed so apposite to the behaviour of many liberal "fellow travellers" of our time. After first falling for the lure of

communist promises of a good time to be had by all and later disillusioned by "Uncle Joe Stalin" after the war, they are still today all too ready to "fall for a trifle." whenever it suits the Kremlin's purpose to appear conciliatory.

While resisting the blandishments of Captain Farrell, I began an enduring friendship with Walter Field and Russell Green who were my "opposite numbers" at the India office on the other side of Whitehall. I knew them first only as voices on the telephone, in arguments as to whether their office or mine was responsible for this or that officer's pay on this or that duty, in this or that theater of war. We became personally acquainted after Russell Green and I began swapping Latin quotations, and engaging in discussions on the classics in which we vied with one another in displaying our erudition, thus wasting government time in conversations which bore no relation to the war effort. Walter for his part, delighted me by his flippant remarks concerning the bureaucracy in general and War Office versus India office in particular.

Soon Russell and Walter were "dating" me or, more accurately, Russell did the dating and Walter the paying when we all three dined together either at Walter's club in Whitehall Court, or at some Soho restaurant. Walter who had been rejected for military service on account of his bad eyesight, came from a well-to-do Jewish merchant family from Glasgow and lived with his parents in Hampstead. He later became my brother's closest friend. There was to be a time when I thought I loved him and he was to remain my friend all his life until he died in England in 1959.

Russell Green, who was of proletarian origin, his father being a factory foreman, had obtained his school and University education on scholarships and had won the Newdigate Prize Poem at Oxford where he was a friend of Aldous Huxley's.

He had married young and was separated from his wife who came from the same "working class" background and who must have had a hard time living with Russell who was as unhappy as only a selfish class conscious intellectual can be.

Russell Green imagined he was in love with me and used to send me poems which flattered my ego but failed to inspire any physical response in me. I never took him seriously, although I pitied him and had an affection for him without believing his sorrows were any more real than the love he professed for me. I laughed with Temple at the ardent verses Russell addressed to me expressing his love and his "faith that from betrayal breathes again," and was flattered rather than offended by the contempt and despair he voiced at my frivolity or cold-heartedness when I made fun of him.

I should be grateful to poor Russell Green whose great expectations of his own genius were never to be fulfilled. He gave me sorely needed confidence when I was "young and twenty." Together with Captain Farrell and Walter Field he dispelled my fear engendered at Prior's Field that to be "brainy" was tantamount to being unattractive as a woman.

Among the few relics of my youth in printed or written form which were neither confiscated in Moscow in the 30's nor destroyed in London in the Blitz, there is a slender volume of Russell Green's poems, published in 1923 on the flyleaf of which is written:

To Freda Utley,

Indescribably yours,

Russell Green

Below this is written: "What was that superb impromptu euphuistic epigram? The hobby horse of your discontent becomes the Pegasus of your ambition?" - Ah God, the tragedy .... there was a King in Thule . . became a clerk in Whitehall."

Russell Green, although an egotist and an inveterate poseur, had the redeeming quality of being able to mock himself. Maybe, he might have been a "King in Thule" - meaning a

great bard - had he been born in another age instead of driven by economic necessity to become "a clerk in Whitehall." But had the divine spark of poetic genius burned brighter in him, it would not have been drowned in self-pity, or stultified by his need for security, and he would not have sunk into obscurity after his brilliant beginnings.

Today in my seventies, I can perhaps take pride that I once inspired some quite good verses by a minor poet, as when he wrote:

When time and change have taken me from your eyes

And I am home again in solitude

Think of me not as one whose heart pursued

Each sudden fire that on the marshland flies.

Not as the reckless fugitive from despair

Caring not of the road of his escape

From the impending shadow of the shape

Of love betrayed and of the lost betrayer.

Think but of one adrift in the storm of time

Who saw the cloudwrack sundered by a star

And with a new faith followed from afar

The light untrembling in the air sublime. In the same volume of his published poems, he included one written when he was mad at me because, when rejecting his daily demands to see me, I had capped one of his classical quotations by citing Juvenal's lines that pleasures are best enjoyed if rarely indulged in. As printed it reads:

JUVENAL

(Who said:

Voluptates commendat rarior usus

Which she quoted)

He had lain at feasts that toiled from sun to sun,

Drunk daylong draughts of brute oblivion,

Drowned spirit in the dead sea of desire,

Parched even sense to dust in sensual fire,

Withered his heart in the burning sand of remorse

Till age came limping on . . .

This senile raker of imperial styles

Prying about with scatologic eyes!

This bombous crater of exhausted force!

Shall he suffice to curb the youth in me?

This desiccated dotard! Shall I see

The pure and vernal passions of my brain,

The faith that from betrayal breathes again,

The ardours I imagine - all that I am,

Butchered to make a Roman epigram? Today I read with a smarting of the eyes close to tears Russell Green's outpourings in verse - sublime or ridiculous. I am no judge of modern poetry which has no rhyme or reason or makes much sense to me, so I conceive it possible that some of his poems are more beautiful and express more than many written in our time by poets who have achieved greater fame. Russell Green lacked the good looks or the charm which make women and the world fall for even second rate poets and other literary characters of small talent but great pretensions.

Meeting again in the late thirties after my return to England from my experience of love and terror in Russia undreamed of in his small world, I found Russell Green complaining of his mistress's unfaithfulness and failure to understand him just as formerly he had complained of his wife's shortcomings. I have long since lost touch with him and do not know if he is still living, but the truth of his line that "the hobby horse of one's discontent becomes the Pegasus of one's ambition" is incontrovertible.

During the war years the international outlook I had acquired form my father's teachings and my continental education prevented me from becoming a 'war patriot'. I could not hate the Germans, among whom I had dear friends and who had been so kind to me at La Combe, and my knowledge of history precluded me from believing the war propaganda which represented them as being a peculiarly aggressive or wicked nation. Then, as in later years, I always enquired, how come, if the Germans were so aggressive it was not they, but we, their Teutonic English cousins, who had acquired an Empire upon which the sun never set?

I had some prejudice against the French as the most chauvinist and military-minded nation in Europe, as a result, no doubt, of the overdose of French literature I had swallowed while at school in Switzerland, which had given me a conception of France as a nation eternally seeking la gloire and honoring the Napoleonic tradition above the revolutionary. But I had in general no national or race prejudices and believed that men are much of a muchness everywhere in the world.

My good grounding in history at Prior's Field also caused me to distrust the League of Nations as an instrument to ensure peace and democracy. I can remember mustering the courage to get up at a public meeting in 1919 to suggest that the League appeared to be one of the victors against the vanquished and might prove to be no better than the Holy Alliance set up after Napoleon's defeat to preserve the status quo.

Among my vivid memories of this time is the profound impression made on me by Sybil Thorndyke's performance in Euripides Trojan Women, put upon the London stage shortly after the Armistice while the starvation blockade of defeated Germany was being continued in order to force the Weimar Republic to submit to the Versailles 'Diktat'. In this play, written during the war between Athens and Sparta, the victorious Greeks decide to throw Hector's young son Astyanax from the battlements of Troy, lest the seed of the Trojan hero survive to menace their hard-won victory. And the child's mother, Hector's widow Andromache, awaiting her fate as a Greek slave among the other Trojan captives exclaims:

Ah, ye have found an anguish to outstrip all tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks.

Time was in my youth, after the first World War, when all who claimed to be liberals opposed the peace of vengeance which was to make a second World War inevitable. I lived to see the contrast when, during and after the Second World War to "make the world safe for democracy," many of those who claimed to be liberals but were racists at heart, not only demanded the unconditional surrender of our enemies, but favored the Morgenthau Plan for the starvation of millions of Germans and the conversion of what remained of Germany into a "goat pasture."

O tempora, o mores, as the Romans said. Or better to quote one of the many memorable sayings of the greatest of all historians. Thucydides, who in recording the decline of Athenian humanitarian virtues during the course of the Peloponnesian War, wrote: "War, teaching men by violence, fitteth them to their condition."

Today, surveying the wreckage of hopes for an enduring peace which followed both

Chapter 6

TRAVELLING LEFT IN BOHEMIA

Before the war ended I had attained a position of some responsibility as a "Junior Administrative Assistant" at the War Office earning a salary of £250 a year which rendered life easier for me and mother before my brother came home from the war.

Temple, after returning from Mesopotamia on leave following Dada's death, had been posted to France where he was wounded and gassed at Le Cateau shortly before the Armistice in November 1918. Discharged from hospital early in 1919 he joined us at 68 Jessel House, Judd Street, opposite St. Pancras Station.

His experiences and mine since our childhood and early youth had been so different as partially to account for the divergent paths along which our destiny or our characters were to lead us in the years to come. He had escaped my bitter experience at an English boarding school and had enjoyed a year at Cambridge University before enlisting in the army at the beginning of the 1914 war. Subsequently commissioned as an officer and posted to the Connaught Rangers, he had lived under the shadow of death, been wounded twice, and suffered far worse deprivations than I while fighting in the mud and cold of the trenches in France and in the desert heat in Mesopotamia. But his worst periods of danger and discomfort had been interspersed by joy and ease, love and laughter, whereas my life had been drab. Untroubled by our mundane cares he had enjoyed the war in spite of hardship, danger and wounds. Having faced the ultimate test life seemed wonderful to him as to others who have escaped death. As he was to write years later on his hazardous voyage across the Atlantic in a small sailing boat, the most wonderful feeling in the world, bar only the ecstasy of love, is that following escape from danger. In Edmond Spencer's words:

Sleep after toyle. port after stormie seas,

Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.

Now, together, again, after his high key and my low key sufferings, we confronted the difficulties and uncertainties of life in post-war England without money.

At the War Office I had become a branch secretary of the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries. Through this trade union I obtained, in 1920, a bursary from the Ministry of Labor made available to war workers who could prove that their college education had been prevented or interrupted by the war. Thus, five years after I left school, and six years after I had passed Cambridge University's entrance examination, I became a student at London University. Temple, a year previously, had obtained a grant from the Ex-Officers' Fund to resume his university studies, and I now joined him at King's College.

Neither of us was really unfortunate in having had to wait so long to get a university education. The intervening years since Temple had left Cambridge and I had left Priors Field, had taught us both, through a variety of experiences, lessons rarely learned in the academic world. And because we had both had to wait so long to get our university education, we appreciated our opportunities more than most college students.

The Librarian at King's College told me that Temple and I were continually astonishing him by the variety of our interests. For both of us it was wonderful once again to be able to satisfy our hunger for knowledge, irrespective of whether the books we read would help us to pass examinations.

Originally, my bursary of £2 a week covered only two years of study, which did not permit me to enroll for the B.A. degree. So, like Temple, I started work for the Journalism Diploma. Both of us specialized in psychology and attended most of the B.A. Honors lectures in this subject along with our regular journalism courses.

Here I might mention a striking illustration of the difference between Temple's mind and temperament and my own. One night during my first year at King's College I had got home at 1:00 a.m. from a dance, to be told by Temple that our class would have a psychology test that morning. For an hour he coached me and I did so well that I gave 97% correct answers in our written test and came out top of the class. But Temple, who had enabled me to achieve this success in competition with a lot of Divinity students, got a rating of only 70%. The difference was that the challenge of an examination brought all my faculties to the highest pitch, whereas Temple was stymied by his greater and more profound knowledge of the subject, as also perhaps by lack of the competitive spirit which was highly developed in me. Moreover, he could not write as fast as I could because he had lost the use of one finger of his right hand when wounded in 1917 on the Somme.

It is easier to answer questions when one does not know too much, as I have long since realized. Yesterday, I could write articles and books very fast. Today, I take much longer because I have learned enough to need to pause and reflect and ponder what I really think or believe. And, of course, today I no longer possess the exceptional memory of my youth.

Encouraged by Temple, who believed I could do anything I set my mind to, and determined that after having at long last got to college I must obtain an Honors degree, I entered for the B.A. Intermediate examination in the Spring of 1921, without having attended the preliminary courses.

For a few weeks I mugged up on my Latin and other subjects not included in the Journalism course, and thanks to the good grounding I had acquired at Priors Field, passed this preliminary first year B.A. examination. A feat which so impressed the King's College authorities that they induced the Department of Labor to extend my scholarship from two to three years, thus enabling me two years later to obtain my B.A. degree in History with First Class Honors.

Temple had tried to persuade me to take Honors in Psychology but I was more interested in history, economics and politics. He, having studied history during his pre-war year at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, had become interested in psychology during his years in the Army. But coming to realize that psychology without a knowledge of medicine was of little use, he became a medical student, after obtaining his Diploma in Journalism. Like my father, my brother was always as interested in the sciences as in the humanities and possessed a rare combination of "literary and scientific aptitudes" to quote from a testimonial given him by King's College recommending him as a "stimulating lecturer alike in history and in elementary science."

Although we profited in other ways from our Journalism courses, neither Temple nor I ever learned how to make easy money by catering to popular tastes. We both had a try at writing stories for magazines but they were always rejected. I remember endeavoring to get a soap opera type of story of a poor girl gets rich boy accepted under the pseudonym of Felicity Fitzmaurice. My failure was no doubt due to my story sounding too much like

a parody of popular fiction. Temple with memories of his pre-war years at Cambridge when he had been influenced by the literature of decadence and had been able to indulge his love of beauty and "gracious living," fine wines and foods and furnishings, wrote stories in a neo-Oscar Wilde or early Waugh vein. His efforts were no more successful than mine for much the same reason since they read like a burlesque of such books as "The Portrait of Dorian Grey" and "Vile Bodies." One of his stories I remember involved a millionaire aesthete who had his bathroom fixed up with two tubs enabling him to plunge from warm scented water into an icy tub - a procedure supposedly calculated to restore his sexual virility following a drunken orgy the night before.

One writes well only when one writes as one pleases, not in conformity with actual or imaginary popular taste. Many years later, reviewers of the book Temple's widow and I compiled from his log book jottings and letters, written while sailing across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on a small yacht*, praised the charm of Temple's fine writing which showed "the heights to which Utley might have risen had not death taken him."

Since my brother and I were supporting our mother, our bursaries were not sufficient for us to live on. We both gave lessons in English to foreigners, helped by our knowledge of French and German. We only got five shillings an hour and had to travel long distances by tube or bus to earn it in the late afternoon or evening after a day's work at college. But we were lucky in that our pupils were interesting people with whom we established friendly relations and whom it was a pleasure to teach. Temple had pupils at the Czecho-Slovak Legation - his "Checks" we called them - with whom he was brought in contact by his friend George Silva, translator of Kapeck's famous play, R.U.R., which gave the word "robot" to the English language. I taught Russian employees of the Soviet Trade Delegation and of Arcos, the equivalent of Amtorg in America.

During the war years I had been more concerned with my own and my parents' struggle for existence than with the class struggle or Socialism, or any idealistic notions of how to establish a more just and rational social and economic order. But once at college I began to take an active part in politics, becoming secretary of the King's College Socialist Society, and later chairman of the London University Labour Party. I joined the Independent Labor Party and became well acquainted with Fenner Brockway. Jimmy Maxton and other dedicated Socialists who led, or inspired, this Left Wing tail of the official Labor Party and opposed its underlying imperialist concepts.

As yet, I had no more knowledge or understanding of Communism and Marxist theory than the "Parlor Bolsheviks" or "Park Avenue Pinks" of the 30's and 40's. Nor did my first Russian pupils enlighten me. They were high Communist Party officials out to enjoy life in the "capitalist world" after the rigors of the "Workers Paradise" and for the most part confined their propaganda to jokes about England where they were enjoying the best years of their lives.

Then I met Plavnik. an old Bolshevik who had lived long years in exile in Germany after the revolution of 1905. To him Bolshevik theory was the breath of life. He was honest and sincere, although extremely vain. His English lessons usually became my German lessons and instruction in Marxist theory. Boris Plavnik was the best type of "Old Guard" Communist: courageous and sincere and self-sacrificing in contrast to the hypocrites and self-seekers who assumed leadership of the Party following Lenin's death. He was honest even in analyzing himself, which is a most rare quality. One evening he took me to listen from the gallery to a meeting of Russian Mensheviks in exile in England.

