6. THE ‘STALINIST’ SIXTIES AND DISCOVERING THE GAY SCENE

For me the 1960s did not start swinging until very late, eight years into the decade in fact. I diverted my repressed sexual desires into first the anti-nuclear weapons and anti-war movement, and later into other leftwing causes, culminating in becoming a member of the hardline, Stalinist factions of the YCL (Young Communist League) and later the Communist Party itself. There were lots of reasons for this regression from pacifism to Stalinism, not least disillusionment with the Wilson Labour government elected in 1964 which then betrayed all its promises. The Vietnam War also confused the simple anti-nuclear weapons and anti-war stance of the peace movement, as many leftwingers sympathized strongly with the National Liberation Front (Vietcong) and took sides with them against what they saw as a U.S. imperialist war. I also came into contact, at CND office where I worked, with several Communist Party members and sympathizers, and was undoubtedly influenced by them.

 

In particular there were two voluntary workers who came in regularly. One was a timid-looking old lady who was a softly-spoken Quaker. I was amazed when, during a General Election campaign, someone asked her if she was actively supporting the Labour campaign and she whispered apologetically:

 

‘Well, actually I’m CP’.

 

Lucy was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, yet somehow reconciled this with her religious and pacifist beliefs as a Quaker. The other voluntary worker was, I believe, a Labour Party member or supporter, but was an out-and-out Stalinist, condemning the U.S. and the West for stirring the Hungarian people to rebellion in 1956.

 

Dick Nettleton, the General Secretary of CND at the time, had like many others, left the Communist Party over the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, but this Labour supporter firmly blamed the ‘Voice of America’ for stirring up trouble:

 

‘It was all their fault, saying: ”Come on boys, rise up and overthrow the Reds”,’ she said.

 

No doubt there was an element of truth in this, for the West, whilst encouraging rebellion in their propaganda, never intended to lift a finger to help the people of Eastern Europe throw off the Communist yoke.

 

Yet another voluntary worker, a young girl, claimed she was ‘in love with Communism’, a phrase which could equally well have applied to me. I was stirred to emotion by the very symbols of Communism, and Socialist Realism was an art form I worshiped.

 

Another very influential factor in my becoming a Communist was my first two trips abroad, both thanks to CND and both to Socialist countries. In 1966 I ventured out of the UK for the very first time on Youth CND’s ‘Project 67' holiday by train to Moscow and Leningrad, passing thru East Germany and Poland on the way. I was very impressed by the Soviet Union, and by what little I saw of East Berlin from the train window. One of my traveling companions, who must have influenced me a lot, was a middle-aged Greek-Cypriot Communist tailor named Nicos whose lifelong ambition had been to visit Moscow and he lavishly praised almost everything we saw. Seeing a new housing estate as we passed thru West Germany he pointed excitedly out of the window and exclaimed:

 

‘Look at those new houses, it must be East Germany, the workers’ paradise,’ but he said very little when we saw the grim reality of the actual border with its fences and watchtowers, except to express deep disappointment that the border guards of the German Democratic Republic didn’t speak Greek, ‘the international language’ according to Nicos. In Russia itself, he refused to pay his fare on any of the buses, saying ‘tourists go free in the workers’ paradise’. He got very dirty looks from other passengers dropping their fares into the ‘honesty boxes.’

 

Two years later, as a leaving present from CND headquarters where I had worked for six years, I and Sheila, another staff member who was leaving, were offered a free holiday in the GDR (East Germany) courtesy of the East German Peace Council (Friedensrat der DDR). These invitations were sent to British trade unionists, peace groups, etc. every year. Sheila and I had little money and hitched most of the way to Berlin and back. We arrived a few days before the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. I was very impressed with everything I saw in the GDR, not least its extremely open and liberated gay scene at that time. It was so open, even straight members of our delegation noticed it and remarked on it. I met someone in an outrageous gay coffee bar next to the ‘G’ (pronounced ‘gay’) Bar pub, and as we walked hand-in-hand down Friedrichstrasse without anyone blinking an eyelid, he stopped a woman in the street and asked her to translate for him: ‘Your friend wants to know if it’s OK for him to come back and spend the night with you in your hotel,’ she said, quite unembarrassed. I replied: ‘Yes,’ and so had a very pleasant night.

