The Human Front (5 page)

“Russell, I guess,” I said. After that I could only think of exiles and refugees from the ravaged Continent. “And there’s Sartre, and Camus, and Deutscher—”

“That’s the man,” he said. “Deutscher. Staunch Marxist. Former Communist. Respected alike by the
Daily Worker
and the
Daily Telegraph.
Man of the Left, man of integrity, right?”

“Yes,” I said, suspecting that he was setting me up for another fall. He was. When we went inside he handed me a worn volume from his study’s bowed bookshelves.

Deutscher’s
Stalin,
published in 1948, was a complete eye-opener to me. I had never before encountered criticism of Stalin or his regime from the Left, nor so measured a judgement and matchless a style. It seemed to come from a vanished world, the world before Dropshot, before the Fall.

“Fuck that,” said Dan Orr. “Deutscher’s a Trotskyite, for all that he’s all right on the war. And Trotskyites are
scum.
I don’t give a fuck how many o them Stalin killed. He didnae kill
enough.
There were still some alive tae be ministers in the Petrograd puppet government, alang wi all the Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists and NTS trash that the Yanks scraped out o the camps where they belonged.”

I didn’t have an answer to that, at the time, so I shelved the matter. In any case we had more urgent decisions to make. Although we had not had our results yet, we both knew we had done well in our Highers, and could have gone straight to University the following September. This would have deferred our National Service until after graduation. Graduates could sign up for officer training. Most of our similarly successful classmates rejoiced at the opportunity to avoid the worst of the hardships and risks. Orr was adamant that we should not take it. It was a principle with him (and with the Front, and with the Young Communist League of which, unknown to me at the time, he was a clandestine member).

“It’s a blatant class privilege,” he said. “Every working-class laddie has tae go as soon as he turns eighteen.
Why should we be allowed tae dodge the column for four mair years? What gies us the right tae a cushy number? And think about it—when we’ve done our stint that’ll be it over, we can get on wi university wi none o that growing worry about what’s at the end o it, and in the meantime we’ll hae learned to use a rifle and we can look every young worker in the eye, because we’ll hae been through the same shit as he has.”

“But,” I said, “suppose we find ourselves shooting at the freedom fighters?”

Or shot by them, was what was really worrying me.

“Cannae be helped,” said Orr. He laughed. “I’m told it seldom comes tae that anyway. It’s no like in the comics.”

My mother objected, my father took a more fatalistic approach. There was a scene, but I got my way.

We spent the summer working to earn some spending money and hopefully put some by in our National Savings Accounts. In the permanent war economy it was easy enough to walk into a job. Orr, ironically enough, became a hospital porter for a couple of months, while I became a general labourer in the Thompson yard. We joked that we were working for each other’s fathers.

The shipyard astounded me, in its gargantuan scale, its danger and din, and its peculiar combination of urgent pace and trivial delay. The unions were strong, management was complacent, work practices were restrictive and work processes were primitive. Parts of it looked like an Arab
souk,
with scores of men tapping copper pipes and sheets with little hammers over braziers. My accent had me marked instantly as a teuchter, a Highlander, which
though humiliating was at least better than being written off as middle class. The older men had difficulty understanding me—I thought at first that this was an accent or language problem, and tried to conform to the Clydeside usage to ridiculous effect, until I realised that they were in fact partially deaf and I took to shouting in Standard English, like an ignorant tourist.

The Party branch at the yard must have known I was in the Front, but made no effort to approach me: I think there was a policy, at the time, of keeping students and workers out of each other’s way. This backfired rather because it enabled me to encounter my first real live Trotskyist, who rather disappointingly was a second-year student working there for the summer. We had a lot of arguments. I have nothing more to say about that.

Most days after work I’d catch the bus to Nelson Street, slog up through the West End to our house, have a bath and sleep for half an hour before a late tea. If I had any energy left I would go out, ostensibly for a pint or two but more usually for activity for the Front. The next stage in its escalating campaign, after having begun to make its presence both felt and overestimated, was to discourage collaboration. This included all forms of fraternisation with American service personnel.

Port Glasgow is to the east of Greenock, Gourock to the west. The latter town combines a douce middle-class residential area and a louche seafront playground. Its biggest dance-hall, the Cragburn, a landmark piece of ‘30s architecture with a famously spring-loaded dance floor, draws people from miles around.