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* A Modem Sea Beggar, Peter Davis, London, 1938.

The speakers were Abramovitch and Dan, leaders of the Social Democratic minority which had split with the Bolsheviks in 1905. As we listened to the speeches, Plavnik got more and more excited and finally exploded to me: "He is a very bad man." "Why bad?" I replied. "Of course you disagree with him fundamentally, but that does not prove he is a bad man." Plavnik kept saying that he knew Abramovitch (or was it Dan?) was bad, bad, and I kept on saying, "How do you know he is a bad man?" Finally Plavnik replied, "Because he does not like me."

All of us are inclined to see evil in those who dislike us, but how few are candid enough to admit it!

Although so honest about himself, Plavnik shied away from realities when it came to his beloved Party. Whenever I pushed him into a corner by demonstrating the inconsistencies or contradictions of the "Party Line" he would tell me I had no understanding of dialectics. "Sprechen sie bitte dialektisch", he would adjure me, looking at me severely down his long nose when I argued that it made no sense to attack and undermine the British Labor Party as "social fascist" while also hoping for a Conservative defeat.

Plavnik was the most humane of men, and later on in Moscow where he and his devoted wife remained my friends, he sank more and more into his shell, unable to defend, but unwilling to condemn outright, the atrocities committed by Stalin. Like others among the best of the old Bolsheviks, he could not bring himself to face up to the fact that the revolutionary movement to which he had given his whole life had failed and degenerated into Stalin's tyranny. As the years passed, we saw less and less of him because meetings were too painful between friends who dared not speak their thoughts to one another. Plavnik was lucky enough to go into an insane asylum just before the great purge began: at least that is where he was supposed to be in 1935, and we knew his mental faculties had been failing since the death of his beloved wife a year or two before.

Shortly before my graduation in 1923 I defended the Soviet Union as the college speaker in a debate on Russia with H.N. Brailsford as the guest speaker on my side. Our opponents were Sir Bernard Pares, a "White Russian" emigre who had won high academic honors in England, and Cecil H. Driver, a fellow history student, who in later years became a Professor at Yale. When I next met Pares, thirteen years later, he had become a defender of the USSR, while I, back in England after my disillusionment in Russia, was holding my tongue for my husband's sake, but hating Stalin's totalitarian tyranny. The change, it seemed to me was not in us but in Russia. Like some other distinguished exiles Pares patriotism caused him to welcome precisely what I abhorred, namely Stalin's transmutation of communism into national Socialism; and of the Comintern into the arm of Russian policy.

Brailsford, meanwhile, standing steadfastly on his liberal principles, had become one of the all too rare British writers who dared to expose the horrors of Stalin's Russia in defiance of the powerful 'Popular Front' of 'Totalitarian Liberals' and Communists which was exerting so great and baneful an influence on Western public opinion and policy.

Cecil Driver's subsequent career exemplifies the academic rewards which accrue to those who never compromise themselves through extra-curricular activity or any expression of "controversial" views. He and I were rivals at King's College where his conservative bent endeared him to the head of the History Department, Hearnshaw, whereas my radical opinions and activities as Secretary of the King's College Socialist Society were disfavored. Yet such was the impartiality in academic judgement which has generally distinguished British universities that it was to me, not to Driver, that Professor

Hearnshaw awarded the Inglis Research Studentship, after I had won higher honors in London University's B.A. examination. Three decades later, invited to speak at Yale University by such conservative stalwarts as Professor Willmore Kendall, William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell, I found Cecil Driver securely ensconced as a teacher of Political Science, in good repute in the liberal establishment. Whereas I, despite my more distinguished academic record, had found myself precluded from obtaining a university appointment in America on account of my strongly expressed anti-Communist views which made me too "controversial." This is a later story referred to here to illustrate the "changes and chances" of life and the ambivalent meaning of "conservative" and "liberal" in our politically rotating world.

The Inglis Research Studentship at King's College paid only £ 50 a year and required that I conduct a weekly seminar on political theory. But it also gave me the opportunity to coach backward undergraduates for payment.

A year later I was appointed to a resident research scholarship at Westfield College for Women in Hampstead where I enjoyed the luxury of a bedroom and study of my own. besides free meals and a bursary of £100. Of course, I still had to contribute to Mother's support, but I earned extra money teaching Workers' Education Association evening classes, writing occasional book reviews for the Daily Herald, and contributing articles to the Independant Labor Party's New Leader (which, insofar as I remember, managed to pay only 10/ for an article) but was an influential weekly. Thus, I was enabled to study for London University's M.A. degree which, unlike that of Oxford and Cambridge, is rated as the equivalent of the American PhD.

The subject I chose for my M.A. thesis was research on the "Collegia," (trade guilds) of the later Roman Empire, thus combining my knowledge of Latin and the interest in ancient history I had acquired in childhood and youth with my modern political interests and activities.

During my two years' work for my M.A. degree I spent long hours in the British Museum deciphering collected Latin inscriptions from tombs, studying the Theodosian Code and Gothofredus' Commentaries thereon (available in a huge brown leather bound volume requiring a 2 ft. high stand to prop it up to be read) and reading translations from the Greek of the writings of such early Fathers of the Church as St. John Chrysostom in order to glean information on the status and condition of the workers in the last days of the Roman Empire.

My Director of Studies, Norman H. Baynes, Professor of Ancient History at University College, was the most inspiring as well as profound scholar I ever knew, and had a delightful sense of humor. At his yearly series of public lectures on the Byzantine Empire you could "have heard a pin drop," as the saying goes, except when his audience roared with laughter at his funny stories of saints and sinners, emperors and courtesans. hermits and foolish virgins, bishops and monks, and the 'sports news' in Constantinople where the chariot races between Reds and Greens at the Hippodrome were followed like American baseball games. The story I remember best, (which may be included in the small volume Baynes later wrote on Byzantium in the Home University series), concerned some beautiful girls in a Black Sea Greek City who mocked a Christian hermit who, being a 'fool for Christ's sake,' was revered by the ignorant but regarded as a lunatic by the sophisticated. As I remember the legend, this otherwise kindly old man had cursed the foolish virgins who teased him, and rendered them all squint-eyed. When implored to lift the curse which marred their beauty he replied that it was better for them that he not do

so since had they remained beautiful they would certainly have sinned. Being now ugly, they were sure to be virtuous and go to heaven.

Norman Baynes, who died in February, 1961, at the age of 83 after a long illness, combined, in the words of his obituary in the London Times, "scrupulously exact scholarship with the gift of an imagination which he was not afraid to use." For this reason, "his lectures and writings have meant so much to generations of undergraduates who were enabled by his bold reconstructions to understand something of Jewish, Greco-Roman and Byzantine life."

Because I had specialized in ancient and medieval history - a rare choice since most students took medieval and modern courses - I had attended Norman Baynes lectures and small seminars as an undergraduate before he became my Director of Studies while I worked for my M.A. degree. It is to him I owe the wide horizons of my historical perspective, as also more inspiration, help and encouragement than from any other Professor under whom I studied. Today I deeply regret having failed to get to England to see him once again before his death, following my extensive travels in the Middle East of recent years when I visited Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq; all the lands permanently influenced by Greece and Rome which after they became part of the Arab world preserved much of our classical heritage during Europe's Dark Ages. And which, after having made so great a contribution to civilization in times past, are once again beginning to play an important role in history after centuries of obscurity under Turkish or Western imperialist domination.

My debt to Norman Baynes as an inspired teacher is incalculable. I also owe a great deal to him as a friend. In 1926 after visiting him at his home at Northwood I wrote to Mother, "He was charming, and has made me feel so much happier and less worried. He has taken my thesis to read again in order to help me to put it into final form for publication. He was so nice about everything and so really friendly. Do you know, just because I mentioned earlier on that I had been very occupied with your affairs which were going badly, he said I should remember that if I were in difficulties there was always £ 50 ready with him for me. Isn't he extraordinary?"

Many years later, after I had escaped from Russia with my two year old son and was nearly destitute in England prior to the success of my book Japan's Feet of Clay * Norman Baynes again wanted to help me financially. I can no longer remember whether or not my 'bourgeois prejudices,' not yet quite dead, prevented me from taking money from him, although I think I must have done so. The big thing was that Norman Baynes, the revered and beloved teacher of my youth, still held me in high regard and with considerable affection, despite my having abandoned the study of history to immerse myself in politics. Although he spent his own life in academic studies, he understood and sympathized with my descent to Avernus in the belief that the Soviet purgatory was Paradise, or at least a way station toward it.

In contrast to Norman Baynes, whose profound historical knowledge and perceptive intelligence prevented him from having illusions about Stalin's dictatorship, Dr. Laistner, Professor of Ancient History at King's College, was to shock me when I met him again some fifteen years later in America. In the 20's at King's College he had been a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who disapproved of my radicalism but, like Professor Hearnshaw, did not let his political views affect his judgement of my academic merits. But in 1941 when I gave a lecture at Cornell University where Laistner had become a

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* Faber & Fabei, London, 1936.

professor, he defended the Soviet Union against me. He was, of course, an Englishman and "Uncle Joe" Stalin was by then England's "gallant ally." Laistner was a handsome, blond Aryan type of fine physique, but a colorless personality who never married and lived with his mother. Baynes, rugged face, too wide mouth, beetle brows and angular figure was almost ugly, but his dynamic personality, character and intelligence rendered him singularly attractive.

* * *

Although the perpetual problem of how to get money for Mother still made life difficult for Temple and me, by 1924 we were much better off than when he first came home from the war.

We still lived in a small cold-water, three-room-and-kitchen flat at Jessel House. Judd Street, close to St. Pancras Station on the outer edges of Bloomsbury. But we now had a gas fire in the living room and a bathroom with a geyser to heat water, instead of having to light a fire under the "copper" in the little wash house behind the kitchen and transfer the heated water with a scoop into a tin tub in the kitchen which, when covered by a board served as a table.

Remembering our poorest years as students in London Temple was to write from Suva in the Fiji Islands shortly before his death in 1935:

I have not to get up on a freezing, foggy London morning and light the copper before I get a bath. I have not to go dashing about all over London to earn 5/- an hour giving English lessons - I am probably a 'spoilt child of fortune' as I tell Zarathustra my half-caste Persian kitten, he is. I remember well that I have now got everything material I used to think I wanted when we could get nothing in Jessel House. Nevertheless, it was more fun in the Galapagos with Brun . . . .

Today, as I sit writing this book in my centrally heated house in Washington, D.C., with the wolf far from my door instead of howling nearby as during many of the years of my youth, I look back on the Spartan years of my life with nostalgia. So true it is that material comforts have little to do with happiness. Many who have always enjoyed them say this without knowing what it means to be without them. But I can claim to speak from experience, having known real poverty in England, and far worse deprivations in Russia than even the most 'underprivileged' Americans can imagine.

Although I was to experience far greater privation and discomfort in Moscow in the 30's, the niggardly poverty of our life in London in the 20"s was harder to bear. Not only because it is in youth that one longs most for pleasure, pretty clothes, fun and gaiety, but also because it is far worse to be without money in an affluent society than to share the general poverty of neighbors and friends.

Arcadi, my long lost Russian husband, whose gift of humor sweetened our lives and helped me to make light of hardships and discomforts in Russia, used to say how much easier it was to be happy there than in the "capitalist world" where everyone longed for all sorts of unnecessary things. "Look," he would say with a twinkle in his eye, "in the bourgeois world people are never satisfied, but in Russia one feels fortunate if one manages to get a seat on a streetcar getting to work, or if one's soup at dinner contains a bit of meat."

All values are relative as Hadow, who once loved me, used to say during our student days. Although I have forgotten his first name, I can still hear his melodious Scotch voice with its rolling r's pronouncing this favorite aphorism of his, the truth of which has become ever clearer to me during the up and down course of my life.

I have no idea what happened to Hadow or whether he is still alive today somewhere in the vast reaches of the declining British Empire which Scotsmen of his quality did so much to create, develop and sustain. But the memory of his healthy ruddy countenance, vivid dark eyes, thick black hair, warm smile and sturdy figure clothed in an ill-fitting reach-me-down suit, revives in my mind's eye as I distinguish between the dim or well-remembered companions of my youth. He was one of the nicest men I ever knew and he would have cherished me and given me security and his mind was as good or better than mine. But he aroused no spark in me much as I valued his friendship and respected him for his goodness, intelligence and honesty. He was a down-to-earth Scot with his feet firmly planted on the muddy ground of reality who would have held me back from expending much of my life on an abortive quest for justice on earth.

Mother was a good cook who managed to provide us with a tasty and satisfying dinner in the evening during the hardest years of our student lives. Dinners which ended with strong cups of coffee, ritually brewed by my brother from beans freshly ground at the corner of our kitchen-dining-room table. Until this welcome end to the day, Temple and I endeavored to stave off our youthful appetites, unsatisfied by the ham or cheese sandwich, which, with a cup of coffee, was all we could usually afford to buy for lunch at the King's College underground cafeteria, except on the rare occasions when we won a few shillings, sometimes even a pound or two, betting on the horses. Many other students at King's could be found running out into the Strand between afternoon classes to buy a paper giving the racing results. The attraction of betting is, no doubt, greatest among the poor, and in our case we had been lured into temptation by having been given a tip about Spion Kop who won the Derby in 1920 at odds of 16 to 1. Mother and Temple had dared to stake several pounds on this tip, given us by our once-a-week charwoman whose sister's husband worked at a famous racing stable, and they enjoyed a long holiday together in Brittany that summer on their big gains. I. too, had won a few pounds and was able to buy some clothes, although unable to accompany them to France since I was then still working at the War Office.

We occasionally got another good tip from our charwoman and Temple also worked out a "system" which required that he do complicated calculations based on weights and age and past performance of the horses. By and large I think we won more than we lost by the shilling or half crown bets we usually confined ourselves to. The main thing was that these "flutters" added a little excitement to the daily grind, and sometimes enabled us to enjoy a good dinner with wine at some Soho restaurant.

As our economic situation improved we betted less and less and eventually abandoned the futile pursuit of fast horses as a means to make money.

Although I had missed out on Spion Kop there were other summers when I enjoyed a vacation abroad. Temple and I knew how to enjoy a cheap holiday on the Continent by travelling "hard"-third class-with bread, wine and cheese to sustain us on the journey, and finding some auberge, or small hostelry in places where no tourists and few foreigners came, and prices were so low that we could afford to pay them.

Speaking French fluently, and feeling ourselves carefree if we had a few pounds and a return ticket in our pockets, we went off together or separately to France or Italy on summer vacations returning home when the money was spent. At Camaret in Brittany, during that Spion Kop summer, Temple and Mother and Walter Field had discovered an inn where £2 a week covered the cost of room and board, including lobster or langouste, almost every day. Here, becoming friendly with the daughter of the house, I went fishing

with her and her brothers at the dawn of many a happy day, and learned from them the words of Breton songs, still remembered.

This fishing was quite different from mackerel drifting in Devonshire where one cast long nets at evening and hauled them in at daybreak. In Brittany the fishermen depended mainly on the langouste (crayfish) they caught off the Cornish shores from large sailing boats which spent weeks or even months away from home. The dawn fishing at Camaret was more of a pastime or only a minor means to earn money. Ground bait was cast around the boat attracting multitudes of fish which we caught with small harpoons.

Besides holidays abroad I was lucky to have Marjorie, my Prior's Field friend, whose story I have already told in the chapter entitled "My English School." After marrying her fisherman in 1921 she was happy to have me visit her in Sidmouth whenever I could afford to leave London and enjoy the greatest of all pleasures to me: swimming in the sea. Nor was Marjorie my only good friend in Devon. There was also Kathy and her husband Stan Harris. Kathy was an educated girl whose widowed mother had run a boarding house and who had married an illiterate, but far more intelligent fisherman than Marjorie's Ern whose views reflected those of the newspaper he happened to read that day.

