The Human Front (3 page)

It was while exploring what to my imagination were dangerous, Dickensian slums, but which were in reality perfectly respectable working-class districts, that I first encountered evidence that this division was regarded, by some, as part of the greater division of the world. On walls, railway bridges and pavements I noticed a peculiar graffito, in the shape of an inverted “Y” with a cross-bar—a childishly simple, and therefore instantly recognisable, representation of the human form. Sometimes it was enclosed by the outline of a five-pointed star, and frequently it was accompanied by a scrawled hammer and sickle. These last two symbols were, of course, already familiar to me from the red flags of the enemy.

It was at first as shocking a sight as if some Chinese or Russian guerrilla had popped out of a manhole in the street, and it gave me a strange thrill—a
frisson,
as the French say—to find that the remote and gigantic foe had his partisans in the streets of Greenock as much as in the jungles of Malaya or the rubble of Budapest. One day in 1966 I actually met one, on a street corner in the East End, down near the town centre where the big shops began.

This soldier of the Red horde was a bandy-legged old man in a cloth cap, selling copies of a broadsheet newspaper called the
Daily Worker.
He met with neither hostility nor interest from the passers-by. With boyish bravado, and some curiosity, I bought it. Its masthead displayed the two symbols I already knew, and an article inside was illustrated by, and explained, the third.

“Against the warmongers and arms profiteers, against the reckless drive to destruction, against the forces of death, it is necessary to rally all who yearn for peace. The
situation cries out for the broadest possible united front, one broader even than the great People’s Fronts against fascism, one in which every decent human being, every worker, every woman, every honest businessman, every farmer, every patriot can take their place with pride and determination. It is not for any political party, or class, or ideology that such a front shall stand, but for the very survival of the human race.

“This greatest of all united and people’s fronts exists, and is growing.

“It is the Human Front.”

I understood barely a word of it, and the only reason why I clipped out the article and kept it, long after I had secretly disposed of the newspaper, long enough for me to reread and finally understand it, years later, was because of coincidental resonances of its author’s name—Dr. John Lewis.

After that initial naive exploration I settled down to a sort of acceptance of the world as it was, and to learning more about it, at school and out. Science was more interesting than politics, and it soothed rather than disturbed the mind. The war was a permanent backdrop of news, and a distant prospect of National Service. The BBC brought it home on the wireless and, increasingly, on black-and-white television, with feigned neutrality and unacknowledged censorship. News items that raised questions about the war’s conduct and its domestic repercussions were few: the Pauling trial, the Kinshasa atomic bombing, the
occasional allusion to a speech by Foot in the Commons or Wedgewood-Benn in the Lords.

The biggest jolt to the consensus came in 1968, with the May Offensive. Out of nowhere, it seemed, the supposedly defeated
maquis
stormed and seized Paris, Lyons, Nantes, and scores of other French cities. Only carpet-bombing of the suburbs dislodged them and saved the Versailles government. This could not be hidden, nor the first anti-war demonstrations in the United States: clean-cut students chanting “Hey! Hey! JFK! How many kids did you kill today?” until the dogs and fire-hoses and tear-gas cleared the streets. At the time, I was more frightened by the unexpected closeness of the Communist threat than shocked by the measures taken against it.

My first act of dissidence wasn’t until three years later, at the age of seventeen. I slipped out one April evening to attend a meeting in the Cooperative Hall held under the auspices of Medical Aid for Russia. The speaker was touring the country, and it may have been the controversy that followed him that drew the crowd of a hundred or so. It’s certainly what drew me. He was flanked on the platform by a local trade union official, a pacifist lady, and Greenock’s perennially unsuccessful Liberal candidate. (The local Labour MP had, naturally, denounced the meeting in the
Greenock Telegraph.)
The hall was bare, decorated with a few union banners and a portrait of Keir Hardie. I sat near the back, recognising no one except the little old man who’d once sold me the
Daily Worker.

After some dull maundering from the union official, the pacifist lady stood up and introduced the speaker, the
Argentine physician Dr. Ernesto Lynch. A black-haired, bearded man, about forty, asthmatic, charismatic, apologetic about his cigar-smoking and his English, he brought the audience to their feet and sent me home in a fury.

“You’re too gullible,” my father said. “It’s all just Communist propaganda.”

“Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Moscow, Magnitogorsk, Dien Bien Phu, Belgrade, Kinshasa!” I pounded the names with my fist on my palm. “They happened! Nobody
denies
they happened!”

He lidded his eyes and looked at me through a veil of cigarette smoke. Bare elbows on the kitchen table, mother in the next room, the hiss of water on the iron, the Third Programme concerto in the background.

“If you had seen what I saw in Burma,” he said mildly, “you wouldn’t be so sorry about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the men who went into the Vorkuta camps weren’t sorry about Moscow, and—”

“And what troops ‘liberated’ Siberia?” I raged. “The dirty Japs! With their hands still bloody from Vladivostok! Their hands
and
their—”

I stopped myself just in time.

“Look, John,” he said. “We could go on shouting at each other all night about which side’s atrocities are worse. The very fact that we can, that this Argentine johnny can tour the country and half the bloody Empire with his tales of heroic partisans in the Ukraine and sob stories about butchered villagers in Byelorussia, while nobody from our side could possibly do anything remotely similar in the Red territories, shows which side has the least to fear from the truth.”

”Britain didn’t let the Nazis speak here during the war—William Joyce was hanged—”

He poured another whisky, and offered me one. I accepted it, ungraciously.

“We listened to Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose for a
laugh”
he was saying. “Then they were decently hanged, or decently jailed.”