 

One of our delegation came from the British Young Liberals, and was evidently quite impressed by the GDR’s Liberal Democratic Party (part of the Communist-led coalition). He seemed to be very leftwing indeed. He kept singing: ‘Harold Wilson is a Tory, And he lives at Number Ten, Keir Hardie’s all forgotten, By Harold Wilson and his merry men, Harold Wilson, Harold Wilson, Harold Wilson thinks he’s God, Harold Wilson thinks he’s God.’

 

In 1966 on my first visit to the Soviet Union I had been a Labour Party member, fast becoming disillusioned with the Wilson government. After my trip I soon decided I might as well leave the Labour Party, who called each other ‘comrade’, paid lip service to public ownership and sung ‘The Red Flag’, and join the real thing. It did not seem such a great leap of ideology, just switching to a Party which intended to practice what it preached from one which didn’t. So I became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, or to be precise, its youth wing, the Young Communist League. We used to meet in an outhouse of a huge, affluent West Hampstead mansion, where Ann, the daughter of the occupants, lived with her Irish boyfriend. We were a hardline Stalinist faction within the YCL, and anti-Stalinists called Ann ‘Madame Mao’, a name she detested being pro-Soviet and anti-Maoist. A number of us went as delegates to the YCL Congress in Scarboro’ after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Soviet fraternal delegates were booed, and the invasion was heavily criticized by the Congress, but our Stalinist faction conspicuously and defiantly gave the Soviet fraternal delegates and their allies a standing ovation. The North Koreans greatly impressed us when they presented a bust of the Great Leader Kim Il-Sung to an embarrassed anti-Stalinist leading comrade of the YCL, and we gave them a standing ovation as well, then later chatted with a Bulgarian fraternal delegate about ‘the correctness of the intervention of five Socialist countries to safeguard Socialist democracy in the Czecho-Slovak Socialist Republic’, and the revisionism of the British Communist Party and YCL.

 

I was already a hardline Stalinist by my second foreign trip in 1968, and I was overjoyed at the news that revisionist Czechoslovakia had been invaded by East Germany, the Soviet Union and three other Warsaw Pact countries. As a member of a CND delegation I had to button my lip somewhat, but Sheila was well aware of my views and said that I would make excellent cannon fodder for Nazism or Communism, I was so gullible. Even the British Peace Committee delegates (the BPC was a Communist-front peace organization, part of the Soviet led World Peace Council) followed the British Communist line and condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The British Communist daily, The Morning Star, was unavailable in the GDR after the invasion because of its anti-Soviet line.

 

I returned from the GDR in 1968 glowing with praise for that country, which from then on I saw as the ideal Socialist state, ‘a steel fortress of Socialism’ as I described it. As VIP visitors we had been guests of honor on the platform of a huge political rally in Marx-Engels Platz in East Berlin, which ostensibly was to condemn Germany’s Nazi past but in practice was a justification for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. We were also taken on a tour of the Brandenburg Gate and nearby ‘anti-fascist wall’ or ‘Wall of Peace’, where we climbed a dais with a GDR National People’s Army officer and stared at Westerners a few yards away on a similar dais near the Reichstag staring back at us. It was very surrealistic.