Many of my letters preserved through the years by my mother, now helping me to write this book were written to her while, for one reason or another, she was staying with Kathie and Stan Harris at their house on Old Fore Street, Sidmouth, ostensibly as a paying guest or lodger, but receiving the love and care and sympathy which are beyond price.

Mother accomplished wonders in decorating our small flat, where her "bedroom'" with its black silk-covered divan and various-hued cushions was also our living room. We kept open house once a week with only beer or cheap Spanish wine and sandwiches with most of our guests sitting on the floor, but with good conversation and great argument lasting far into the night.

Temple, after passing his medical examinations at King's College, started clinical studies at St. George's Hospital in 1925. One of his best friends was Dr. David Frost, who married my college classmate, Dora, who later became the wife of Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the British Labor Party.

I remember Dora as a petite, very pretty girl with flashing dark eyes and beautiful curly black hair, who aroused the protective instincts of all the young men in our circle. although she was tough-minded, had a sharp and witty tongue and was eminently well able to take care of herself. In 1962 Teddy Joll, with whom I had long lost touch, wrote me a letter telling me about various members of the "Utley Circle" in Bloomsbury in the 20's. and said: "And there is dear little Dora, maybe wife of a future Prime Minister and of an eventual Earl." To judge from which remark, "steady Teddy" Joll. who became Deputy Registrar General of the United Kingdom before his retirement in I960, and was our neighbor and close friend while he lived with Bobby in Jessel House, still felt protective toward Dora.

David Frost, unlike Dora, was the type of sensitive Jew without money and with an inferiority complex, which may have accounted, in part, for his joining the Communist Party years after I had already left it. After his and Dora's son was born. Temple warned David that he might give the same complexes to their child as those from which he himself suffered. As Temple saw it, Jewish parents were inclined by excess of affection to store up trouble for their children by making them feel themselves to be the center of the universe. Later, confronted with the realities of life, a child thus reared reacts by

developing either a superiority or inferiority complex, resulting, in turn, in behavior that alienates friends and creates prejudice.

I don't know what has happened to David and Dora's son. His parents were divorced long ago and according to what Dora told me when I visited her in London in 1953, David had been such a brute to her that she had left him to marry Hugh Gaitskell. Since God works in mysterious ways one can count it a good thing that, thanks perhaps largely to David's behavior to her after he became a Communist, Mrs. Hugh Gaitskell became uncompromisingly anti-communist, and no doubt also influenced her husband in that direction.

Yet, I remember David with affection as a gentle, intelligent and kind young man. and wonder whether if Dora had been less hard and ambitious, although so feminine in appearance and behavior, he would ever have taken the Moscow road.

Because David Frost was one of the most devoted, loyal and helpful friends Temple ever had, I am, no doubt, prejudiced in his favor. There were so many times when David "turned up trumps" when Temple was in trouble that I find it well nigh impossible to believe that he was ever the brutal husband Dora depicted. But I must admit that I never really liked Dora, no doubt because she possessed and exploited to the full all the feminine allure which I lacked. I was no doubt "catty" about her in those distant days, to judge from a letter written to my mother dated 5 July, 1926 in which I refer to "a man called Napier with whom both Robert and Dora have been very friendly but who seems to have fallen in love with me . . . Married of course, still it is quite pleasant and I have annoyed Dora very much." Showing that I was as inclined to female joy in conquest as most women, I concluded my letter by saying: "I am feeling better about life."

There are several other references to Dora Frost in my letters to Mother which revive my memories of this clever and attractive woman whom I knew so well when we both studied at London University and who was to become the "first lady" of the British Labor Party.

Since I am now dropping famous names, I should also mention Elsa Lanchester, another member of the 1917 Club who was a friend of Temple's and came to our parties. Her "boy friend" in those days was a musician singer and comedian called Harold Scott who never won fame and fortune, but helped launch Elsa Lanchester on her successful career long before her association with Charles Laughton. Elsa then was a girl and Harold in his thirties, or maybe even older since he was one of those small, slight, blond, blue-eyed types who never look their age.

Strange that although I never knew him well or liked him much, I can today still vividly remember Harold Scott dressed in grey flannel trousers and a worn tweed jacket, his high forehead surmounted by scanty golden hair and his long, thin nose slightly red at the tip above his full lipped mouth, strumming on the piano and singing a long forgotten song called "Thank God for the Middle Classes," with the refrain:

If His Majesty the King

Wants any little thing

He sends for the middle classes.

One evening at our flat Philip Rabinovitch, chairman of the Russian Trade Delegation in London, "fell for" Elsa Lanchester after she and Harold had delighted us all by their comic skits.

Philip Rabinovitch had been a tailor in New York before the Bolshevik revolution, had a fine baritone voice and enjoyed singing, fun and good company. His rendering of "Black Eyes," and the "Volga Boat Song" (or Vulgar Boot Song as my friend Yaffle, the

humorist and cartoonist of the I.L.P. called it) was superb. But he also took joy in singing such silly popular ditties of the time as "When it's nighttime in Italy, it's Wednesday over here." That evening long ago in London he and Elsa Lanchester sang a duet I should otherwise long since have forgotten, in which two derelicts on the Thames embankment tell one another:

The Times, The Telegraph And all the papers says: Money is much cheaper today.

Philip Rabinovitch and his wife Sophie, also a Party member, were to remain my friends until the end of my life in Russia. He became a Vice Commissar of Foreign Trade but was never a party snob. He had a sense of humor, courage and a kind heart, and he owed his rise to a leading position in the Communist hierarchy to his great abilities, which was rare, since the road to preferment for most was paved with the bodies of those they had denounced, slandered, or falsely accused.

Whenever in Moscow our housing difficulties were the greatest, Sophie Rabinovitch would invite me and my husband to take a bath in their well-appointed apartment - a tremendous boon in those days. And it was Philip Rabinovitch who secured us a room in the New Moscow Hotel when we were homeless. He respected my husband as one of the best "non-party specialists" working for the Commissariat of Foreign Trade, and there was doubtless an affinity between them since both were former members of the Jewish Social Democratic Bund.

It required both social and political courage in the 30's in Russia for Bolshevik "aristocrats" like Philip and Sophie Rabinovitch to welcome a "non-party specialist" such as my husband to their home. Looking back I realize that they were permanently influenced by the years they had spent in exile in America, where democratic personal behavior comes naturally.

When I finally left Russia in April 1936 following my husbands arrest. Philip Rabinovitch was to send his official limousine to take my son and me to the station, a courageous act in those times when even to speak to someone connected to anyone else arrested in the Great Purge was dangerous.

I do not know what happened in the end to Philip and Sophie or to their lovely daughter Nuria, whose piquant face, sylph like figure, and lovely smile revealing small perfect teeth which really were like pearls, are etched on my memory. She had been married three times before I left Russia in 1936 which was not unusual among the children of the Communist "aristocracy," but she had followed her heart and never became a snob like so many others who married for privilege and status.

Probably they were eventually liquidated since this was the fate of most of the best of the old Bolsheviks. Today, more than forty years after I first knew them in London, I can still hear Philip singing silly songs at Jessel House, in the days when it was still possible to be both a Bolshevik and a decent human being full of the joy of life.

Chapter 7

MARX, FREUD, LOVE, AND THE LIBIDO

Temple and I both belonged to the "1917 Club" on Gerrard Street, which had been founded in commemoration of the Russian Revolution. Its membership in the 20's included Ramsay MacDonald and other right-wing Labor Party leaders, as well as many left-wing intellectuals and politicians half-in and half-out of the Communist Party. It was a meeting place for avant garde writers, poets, artists, University professors and teachers of various hues from red to pink, collectively named "the bloody intelligents" by my brother.

The interest of many of them in the Labor and Socialist movement stemmed largely from their inclination to free love unconfined by 'bourgeois prejudice' or conventions. But among the members there were some outstanding writers and thinkers of our time. Such a one was Henry Nevinson, a grand old man who belonged to the 19th century liberal and classical tradition in which I had been reared. I remember him well as a tall, white-haired, still virile and handsome old man with sad, pale blue eyes and a drooping moustache partially hiding his sensitive mouth. Once after telling me how well I looked upon my return to London, tanned and fit after a holiday in Italy, he remarked: "Man should never have left the Mediterranean Sea, the fount of beauty and of Western civilization," or words to that effect, reflecting our love of Italy and Greece where freedom, love of truth and the concept of government by law were first conceived, and triumphed for a brief period between the long ages of darkness and tyranny before and after.

Describing Nevinson in his paper the Daily News, my father's friend A. G. Gardiner wrote:

He boils with indignation or scorn, and throws discretion to the winds. He has a noble thirst for fighting forlorn battles. He does not care so much about the merits of a cause so long as it is the cause of the underdog. The underdog is always right because he is the under-dog. Let him become the top dog and the Knight Errant's passion for him is chilled . . . . This instinct is very apparent in such conspicuous crusaders as Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. Nevinson. They bring into life a fine, uncalculating spirit of chivalry, the one touched with ironic scorn, the other charged with a fury of indignation; but both entirely unselfish and elevating, and both a little inclined to regard the question of odds as more important than that of merits. They love to be on the side of the failures, and distrust all success as, ipso facto, a little squalid.

Nevinson himself repudiated this "panegyric," not, as he wrote, that he would not like to deserve it, but because he saw himself as a man "much too easily appeased, much too considerate not only of my enemy's feelings, but even of his arguments." He insisted that he made up his mind with painful deliberation, so that "nothing but the calmest exercise of reason would ever induce me to take one side rather than another, although the first

impulse of every decent Englishman is, of course, to favor the underdog," a remark as revealing about Nevinson himself as concerning the peculiarities of the English who, while generally pursuing their own self-interest with phenomenal success, have also tolerated and sometimes honored the minority among them who champion the oppressed.

In his introduction to his 1925 book More Changes More Chances* Nevinson, with sublime disregard of his own motivations, or perhaps ironically, wrote:

Guided only too cautiously in my endeavors to discover where reason and justice lie,. I have never wasted time upon any lost cause, and indeed almost every cause for which I have contended has already won.

After cataloging these causes ranging from the freedom of Greece from Turkish misgovernment to the overthrow of Russian Tsardom, women's suffrage, Irish self-government and the advance of India toward it, Nevinson proclaimed that all these 'lost causes' or underdogs for whom he had done what he could as a journalist now "stood on top."

Happy Nevinson at that hour, I left England and lost touch with him soon after, so do not know whether, like myself, he realized how right Bertrand Russell was when he wrote that yesterday's underdog when he gets on top is most brutal because he has learned underneath to scratch harder in the battle for survival than those born on top. Yet he surely knew that the battle against tyranny must constantly be renewed in each generation with the enemy always in a different place under a different guise.

There were all too few old vintage liberals such as Nevinson at the 1917 Club fearlessly seeking and fighting for justice, truth, and beauty and an end to all oppression everywhere under the sun.

For the most part, the membership was composed of the careerists and camp followers of Socialism, or girl-chasers masquerading as literati or philosophers. Such a one was C. M. Joad who, following the Second World War, was to become for a while a preferred speaker of the British Broadcasting Company. He was one of the nastiest and most phony characters of the Bohemian World which had its center in the 1917 Club in the 20's in London. Joad made his reputation as a "philosopher" partly by lifting passages from Bertrand Russell's books without acknowledgement, or by plagiarizing them, but also by pandering to the need of men like himself to justify their unrestrained indulgence of their sexual appetites by highfalutin rationalization. He was so frankly cynical that when my brother asked him why he was learning folk dancing, Cyril Joad replied that the girls who went to the classes were for the most part intelligent young women yearning for culture, and he found this type most easy to seduce.

It was perhaps because the Bohemian society to which I then belonged outraged my Puritan prejudices or my romantic conceptions of love and politics, that I was to fall so easily under Communist influence. This may sound strange, but in contrast to the London left-wing intellectual society whose mores repelled me, the Russians I first met were decent and honorable men with concepts of the relationships between men and women which corresponded closely to my own. Lenin himself had replied to those who said that sex should be satisfied as simply as thirst, by taking a glass of water, by saying, "Yes, but who wants to drink out of a glass soiled by many lips?"

Reared without religious beliefs or fears of punishment for carnal sins, I had nevertheless inherited, or acquired, a view of life which caused me to recoil from easy indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh. Either for this reason, or because the love of my

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*Harcourt Brace, New York.

mother and father for one another caused me to reject base substitutes, I was repelled by members of the 1917 Club who made casual attempts to add me to the long list of their easy conquests. I was upset, but nevertheless impervious to the argument that there must be something wrong with me physically or mentally when I refused to sleep with them.

Yet I yearned for love, and no doubt my increasing absorption in political activity was to some extent a sublimation of my sexual desires.

Part of my trouble was due to the several radically different environments in which I had lived since childhood. The Bohemian atmosphere of the society in which I found myself in London in the 20's was as alien to me as Prior's Field had been after LaCombe. I had been reared on Christian ethics but without Christian faith; taught to despise conventions but also to discipline myself and behave like a "lady." My mother had a gold cigarette case inscribed with the old French motto "Fay ce que voudra" but she did not really believe one should do as one pleases. Her ideals are indicated in the lines she wrote to me in 1940 when my own son was not yet six years old:

I have just seen the New Year in. I have kissed Jon. I wish you and Jon the best of all things. I feel I shall not see another year. Do see to his character. He is such, such good stuff. Try and train him to what you call my old fashioned ideals. Your father and Temple were courageous and honest and truthful and had their own fine standards. If Jon will only give you as much joy and happiness, I cannot wish you better. All my love, dearest Fredakin and all my thanks.

I was perhaps a proof of Bertrand Russell's theory that the way to cure a child of undue preoccupation with sex is to give him all the information he wants in a scientific way so that he thinks there is nothing more to know, and that what he does know is uninteresting. I had been brought up with full knowledge about "the birds and the bees," and imagined that I knew everything when I really knew nothing. It was only after I read Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession in my early teens that I was shocked into awareness that there was something more to sex than I knew from my mother's aseptic teachings. In great distress I had gone to Temple for information, as was my usual practice when seeking knowledge, and he, albeit gently, had taught me some of the facts of life which mother's sense of delicacy and restraint had withheld from me in spite of her conviction that she was a "modern" woman. Yet even in my twenties I was still not only without experience, but also did not know how little I really knew.

Moreover, I had been reared on the works of the great novelists of the 19th century. Romola was one of Mother's favorite books and George Eliot's novels made an enduring impression on me. Since the one I remember best is The Mill on the Floss, I suppose that the sad fate of Maggie Tulliver, who ruined her life by the sin of loving out of wedlock influenced my own 'virtuous' behavior in youth. In a word, I was at heart still a 'Victorian' in matters of sex, although politically I had no respect for "bourgeois" values or conventions.

Although at Prior's Field I had found English upper class society alien to me, and since then been excluded from it by poverty, I retained some of its prejudices or preferences. As Temple once observed "I like intelligents, English and French-but I also like what David Frost calls the barbarian Englishmen from the best schools, and also Navy officers. Of course, Freda does too, really."

I suppose I did, too, "really," as evidenced by an unforgettable summer in Devon before my graduation. I was 25 then.

Intending to study in Devonshire solitude for my final B.A. examination, I met and

fell passionately in love with a "barbarian Englishman." His name was Eric, and he was the games master at Harrow. He was also intelligent and very quick on the uptake without the distasteful characteristics of most intellectuals. He had a delightful sense of humor and was a dear, sweet lovable and kind person with a most happy temperament.

He was in fact everything my romantic imagination could ask for, but, unfortunately, he was married. To Eric, as to me, no "light affair" was possible. He could easily have seduced me but he loved me too much to take advantage of the overwhelming attraction he had for me - the feeling which comes so seldom in life when the presence of the beloved even across a room makes one's heart beat faster.

