Free Radical Page 4
The house was managed by a terrifying man whose weepy, wilting wife and young horsey mistress occupied adjacent bedrooms. He patrolled the corridors at night, seeking out other people’s vices. The other permanent presence, the ‘Host’, was there to organize social activities. Mine was a man called Derek, who strongly resembled the actor Donald Pleasance and had the same creepy, ingratiating voice. As I came to know him, he gradually revealed his politics. He was a dedicated Nazi, a firm believer in the Aryan master race, and kept Third Reich memorabilia in his suitcase. Despite being physically repulsive, he had the same charisma as my communist schoolfriend David and translated it effortlessly into sexual conquests. Every week he would assess the new female intake and draw up a shortlist and timetable for seduction. As far as I could establish from the bedroom traffic, he was invariably on target.
I sought refuge from these characters and from my social awkwardness in the mountains, where my energy and physique could prevail and I could daydream unhindered by real people. One exception was a pretty, shy nurse, Penny, from Manchester, whom I only really got to know as she was leaving, after which we exchanged poignant letters – she from the night desk of a cancer ward where she cared for the terminally ill – until the faint embers of our holiday romance finally burned out.
When I try now to come to a balanced assessment of my childhood and my parents, I am reminded of Chou En-lai’s comment that two hundred years was too short a time to judge the impact of the French Revolution. But perhaps fifty years is long enough to reflect fairly on my upbringing without the intervening feelings of guilt, anger, revenge – and, finally, gratitude. There is now only one witness left, my brother, who is ten years younger and experienced different things at a different stage in our family life.
Something happened in childhood that cauterized my emotions. In contrast to the warmth of my own marriages and my strong parental feelings, I came to feel almost total indifference towards my parents. When they died, I felt a vague sense of sadness and guilt that there was nothing more: no tears. I met my father in hospital before he died and we had an awkward conversation about practical things before he told me that he had concluded his life and wished to meet his Maker. He was just seventy years old. As he talked, I understood for the first time the shape and meaning of his life’s work. He was a fine, perhaps great, craftsman, with a genuine talent for communicating his skills. A generation of young people had learned from him. He had become President of the NAS not, as I imagined, to fight the good fight against the opposite sex but to promote vocational education, for which he had produced a national template. He had become President of York’s Guild of Building, heir to those medieval geniuses who created the Minster. He had devoted his retirement not just to Mrs Thatcher but, as governor of a secondary modern which became a comprehensive school, to encouraging youngsters from underprivileged backgrounds to learn a trade. His tragedy was that of the country: the skills were no longer valued. The ‘ arty-farty’ people had taken over: good with words and ideas but barely able to change a light bulb. I was one of them. And when I most needed words, I couldn’t find any.
My mother survived more than twenty years of self-contained widowhood which my brother and I punctuated with dutiful visits. At the end there were a few months of unhappy confusion in a care home, and she died and was cremated far from her York home, in London. Her Christianity was deep and meaningful, and was mocked at her funeral by my having organized a locum priest whom she had never met and who struggled to remember her name.
Months later, Keith and I sought, in some way, to make amends and tidy up our past by mingling our mother’s ashes with our father’s in the grounds of York crematorium. It was a well-intentioned gesture but ambiguous: we both knew that they had merely coexisted. Today, couples like my parents would have split up, but in those days convention and household economics kept them together. In later life they developed an irritable companionship and mutual toleration and perhaps, even, rekindled some of their earlier affection.
For better or worse, they made me; and my good and bad traits originated with them. From my father I inherited his restless energy, drive, ambition and determination, some of his Gradgrindian prejudices against the idle and self-indulgent, and his weakness for the workaholic bottle. His dominating personality largely obliterated that of my mother, whose creativity and intelligence were kept well under lock and key when I might have appreciated them. Nonetheless, I have distant memories, as a young child, of a kind and gentle person, and my own family has, I hope, uncovered a little of that capacity in me.
For many years I blotted out my parents from my consciousness. Like many children, I learned how to shut my ears to the noise of rows and my eyes to what I didn’t want to see. I created a walled garden of fantasy and reverie to hide in. The walls helped me through childhood and adolescence and the bitter estrangement from my parents that followed. I only came recently to understand that the defences I created were not on account of what my father and mother did to me – they were good parents, generous with their time and modest financial resources – but because of what they did to each other. Now that the wall has gone, I look back at them with more affection and gratitude.
Chapter 3
Ivory Towers
The Cambridge of the early 1960s was, at first sight, not greatly different from that of today, with the exception of a gross imbalance between men and women. Those with a discerning eye for class analysis could also see the university as I saw it, roughly divided into two: the privileged, lazy, effete products of traditional English public schools on the one hand; and the hard-working, undervalued, grammar-school boys on the make, like me, on the other.