 

On this trip I actually felt I had tasted what it was like to be in the ruling party of a Socialist state. I had been in the GDR capital when the invasion of Czechoslovakia took place, and was then invited on to the visitors’ platform at a political rally justifying and approving this crushing of the Prague Spring, with a sea of blue-shirted FDJ (Free German Youth) members and other GDR citizens staring towards us and applauding. I had also been invited to inspect and approve the Berlin Wall, having watched a National People’s Army film and been given a pile of propaganda justifying why it was built. I enthusiastically approved both the rally’s endorsement of the Czechoslovak invasion and the ‘anti-fascist wall of peace’ sealing off West Berlin from the surrounding territory of the GDR, which I perversely took pleasure in calling Democratic Germany. I remember a fellow operator at the Overseas Telegraph Office commenting as he dealt with a telegram to or from the German Democratic Republic that it was ironic that the most undemocratic countries like East Germany and North Korea had the word ‘democratic’ in their official titles. I replied that perhaps they considered Socialism a more democratic system than capitalism, clearly implying that I agreed with them that anyone who opposed Socialism was an enemy of democracy.

 

I was so impressed with my visit to the GDR, not least by the extremely liberated 1968 gay scene in East Berlin, that the GDR became my model Socialist society, and I wrote my GDR hosts in the Peace Council for a color picture of the Stalinist GDR leader Walter Ulbricht, which then had pride-of-place in my bedroom for years.

 

The influence of all these events and the people I came into contact with drove me into the arms of the YCL and CP, and Stalin to me appeared a sort of heroic, father figure who had tried to bring about a new golden age of Communist equality and justice by brute force. George analyzed me later and said I needed something bigger than myself to believe in. When I first became a Stalinist, just before discovering the gay scene, I think I also needed justification, in place of religion which I had by then rejected, for my enforced celibacy. For me the Party and Stalin (long since dead and denounced by Krushchov) came before everything, and I could sacrifice myself and repress my sexual desires for the cause. As with the teenage girl ‘in love with Communism’, I had sublimated my sexual desires into an almost sexual love of the Party and its icons. Although I did not find them sexually attractive, Engels, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi-Minh, Walter Ulbricht and, above all, Stalin, were God-like father figures of authority whom I could worship and obey, and Communism and its symbols became an obsessive, almost sexual passion or fetish.

 

This complete surrender to a higher authority warped my true pacifist beliefs, so that I was willing to justify war and even some of Stalin’s purges as being ‘for the good of the cause’. I told myself that ‘the end justifies the means’. A very perceptive woman instructor on a GPO training course, who became familiar with my Stalinist and pro-capital punishment views of the time, told me I was very bitter, and that I would meet someone and fall in love eventually, be it a man or a woman, and my views would change. She was absolutely right. It was as though this warped, bitter period of my life was a direct result of being starved of romantic/sexual love and affection all thru my adolescence and well into my twenties.

 

In 1967 the Sexual Offences Act was passed which legalized homosexuality in certain very restricted and closely defined circumstances. Basically, all gay sex between men remained illegal unless they were both over 21, neither were serving in the armed forces and they magically found themselves alone together in a self-contained residence. Virtually any way they could possibly meet and indicate to each other they were sexually interested remains to this day (2003) illegal, and if a third person is present anywhere in the residence an offense is still being committed even if the two men are in a locked bedroom. This means the type of gay clubs with backrooms (legal all over Europe, in the US, Australia and elsewhere) remain illegal in Britain, despite their recent flourishing in London and some other cities. They still have to be undercover and surreptitious and the police can close them down at any time, so purpose built backrooms with proper facilities such as private cubicles and safe sex material still do not exist here. Moreover, backrooms cannot be openly advertised as such, so only those on the gay scene know of their existence. Those on the fringes of the gay world are therefore still forced into the few remaining public toilets and dangerous open spaces. (By 2005 the laws had at last changed in UK to make backrooms and places where more than one person was present when gay sex occurred legal. Pornographic films also went legally on sale for the first time in recent years, with an R18 restriction. Britain has finally entered the 21st Century.)

 

Despite the very limited and grudging nature of the law change, the 1967 Act was justly hailed as a great reform if only because it ended the ‘blackmailers’ charter’ by which all gay men could be threatened with being handed over to the law if they did not pay up.