“Pity we’re on the same side now,” I said. “Maybe the Yanks should let Tokyo Rose out. ‘Ruthki soldjah, you know what ith happening to you girrfliend? Big niggah boyth ith giving her big niggah—’”

Again, I shut up just in time.

“Your racial prejudices are showing, young man,” Malcolm said. “I thought Reds were supposed to be against the colour bar.”

“Huh!” I snorted. “I thought Liberals were!”

“The colour bar will come down in good time,” he said. “When both whites and coloureds are ready for it. Meanwhile, the Reds will be happy to agitate against it, while out of the other side of their mouths they’ll spout the most blatant racialism and national prejudice, just as it suits them—anything to divide the free world.”

“Some free world that includes the American South, South Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Fourth Reich! That holds on to Africa with atom bombs! That relies on the dirty work of Nazi scientists!”

He tapped a cigarette and looked at it meditatively.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The bombers. They’re what’s made the whole war possible, from Dropshot onwards, and it was the Germans who invented them—to finish what Hitler started!”

He lit up, and shook his head.

“Werner von Braun died a very disappointed man,” he said. “Unlike the rocket scientists the Russians got. They got to see their infernal researches put to use all right, with dire consequences for our side—mostly civilian targets, I might add, since you seem so upset about bombing civilians. At least our bomber pilots risk their own lives, unlike the Russian missilemen who deal out death from hundreds of miles away.”

I could see what he was doing, deflecting our moral dispute into a purely intellectual, historical debate, and I was having none of it.

“Yeah, I wonder if the Yanks are still sending
children
up to fly the bombers.”

He almost choked on his sip of whisky. Through the open door of the living-room came the sound of the iron crashing to the floor and my mother’s shout of annoyance. A moment later she said, sharply: “James! Margaret! Off to bed!” A faint protest, a scurry, a slam. She bustled through, hot in her pinny, and closed the door and sat down. Her flush paled in seconds. My father glanced at her and said nothing.

They both looked so frightened that I felt scared myself.

“What’s—what did—?”

My mother leaned forward and spoke quietly.

“Listen, Johnny,” she said. I bristled; she hadn’t called me that for years. She sighed. “John. You’re old enough to do daft things. You could go off and join the Army tomorrow, or you could get married, and there’s not a thing we could do about either. And it’s the same with
listening to Communists and repeating their rubbish. It’s a free country. Ruin your prospects if you like. But there’s one thing I ask you. Just one thing. Don’t ever, ever,
ever
say anything about what you and your father saw in Aird. Don’t even drop a hint. Because if you do, you’ll ruin us all.”

“You never said this to me before!”

“Never thought we had to,” Malcolm said gruffly. “You kept your mouth shut when you were a wee boy, as you promised, and good for you, and I thought that maybe over the years you had forgotten all about it.”

“How could I forget that?” I said.

He shrugged one shoulder.

“All right, all right,” I said. “But I don’t understand why it’s such a big secret. I mean, surely the age or is it the
size
of the—”

My father leaned across the table and put his hand across my mouth—not as a gesture, as a physical shutting up.

“Not one word,” he said.

I leaned back and made wiping movements.

“OK, OK,” I said. “Leave that aside. What were we talking about before? Oh yes, you were saying it wasn’t the Nazis who invented the flying disc. So who do you think did?”

“Who knows? The Allies had Einstein and Oppenheimer and Turing and a lot of other very clever chaps, and it’s all classified anyway, so, as I said—who knows?”

“How do you know it
wasn’t
the Germans, then?”

“They weren’t working along these lines.”

”Oh, come on!” I said. “I’ve seen pictures of the things from during the war.”

“These were experimental circular airframes with entirely conventional propulsion,” he said. “That doesn’t describe the bombers, now does it? Have you ever heard of Nazi research into anti-gravity?”

“Have you ever heard of American?”

He shook his head.

“It’s all classified, of course. But it was obviously a bigger breakthrough than the atomic bomb. Consider the Manhattan Project, and all the theory that led up to it.” He paused, to let this sink in. “What I’d like you to do, John, is to use your head as well as keep your mouth shut. By all means rattle off the standard lefty rant about Nazi scientists, but do bear in mind that you’re talking nonsense.”

I was baffled. My mother was looking worried.

“But,” I said, “the
Americans
say it was German scientists who developed it.”

“They do indeed, John, they do indeed.”

He looked quite jovial; I think he was a little bit drunk.

“I think you’ve said enough,” my mother told him.

“That I have,” he said. “Or too much. And you too, John. You have homework to do tonight and school to go to tomorrow. Goodnight.”

The following day I felt rather flat, whether as a result of the unaccustomed glass of whisky or my father’s successful
deflection of my moral outrage. After school I walked straight to the public library. My parents never worried if I didn’t come home from school directly, so long as I phoned if I wasn’t going to be home for my tea. The library was a big Georgian-style pile in the town centre. I stepped in and breathed the exhilarating smell of dark polished wood and of old and new paper. It took me only a minute to Dewey-decimal my way around the high stacks to the aviation section. Sheer nostalgia made me reach for the first in the row of tiny, well-worn editions of the
Observer’s Book of Aircraft.
I still had that 1960 edition, somewhere at home. Flicking past the familiar silhouettes of Lancaster and Lincoln and MiG, I looked again at the simplest outline of the lot: the circular plan and lenticular profile of the Advanced High Altitude Bomber, Mark 1. The description and specifications were understandably sparse (“outperforms all other aircraft, Allied and enemy”) the history routine: first successful test flight, from White Sands to Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico, July 1947; first combat use, Operation Dropshot, September 1949; extensive use in all theatres since.