Last Things (36 page)

Yet there was no doubt that he had, to use the fashionable word of that period, charisma. Characters as different as Charles, Gordon Bestwick, Grenfell, Muriel, all recognised it and succumbed to it; perhaps some envied it. Quite why he had it, or what it consisted of, none of them could analyse, even later in cooler blood. He was a fair organiser, though not as competent as some of his student colleagues: he had considerable powers of decision. He possessed some knowledge of the theory, Marcusian and so on, which was running round the student world. His intelligence was better than average, but Gordon and Charles couldn’t have thought him a flier. He was an impassioned but repetitive speaker.

None of that added up to the effect which he produced. Perhaps the answer was quite simple. He really did feel exactly as others round him felt, and had the gift of voicing it an instant before they recognised it for themselves. That night in Trinity, over a year before, Charles had said – with self-knowledge, with inhibiting self-knowledge – in politics you couldn’t afford to be too different from everyone else. In behaviour Charles to some extent acted on that maxim, and Bestwick more so: but not in feeling. Whereas to Olly it came as natural as his strong-muscled walk.

He had no irony, such as Charles in private couldn’t suppress. Irony would have been a crippling disqualification for Olly’s kind of leadership, and probably for any other. When he heard a battalion of his followers, mobilised and drilled according to plan, chanting Dinshaw-out (Dinshaw was the principal of the college), Johnson-out, Wilson-out, Brezhnev-out, any other disyllable-out, Olly was at one with them, all he wanted was to join in. Charles and others like him might have forced themselves to join in, but they would have felt the discomfort of simultaneously watching performing animals and being performing animals themselves.

In a similar manner, Olly didn’t suffer from intellectual reserves. Quite sensibly, he believed that student protests could, before too long, exact their own demands from universities. Equally sensibly, he believed that student protests would end where they began, unless they were supported by, and finally submerged in, the working class. The working class, with students acting as catalysts, was the only force which could break the old order – as an article of faith, Olly believed that that would happen. Gordon Bestwick argued that it was intellectually untenable. Gordon, still living among the English working class, didn’t dramatise them. Olly, more prosperous, did. His faith was untouched. Once the working class took over, he was willing not to lead anything or anyone again.

That Christmas, Olly and his London lieutenants met a number of times at Chester Row. They weren’t trying to hasten the revolt – the current word was blast-off – at the college. That wasn’t necessary, it was coming anyway, they judged it good tactics to let it start, as it were, out of the ruck, with no leaders at all. What they wanted was to be ready with plans and take control just before the countdown.

It was the kind of preparation and patient waiting which would have been familiar enough to any politician, public or private. Their planning of the phases of the revolt, so it appeared in the event, was excellent. Here Gordon, Charles and others who were let into their confidence had nothing to give. They were beginners, and Olly’s staff were experienced professionals. Some of them were first-class organisers. It was a mistake to think that young men in their early twenties (most of the London group were round Muriel’s age) had much to learn about organisation. That didn’t require experience, but energy and some clear minds. These did their job as briskly and unfussily as Hector Rose in middle age might have done it. Where they could still have learned something from Hector Rose was, not in primary organisation, but in foreseeing consequences.

Under the cover of those plans, which the Cambridge cell imbibed lessons from, they were also devising one of their own. It was not clear (or at least I never knew) who had the first conception, but Gordon and Charles passed it on to Olly, and Muriel used persuasion on him too. Not that he made difficulties about others’ ideas; he was ready to give these bright outsiders a run: that showed one of his strengths. All the evidence suggested that he was quick and active in getting their plan worked out. He thought it valuable enough to call it top secret (they had adopted many of the official forms). A number of followers had to receive logistic instructions, but the only persons Olly informed about the inner purpose were his numbers two and three.