 

The publicity surrounding the change in the law was considerable, and the London ‘Evening Standard’ published a series of articles on homosexuality, with descriptions of how gay men met each other in various locations around the capital. I read all this with avid interest and growing frustration, for all the locations were described in tantalizing detail but were not identified. I read of a cinema ‘where you cannot see the film for men getting up and leaving in pairs’ and of a wood in North London popular with less attractive gay men because it was dark, and I felt more miserable and isolated than ever. Here was I at 22, still a virgin and, as far as I knew, I had never even met another gay man, yet all around me other gay men were apparently having a whale of a time because they knew about the secret places this newspaper reporter had somehow sought out. I had no way of knowing the cinema was the Biograph in Victoria or the wood was located on Hampstead Heath and visited by gay men at night.

 

On a holiday with my mother in Blackpool that summer we were sitting on the beach and she started daydreaming aloud about when I got married and had children, and what sort of girl I might marry. I then told her I did not think I would ever marry, and in my stumbling way told her I was attracted to men and not women, but that I had never acted out my desires. I told her I was totally isolated and did not know how to meet others like myself. My mother had a gay boss at the time who lived with his partner, and I actually asked my mother if she could ask him for advice as to where I could meet other gay men. It is possibly the only time a gay man has asked his mother to put him in touch with the gay scene, but I was absolutely desperate. For nine long years, all thru my teenage since I was 13, I had kept my sexuality repressed. Now I knew there was an active gay world out there and I really was not the only one, I had to find this secret world somehow. Of course, before the ‘Standard’ articles were published I knew homosexuals existed, but I had no idea how common they were or that places where they met existed in London. I used to sometimes sit alone rather than with friends on buses to and from school in the vain hope that a homosexual would sit next to me and make advances. I was so naive it did not even enter my head to go into a public toilet, where I would have stood far more chance of making contact, nor to seek out bars and cinemas in the West End on the off chance of hitting the right one at the right time.

 

Some years before there had been stories in my local paper in Welwyn Garden City about ‘Queers in the Woods’, which people at work were talking and laughing about. I was so naive I rushed over to the wood in question on my bike in broad daylight, took a brisk walk thru wheeling my bike, and rode home again thinking the news stories were all nonsense. It never occurred to me to go after dusk without my bike and hang around, walking slowly. Also I used to dress and wear my hair in a most unattractive manner, influenced by my mother. Sexy clothes such as jeans and tee-shirts were simply not in my wardrobe. It was short-back-and sides, jacket and trousers, collar and tie for me all thru my teens and beyond.

 

One day I happened to be walking along Euston Road between St Pancras and Euston stations, when I saw a bookstall in a side street. On display were a number of girlie and male physique magazines. There were also some hardcore pornographic gay magazines, the like of which I have never seen on open display on a street stall in this country since that day in 1967. One in particular was displayed on the top of the stall pegged to a line, and depicted a man climaxing over another man’s face. This was in full view of old ladies, housewives and children walking by in the street. Anyway, needless to say this display caught my attention, but I could not pluck up the courage to buy any of the magazines.

 

After several furtive visits, on most of which I simply walked by the stall once or twice, I eventually took a deep breath and bought one of the physique magazines. As luck would have it it contained an advert for a gay guide, called ‘The Lavender World’, which listed places all over the world. It was an American magazine and I had to send off to California for this guide. I was very disappointed when a list of gay places in the U.S. came back to me. I wrote off again explaining it was the global list I wanted, and eventually got a list of places, including those in my home city of London. It was a very round-about way of breaking into the secret gay world, but in those days there was no gay press in this country and no gay guides of any sort.