Divorce would have brought an end to his job or any possibility of another one in England in his profession. The only way out seemed to be emigration to Canada, which we actually contemplated, so that I came near to jettisoning my academic career in the north of the American continent in 1923 instead of in Russia in 1928. Our "affair" was further complicated by the fact that Eric's wife when I met her in London was so very nice to me that I felt ashamed. In the final event, both Eric and I, realizing that the end of an elopement could not be happy, since in spite of the strength of our attraction to one another, we had few shared interests, parted in sorrow.

He was a conservative and I was a radical Socialist, but we both had the same old-fashioned prejudices, or attitudes, about love which, no doubt, was one reason why I loved him so much. He was perhaps the one man in my life besides my future husband, Arcadi, with whom I could have been happy. No one else except Arcadi ever excited me so much, or aroused such deep feelings in me. Feelings which combined a powerful sexual urge with appreciation of the qualities of mind and heart of the man to whom one desired to give one's self.

Today, in my seventies, "with all passion spent," I still have rosy memories of that lovely summer in Devon by the sea when I went to bed each night with thoughts of the joy of meeting Eric early next morning on top of the cliffs which separated Branscombe and Sidmouth, at the try sting place to which we both walked two or three miles in the dawn; of long walks and swims together and of evenings at the "pub" in the small and very old village of Branscombe drinking flagons of home-brewed cider before we parted for the night.

The good constitution and strong muscles I owed to my upbringing had survived the hard years of poverty so that I could almost keep pace with Eric in the sea. That summer I swam the three miles between Sidmouth and Ladrum Cove, emerging so frozen that my limbs had to be rubbed to restore circulation. And I acquired a set of knives and forks as prize for winning the annual long distance women's swimming race at Sidmouth.

Remembering Eric forty-five years after, I can still see the lovable quirk at the corner of his generous mouth when he tenderly teased me. I suppose that his attraction for me was not dissimilar to that of my future husband, Arcadi, despite the differences in their origins, physical appearance, beliefs, and destiny.

Besides looking for a rare or impossible combination of Kipling hero and Socialist idealist, English "gentleman" and intellectual, I was also, no doubt, obsessed with a father-image or whatever the correct psychological term is.

Freud was all the rage in the 20's and I had studied enough psychology myself during my first year at college to be able to diagnose my trouble according to psychoanalytical theories. But I agreed with my mother who, one evening after a lot of talk about the libido and all that, exclaimed: "Well, it seems to me that according to Freud everything

decent you do is done from a bad motive, while when you do wrong it's fine because you are not repressing yourself."

During this 'Freudian period' my brother fell deeply in love with a psychology student called Dickie, who looked like a Botticelli angel but believed in free love. She and Temple lived together for a year or two 'in sin' and parted in friendship when their passion was spent, Dickie eventually marrying a professor of philology and living respectably ever after. I never liked her much because she mocked my Socialist faith while I regarded her as woefully lacking in social consciousness, or a proper concern for the economic welfare of mankind. To her, as to many others in our circle of friends and acquaintances, Freud, not Marx, was the prophet of our age, and the uninhibited satisfaction of sexual needs the primary requisite for the successful pursuit of happiness.

In spite of my antagonism to the idea that freedom for the libido was more important than "breaking the chains of capitalist exploitation," I respected Dickie's courage in defying "bourgeois conventions," by living openly with Temple in a one room apartment in Bloomsbury, and not insisting on marriage as the price for surrender of her virtue. I had already learned that most of the girls who professed scorn for the marriage tie had in reality only adopted a new way to get a husband. By a reverse process to that of the Victorian age when well-bred girls got their man by refusing to give themselves without benefit of clergy, the modern girl who gave herself freely could count upon subsequently making life so miserable for her lover should he fail to marry her, that she achieved the same aim as her Victorian mother or grandmother.

Dickie, in spite of her independence, may have wanted to be bullied a bit, as shown by the type of man she eventually married. His name was Norman and we used to call him "the fascist" because of his Nietzschean ideas and contempt for such liberal ideas as the equality of the sexes. Nietzsche, as my brother liked to quote him in teasing me about my unrealistic views about sex, wrote that "When you go to a woman, take a whip." Temple, despite his appreciation of Nietzsche, was never the type of lover capable of treating a woman with what Michael Arlen in his Green Hat* described as "a little tender brutality tastefully applied." Either because she was too intellectual, or too feminine, or both, Temple and Dickie soon found life together incompatible and parted in friendship.

Temple's next love affair was with a strikingly lovely brunette who had a profile like Queen Nefertiti and was so passionate that, on returning to London from a walking tour with her in Cornwall, Temple fled from her telling me that loving Bobbie left a man no energy or time to do any work. Bobbie then became the mistress of our sedate and respectable friend Teddy Joll, then already on his way up in the Civil Service to an eminent position. Fortunately for Teddy, Bobbie, after some stormy years with him as our neighbors in Jessel House, left him to marry a Sassoon and lived richly ever after.

Although I loved Temple dearly and we were good friends all our lives, I strongly resented the fact that Mother loved him so much more than me that she was, as I saw it, unfair to me, expecting me to do more than my fair share of household chores although I was contributing as much, and often more, to our living expenses. Today, I realize that he paid a heavy price for her great and all too possessive love for her son. Only his strength of character enabled him to break away and live his own life in spite of his great love for her, since Mother tried hard to shatter any lasting attachment he formed to any woman.

She had no objection to his 'light affairs' which, as a result of her Victorian upbringing she considered unreprehensible for the male animal, and she liked to have him tell her

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* W. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., London, June 1924.

about them since this assured her that she was in his confidence. But she did not in her heart of hearts really want him to marry anyone, although she never admitted this even to herself.

Although Mother was to make difficulties for me with my husband a decade later, when by force of circumstances she lived with us in Moscow, and although during most of my adult life she endeavored to bind me to her by my sympathy for her loneliness and her financial dependence on me, I now realize that Temple's problem was greater than mine.

In spite of, or because of, Mother's endeavor to keep him forever by her side, Temple eventually married a girl called Robert who was a games mistress with honey-colored hair and features as classically proportioned as her figure, but who lacked the warm human qualities of her sister Jean, whose husband Rab was Temple's close friend and who years later enabled him to sail to the South Seas.

In contrast to Dickie, Robert was so virtuous that she insisted on marriage. She was also, in my estimation, a prude and a hypocrite. Small incidents sometimes reveal most, and I recall one occasion before their marriage when Robert told us how shocked she had been when one of our friends, taking her home in a taxi from a party had made amorous advances. Whereupon i said to her, "Isn't that what you expected? Why else should he have paid for a taxi for the long ride to Hampstead instead of taking you on the underground?"

Maybe today this remark of mine makes little sense. But in those days in London in our circle of students and struggling young professional men. a taxi was a luxury few of us could afford unless absolutely necessary.

Before her marriage to Temple, Robert had professed herself to be an independent woman happy to be earning her own living and not expecting Temple to support her. But she had never really meant it and was continually demanding money from him, both before and after their marriage went on the rocks, following Temple's contraction of tuberculosis and the end of her hopes that he would eventually become a well-to-do medical practitioner.

On their honeymoon in France Robert had travelled first class Calais-Dover while Temple went third class New Haven-Dieppe, meeting her in Paris. During their life together in an apartment in Hampstead, Temple occupied a small room furnished with only his minimum requirements of a bed, table and chair, while Robert furnished her bedroom and the living room with every comfort and all artistry. Temple always wanted to live the simple life, whereas Robert wanted all the luxuries. And Robert, despite her athletic prowess was a rotten sailor who could get seasick even in a rowing boat, and whose conception of a Riviera holiday was far removed from Temple's. Visiting them one summer at Portofino I found Temple so happy to have me with him sailing and swimming and talking that I felt compelled to leave them and go south to Porto de Venere on my own on account of Robert's jealousy.

As can be judged from the foregoing, I disliked my brothers first wife, as much as I came to love his second one, Emsie, whom he met in Barbados in 1930 on his voyage to the South Seas and who was to become my very dear friend after his death.

For both Temple and myself the problem of our mother was not only that of earning enough to support her. There were also the difficulties created by her loneliness and her demands upon our time. Often when I told her I was too busy to talk to her or take her out she would say, "But you went out with so-and-so last night - you always find time for what you want to do." Which, of course was true. Mother would be very good in helping me to 'look my best' when I went out on what Americans call "a date." But she was hurt

and resentful when Temple or I went to a party without her. It never occurred to her or to us that, following my father's death, she could have taken a job of some kind or got married again. She was still, in her 50's and even later in her 60's an attractive woman, with vitality and great charm, so much so that Temple's and my friends really enjoyed her company. But this did not mean that she could expect to be invited to all the parties we went to.

Yet she had something of a Ninon de Lenclos about her, in spite of being a virtuous Victorian. Age had not staled, nor custom withered her charms nor the enduring quality of her beauty of face and figure. Had she only had a little money she could still have enjoyed life enormously. But since she had none and Temple and I so little, it was impossible to give her all she needed. I could not buy a dress or a hat without feeling mean unless I could afford to buy something for Mother. And if I had anything nice to wear I lent it to her or shared it with her. For instance, in a letter from Manchester in January, 1926, I wrote: "Dear, it sounds mean, but I am afraid I shall have to ask you to send my black felt hat here. I meant you to use it but I cannot manage here in the rain with only a velvet hat. Could you ask Kathie to send it to me at once?"

Reading my many letters preserved by Mother through the years, I now marvel at myself. They are so full of love and sympathy; concern for her happiness and desire to give her a little pleasure, or some small luxury to compensate for her loneliness. The recurring motif is gifts of clothes or money to buy clothes, or money to pay for a holiday, or to provide for her living expenses. In later years in America, when I had to choose between my son's needs and mother's, I became much harder. But in my youth and during my married life my letters show that I was continually concerned with how to make up to her in material ways for the lack of basic sympathy between us.

I suppose I was driven not only by pity and love but by a feeling of guilt. Whenever Mother was away from me I remembered only that I loved her, felt dreadfully sorry for her and regretted having hurt her. When she was with me I was often cross and irritable and mean to her, so that as soon as she was away I wanted to compensate for having been unkind.

In spite of the temperamental antagonism between us, she knew my heart's secrets, my sorrows, joys and frustrations; my longing to find my own true love and my doubts that I ever should. In a word, there was always trust between us as between her and Temple and myself. We quarrelled but we never doubted the loyalty which united all three of us.

My letters, read again after so many years, recall the time when I had become convinced that I must overcome my Puritan or Victorian inhibitions concerning love without marriage. In March, 1926, I wrote Mother: "Had another long and loving letter from the Czech. He is coming to England May 8 and going to stay a few days to see me. I really believes that he loves me, and dear, I shall give myself to him when he comes. I am beginning to think this is going to be the big love of my life. He remembers every detail and moment of our time together and he understands me and seems to look at things something like me. His letter has made me very happy."

In the final event, I did not "give myself to "the Czech," whose name I have forgotten and of whom I have no visual memory except, in a dim way, that he was tall and slender, had brown hair and dark blue eyes. Having nerved myself, as for an operation, to consummate the sexual act in the room he had taken for us in the Imperial Hotel on Bloomsbury Square, I frightened him into impotency. So true it is that one cannot go against one's nature however persuasive the psychoanalyst's arguments that

freedom for the libido is the way to adjust to life. In reverse fashion to my brother, I had to follow my real will or hurt my soul.

Maybe it was not my instinctive rejection of Freud, who outraged my romantic imagination, but my 'guardian angel' who preserved me that night from "giving myself on the altar of free love without really wanting to. Because, a few months later I met Arcadi who, soon after our first encounter, convinced me beyond a shadow of doubt that we belonged together.

All my Puritan inhibitions were dispelled as we joyfully became lovers, although it was to be long before we could become man and wife.

Perhaps my enduring love for my mother in spite of irritations and temperamental antagonism was due to my realization that without her influence and example I might not have been able to wait long enough to find the greatest happiness which life can give-to love and be loved utterly.

As I was to write to her from Japan in January, 1929:

Life now is altogether a different thing, more complete and wonderful than I ever imagined it could be. Even the love I felt for Arcadi a year ago seems a small thing now, I love him so much more. There is really a complete understanding between us and sometimes I feel my happiness is too great to last. You know I have always felt, like the Greeks, that the Gods are jealous of human happiness. But anyhow life is worth having lived for this alone. So you see how I feel, dear, in answer to your birthday letter and whether I am glad I was born. Life seems a wonderful thing now and also I can see that my childhood made this happiness possible. That has given me such great happiness in the end. The memories I have always had of you and Dada which made the substitutes, the second-bests, of no use to me and kept me lonely for so long, have now given me Arcadi and our happiness together. So I love you, Mother dearest, more and more for the happiness you have given me.

Today I realize that I also owe a great debt to my brother for having saved me from becoming the type of unsexed, frustrated or embittered woman who provides dynamic energy to all movements for the regimentation of mankind, whether they call themselves Communists or Nazis or 'progressives.' Thanks largely to Temple's influence my Puritan conscience and sexual repressions did not result in my becoming a Beatrice Webb, a Priscilla Hiss, or an Eleanor Roosevelt type of ambitious woman.

How nearly I came to belong to the monstrous regiment of self-righteous women with cold hearts puffed up by their virtue and supposed dedication to humanity, is revealed by the following quotation from a letter I wrote to my mother in March, 1926 in which I display a priggish attitude toward life, sex, drink and all other pleasures of the flesh, also my too great intellectual class consciousness which is the hallmark today of the liberal intelligentsia of the Western World.

Back's party on Saturday was very much a drinking, loving party and was very dull. They are no pleasure to me now. Joll was very charming but Molly McClane is simply sucking him under in a sea of sex. Whenever he tried to talk to me or Eleanor she put her arms around him, dragged him to her and began stroking him! She is one of those fat, heavy, odorous people and obviously perfectly inane. Even Mrs. Boothroyd asked me the other day who was the stupid-looking girl Joll

was going about with. I think all the same Joll may marry her. She makes no pretense about her having him, or so the Frosts say.

I am going tonight to dance with Stewart, the Assistant Secretary of State at the India office. I told you, didn't I, that I had met him again at the Hunter's party? He is only 45-at least ten years younger than anyone else in such a position. A widower with two children, but I am not likely to fall in love with him."

I had known Sir Findlater Stewart when I worked at the War Office before he was knighted. He was the second level-headed Scotsman in my life who for some unaccountable reason was fond of me. I remember him best on account of an incident later that year. Philip Spratt had got himself arrested in India as one of the "Meirut prisoners" on account of his activities in the left wing Indian Trade Union movement. Jane Tabrisky tried to get Professor Laski to intercede to get bail for him, but got no help from him. I went to see my conservative friend Stewart who was frank and honest with me saying: "Freda, we know much more about this young man than you do. He is a communist and nothing can be done about it. But believe me, an English prison in India is not as bad a place as you think."

A quarter of a century later Philip Spratt, married to an Indian girl and living near Bangalore, was to write an anti-Nehru, anti-communist book called Blowing Up India* in which he relates how while in jail in India, he had time to think, read, study, learn and reflect, and had thus ceased to be a Communist. As also that the treatment he and the other political prisoners received was so humane that he was "disconcerted" to see a cartoon in the Communist Daily Worker picturing them as "emaciated, manacled and starving with horror filled eyes from behind barred windows." The reality more than justified the assurances given me by the Under Secretary of State for India. He writes:

In the summer we were allowed to sleep in the yard. We were given 12 annas per head per day for food, and were allowed to supervise its expenditure and to do the cooking ourselves, with the aid of two convicts. Needless to say, we lived well. We were also given a clothing allowance. Twice in the hot weather we were taken to jails in the hills. We were allowed to bring into the jail books and papers with scarcely any censorship, and we played chess, cards, table-tennis, cricket and volley-ball. The court was held in a house some distance from the jail and we met visitors there without effective supervision.**

By very different experiences to my own, Philip Spratt and I were to learn the same facts about Communism and become its irreconcilable enemy. But in the intervening years, Laski, who had been anti-Communist until Hitler came to power, had come to exert all his great influence among Western youth in favor of the Soviet Union.