I did, however, have one major advantage. In an institution as ferociously competitive as Cambridge was – and almost certainly still is – there is considerable merit in starting at the bottom, unburdened by high expectations. A ‘NatSci’ at Fitz from an obscure north-country grammar school and digs miles from the centre of town was as low as it was possible to get. My new college friends and I felt lucky to have scraped into the university at all, and were proud to ride around in our gowns and entertain awestruck relatives by walking them round the old colleges. We developed a camaraderie based on affected yobbishness, exaggerating our provincial accents and proletarian ancestry. Our main aim was to survive, which sounds more challenging than it was, since outright exam failure was extremely rare. (Two of my friends managed it, however, one succumbing to a breakdown, another departing bewildered and in tears back to Accrington.)
Fitzwilliam, after my first year, became a ‘real’ college with an adventurously designed new building and its sense of inferiority lifted. It provided me, also, with some new and rewarding friends. One was an Indian economist, Sarwar Lateef: unusually, a married student and, even more unusually, a Muslim married to a Hindu. He had enormous eyes and an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, economic development, and for India. More than anyone, he filled me with curiosity about India, which led to a vacation trip after my third year and a lifelong love affair with the country, professionally and personally.
Another was John Costello, a larger-than-life character who shared my involvement in the Union and, later, a twenty-first birthday party. He was a shameless exhibitionist, whose desperation for attention often took the form of loudly, and without provocation, insulting some hapless individual, chosen at random. His views were outrageously reactionary, from affectation as much as conviction; and in spite of, or because of, being one of Cambridge’s few products of the comprehensive system, he was a fierce advocate of selective and fee-paying education. He introduced me to some equally bizarre characters, like an advertising genius, Robin Wight, and a Georgian prince, Michael Coward. His circle of friends also included a brilliant history student, Tom Glazer, who later worked with me on the Liberal magazine and, in the nicest way, tried to teach me how to write. As for Costello, he did little work and was almost certainly unemployable. But he developed a career as a freela
nce writer, produced the best-written account of Concorde, and moved on to traitors and spies. His colourful world of far-right politics, Soviet exiles and conspiracy theorists obtained him unprecedented access to KGB files at the fall of the Soviet Union. Before he could complete the culmination of his life’s work he died suddenly on a transatlantic flight, leaving his friends and fans to speculate, as I am sure he would have wanted, that he was the victim of a KGB murder plot.
After an initial sulk, having failed to persuade the college authorities to let me switch to economics, I began to appreciate the privilege of being taught by some of the world’s great scientists. Although the global centre of scientific gravity has firmly shifted to the USA, Cambridge in the early 1960s was a formidable place and our lecturers were pre-eminent in their fields. I disregarded tutorial advice and decided to enjoy science and chose the most exotic combination of new subjects I could assemble within the Tripos rules, including geology, the history and philosophy of science, experimental psychology, metallurgy, and chemistry, of only the last of which I had any previous knowledge. For the first and only time in my life I studied for the joy of it and discovered unexpected pleasures: the emerging science of plate tectonics and continental drift; a self-effacing genius called Cottrell who had changed the science of metallurgy; experimentally based explanations of the complex workings of the human mind; and theories that set out how new ideas were born and then destroyed.
This enthusiasm obviously communicated itself to the examiners since, to the amazement of the college authorities, and my friends, I finished just short of a first in the first-year exams. Unfortunately, I got carried away and, in the second year, recklessly added to an already overloaded portfolio with politics, drama, and an unhappy and passionate, albeit unconsummated, love affair with a Girton girl called Tanya. I lurched from false modesty to arrogant overconfidence and painfully discovered that political intrigue, memorizing lines from George Bernard Shaw, and late-night lovers’ quarrels with Tanya were not the best mental preparation for learning the names and shapes of hundreds of fossils. I managed a respectable but undistinguished second in the Part One exams and was, thereafter, released to economics.
The relationship with Tanya cast a long shadow over this period. Cambridge undergraduate women were outnumbered by men by approximately ten to one. For those who were attractive, like her, there was constant attention from male suitors. Adjusting from the monastic life of A levels at academic girls’ schools to this cornucopia of male choice and endless flattery was not easy. Immature, inexperienced men – like me – didn’t help. This was the only seriously unhappy relationship I have ever had.
Even without such distractions, it was difficult in three eight-week terms to absorb all the intellectual excitement of the place. Outside our subject area, there was a ferment of debate around the nature of God. The Bishop of Woolwich had published his book Honest to God, questioning a large part of orthodox Christian teaching. Cambridge theologians responded in public lectures packed to overflowing with students. A civil war had broken out in English literature and many of us forsook the chemistry labs to listen to F. R. Leavis in full flow. A Marxist economic historian, Maurice Dobb, lectured to packed halls about the Soviet Union.
Not all the activity was so serious. This was an era of satire and inventive comedy and the Cambridge Footlights was building on the breakthrough achieved by That Was the Week That Was and, before that, the surreal humour of the Goons and the hilarious but dry, self-pitying, social drama of Tony Hancock.