Orr and I met in the Ashton Cafe one Friday night in July. Best suits, Brylcreemed hair, scarves in our pockets. Hip-flask swig and gasper puff on the way along the front. The Firth was in one of its Mediterranean moments, gay-spotted with yachts and dinghies, grey-speckled with warships. Pound notes at the door. A popular beat combo, then a swing band.

We chose our target carefully, and followed her at distance after the dance. Long black hair down her back. She kissed her American sailor goodbye at the pier, waved to him as the liberty-boat pulled away. We caught up with her at a dark stretch of Shore Street, in the vinegar smell of chip-shops. Scarves over our noses and mouths, my hand over her mouth. Bundled her into an alley, up against the wall. We didn’t need the masks, not really. She couldn’t look away from Orr’s open razor.

“Listen, slag,” he said. “Youse are no tae go out wi anybody but yir ain folk frae now on. Get it? Otherwise we’ll cut ye.”

Tears glittered on her thick mascara. She attempted a nod.

“Something tae remind ye,” Orr said. “And tae explain tae yir friends.”

He clutched her hair and cut it off with the razor, as close to the scalp as he could get. He threw the glistening hank at her feet and we ran before she could get out her first sob.

I threw up on the way home.

Three days later I overheard two lassies at the bus-stop. They were discussing the incident, or one like it. There had been several such, over the weekend, all the work of the Front.

”Looks like you’re in deid trouble fae now on,” one of them concluded, “if ye go out wi coons.”

Call-up papers arrived in August, an unwelcome 18th-birthday present. After nine weeks’ basic training I was sent to Northern Ireland, where I spent the rest of my two-year stint guarding barracks, munitions dumps and coastal installations. Belfast, Londonderry, south Armagh: the most peaceful and friendly parts of the British Empire.

Orr was sent to Rhodesia. His grave is in the Imperial War Cemetery in Salisbury.

I was demobilised in September 1974, and went to Glasgow University. My fellow first-year students were all two years younger than me, including those in the Front. The Party line had changed. Young men were being urged to resist the war, to refuse conscription, to take any deferral available, to burn their call-up papers if necessary, to fill the jails. This was not because the Party had become pacifist. It was because the Party, and the Front, now had enough men with military experience for the next step up Lin Piao’s ladder.

People’s War.

It is necessary to understand the situation at the time. By 1974 the United States, Britain and the white Dominions, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Belgium were almost the only countries in the world without a raging guerrilla war.
Although nominally on the Allied side, the governments of France and Italy were paralysed, large tracts of both countries ungovernable or already governed by the Resistance movements. Every colony had its armed independence movement, and every former socialist country had its reliberated territory and provisional government, even if driven literally underground by round-the-clock bombing.

“The peoples of the anti-imperialist camp long for peace every day,” wrote Lin Piao. “Why do the peoples of the imperialist camp not long for peace? Unfortunately it is because they have no idea of what horrors are being suffered by the majority of the peoples of the world. It is necessary to bring the real state of affairs sharply to their attention. In order for the masses to irresistibly demand that the troops be brought home, it is necessary for the people’s vanguard to bring home the war.”

That later came to be called the Lin Piao “Left” Deviation. At the time it was called the line. I swallowed it whole.

I lodged in a bed-sitting-room in Glasgow, near the University, and took my laundry home at weekends. During my National Service I had only been able to visit occasionally, and had followed the Front’s advice to keep my head down and my mouth shut about politics, on duty or off. It was a habit that I found agreeable, and I kept it. My parents assumed that my National Service had knocked all that nonsense out of me.

Greenock had changed. The younger and tougher and more numerous successors of the likes of Orr and I
had shifted their attacks from the sailors’ girlfriends to the sailors, and the soldiers. They never attacked British servicemen, or even the police. At least a dozen Americans had been fatally stabbed, and two shot. Relations between the Americans and the town’s population, hitherto friendly, had become characterised by suspicion on one side and resentment on the other. The cycle was self-reinforcing. Before long Americans were being attacked in quite non-political brawls, and off-duty Marines were picking fights with surly teenagers. The teenagers’ angry parents would seek revenge. Other relatives would be drawn in. Before long an American serviceman couldn’t be sure that any sweet-looking lass or little old lady wasn’t an enemy.

Armed shore patrols in jeeps became a much more common sight. In the tougher areas, kids would throw stones at them. None of this was covered in the national press, and the
Greenock Telegraph
buried such accounts in brief reports of the proceedings of the Sheriff Court, but the
Daily Worker
reported similar events around U.S. bases right across Britain.