During the Spratt episode Jane and I, and some others, endeavored to check up on Harold Laski. He was well known not only as a namedropper, but as a telephoner-to-important-persons in the presence of his students or petitioners. Several people at the London School of Economics had got suspicious because nothing ever seemed to come of Laski's telephone conservations with "the P.M.," or the Foreign Secretary or other VIP's.

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* Blowing Up India. Reminiscences and Reflections of a Former Comintern Emmissary, Prachi Prakashan, Calcutta, 1955.

** ibid.

Chapter 8

REMEMBERING RUSSELL

The strongest influence which held me back for a time from joining the Communist party was that of Bertrand Russell. I met him first when he came to speak for the King's College Socialist Society in 1924. Subsequently he invited me to tea at his home in Chelsea. Thus began a friendship which has been one of the precious things in my life. In the Easter vacation of 1926 I spent a month with him and his wife, Dora, at Porthcurno in Cornwall, teaching their young son John in the mornings, walking, talking, and bathing in the afternoons, reading aloud in the evenings.

"Bertie" as I already called him tried hard to convince me that the Marxist theory was untenable in the light of modern physics. I wrote to Mother in April 1926: "Tell Temple I have been driven to try to understand relativity in order to understand what Russell thinks about Russia: I am reading the A.B.C. of Relativity,* with Russell sitting near me to explain what I don't understand. He is most awfully kind to me."

Unfortunately, I never understood the theory of relativity. In spite of Russell's patience and the time he spent on my education, my mind could not grasp the basic connection between Marxism and Newton's theory of gravity. Nor could I as yet accept the truth of Russell's Practise and Theory of Bolshevism.** Written in 1920, this book was uncannily prophetic of the Russia I was soon to know. Bertrand Russell was one of the very few who, in those early days of the Revolution, was able to perceive what manner of tree would grow from the seed which Lenin planted.

Others have appreciated the truth expressed by Lord Acton that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it took such a rare philosopher as Bertrand Russell, who had the faculty of seeing things writ small as well as large, to appreciate the significance of such incidents as his witnessing Kameniev smuggling milk for his children in his Commissar's car during the famine in Russia in 1920. As Russell endeavored to impress on me, the instinct to provide for one's own family would bring to naught all Communism's fine promises of equality and brotherhood. Forty years before Djilas wrote his famous book*** Russell foresaw that the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat meant that of a Communist party elite which could not but lead to the establishment of a new privileged class.

I can of course no longer recall many details of our conversation during the memorable and most happy days I spent with Bertrand and Dora Russell in Cornwall long ago when, as I wrote to Temple, "We talk and discuss everything under the sun." But I well remember how Bertie, one of the very few people who has actually read Das Kapital from beginning to end, endeavored to convince me that Marx's philosophy was bound to produce bad results because he was motivated by hate - by hatred of the rich, not

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* K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., London, 1925.

** G. Allen and Unwin Ltd., London, 1920.

*** The New Class, Praeger, N. Y., 1957.

sympathy for the poor, by the desire to punish the exploiters rather than by compassion for the exploited.

I, who had read and thought I understood Anatole France's Les Dieux Ont Soif about the French Revolution, as well as his Révolte des Anges, failed to heed Russell's warnings concerning the inevitable corruption of the Bolshevik Revolution with its built-in despotism. So true it is that one learns only by experience. I had to find out for myself the hard way that even if Lenin had envisaged human freedom as the goal of the class war, by inflaming the hatreds of mankind he laid the foundations for a more total tyranny than the world had yet known.

One windy afternoon as we walked together on the Cornish cliffs above a turbulent sea, Bertie remarked that since no one can ever be sure of the ultimate result of his actions, one should be guided by realization of their immediate effects, and never inflict a certain present evil for the sake of a doubtful future good. A principle which Russell himself has not always observed, since he came to support the Second World War after it began, and is today aligned with those who are helping to sustain the immediate evil of Communist tyranny for the sake of a doubtful future peace to be achieved by the unilateral atomic disarmament of the West. As Russell himself has written, empiricists should never hold any principle absolutely because there are occasions when the future consequences of failure to act may be predictably worse than the consequences of taking action, however bad or dangerous its immediate consequences. None of us are always logical, or consistent in our beliefs, not even Bertrand Russell, the greatest man I ever knew.

Life in Porthcurno with the Russells that April long ago was like a brief return to my happy childhood. Writing to Mother and Temple during those halcyon days in Cornwall in the springtime, I said: "I like him better and better and feel a little bit like I used to feel about Dada."

My father, as I remember him before his last sad years of illness and hapless poverty, had the same capacity as Bertrand Russell for enjoyment of life and laughter, work and play, strenuous exercise followed by relaxed ease, good conversation and good argument, appreciation of poetry and music and beauty in all its forms, and above all such delight in the company of his children and such an intimate and understanding relationship with them.

Remembering both Bertie and my father, I call to mind lines from Gilbert Murray's translation of the Choruses in Euripides' Bacchae, learned long ago and still remembered:

A God of Heaven is he,

And born in majesty;

Yet hath he mirth in the joy of the Earth,

And he loveth constantly

Her who brings increase,

The Feeder of Children, Peace.

No grudge hath he of the great;

No scorn of the mean estate;

But to all that liveth His wine he giveth,

Griefless, immaculate;

Only on them that spurn

Joy, may his anger burn. Whoever has read, and felt his courage revived by reading Russell's incomparable expression of his stoic philosophy in the essay called A Freeman's Worship, must feel how

apposite are other verses written by the greatest of the Greek dramatists more than two milleniums ago. Such lines as:

What else is wisdom? What of man's endeavor?

Or God's high grace, so lovely and so great?

To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait

To hold a hand uplifted over Hate

And shall not loveliness be loved forever? Bertie loved his children far more than any of the many women in his life, continuing to enjoy through his extraordinarily long life the simple pleasures of humanity which many other philosophers have failed to appreciate. He shared their pleasures and romped with them and played with them like a young man, besides talking to them as if they were adults.

When grown to manhood, Bertie's first-born son, John, gave me great pleasure in recalling the impression made on him when he was not yet six years old. by my vivid account of Columbus dreaming as a boy in Genoa of the vast seas he would traverse as a man searching for a Westward route to the East Indies and accidentally discovering the New World.

I myself remember best the remark John made while Bertie was reading the Bluebeard story to him and his four year old sister Kate. At the point in the narrative when Bluebeard's wife, terrified at the prospect of having her head cut off unless her brother arrives in time to rescue her, calls again and again to her sister watching on the castle battlements: "Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?" John interrupted his father's dramatic rendering of her anguished tones by remarking: "Wasn't she a fuss pot."

During that month in Cornwall Bertie taught me far more than I taught John or four year old Kate whom he was paying me to teach. What I learned from seeing how he was bringing up his own children was to prove important to me a decade later when I had a son of my own to rear without father, husband or brother to help me. Bertie believed that parents must be careful not to impair a child's nerve by letting him know one is fearful for him. He would watch John climbing dangerously on the rocky Cornish coast with anxiety, but determined not to let his son know how fearful he was. Years later in Moscow I was to have arguments with my husband who was all too prone to pick up our baby son from the floor to save him from bumps and scratches or a bad fall when he was showing himself too adventurous in his explorations of the world. And later on in England and America I had to contend with my mother's nervous exhortations to her grandson to "be careful" as against my endeavors never to arouse fear in his heart.

My father's training of Temple and me had been like Russell's treatment of his children. I became a fearless swimmer in my early childhood because my father used to take me far out of my depth when I barely knew how to swim, but trusted him completely. And, when I was ten or eleven years old I had climbed quite high mountains in Switzerland with my brother and a guide, besides being one of the crew in bobsled races along fast courses in competition with adults in the Engadine.

In bringing up my own son I tried to follow the example set me by Bertrand Russell and my father, and was greatly pleased when on his 27th birthday in 1961, Jon wrote me that I had "taught me to live so that I am not afraid to die."

Without courage there can be no virtue, as the Romans, who had the same word virtus for both, knew.

Although Bertrand Russell failed to save me from myself by stopping me from joining the Communist party, his influence remained potent.

When I came back to England from Russia in 1931 for a brief visit and stayed with the Russells in Hampshire I believed that the horrible society I was living in was Stalin's creation and that if Lenin had lived or if Trotsky's policies had been followed, all would have been well. Bertie would bang his fist on the table and say "No! Freda, can't you understand even now, that the conditions you describe followed naturally from Lenin's premises and Lenin's acts? Will you never learn and stop being romantic about politics?"

Some of my best friends still like to quote this Russell remark against me, although I think it is no longer true with regard to my political outlook. But if it be "romantic" to believe that man, by exercise of his reason and critical faculties, and by fostering his creative instead of his destructive instincts, could if he would, create a world nearer to the heart's desire, then Bertrand Russell has been the greatest romantic of us all.

The word "romantic" with its connotation of disregard for realities is not the right adjective to describe those who realize that there is an impulse within us, unexplained by the instinct for survival, to seek for truth and justice. It may be an illusion to believe that man has the capacity to attain to stature of the gods in whose existence he has longed to believe since he first came out of brutishness, but if this be romanticism let no one be ashamed of the appellation.

The poems Bertie loved best reveal that despite all his analytical, aseptic or "scientific" dissertations about sex, marriage, morality and libido in his popular books or pot boilers, he was at heart as old fashioned and romantic about love as any Victorian novelist or Elizabethan poets. Remembering his favorite poem, read to me long ago in Cornwall, as "Lady of Walsingham," which is not its title, I have now found it by searching diligently in the Oxford Book of English Verse. Included among anonymous 16th century poems, it is so beautiful, so little known, and so evocative of the tender and romantic side of Bertrand Russell's nature that I here reproduce it in full.

As ye came from the holy land

of Walsinghame,

Met you not with my true love

By the way as you came?

How should I know your true love,

That have met many a one

As I came from the holy land,

That have come, that have gone?

She is neither white nor brown,

But as the heavens fair;

There is none hath her form divine

In the earth or the air.

Such a one did I meet, good sir,

Such an angelic face,

Who like a nymph, like a queen, did appear

In her gait, in her grace.

She hath left me here alone

All alone, as unknown,

Who sometime did me lead with herself,

And me loved as her own.

What's the cause that she leaves you alone

And a new way doth take,

That sometime did love you as her own,

And her joy did you make?

I have loved her all my youth,

But now am old, as you see:

Love likes not the falling fruit,

Nor the withered tree.

Know that Love is a careless child,

And forgets promise past:

He is blind, he is deaf when he list,

And in faith never fast.

His desire is a dureless content,

And a trustless joy;

He is won with a world of despair,

And is lost with a toy.

Of womenkind such indeed is the love,

Or the word love abused,

Under which many childish desires

And conceits are excused.

But true love is a durable fire,

In the mind ever burning,

Never sick, never dead, never cold,

From itself never turning.

Bertie, for all his many love affairs and four marriages, never did find in the words of his favorite poem the "durable fire" of true love, "in the mind ever burning." This failure was not, I think to be ascribed simply to his inability to restrain the abnormally strong sexual urges which were the accompaniment of his great physical and mental vigor rendering him incapable of monogamy. His marriage failures were also due, as it seems to me, who knew two of his wives well, to his longing to mate with an equal. This led him to ascribe greater human qualities and mental capacities to the women he married than they possessed, or could long continue to pretend to have. Since he was seeking for an impossible combination of Cleopatra and Aspasia, Hypatia and St. Theresa, Boadicea and Joan of Arc, and was also drawn to Quakers and other Puritan types as shown by his first and last choice of wives*- his quest for enduring love was abortive. But he would not have made so much trouble for himself had he not so puffed up his wives that they became difficult to live with. Convinced by Bertie that they actually were his equals and collaborators, they acquired an undue influence over him which led him to great follies. As when he let Dora "inspire" him to write several rather silly books about free love which did great harm to his reputation, expressing views which he was to find untenable after she foisted two bastard children upon him. Or when, as today in his 90's he is married to a woman of Bryn Mawr who has no more understanding or knowledge of Communism than a nun in a convent insulated against evil has about the world, the flesh and the devil. I surmise from my memory of a talk with them in London in 1954 that the last Lady Russell bears considerable responsibility for the fact that Bertie in his last decade came to ignore his original acute perception of the nature and aims of the Soviet Power.

Influenced as he was by Dora's free love theories as well as by his own polygamous

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* The present Lady Russell is not a Quaker but a pacifist of similar persuasion.

inclinations, Russell remained impervious to her arguments in favor of the Soviet dictatorship. He relates in his autobiography that she viewed his revulsion to the "cruelty, poverty, suspicion and persecution in Russia" as "bourgeois, senile and sentimental" while he regarded her liking for the Bolsheviks "with bewildered horror."

I confess that I do not remember much about Dora's political views in 1926 in Cornwall. I must have been too enthralled by Bertie to take note of them, much as they no doubt resembled my own at this time. I remember her as an attractive buxom fresh faced and energetic woman and recall Bertie's remark that living with her was as relaxing as travelling on an express train bearing one to one's destination without effort on one's own part. Dora's main interest in the mid-20's was in birth control and her campaign to induce the Labor Party to go all out for it. One remark of hers stuck in my mind. Telling about a textile trade union worker she had stayed with in Lancashire, Dora, instead of being repelled by her dirty house and unkempt personal appearance had understood that a woman in her circumstances could not possibly do a day's work in the mills and be active politically, unless she neglected her household chores and herself.

Writing to Mother I described Dora as "about the most able all around woman I have ever met." She seemed able to do everything, "is a perfect mother and she writes and runs birth control propaganda" and she was "awfully nice to me."

A decade later I was to accept, all too uncritically, Bertie's charges against Dora. I did not come to realize until the 50's, after his break with his third wife Patricia, Russell's capacity to erase from the tablet of his mind the true record of loves and friendships turned sour.

Today finding a letter I wrote on March 7, 1926, I am amazed to recall that, honored and pleased as I had been, by the Russell's invitation to spend the summer as well as the Easter vacation with them in Cornwall, I hesitated to commit myself to acceptance of an opportunity which many people would have jumped at then as well as today. Not because I did not revere Bertie or was not delighted at the prospect of enjoying the privilege and pleasure of his company. But on account of overriding concern for my lonely mother temporarily "exiled" in Devonshire as a paying guest with our friends Kathie and Stanley Harris. Because while I was in residence at Westfield College and Temple living with his wife in Hampstead, neither of us could contribute sufficient funds to Mother's support and she had sublet the Jessel House apartment. "Dear Mother," I wrote,

I want especially to tell you about an offer I have had from the Russells, I enclose his letter which you might read first. I had dinner with them last night and said then I should love to come at Easter but did not like to promise anything definite about the summer, though I thought I could come for a month if I could arrange for you to come to Mousehole so that I could see you often. Today Mrs. Russell rang up and said she and Bertie did not want at this stage of my career to persuade me into anything but I have been round again this afternoon and have promised to come for April and for July. I saw Temple in the meantime and he seemed to think I ought to go as it is rather an opportunity, isn't it? I like the children and shall, I think, enjoy teaching them. Also, Porthcurno is quite near Mousehole and you thought, dear, that you would like to go to Mousehole in the summer and if you came for July I could see you nearly every day. Let me know what you think, dear? I think really I ought to feel honored.

As it turned out, by the summer of 1926 I was too actively involved in the long losing struggle of the British miners - which followed the collapse of the Genera] Strike-to indulge myself again with the Russells in Cornwall as tutor to their children. I visited them only briefly that summer while accompanying A.J. Cook, Secretary of the Miner's Union, on a speaking tour through the Western Shires to raise funds for the striking miners.