 

So at last I had my magic key to the secret gay world which had eluded me so long, but the lock was not easy to open. To begin with the guide was not very accurate, and I wasted a lot of time trying to find places listed in King’s Cross which were, in fact, in King’s Cross , Sydney, Australia, but were listed under London, England. The bars I did find were very disappointing. Quite often only one bar was gay, often upstairs, and I inevitably went to the wrong bar. I also went at the wrong time - far too early in the evening, or even at lunchtime. I was also dressed completely wrong, and any gay person would have assumed a ‘straight’ person had walked into the bar by mistake. In actual fact, gay bars and clubs in London are extremely difficult places to make initial contacts, or so I have found. I can only think of three occasions in my life I have met anyone in a London bar or club, except for those which had a ‘backroom’ type scene going on. The first time was when a very extrovert character came up to George and myself in a gay bar next door to where we lived, and started ‘chatting us up’. If you are this type of person, extrovert and full of self-confidence, then you can make contacts practically anywhere. From my experience, gay men who score in pubs and clubs also manage to score in the street, on Tubes and at work as well. They are either incredibly attractive, or just have that knack of chatting-up complete strangers. I do not have this knack, people do not recognize me as gay (I have been challenged by bouncers on the doors of gay pubs accusing me of being ‘straight’) and I wouldn’t know how to chat-up or respond to a chat-up line anyway. The other two times I have met people in bars were very recent, after much prompting from friends, and were both disastrous, the other person being not at all suitable and I was to regret ever talking to them.

 

Eventually, working my way down the Lavender World list, I tried the Biograph cinema in Victoria, which was where I was to meet George three years later. I immediately made a mistake by sitting the ‘wrong’ side of the auditorium. The lefthand side, looking towards the screen, was where most of the activity took place. I sat on the right, where the older men and heterosexuals who just wanted to see the films tended to sit.

 

However, after a few minutes I became aware of the leg of the man next to me coming into contact with mine. At first I thought it was accidental, but it continued and I could feel a definite pressure. It led to my very first real sexual encounter, and was not very exciting or memorable. He was a middle-aged, bald-headed Italian, and after a few minutes’ fumbling in the darkened cinema he got up and went to the gents or moved elsewhere. However, to me, although nothing had really happened apart from some groping, it was wonderful because I knew my years of enforced isolation, frustration and celibacy were over. I now knew where to go and what to do. I changed seats and soon found the lefthand side of the auditorium was much better. At the age of 22 I had finally started experimenting with sex, about 10 years after most other people, gay or straight.

 

Over the next few weeks I had several quick sexual encounters in that cinema, and eventually someone actually arranged a date with me to meet again. He was due to play piano at a social club opposite a council estate in Camden Town. As it happens this was the very estate I was to live with my mother and George in a few years’ time. I sat in the background as his guest whilst he did his stint, and afterwards we went to Victoria and booked into a Red Shield Hotel, run by the Salvation Army. (It was a proper hotel, not a hostel for down-and-outs, but it was reasonably priced). That was the first time I went to bed or stayed overnight with a man, and so could be described as where I first really lost my virginity.

 

Over the next few months I acquired a Swiss boyfriend, who lived in West Kensington. I had met him in the Biograph too, and I stayed overnight at his place several times. What my mother thought of my suddenly staying out all night I do not know, but I was 22, and I knew it was time I left Welwyn Garden City and moved back to London to a place of my own.

 

In early 1968, at my mother’s suggestion, I tried moving into a spare room in my father’s flat in Hampstead, but soon realized it was a mistake. My grandmother was upset and said it would hurt my mother after she brought me up, for me to leave her to go and live with my father. Of course, it was not like that at all - I just wanted to live in London, and it was mother’s idea to move into my Dad’s flat. However, she was always saying things she did not really mean and regretting it later, and so I frantically searched for a room of my own. I found a terrible place in Stoke Newington, and took it out of desperation. My father was furious when he found out I was moving, since my mother had left him suddenly 17 years before and he felt history was repeating itself. I tried to explain that my grandmother was not happy with the arrangement, and I thought it was also upsetting my mother. I would rather be completely independent, then they could not say I favored one rather than the other.