The plan was, in essence, quite simple. The revolt, when under full control, was designed to occupy the main block of college buildings. Food, drink, bedding, new style chemical closets, even books, were already being stored in a warehouse close by, enough for a stay of one month. As a result of American experience, the principal’s office and the administrative floors were to be seized also, in the first hour – which was pencilled in as 4.30 a.m. (shortly before dawn on a summer morning). All that would have been arranged, in precisely the same fashion, without a minute’s change in timetable, if the Cambridge cell had not existed. The only addition that they and their sub-plan had brought about seemed innocuous enough. It was that there should be a side foray, needing perhaps a dozen men, to take possession of two offices in the biochemistry department.

That was not so innocuous as it seemed. Almost everyone concerned with secrets, particularly military secrets, lived under the illusion that they are better kept than ever happened. We had learned that in the war. Heads of State rested happily in the conviction that their own ministers were totally ignorant of the manufacture of nuclear bombs. They probably were: but there were thousands, including humble and entirely unexpected people, who weren’t.

Through an identical process, which was set going by words slipping out, occasionally in fits of conscience, but more often because of self-importance or even the sheer excitement and ebullience of living, friends of Gordon and Charles had picked up what to officials would have been a horrifying amount of knowledge about government work on biological warfare. Second-year science students such as Guy Grenfell could make a fairly sharp guess about the operations at the Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton: they could have written out a list of the viruses which were being cultivated, and the diseases which were available as weapons of war.

Further, they wouldn’t have had to guess, they knew, which pieces of the work had been subcontracted to university departments. Here their intelligence was often precise. They knew, for instance, that research upon psittacosis was being carried out, under Ministry of Defence subsidy, at this London college. They knew it. The difficulty was to prove it. That was the point of the sub-plan, which someone had christened Asclepius. Two professors were known – one of the best intelligence contacts was an obscure laboratory assistant – to be in charge. It occurred to Gordon and Charles that, if their offices could be ransacked, there might with good luck be some evidence. They didn’t expect much. They had consulted some acquaintances in the Civil Service and had learned how secret contracts were drawn up. Probably not so much through delicacy as through prudence, they didn’t come to me, who if I had chosen could have told them more. They had considered employing a professional safe-breaker. They had made up their minds to look for ‘indications’. Even a hint about biological war would be enough, Olly had become vociferous in proclaiming, to ‘blow the roof off’. They could get their hands on nothing so useful. There was no propaganda equal to this.

That sounded cynical, just as their operations sounded, because they were thought out. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that any of them, facing the prospect of biological war, were in the remotest degree cynical. Young men like Gordon and Charles – it is worth remembering, that during this period of planning Gordon was not yet twenty, and Charles a year younger – knew a good deal about power politics. Other states might possess both ultimate weapons and the will to use them. Charles was an amateur of military history, and knowledgeable about it. Nevertheless, when it came to the manufacture of disease, they felt exactly like the simplest of the young people around them. They felt a sheer horror, not in the least sophisticated, naive if you like, that this should be done. That it was done in their own country didn’t soften the horror, but added anger to it.

THROUGH the spring they were still waiting for their time. While I remained in total ignorance of any of their plans. When I saw Charles, which wasn’t often, he was in good spirits, composed and lively, interesting on books he had read. He gave no sign of strain that I perceived. When, months later, I heard something of the story, I wondered how much I had missed or whether he had become a good actor.

One morning in May, Martin rang me up from Cambridge. What about a day at Lord’s? I didn’t see much inducement, but he pressed me. When I had said yes, I felt cross with him. He must have known that I had given up watching cricket: even if I hadn’t, the match, when I looked it up in the papers, had no attractions either for him or me. It wasn’t even good weather. Although the sky was bright, it wasn’t warm enough to sit with pleasure in the open air.

Waiting for me in front of the pavilion, Martin gave an impassive smile. Not too exciting to be unbearable, he said. We were almost alone, sitting there in the cold sunlight. Above the spring-fresh grass, the stands shone white and empty. Nothing was happening. A few runs, no wickets. From one end a large man with a long run bowled medium-paced inswingers to a legside field. From the other end an almost identical man did almost identically the same. Curious how the game had developed, Martin commented. It was probably still great fun to play. He couldn’t pretend it was great fun to watch.