Arthur Cook, who died not long afterwards as the result of his exertions, or perhaps because his heart was broken by his failure to save his people, was a type of labor leader practically unknown in this day and age when high-ranking trade union officials in England as well as America have become indistinguishable in income, mode of living and "status" from the executives of big corporations. A tall, rangy sandy-haired blue-eyed man with a great heart and fighting spirit, he lived almost as poorly as the miners he represented and never spared himself even when sick in his desperate efforts to save his people from destitution.

When we reached Cornwall on Arthur Cook's strenuous speaking tour, during which I occasionally spoke myself but was mainly instrumental in putting him in touch with my fishermen and other "proletarian" friends in Devonshire and Cornwall. I took the Miner's Union leader and his retinue to visit Bertrand Russell at Porthcurno, a small village in a cove some miles beyond Penzance on the way to Land's End. It was an occasion which illustrates Russell's kindness and concern for the practical needs ignored by most philosophers.

It had been raining all day and Arthur Cook was wet and exhausted and so hoarse that he was almost unable to speak after having addressed many small open-air meetings in spite of suffering from a bad cold. While the rest of us chattered excitedly downstairs, Bertie, infuriated by the indifference shown to the Mine Union leader's physical condition by his secretary, who was a hard-boiled left-winger, himself escorted Cook upstairs, carrying a can of hot water, and insisting that his guest change his sodden clothing, put on dry socks and take some rest.

This is one among many small incidents I recall which show Russell's concern for human ills, both great and small. In particular he was always prone to worry about people catching cold through getting their feet wet. At the progressive school which he and Dora established in England in the 30's, it was Bertie who insisted that the children change their socks when they came in out of the rain. And it was Bertie, not Dora, who saw to it that the groceries were ordered and the children properly fed.

How-Well-I-Remember-Bertie could be the title of a book I am unlikely ever to write. His kindness and his naughtiness; his wit and his courtesy and his weaknesses; his enjoyment of family life and his terrific sexual urges which led him to the pursuit of women until long past threescore years and ten. His boyish delight in shocking people by stating his views in the most exaggerated or provocative way possible. His joyful chuckles and the wicked gleam in his eye after making some particularly outrageous statement. The pleasure he took in reducing the sublime to the ridiculous even to the extent of making fun of his own cherished beliefs. His delight in paradox and his facial resemblance to the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. His logical mind which led him to say B.C.D. down even as far as X, after having once said A, even if the end result was absurd. His courage and integrity, his passionate hatred of cruelty and injustice and his burning sympathy for the injured and oppressed. All his great qualities of mind and heart and spirit uniquely combined with compassion and understanding.

As also the defects which are the reverse side of Russell's genius and humanity. His

exaggerated, sometimes ridiculous, overstatements when he refused to make any distinction between the trees and the wood, or to admit that a difference in degree makes a difference in kind. The contrast between his skeptical and stoic philosophy and his behavior when he became a none-too-scrupulous propagandist for a cause in which he passionately believed. His propensity in the heat of controversy to ignore his own precept that one should always be aware that one may be mistaken. The occasions when his judgment has been warped by some particular personal experience, as when he came to conceive an enduring resentment against America because Catholic pressures in 1940 forced the cancellation of his appointment as Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York on account of his "immoral" views on sex and marriage. His pride and prejudices as an Englishman and an aristocrat and his fears for his own country which eventually led him to take positions inconsistent with his basic views. His tendency to forget in the heat of controversy his own warning that "opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction."

Nor can Bertrand Russell be held guiltless of sometimes shifting the original premise of his arguments without admitting he has done so after his heart or his hopes or his fears had, in fact caused him to change his mind.

Russell's liking for me and my deep affection and admiration for him were perhaps due to some basic affinity in our minds, characters and ideals. I do not. of course, pretend to be in any way his intellectual equal. But both of us had the mentality which pursues beliefs or theories to their logical conclusion, and the temperament which impelled us to commit ourselves unreservedly in defense of our convictions. Neither of us ever paid much attention to Goethe's dictum that the essence of wisdom is to know when to stop. Lord Russell is an aristocrat by temperament as well as by birth, and, above all. an Englishman who instinctively reacts as such to the crises of our time. I, on the contrary, was to become a citizen of the United States by choice while remaining an internationalist at heart, and am perhaps also, as Bertie used to tell me in explaining my predilection for America, a 'social outcast by nature.' But we shared the same basic values and esteemed the same virtues: courage, honesty, clarity of mind, and the toughness of moral and mental fibre to face reality, acknowledge error, cast illusions aside and yet continue on the quest for truth and justice.

The inexcusable crimes in Bertie's view were cruelty and lying in either great or small matters. Thus, for instance, he broke off relations with Arthur Koestler, who was his neighbor in Wales after the Second World War, because Koestler was unkind to his wife, Mamime, and had lied to Russell on some small matter. And as I shall relate in a later chapter Russell was to sever his long friendship with George Bernard Shaw, over me in 1937, when he found Shaw to be cruel and deceitful as well as very silly about the Soviet Union.

I, too, am all too prone to break off relations with friends who disappoint me by not living up to my expectations of their integrity or courage. I can like and respect people who disagree with me and remain friends with them if they seem to be honest, but I hate hypocrites, humbugs and prevaricators, and despise those who seem to share my convictions but lack the courage to stand up and be counted when it comes to a showdown. Like Dante, I think those who are so indifferent or "tolerant" or cowardly as to have no opinion, deserve to be consigned to Hell's anteroom.

In a word, in my judgement of people I share to some extent Bertie's aristocratic prejudices.

The original Greek meaning of the word aristocrat was "the best"; and the term noblesse oblige reminds us that there was a time when the nobility was expected to behave nobly. The aristocratic principle, even if more honored in the breach than in observance by men of high degree, is the antithesis of the "bourgeois" passion for security, and the deification of private property rights.

There could be no greater contrast between an aristocrat in the original meaning of the word and the type of 'conservative' whose main concern is the preservation of wealth, incomes or security. Indeed, as it seems to me, the basic weakness of the so-called 'Right' in America today is its lack of 'virtue' - in the Roman sense of the word, meaning both courage and integrity and a measure of generosity.

This similarity in our temperaments, values, and behavior may account for the fact that my friendship with Bertrand Russell stood the test of time, despite some fierce altercations and temporary estrangements. As also because of his generosity of mind and heart. During the early 40's in America, after Bertie had abandoned his pacifism to support the war against Germany, he was to become infuriated by my arguments which echoed his own former belief that the Second World War would have even worse consequences than the first one. Yet, on one occasion, after we had parted in anger, he told his third wife, Peter, that I had the quality of greatness.

The real greatness was in Russell, who saw his own qualities reflected in his friends and in the women he loved or liked.

I am one of the few, if not the only, woman who enjoyed Russell's friendship for many years who did not have an affair with him. Although he wanted to make love to me, as was his nature, and laughed at my 'Puritan prejudices,' he understood me and helped me to understand myself. And it was at least partially thanks to him that when I fell in love with Arcadi, some six months after my vacation with the Russell's in Cornwall, I did not hesitate to consummate our love.

Through the years I was occasionally to be appalled when Bertie's terrific sexual urges, which were the accompaniment of his genius, caused him to assume the repulsive expression of a lustful satyr. My reverence for him as philosopher and humanitarian enabled me to dismiss these recollections from my mind. But buried in my subconscious they can still evoke an all too vivid vision of his hungry lips and avid eyes momentarily blotting out the image of philosopher and friend which mattered most.

I shall have much more to relate about Bertrand Russell in later chapters. At this point I am remembering through the mist of the years the wonderful month I spent with him in Cornwall in the springtime of my life when, if only I had heeded his teaching I would never have become a Communist, and might have saved my husband from being engulfed ten years later by the Red Tide which swept him to death and me to loneliness for the rest of my life.

* * *

After my month with the Russells in Cornwall I returned to Westfield College and my usual practical concerns. With work still to be done on my M.A. thesis I was looking around for a job in the fall, as also endeavoring to raise some cash to continue paying for the patent fees on my father's invention which we still hoped would eventually secure an income for mother. Temple was in a worse situation than myself since I was getting free board and lodging and £ 100 a year from Westfield College and earning some money by articles and book reviews and lectures for the Workers Educational Association. Writing to Mother in Devonshire from London that spring I say:

Very sorry you feel so lonely and sad. Shall come and see you soon.

Cannot come this weekend because going Cambridge for University Labor Federation meeting.

I can't see how Temple can manage to come. He has absolutely no money at all and is worried about it. Perhaps soon you will be getting money from the pump and will be able to come back, darling. I will look this week for a jumper suit for you.

In another letter concerning her forthcoming visit to London to stay with Temple, I

wrote:

I got your letter last night although not posted by 9:30! Today and yesterday I have been chasing round for testimonials for a job advertised in the D. Herald for someone to do Research in a Trade Union Office (£300- £350 pa.). I am afraid though, that there are heaps of people in for it - I have met several - and I don't stand much chance without an Economics degree. Baynes has given me a wonderful testimonial; I enclose a copy. Archie (Henderson, Transport Workers Union Secretary) has too, and his may count most. He is still terribly busy and looking absolutely fagged out but he asked after you very particularly.

As it turned out I was soon to be relieved of worry about jobs and money by being appointed to a fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Chapter 9

I TAKE THE PLUNGE

The General Strike of 1926 was the turning point of my early political development. The high hopes raised when it began and what then seemed to me the "betrayal" of the workers by the Trade Union Council and the Labor Party, which had backed down in the middle of the fight, led me all the way into the Communist camp. I became convinced of the reality of the class war and of the truth of the Communist thesis that Socialism could not be obtained gradually by Fabian methods. There was apparently no solution for unemployment and low wages under the capitalist system. Only its overthrow by the unity of the workers of the world under Communist leadership seemed to offer a way of escape from poverty in the midst of plenty, gross inequalities in income and opportunity, periodic economic depressions or crises, and "imperialist wars."

The General Strike stirred all my emotions, the more so as I was then living at Westfield College among the most conservative set of University teachers I had ever met. My crude, somewhat childish, but I believe sincere, revolutionary reaction is expressed in a letter written to my mother in Devonshire on May 10:

I have never lived through such a terrible week. I feel all hot inside and trembling all the time. It is such an unequal fight for us, and I want so much to help. I am speaking tonight at Edgware, I am glad to say. I wish I could speak all day - never was there a more unjust issue and more lies told by a government. Yet the government is so ruthless it may win. It is parading armored cars about and soldiers are all over the place. The buses are running with two policemen on each and volunteer O.M.S. labor. Everything is quite safe for ordinary people like me – I almost wish it were not! I cannot write properly, dear, I am too worried and upset. It is so dreadful not to be able to help and to have to listen to the misrepresentations of the capitalist press. Westfield is impossible except for a few students. I spent last night with the Boothroyds.* I saw Wilmot,** who is half expecting to be arrested for sedition. Anything almost can be called sedition. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the churches proposed terms of peace: withdrawal of both lockout and strike. The Government would not allow the proposal to be broadcast! It would be acceptable to us and not to them.

A few years later I was to realize that the behavior of the British government was like that of a loving mother in comparison to that of the Soviet government toward the Russian working class. But I still remember the passionate anger I felt in 1926 against the "capitalist government" and its most ruthless member, Winston Churchill, who was responsible for the show of armed force and was prepared to have the workers shot at if

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* Well known humorist and cartoonist under the name of Yaffle.

** Labor M.P.

the strike went on. (Fifteen years later Winston Churchill was to become for a while the darling of the Communists and their fellow travelers, as also a hero in American eyes as Germany's most implacable foe. But to me he seemed no more admirable then than in 1926, since he went along with Roosevelt in demanding the unconditional surrender of the German people which led to the Communist conquest of Eastern Europe.)

Today, I also realize how tolerant were the Principal of Westfield College and the staff members with whom I argued fiercely in the Common Room and who appeared to me in the guise of 'class enemies' or bulwarks of reaction. No one interfered with me, even when I took a group of the undergraduates to T.U.C. headquarters to offer our services.

The day I was invested with my M.A. degree was the day the General Strike was called off. After bicycling all the way from Hampstead to the Senate House in South Kensington and sitting impatiently waiting in a borrowed cap and gown to receive my scroll, I tore off to T.U.C. headquarters. The bitterness of defeat and the long agony of the miners which was to follow the end of the General Strike have obliterated from my mind the feelings of satisfaction I must have had in having finally achieved more than even Mrs. Burton Brown had expected of me.

My M.A. degree had been awarded with the coveted mark of distinction and a recommendation by the Senate of London University that my thesis be published, for which purpose £ 50 was made available. This led to my being appointed to the Ratan Tata Fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science which was one of the juiciest plums in the academic world of my time since it paid £400 a year for two years. I no longer had to worry about how to make enough money to provide for Mother, and a successful academic or political career was open to me. Yet it was now that I prepared to take the fateful step of joining the Communist Party.

The subject I chose for my research and for the book which I was expected to write for publication by the London School of Economics, concerned Eastern competition and the declining Lancashire cotton industry. This may sound an odd transition from my previous work on the Roman Empire, but as I saw it, there was a parallel between the economic and social effects of the competition of slave labor on the condition of free labor in the ancient world and that of cheap "colonial" or Asiatic labor on Western labor standards in the modern world. I had moved from the study of ancient to that of modern imperialism.

The book which I eventually wrote on this subject, entitled Lancashire and the Far East* was to be published without the blessing of the London School of Economics because its principal. William Beveridge, objected to my indictment of British Imperialist rule in India and insisted on the revision of my chapters on India as a condition for his approval.

Subsequently knighted, Sir William Beveridge became famous as the author of the Beveridge Report which laid the foundations of today's Britain's "Welfare State." He was an outstanding example of those, perhaps justly designated by the communists as "social fascists," since his main concern was with the condition of the British working class whose livelihood depended on the preservation of the British Empire and the continued exploitation of its colonial subjects.

Following World War II the United States came to supply the subsidy formerly available for the welfare of the British laboring and middle classes for the maintenance of the standard of life to which they were accustomed.

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* Allen and Unwin, London, 1930.

For the most part, the L.S.E. professors, in contrast to those at Kings College and Westfield, were liberals and socialists. Graham Wallas, R. H. Tawney, Eileen Power, C. M. Lloyd (who was also foreign editor of the New Statesman), and above all Harold Laski, to mention only some of the best known names of the lecturers at the L.S.E., exerted far more influence than the few conservative economists and political scientists who taught there.

I naturally felt very much in my element at the London School of Economics and Political Science and soon came to exert some influence there myself, after being elected chairman of the London University Labor Party.

My friend, Jane Tabrisky, who was Secretary of the L.U.L.P., was already a member of the Communist Party, and between us we largely controlled the show. Since London University was a constituency which sent two members to Parliament, our activities and influence had some importance outside college. On one occasion Herbert Morrison came over to address one of our meetings in a vain endeavor to stem the Left Wing tide which I was leading or being led by. This one-eyed right-wing Labor Party leader was a fighter and man of integrity and intelligence besides being a most eloquent speaker, and I respected him even while opposing him. He well deserved to become Prime Minister in later years but was passed over in favor of the colorless Clement Attlee who made no enemies, thanks to his ability to sit upon a fence.

I was also Vice President of the University Labor Federation which comprised the Labor and Socialist Clubs of all British universities. The President was Arthur Greenwood, M.P., a Cabinet Minister in the first Labor government. Elegantly attired, very tall and rather gaunt in appearance despite his liking for liquor, good natured, amiable, and convivial and apparently devoid of strong political convictions, Arthur Greenwood had charm and the impeccable good manners of the British upper class. He frequently invited me and other students to drink a glass of sherry with him on the terrace of the House of Commons, and these social amenities helped him to preserve unity between the warring right and left wing factions of the University Labor Federation. A federation which comprised all the colors of the left rainbow ranging from such avowed Communists as Professor Maurice Dobb of Cambridge, and the aristocratic Irish Earl of Listowel, to Colin Clark, at that time a boyish looking rosy-cheeked and intrepid right wing Labor man from Australia, today internationally known as a brilliant and enlightened conservative economist.