 

The Stoke Newington room, above a tire shop, was in fact half a room divided by a plyboard partition. You could hear every noise thru it, although I never did discover who lived a few inches away in the other half of the room. My mother visited me there several times and thought it was awful, and a fire hazard with all those rubber tires stored below. When she came she had to sit on the bed, and if she stretched out her legs they touched the dividing wall and blocked the door. There was just room for the bed, a washbasin, a little Belling cooker, a chair and chest of drawers.

 

I was rescued a few months later when I met Kenny, an Irishman from Armagh. Needless to say, I met him in the Biograph, for I did not go to any other gay places. He had a large room in Camden High Street, and said the room next to his would become vacant very soon. Meanwhile I could move in with him. So I did, and we spent some happy times together. He was my second real boyfriend, and my first serious affair.

 

David, his very attractive next door neighbor, was not gay. He was very active in the Socialist Labour League, a Trotskyist organization which later became the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, and Kenny also supported them. David and I used to have arguments because I was an out-and-out Stalinist member of the Communist Party, their sworn enemy. I liked David nevertheless. Eventually he did move out, and I took over his room, decorating it with Maoist posters I bought in the Chinese political bookshop (run by an Albanian) a few doors down the High Street.

 

This was really my first live-in affair. The top floor of the rooming house was almost like a self-contained flat with Kenny’s large bed-sitting room and my smaller one next to it, each with a washbasin, and a shared little Belling cooker on the landing outside. To reach our two rooms and little ‘kitchen’ there was a door at the top of the stairs. We had to go down one flight for the communal toilet and bathroom.

 

I have happy memories of listening to records with Kenny, particularly a Marilyn Monroe album of songs from her movies, and of eating Chinese sweet and sour pork dishes from a nearby take-away. He didn’t want me to leave him soon after we met and go on my holiday to East Germany, but I wasn’t going to turn down a free holiday and the adventure of a lifetime to a country I had been longing to visit since a brief glimpse from a train two years before.

 

Our relationship seemed to work OK, though naturally I got teased about my musical tastes. (I had put the Swiss boyfriend off by bringing round a tape of Jerry Lee Lewis ‘Live’ At the Star-club Hamburg which he said was ‘just a terrible noise’. He evidently did not think a madman screaming ‘You ain’t nothing but a Hound Dog’ whilst smashing a piano keyboard with his boot was the ideal romantic music to make love to.) I once took Kenny to a Jerry Lee recording of a TV show at Elstree, and wore my new blue drape Teddy-boy jacket made-to-measure by Burton’s the tailors a year earlier. He said he would never go with me again wearing that awful jacket which he felt showed him up, and he said Jerry Lee was arrogant and treated his fans with contempt. Gay people just don’t seem to dig good rocking music and hip clothing and hairstyles, or at least those of us who do are in a tiny minority within a minority, but then I am used to that, having been a member of a minority Stalinist faction in the Communist Party. I have never sought to go with the common herd, and revel in being different!

 

My life with Kenny was OK at home, but we had no life outside. He preferred to go to even the local cinemas alone, or at least sit separate, in case he picked up someone, something I could never do in an ordinary cinema. He preferred to take a ‘girlfriend’ with him on trips back home to Ireland, so we very rarely went out together and never on a holiday.

 

Things trundled along, however, until New Year’s Eve when I happened to run into a bisexual acquaintance of mine in Trafalgar Square, and foolishly I invited him back for the night. I introduced him to Kenny, and before I knew what was happening they had hit it off together.

 

I was very immature and got terribly jealous, though it was entirely my fault for bringing him back in the first place and then letting him meet Kenny. We both used to see other people, but for some reason this episode really upset me and we had a terrible row. I played the Star-club Hamburg album at full volume at about 2 a.m. in the morning to vent my frustration, and Kenny knocked on my door begging me to show some consideration for the old lady who lived underneath.

 

My mother got to hear about the row, though not all the details, and evidently decided it was time she moved back to London to take me under her wing again. Of course it was a big mistake, and I allowed myself to be talked into it. She said she was all alone in the house in Welwyn Garden City now my brother and I had left, and if she exchanged it for a council flat in Camden I could move back in with her. I did try to explain I had a different lifestyle now, and would want to bring ‘friends’ (i.e. ‘trade’ or boyfriends) back sometimes, but she seemed ready to agree to any conditions.