Yet he continued to watch with absorption. The technique was always interesting, he said. All I admitted was that the fielding looked marvellous, out of comparison better than when I followed the game. The score seeped up to twenty-five after an hour’s play. One wicket fell, to a good catch at leg-slip.

Just before one o’clock Martin said that we had better have a snack before the rush. I was glad to move, but I couldn’t understand where the rush was coming from. In the pavilion bar, under layers of team photographs, stood half a dozen men, one of whom Martin knew. To one of the ledges under the photographs, we carried our sandwiches and glasses. Martin continued to talk cricket. I asked how he had had the inspiration for us to spend the day like this. He looked at me with a fraternal recognitory glance, and then exchanged a word with his acquaintance close by.

As we left the bar, he suggested that we might take a walk round the ground. Through gaps in the stands, one saw the players still moving in the middle, not yet come in for lunch. We arrived at the practice nets, the expanse of turf behind the Nursery end. There was no one anywhere near.

‘Yes, there is something,’ he said.

I was at a loss. Then I realised that he was replying to my question in the bar, which had actually been entirely innocent, just a mock complaint.

‘I’m not sure how reliable my information is,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘Had you heard that Charles and company are trying to crash Porton wide open?’

That was the first intimation I had. Those meetings in Muriel’s study, which were later described to me, had not been so much as suspected, and still weren’t, either by Martin or me, that morning at Lord’s. He had been given – so I discovered – only the slimmest of hints.

It was enough for him. Most people would not have taken so long, wouldn’t have eased away time by technical analyses of the game, before they broke the news. But Martin, as he grew older, had developed the habit, not uncommon in men who had seen many things go wrong, of deliberately slowing himself down, of adapting the displeasing to his own pace. It was a habit which I had noticed long before in his predecessor in college office, Arthur Brown.

‘I’ve heard nothing at all,’ I said.

‘Does it make any kind of sense? Is it in their line?’

‘It could be.’

‘How would they get hold of anything? I suppose it mightn’t be impossible.’

He knew very little more. Martin and I exchanged remarks about biological warfare in our old kind of Whitehall shorthand. We might have been back in wartime, talking about the most recent news of the nuclear bomb. In fact, that was why Martin had led me to the practice ground, where we could speak without being overheard, just as in the war we held some secret conversations in the middle of Hyde Park.

‘It could be dangerous,’ said Martin.

‘Who for?’ It didn’t need asking.

‘For anyone who wants to broadcast something he hasn’t any right to know.’

‘Yes. Meaning Charles.’

‘Charles. One or two others as well, I fancy. I’m thinking of Charles.’

We had reached, walking slowly, the rough and piebald grass where, during festive matches, the tents were pitched.

Martin said: ‘He might get into desperate trouble. If he gives them a chance to use the law against him, they could take it. He wouldn’t stand a chance.’

‘They’ll try to keep it quiet–’

‘He might have gone too far for that.’ He was speaking very quietly. ‘Good God, he’s making a nuisance of himself.’

‘That’s the least of it.’

‘Why in hell does he want to set up as the conscience of the world?’

For an instant, I got away from thoughts of Charles.

‘I’m not sure’, I said, ‘that that comes too well from you.’

Neither of us could forget that when Martin had been in his thirties, years older than Charles was now, he had behaved in a fashion that was (if one had been feeling like sarcasm) comically similar. From inside the nuclear project, he had attempted to write a letter of outrage when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had stopped him, at a cost to our relation which had taken some time to put right. Then later, with the headship of the whole English operation open to him, he had, without flurry and almost without explanation, resigned. All Charles’ friends would have thought Martin a hard and worldly man: he could be both those things. Yet, among the middle-aged people whom Charles knew, Martin was one of the few who had made a sacrifice.