We were a society of 'Lib-Labs' and socialists or 'progressives' who managed to retain a comradely atmosphere in our debates because we imagined that we all wanted to achieve the same end, albeit by different methods. As also because we paid due regard to the old maxim that "the secret of a close community is toleration of each other's idiosyncracies."

Happy days of innocence before Moscow became strong enough to divide the sheep from the goats and the lions, with intent to destroy all who failed to at least act like sheep in the Bolshevik fold.

The majority of our articulate and active members were 'Left of Center.' Among them, the leading light was G. D. H.Cole and his wife Margaret, already well known as economic historians and later also to become authors of successful detective stories. This brilliant and versatile couple wrote humorous verse and staged skits on topical subjects performed by our members. It was largely due to them that the University Labor Federation meetings at Oxford and Cambridge were great fun as well as forums for earnest discussion of the great issues of our time.

By now. besides my stipend from the L.S.E.. I was earning quite high fees as a

lecturer to extra-mural "Tutorial Classes" paid for jointly by London University and the Workers' Educational Association. I was also making a little money and establishing a reputation as a writer by the articles and book reviews I contributed to such publications as the New Statesman, Labor Monthly, and The New Leader, and soon also to the Contemporary Review and other nonpartisan journals.

For the first time since I left school I had no money worries, and had embarked with a fair wind on the scholastic career which I had hoped to pursue a decade earlier while at Prior's Field. As Arnold Toynbee's future wife, who was at this time Secretary of the London School of Economics, was to tell me in America some twenty years after, it was confidently expected that I would become as distinguished a woman economic historian as Dr. Eileen Power, who was a member of the Board which had chosen me for the Ratan Tata Fellowship against all my male competitors. Such was not to be my destiny. I was too deeply involved in politics, or as I saw it then, in the struggle for the emancipation of mankind. The study of history could no longer satisfy me; I yearned too greatly to take part in making it.

In 1928, two years after I had won the Ratan Tata Fellowship, I abandoned my promising academic career. Forever, as it turned out, since a decade later when I emigrated to America after my disillusionment in Soviet Russia, my anti-Communist views were to preclude my obtaining a University appointment.

In later years I was to regret having so light-heartedly thrown away the opportunity given me long ago to become a professor and make teaching my career, for I liked to teach and was successful with my classes. Moreover, the chance then afforded me to live the contemplative life, which failed to appeal to me in my 20's, seemed very attractive to me in my 60's. Today, I would ask for nothing better than a secure niche in the academic world.

Yet even now, in the evening of my life, I do not really regret having by-passed the opportunity given me in my youth to acquire academic fame and material security. It would be very nice to have them, but I ask myself whether I would consider them worth the loss of the experiences, the freedom, the joys and the sorrows which have made life's great adventure worthwhile, and have given me. if not any great measure of wisdom, knowledge obtainable only in a life of strife and struggle and an unending quest for the unobtainable.

As Temple, my long dead brother, expressed it, "We think there is something on the other side of the furthest ridge. There is not, but a further one. However let us go on looking for something we know is silly from all the viewpoints of others."

The 'motive patterns' of socialism, to use Max Eastman's expression, are various. As also the reasons why at various times and places, one man or woman or another has joined the Communist Party. My own case proves that it is not necessarily, or even primarily, poverty or lack of opportunity which makes Communists, since it was only after I began to earn a good income that I joined the Communist Party.

Nor would it seem to be true, to judge from my personal experience, that sex frustrations, or loneliness, or unhappiness in their personal lives lead both young and old to embrace the Communist faith.

I realize, in contemplating and endeavoring to analyze the motive forces of my life, that my unsatisfied longing for husband, home and children played a large part in impelling me into an increasingly absorbing political life. As also how true it is that, in Russell Green's words: "The hobby-horse of one's discontent becomes the Pegasus of one's ambition." But my decision to join the Communist Party came after I was not only

on the way to realizing my worldly ambitions, but had also at long last found a man to love who loved me.

I first met my future husband Arcadi Jacovlevitch Berdichevsky when Boris Plavnik took me to his house on Goldhurst Terrace in Hampstead on a gloomy rainy autumn evening in 1926. I have no recollection of what we talked about as we sat sipping tea through sweets in the Russian fashion around the dining-room table where there may or may not have been a samovar. But how easy to recall and how difficult to convey by the printed word the current which passed between us, the look in Arcadi's expressive eyes which made my heart beat faster, the humorous twist to his generous sensitive mouth, the touch of his hand at parting when we arranged to meet again alone.

We knew we loved one another after only a few meetings, and in the Christmas vacation we journeyed together to Herrenalp in the Black Forest for a premature honeymoon. Premature, since Arcadi was married and it was to take much time, travail and heartbreak before he could divorce his wife and become my husband in the summer of 1928 in Moscow.

Arcadi, whose love was to illumine my whole life, was a Russian Jew, whose family had moved during his boyhood from Odessa on the Black Sea to Lodz in Poland. After studying at Zurich University in Switzerland for his Masters Degree in Economics and Commerce, Arcadi had emigrated to the United States shortly before the first World War. In New York he had married the daughter of a well-to-do family of Russian Jewish extraction. Her name and patronym was Anna Abramovna and they had a young son called Vitia. They had begun to be estranged when Arcadi, in 1920, gave up a $600 a month salary as representative of an American firm in London, to work for only $150 at the newly formed trading organization of the Soviet government known as ARCOS.

By the time I met them in 1926, Arcadi had become Finance Manager of the Soviet Trade Delegation in London, at a salary of $500 a month, which in those days in England enabled him and his wife to live well in a large house with a servant. But he had become increasingly dissatisfied both with his personal life and his comfortable "bourgeois" existence.

Arcadi was not a Bolshevik, but had been a member of the Jewish Social Democratic Party, known in Poland as the Bund, and had retained his socialist ideals. In 1923 he had been asked to join the Communist Party, thus ensuring his future career, in the Soviet service. But he had the feeling that since he had played no part in the Revolution he could not join now that the fighting was over and membership in the Party had become a privilege. Also, and basically more important, Arcadi had the same repugnance as my brother to adherence to any creed or dogma. He wanted to believe that the Soviet Government could and would establish a Socialist order of society fulfilling the aspirations of men of good will for social justice, but he was never able to subscribe to the Bolshevik philosophy.

In spite of what Bertrand Russell called my incurable political romanticism, my father's and my brother's scepticism, and the distrust they had inculcated in me of those who profess altruistic motives, were not without influence on me. Arcadi attracted me precisely because he made fun both of himself and the lofty pretensions of the Communist 'Saviors of Mankind,' even while ready to work harder, and make greater sacrifices than most Communists, in order to help build the good society. He was as witty, intelligent, and charming, and far more handsome and virile than Walter Field, whom I had once loved, but who, as he told my brother, had run away from me in spite

of wanting me, because he was afraid that life with me would be dangerous and uncomfortable.

Arcadi loved me for the very reasons which, as my mother had so often told me, were likely to prevent any man I liked from wanting to marry me. Far from wishing me to be a 'good wife' subordinating myself to him and my interests to his, Arcadi loved me because he thought I was different from most women. Being an attractive man, he had long since enjoyed a surfeit of feminine women, and was always concerned that I preserve my individuality, go on with my work, and not succumb to the temptation of becoming just another wife and mother.

Anna Abramovna, never having understood or sympathized with Arcadi's socialist aspirations, could not see why he was not satisfied with a comfortable home, a pretty wife, a child and a well-paid job. To the last it remained inexplicable to her why he left her for me, since as she told their friends, I was not pretty and would never make him comfortable.

In the summer of 1927 I was invited to visit the Soviet Union in my capacity as Vice President of the University Labor Federation. My writings had attracted the attention of Ivan Maisky, then Counselor of the Soviet Embassy in London, and I was by this time well acquainted with the British Communist Party leaders. I had met Petrovsky. the Comintern representative in England during the General Strike, and became friendly with him and his wife without knowing his identity or even his real name. He then called himself Max Breguer and was masquerading as a "Nepman" - meaning a businessman - un-der the New Economic Policy dispensation in Russia which permitted a limited degree of private enterprise. I had accepted him as what he professed himself to be, namely a "good capitalist" friendly to the Soviet Government, and was astonished in Moscow to discover that he was a V.I.P. in the Communist hierarchy and its secret apparatus.

I was regarded, I suppose, as a promising young 'bourgeois intellectual' whose writings displayed appreciation of Marxist theory and whose conversion to Communism would have an impact on British Left Wing intellectual circles. I intended to join the Party as soon as I returned. The propaganda effect would be greater if I joined after, not before, I saw the U.S.S.R.

My excitement at my coming visit to the Land of Promise knew no bounds. My brother from his bed in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Surrey wrote me some words of caution:

My dear Freda:

This is just to wish you luck in your adventure. I think in one way you are quite right. I would do the same thing if I wanted to. I expect. After all, one must follow one's own thinking and one's own desires. It is an adventure, but I do not expect for a moment that you will find what you are seeking for intellectually. Men are much of a muchness everywhere, and they behave much in the same way whatever they profess to believe.

Of course you will see the country and the people and the society as you wish to believe they are, at first. But later, your scepticism will reassert itself.

But don't join the Communist Party. It seems to me a terrible thing for any intelligent person to adhere to any creed or dogma; to have to say that you accept any empirical generalization as an article of faith. I

do not see why you should not work for them and with them and yet reserve your opinion about their fundamental propositions.

These sweeping generalizations are to be distrusted. Even when you are dealing with a subject like physics - a subject by which human desires and fears are little affected in its findings, as more and more is discovered and its fundamental promises examined, you are all the time modifying and modifying.

And what a phrase that "materialistic conception of history" is: 'Matter' - the word is not really used in Physics. Bodies have mass and the mass of a body is its weight divided by the acceleration due to gravity. That is all Physics knows about it.

Matter psychologically is one's sense of resistance - pushiness - quite different. Matter is also a "banner word," a symbol with emotions attached to it used by various sects to throw at one another.

I must end half finished, or I will lose the post. I need another four pages to explain myself. Anyhow, the best of luck, my dear, and all my love.

Temple

Failing at that period of my life to appreciate my brother's wisdom, I brushed aside his wise counsel as I had Bertrand Russell's warnings. All their arguments seemed abstract. I could not see that they had any relevance to the concrete problem of how to establish socialism. I suppose I was then like a religious convert whose beliefs are no longer susceptible to reason or philosophical argument. I had faith in socialism as the answer to man's age - old longing for justice and a well-ordered universe; I failed to perceive that Communism, with its false hope of establishing heaven on earth, was a substitute for religion, luring men to worship the devil under the guise of a great emancipator. I replied to my brother: "In spite of what you say, I must join the Communist Party. I cannot live without feeling I am doing worthwhile work. I see no hope in the Labor Party. I think the Communist thesis is right."

Thus, I departed on my first visit to Russia in June 1927, full of enthusiasm and willingness to believe that the Communists were in the process of creating the best economic and social system which the world had ever known.

Chapter 10

RUSSIA IN ROSE

I traveled with Ivan Maisky from Berlin to Moscow, together with W.J. Brown, Secretary of one of the most militant trade unions in England, the Clerical Association, whose members were office workers in government service.

Two days after our arrival we stood in the Red Square to witness the funeral of Voikov, murdered in Poland. This was the first demonstration I saw in the "socialist fatherland"; and I vividly recall the exaltation and excitement that filled my heart and mind as I stood close to Lenin's tomb under a blue sky watching the Red Army parade and the thousands upon thousands of demonstrators. My mind in those days was full of romantic libertarian images. I wrote after the demonstration: "People in the street look well fed enough though poorly clothed, and there seems to be such vitality and purpose among the people one meets .... The soldiers in the demonstration especially looked so splendid-more like the Greeks of Xenophon must have looked than like the usual wooden soldier ..."

I was also enchanted by the as yet unspoiled charm of Moscow which, as Bertrand Russell had told me, rivalled Peking among the most beautiful cities of the world. "Moscow is a lovely place," I wrote to Mother, "I wish you could see the Kremlin across the river and all the domes of the churches. I will bring home some pictures."

Visitors to the U.S.S.R. in those days were comparatively rare. There was no Intourist, and only invited delegates from trade-unions and Labor parties got the chance to travel over Russia. One was lapped around with kindness, hospitality, and good fellowship. Nor were outward signs of prosperity lacking. The market places of Moscow and other towns were overflowing with vegetables, dairy products, milk, and meat. New apartment houses and office buildings built in the severe but pleasing style introduced after the Revolution were much in evidence. There were no queues for bread and other foods at the state and cooperative shops, and one could buy the most delicious pastries for only five kopeks. There was a shortage of manufactured goods even in the cities, but it was not to be compared to the almost total lack of necessities a few years later after the "gigantic successes on the industrial front."

One is tempted to imagine what Russia might have become if the New Economic Policy, permitting the peasants to enjoy the fruits of their labor under free enterprise and thus fructify the fertile Russian soil, had been continued. But as early as 1924 the "Scissors Crisis" (the disproportion between the price of manufactured goods and agricultural produce) had split the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks into left and right factions.

Disagreements began over how much to take from the peasants for industrial development, and ended in the bitter controversy over collectivization. With the aid of Bucharin, Tomsky, and others on the right who maintained that any attempt to force the pace of industrialization would destroy the stimulus to labor, Stalin had overcome Trotsky and was soon to exile him and the rest of the left opposition. Once rid of the

Trotskyists, Stalin, in 1929, was to wipe out the right opposition and embark upon an ultra-left policy of forced collectivization and intensive industrialization.

The U.S.S.R. was soon to become a country of starved peasants and undernourished workers, cowed and whipped by fierce punishments to toil endlessly for a state which could not provide them even with enough to eat. But, unfortunately for my own future, I first saw Russia during the brief period of prosperity which began in 1924 and ended in 1928.

My 1927 visit to Russia was marred only by my fellow guest, Billy Brown, an oversexed left-winger who imagined that in the Communist world he would be afforded unlimited opportunity for the indulgence of his carnal appetites. He had wanted to make love to me before in London, where we were politically associated, but it was not until we got to Moscow that I had difficulty in holding him off. Although he knew I was in love with Arcadi, he fancied that in the supposedly uninhibited sexual climate of the Soviet Union I would naturally sleep with him. When his expectations remained unfulfilled, and he had also found it difficult to find a Russian mistress, he turned nasty. This may all have had the desirable long range effect of souring him on Communism, but at the time he caused me embarrassment.

There was a whole class of hopeful leftwingers whose attraction to Communism was at least partially inspired by their mistaken belief that the U.S.S.R., if not yet all that might be desired economically, was at least the paradise of free lovers. For them, sex and politics were always mixed.

Writing Mother from Moscow in July, 1928, I told her:

They are sending me to a place in the Caucasus for two weeks and then home by way of Tiflis and Baku which will take a week or 10 days. The original arrangement has been broken up because Brown has had a nervous breakdown. The last few days have been very trying. Billy gradually became impossible and has been very rude and unpleasant to me. It is too long a story to tell you in a letter and how much is due to Billy's nerves and how much to sex, etc., I don't know. Anyway, we have definitely split and are following our different programs. Billy has behaved just like a spoilt child. Everything in Russia has annoyed him especially the unpunctuality - and the food upset him - he was in bed for two days.

But the occasion of things going wrong was his accusation that I monopolized people: the fact is that people have been awfully nice to me and as I speak German and am a woman, I do perhaps get more attention. But the whole business has been childish I think it is his nerves which are wrong; in fact two doctors say he has a bad nervous breakdown. Also there has been this sex business. In Berlin already he was telling everyone he wanted to find a girl and he went off to find a prostitute and came to tell next morning. Also, he had asked me, moreor less casually, the first night, if I would sleep with him, and I passed it off as a joke. Then he said quite calmly: "How will you manage so long away from your lover?"