 

So she got a flat in Camden Town and I moved in. Kenny was disappointed, but I still kept in touch with him and stayed overnight at his place occasionally. During the next year, 1969, I went in hospital to have a long postponed operation on my upper lip. I had been born with a cleft palate and hare lip, and had many operations on it as a child, but in my teens I had put off this final operation as I just could not face any more hospitalization. Now I had been on the gay scene for 2 years, my appearance began to worry me more, so I went in and had it done. I still think they could have made a better job of it and that a very simple operation would make my upper lip quite symmetrical instead of lop-sided, but I shall not bother at this late stage in my life.

 

At this time I had a boyfriend, Billy, who visited me at my Mum’s flat occasionally - I remember we all watched the TV pictures of the first manned moon landing together. Billy rang to check how I was in hospital, and the nurse who relayed this message to me swore she had spoken with a woman on the phone, he had such a camp voice.

In the summer of 1970 I planned my second trip to the Soviet Union, this time in the company of two colleagues in the local Communist Party, and the YCL before that - Steve and his sister Janice. We had been on holiday together to Paris in 1969, slumming it in a cheap bug-infested hotel and eating baked beans out of cans. I managed to give them the slip one time and scored in a Paris version of the Biograph cinema. My most vivid memory is of an incident during a visit to the zoo, when Janice, who was a big girl, came soaking wet out of a primitive public toilet of the hole-in-the-floor variety, laughing and screaming at the top of her voice as English-speaking tourists looked on in horror: ‘I fell dahn the bleedin’ crap’ole!’

 

After we had been discussing the planned Soviet trip in my mother’s flat, she suddenly decided to come with us, and my mother told me later that she was worried I might try to defect, so wanted to keep an eye on me. I had become so infatuated with Communism this must have been a real concern to her. I even insisted on putting up a Communist election poster in our window, although my mother had in the past voted Conservative like her mother, and would never dream of voting left of Labour. No doubt she was quite horrified at what the neighbors would think, but I had tasted independence and was no longer the same person as the timid one who had left home over a year before.

 

In the summer we all flew off to Leningrad from Heathrow by Aeroflot, the Soviet airline (my mother thought we were making up the name, she had misheard us discussing a flight by ‘Aeroflop’!) It was the Communist Party of Great Britain’s ‘Lenin Centenary’ friendship trip to the USSR, and we got VIP treatment. Caviar, champagne and delicious chocolates were served to us on the flight. During the holiday an outbreak of cholera around Volgograd meant a cruise down the Volga to that city had to be canceled, much to our disappointment. My mother felt especially let down, since the boat trip was what she was most looking forward to. Our little Stalinist group was disappointed not to be visiting the city which proudly bore our hero’s name of Stalingrad for years, and to see the gigantic Motherland statue wielding her sword above the Great Patriotic War battleground.

 

At no time did our ‘Soviet comrades’ (as we called them) mention the dreaded word ‘cholera’. Russians were much less straightforward and honest than the East Germans, as I had already discovered on previous trips to those countries. On my first Soviet trip, in response to a question about the plight of conscientious objectors in the Soviet Union I was met first by incomprehension, and then an assurance that ‘such people don’t exist in the Soviet Union’. In East Germany when someone asked why the Wall was built they were told with blunt honesty ‘to stop people from leaving’. No such frankness with the Soviet comrades on this trip either, for Heaven forbid such a third world disease as cholera should exist in the Soviet Union. All they would say was the river trip had been canceled because.... ‘Well, you know the situation. It is difficult.’ So we were flown instead to two cities - Ulyanovsk (Lenin’s birthplace of Simbirsk now honored with his family name) on the banks of the upper Volga unaffected by the epidemic down South, and Kharkov in the Ukraine.