Even in the self-regarding, narcissistic cocoon of undergraduate life we were also aware that this was a period of great political turbulence and excitement, unmatched since the rise of Fascism in the 1930s and not to be matched again until the global ideological upheavals at the end of the Cold War. Kennedy was in the White House and, in my first term, there was the Cuban missile crisis, with the genuine fear of nuclear annihilation. Macmillan had spoken in 1960 of the ‘wind of change’ in Africa, and the world of British imperial superiority and certainty was disappearing fast. There was a new debate as to whether Britain’s destiny lay, instead, in Europe. The disintegration of empire, in turn, had triggered a new preoccupation with race. I had never met a black or Asian person until I arrived at Cambridge, but suddenly the politics of race was everywhere: apartheid and Mandela’s Rivonia trial; a growing debate about non-white immigration which was changing the face of Britain for the first time in centuries; and a questioning of racial discrimination, formerly the natural order of things but now, suddenly, unacceptable.
The certainties of British politics – the apparently endless rule of the Conservatives and the hitherto irrelevant, impotent, socialist alternative – were starting to crumble and, with them, the self-confidence of the British Establishment. Nothing quite captured the spirit of the time, the sudden fracturing of old certainties, than the Profumo affair: a defence minister frolicking in a swimming pool at an aristocratic residence with a naked prostitute who happened simultaneously to be managing relationships with a Jamaican drug-dealer and a Russian spy.
Yet, although there was a growing irreverence for, and lack of deference towards, those who occupied exalted positions, today’s cynicism and pessimism about politics and politicians had not yet arrived. Democratic politics mattered. Protest was passionate but innocent and good-humoured, as with the anti-apartheid banners that appeared between the spires of King’s College, planted by rock climbers to the bafflement and annoyance of the college authorities. Even if I had not yet started to incubate serious political ambitions, it was difficult not to be caught up in the whirl.
The issue was: which party? For reasons already described, I was attracted to the Liberals, but they were not a major force. I was heavily influenced by the big national debate on entry into the Common Market, which was gathering momentum and passion. I knew nothing about Europe, beyond a short school trip to Germany, chiefly remembered for inedible food and a ride in a Mercedes at high speed on an autobahn, and I have never got to grips with modern languages. But for someone young, struggling to understand big political ideas, the arguments reached to the core of what the country’s future was about: wallowing in the fading imperial past, which I now associated with the debacle at Suez and those resisting the rapid retreat from African colonies, or moving on to a project that seemed to combine practicality and idealism. The Conservatives seemed on the right side of this particular argument, despite my father’s conviction that his party’s leaders were compounding the treachery of decolonization by taking leave of their collective senses over Europe. What baffled me was the anti-colonial Labour Party whose leader talked nostalgically about a ‘thousand years of British history’. A decisive intervention came from the Liberal leader, Jo Grimond, whose sharp wit and eloquence won over a lot of impressionable minds, including mine.
I decided to spend a few weeks sampling the alternatives by doing the rounds of the university political societies. The student Conservatives enjoyed much support, were professional, and, to my surprise, were not dominated by public school toffs but by people with backgrounds like mine. They seemed to be well connected, with weekly visits from cabinet ministers, some of them highly impressive, like the liberal-minded colonial secretary, Iain McLeod, the Education Secretary, Sir Edward Boyle, and the brilliant but rather spooky Enoch Powell, who had recently resigned from the government. Although individually the young Tory student politicians were pleasant and plausible, collectively they were repulsive. Their sycophancy towards visiting MPs and authority in general was flesh-creeping. They had an arrogant self-belief and self-importance based on the confidence (well placed as it turned out) that, at the age of twenty, they were already on a conveyor belt to political power. Whilst there was a liberal veneer, I knew, because I had seen it first-hand, that their activist base depended on the energies and prejudices of bigoted people like my father, whom they were only too happy to use. Many years later, when the Conservatives were in the wilderness, they started to won
der aloud why they were seen as a ‘nasty party’. Back then, there was no such self-doubt, since the Conservatives were in power and, even if the cracks in their popularity were beginning to appear after a decade in office, the sense of being ‘the natural party of government’ was pervasive. The side of me that was ambitious and calculating – and also wanted to please my father – yearned to join them. Yet some rebellious, bloody-minded streak stopped me doing so.
The Labour Club was off-putting for different reasons. Unlike the Tories, who welcomed converts and new recruits, the young Labour activists treated all newcomers with deep suspicion. One might be a ‘careerist’, or a Special Branch infiltrator. Activists were dressed up in donkey-jackets emblazoned with the name of a leading building contractor, designed to give the impression that they had come to Cambridge via a construction site, and there were earnest discussions about how best to show solidarity with the latest unofficial strike in the West Midlands car industry. Coming from a city where the workers never went on strike and many voted Conservative, despite the efforts of my friend David, this obsession with industrial militancy seemed to me remote from reality, let alone university life. And, since many of the militants had public school accents and had clearly never been near a factory, they were transparently phoney. Meetings were dominated by procedural wrangles about substantive motions and amendments which bored and bewildered me. There were coded references to different party factions which were lost on those of us who had not mastered the code. I struggled to see the connection between the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacist revolt on the one hand, and the mild economic downturn that Britain was experiencing in the early 1960s on the other. Unlike the Tories, the Labour Party itself clearly did not take the students very seriously, and none of the Labour student politicians were ever heard of again. I did not hesitate long before moving on.