Billy Brown, as I say, was only one among several left-wingers who visited the Soviet Union with false expectations. Years later, when living with my husband in Moscow, I witnessed with considerable amusement the frustrations of an American from Georgia, who came to Russia on a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship, confidently expecting to be

able to indulge his sexual appetites without bourgeois restraints. Unable, to his dismay, to find any girl to sleep with him in spite of the soap, coffee, and other luxuries he had to offer, he married a nice Canadian girl in Paris after six months of sexual abstinence. Admittedly, X, as I shall call him (since he was a nice person and is today not unknown in America), did not know how to go about it. There were plenty of women in the hungry 30's in Russia who were ready to give themselves for "three pairs of silk stockings," to quote the title of a novel at that time, or even for one lipstick, as my husband phrased it. But X made the mistake of imagining that he could find a mistress among the Communist elite who traveled de luxe like himself and had no reason to fall for a trifle.

I drove to Tiflis from Vladikafkaz along the fabulous Georgian Military Road built by the Tsars during their conquest of the Caucasus. A road which skirts high mountains rising almost perpendicularly from the river beds, torrent gorges and narrow valleys of the land known to the ancient Greeks as Colchis. How easy to imagine that Prometheus was chained by Zeus to a high peak in this majestic territory to have his heart devoured by a vulture for his defiance of the gods by setting man on the road to progress by teaching him to make fire. Here Jason had come in search of the Golden Fleece. And here, today, there may still remain, in inaccessible mountain Fastnesses, remnants of the many races which have passed through this land bridge from Europe to Asia, still unconquered even by the all reaching Soviet power.

I have forgotten more than I remember about my first visit to Russia when I was seeing everything in rose, or through the spectrum of my romantic imagination which enabled me, incongruously, to regard Bolsheviks and ancient Greeks equally striving to emancipate mankind from what Swinburne called "the shambles of faith and of fear." But I can still conjure up in my mind's eye my first view of the Caucasus Mountains purple dark in the early dawn as dimly seen from the railway carnage on arrival at Vladikafkaz from Moscow. And of the drive along the Georgian Military Road to Tiflis when my heart stood still with dread and wonder as we sped round bends thousands of feet above the river beds below in this majestic and untamed land "half as old as time."

In view of all the legends and stories about "Circassian beauties" captured or sold to become slaves or harem concubines by Persians, Greeks, Arabs and Turks, I was surprised to find in Tiflis that it was Georgian men, not women, who were strikingly handsome. The women of the Caucasus seemed to me less beautiful than Italians and generally far too fat - a defect doubtless remedied soon afterwards by Stalin's economic policies which condemned all but the Communist elite to near starvation. In 1927 I remembered Elroy Flecker's poem. The Road to Samarkand in which he expressed the oriental love for women whose hips are "as broad as watermelons in the season of watermelons."

No doubt today the gay talented, courageous and handsome peoples of the Caucasus, among whom the Georgians take pride of place, have been reduced to the same drab uniformity or conformity as all the other races and peoples subjected to Communist tyranny. But I saw Tiflis before Moscow's heavy hand had extinguished the enjoyment of life and love, laughter and beauty which distinguish the peoples of the Mediterranean world and which tyrants from time immemorial have found hard to drown.

In Tiflis I became friendly with a woman who was a Menshevik but who defended the Soviet regime and convinced me that there was no terror anymore. The time was as yet far off when I was to learn that Communist terror is so all pervading that it forces all its victims to pretend that it does not exist. Perhaps this woman of Tiflis believed what she said to me because she had convinced herself that now, thanks to the New Economic

policy, incentives had supplanted brutal compulsions as the dynamic of socialist construction. I was at this time as gullible or ignorant as the rest of my liberal contemporaries in the West who, a decade later, came to exert such direful influence on Western policy during the Roosevelt era. But my brief belief in the Communist Party was before Stalin won absolute power and plunged Russia into the hell of forced collectivization.

My first impressions of the U.S.S.R. were obtained during the all-too-brief period of the NEP policy when the Russian "toiling masses" were substantially better off than they had ever been before or were to be again in our time. (Even if today some few of them have refrigerators and T.V. sets, most would still seem to have less to eat than when I first visited Russia forty years ago.)

Returning from the Caucasus to Moscow I had the thrill of travelling in an airplane for the first time in my life. It was supposed to fly to Moscow from Kharkov but came down with engine trouble in a field half-way. The only other passenger was an amiable Italian businessman, and together with the pilot we made our way on foot to the nearest village, and thence by a horsedrawn cart to a railroad station. The Italian, who was middle-aged and corpulent, made heavy weather of our mishap, but nothing could then daunt my spirits or my enthusiasm about Russia. From Moscow, referring to Temple's plea that I should pause and reflect before joining the Communist Party, I wrote to Mother:

"I am sorry Temple is worried about me. I shall come home, dear, but I hope I shall be able to join Arcadi here next year. I have been making inquiries about the cost of living in Moscow and think we could manage and me send you £ 2 a month."

In a postscript I wrote that it was difficult to write without writing a great deal about Russia, and that I was too busy making notes for articles to write more in a letter. "I do feel that things worthwhile are being accomplished in Russia," I added. "I like the spirit of the people and the look of them. Everyone is simply or poorly clad, but everyone looks well fed. Clothes are just made of anything and one can go out in any sort of dress without exciting comment." How welcome this must have seemed to me who had never had enough money to dress well during my adult life.

I returned to England full of enthusiasm and prepared to tell the world about the wonders of socialist construction in the U.S.S.R. Rejecting an offer to stand for Parliament as a Labor Party candidate in the Rusholme division of Manchester, I publicly proclaimed my adherence to the Communist Party, and addressed meetings all over England.

Archie Henderson, one of the National Secretaries of the Transport Workers Union, told our friends: "Freda always belligerently rolls up her sleeves when she starts to talk about Russia."

I admitted that the standard of life in the U.S.S.R. was far lower than in the Western capitalist countries, but went on to explain that this was because Russia needed to accumulate capital for industrialization. I assured my audiences, that since there was no exploiting capitalist class in the Soviet Union, the burden of saving and investment was being borne equally by all, so that there was no such acute misery in Russia as in the era of the British Industrial Revolution.

"Bliss was in that dawn to be alive," as Wordsworth had thought at the time of the French Revolution. To me it seemed that Russia had unlocked the gates of Paradise to mankind, and that I must help to convince the workers of my own country to enter in by overthrowing capitalism and joining up with the U.S.S.R.

Looking back to that distant time, I now ask myself, did I really believe it? Was I, who had studied history, really so naive? I must have been, else I should never have thrown up

my career and encouraged my husband to abandon his comfortable life in the "capitalist world," to go off with me to take part, as we imagined, in the construction of Socialist Society in Russia.

On my return to London from Russia I learned that Arcadi was being expelled from England by order of the Home Office. His expulsion may have been due to the indiscreet letters I had sent him from Russia expressing my complete conversion to Communism. But it is more likely to have been the result of his having been assigned by the Chairman of the Russian Trade Delegation to be one of the small number of Soviet employees permitted to remain on the premises when the British Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks, raided the Arcos offices in June, 1927.

Although I was flattered to think that I was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by the British Home Office, it was a great blow to have Arcadi expelled. The Soviet authorities assigned him temporarily to Berlin where I visited him during the Christmas vacation, but he was so busy that we were unable to go off and enjoy ourselves as we had done the previous year in the Black Forest.

Whereas Arcadi had been working so hard on Soviet Government business in Berlin that we had all too little time together, I took my political work so seriously that when, in February, 1928 he was allowed to come to London for ten days to represent Arcos in a lawsuit, I was so busy campaigning as the Communist Party's candidate in the London County Council elections, speaking either to indoor meetings or at street corners mornings, afternoons and evenings, that I did not give up a single evening to him. This was the first election in which the Communist Party came out in opposition to the Labor Party, thus helping the Conservatives to win. Although I had no hope of winning the election, I made a fair showing, gaining a considerable number of votes against both my Labor and Tory opponents.

Two incidents stand out in my memory of my first and last political campaign. One is the remark made to me by a respectable working class wife and mother. "I'm for you and what you say the Communist Party stands for," she said, "but I and many others like me cannot abide those loose-living, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed young men and women of the upper classes who call themselves Communist and support you."

The other is my own behavior on election night when at London's City Hall, after the votes had been counted, the winning Conservative candidate came up to shake hands with me. My upbringing in the traditions of British good sportsmanship warred within me against my belief in the Class War. For a moment I had difficulty in repressing my natural impulse to smile and take his outstretched hand. But ideology triumphed over good manners and I firmly placed both my hands behind my back, albeit with a feeling of acute shame and embarrassment.

Even after I joined the Communist Party I could have continued my successful academic career had I remained in England. Although being a Communist in those days was a handicap, my scholastic record and the tolerant attitude of British Universities toward "heretics" of one kind or another provided that they are "brainy," speak with an educated accent and have tolerably good manners, ensured me a University appointment following the termination of my Fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In the 20's, the distinction between a Socialist and a Communist was not clearly demarcated. Most Labor Party and Trade Union leaders had already learned enough through experience to hate and distrust all Communists, but in intellectual left-wing circles they were generally regarded simply as people who wanted to achieve Socialism

faster than others, if necessary by revolutionary means. Revolution was only a word to them as to me in those days when like most of my contemporaries I had no conception of what violence meant, or of the horrible "means" or methods which were soon to become standard operating procedure in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

We all laughed and enjoyed the musical skit about my Soviet tour, written and stage managed by G.D.H. and Margaret Cole at a special meeting of the University Labor Federation called to hear my report on Russia at Oxford in the fall of 1927. I remember some lines from some of the songs sung to popular tunes by our members, making fun of my glowing account of the state of Russia. One was called Come to Prison in Georgia, where life was just wonderful, and one could meet either:

Burglar Bill who, flushed with wine

Murdered his registered concubine.

or:

Commissar Trotsky, in for life

Fraction work with Lenin's wife.

The performance ended with myself appointed as Soviet Commissar of Education, while the other members of a U.L.F. delegation to Russia were strung up one by one on lamp posts to the refrain:

Red, white or pink, no difference can we see,

So perish all the British bourgeoisie.

There was also a song with a refrain: "Stick to Marx, my hearty, Damn the Labor Party, Keep the hell fires burning for the bourgeoisie."

It could be that Margaret Cole was to be responsible for my husband's arrest some nine years after she and her husband had made fun of my conversion to Communism. For on my return to England in 1936 I learned that she had betrayed the confidence I had reposed in her during her visit to Moscow not long before when I had told her in strict secrecy my real views. She had, I heard, been going around telling people that "Freda was very soured on Russia" - her term for my profound disillusionment. This was surely not because she was malicious or wished to jeopardize my husband's life, but simply because she had remained as ignorant or innocent as I had once been. She simply had not believed me when I told her in Moscow how dangerous it is to speak the truth under a Communist dictatorship.

Still today in the West there are all too many liberal innocents who cannot or will not understand what terror means.

Chapter 11

OFF TO THE EAST

Arcadi had asked his wife Anna Abramovna, to divorce him in January 1927, following our time together in the Black Forest, but his separation from her proved to be a long and painful business, complicated by his expulsion from England in the fall of that year. "Mrs. B," as we called her, had first asked him to wait until she could join either her brother in New York, or her sister in Paris, because she could not bear to have their friends in London know he had left her. Subsequently it became clear that she hoped all along that his feeling for me was a temporary infatuation and that if they continued to live in the same house he would return to her.

Arcadi tried without success to obtain a visa for her to go to the United States where her brother was an engineer with the General Electric Company. And by the time he was able to secure a French visa for her, he himself was being expelled from England. Unfortunately for her own future and that of their son Vitia, she insisted on following him to Moscow after a short sojourn in Paris. Since I remained in England to finish my second year as a Fellow of the London School of Economics and to work for the Communist Party, she continued to hope he would change his mind. It was not until I came to Moscow in the summer of 1928 that they were at long last divorced. Arcadi and I then registered as man and wife in the apartment house where we lived.

I had been too inexperienced fully to appreciate Arcadi's difficulties. At times I had rebelled at his long delay in freeing himself to be with me. I had felt that he should either break with her at once or give up the idea of living with me. I knew that leaving his son was very difficult for him, but I failed to understand that the ties between a man and a woman who once loved each other are hard for a sensitive man to break when the woman tries with every means at her disposal to maintain the old relationship. Moreover, in leaving his wife Arcadi was making a break with the "bourgeois" life he had lived since finishing his studies in Switzerland. For him I was a symbol as well as companion in the new life in socialist society which we both wanted to lead.

Nearly ten years later the O.G.P.U. was to deprive me of almost all Arcadi's letters when they searched our Moscow home. But one he wrote to me during this difficult period of our relationship remained hidden within the pages of a book.

"Darling Fredochka," he wrote,

I suppose you are right in your own way, your brutal way, and that I shall never be able to satisfy you as to the validity of my reason for acting in the way I do.

I shall not pick a quarrel on what you say about my "playing about with the idea of living a different sort of life"; "desiring to go on the same way as before" and a number of other things "read at the bottom of my heart." There is no use to argue about things on which we can never agree, and I shall not appeal to you to reverse your decision until I can tell you that the way is clear for my giving you as much of myself

as you can desire. I love you and I cannot and shall not believe that everything is over until you refuse to come to me when I shall ask you to do so on the strength of changes in my family life. There are for me two possibilities only in the future; either I shall embrace fully to the extent of 100 per cent the creed which will keep me going and make me forget you, or I shall accept it partially as I have done until now and you will be my beloved comrade in fighting all doubts which will arise. Nothing else is possible and the "desire to go on the same way as before" is death, which I do not feel I am ready to accept.

Both of us knew that life in Russia would be hard, that living space was difficult to obtain, and that the conveniences and comforts he had for many years enjoyed abroad would not be obtainable in Russia. Also since he was not a member of the Communist Party, he could never rise to a top position in the Soviet State. Arcadi, being well acquainted with both the old enduring Russian character and the Communists with whom he worked in London as a "non-party specialist," realized that my rosy picture of the Soviet Union was naive. But, like myself, he believed that a new and better world was being created in Russia, or could be built, if he and others like him devoted themselves to the endeavor without thought of personal advantage.

When my Fellowship came to an end in July, 1928, I took off for Moscow to join Arcadi, prior to his expected assignment to Japan where I should be able to complete the research work on my book on the cotton industry.

This time no smiling delegation met me at the Moscow station, and no luxurious quarters at the Metropol Hotel awaited me. Arcadi took me to a tiny room, not more than fifteen feet by twelve, with a single bed, a chest of drawers, and two straight chairs. There was not even a table, and I had to cook and iron and write on the wide window sill. But the flat was clean, and there was only one family in each of the four rooms sharing kitchen, bathroom and lavatory. For Moscow that was not bad. Unfortunately the room was not ours, but only lent to Arcadi for a few weeks. During the three months we lived in Moscow that year we moved twice.

Arcadi's salary was only 300 rubles a month, and since we were expecting to leave for Japan at any moment, I could not take a regular job. We just managed to live. Our rent was 50 rubles, meals at a cheap restaurant cost a ruble each. But bread was still cheap; and butter, when obtainable, about the same price as in England. Cigarettes were our greatest extravagance. At the end of each month I used to cart our empty bottles out to sell, or rake through our pockets for forgotten kopeks, to raise the price of a meal.

We were very happy. Discomfort and comparative poverty do not matter much so long as one is in love and has faith. And we both still had faith. Arcadi never regretted his house in London, and I had been poor most of the years since 1914. I wrote to my mother:

I feel sometimes that having found Arcadi is too good to be true. I feel that the fact that we have been able to be happy together in these conditions argues well for the future. We have begun life together in the worst material conditions instead of the best. All the same, we both look forward to the day when we have a bed each and spoons and knives, and a bath and toilet of our own.