by Mark Mazower
Like Dad, most of them were waiting for the call. Unlike him, most of them would find frontline action within a year or two anywhere from the European theater to the Bay of Bengal. Afterwards, if not ensconced in Whitehall or the City, there beckoned years on the North-West Frontier, in Burma, or on the Gold Coast, entering into colonial administration or a Calcutta trading house. The prospects were still imperial, almost Victorian, although many at Balliol were on the Left and would have welcomed the sudden postwar collapse of the empire had anyone seen it coming. Something else they cannot have anticipated was that despite plenty of close shaves, only one or two of the sixty or so among them would be killed during the war. Dad’s classmates did not experience anything resembling the bloodletting that Sumner’s generation had known, although they probably expected to. For all the risks involved in the invasion of Europe, the sheer murderousness of the trenches was not repeated.
For Dad the entire atmosphere was a revelation. A slow start in the first cold days of January suddenly gave way to animation, and his embrace of this new world completely changed his personality. After several years of feeling isolated and perhaps slightly depressed, he now flourished and a more sociable side to his personality emerged. When he went home that Easter vacation, he once told me, his mother was completely amazed. He had been a very silent child while he was at school, she had said, but when he came home he didn’t stop talking. It was a new experience for everyone.
“I was suddenly liberated.” Those were his words. Liberated from what, I now wonder. From the brooding impassivity of his aging father, from the solicitude of his infinitely anxious mother? Above all, from the weight of being the good son? He would never entirely shake these things off, nor even really seek to, but a time began that was an experiment in independence. A smart sports jacket and tie now replaced the more formal school suit. He started to speak like an Oxford man. Photographs show him at ease in deep armchairs. He has a room of his own. The chubbiness of the schoolboy has been replaced by a more confident glance. He was not ambitious. But he has gotten into Oxford; he has made it.
Highgate, Somerset, and Oxford: At each step in Dad’s life, England took on new depth and meanings. This was the golden age of the country ramble, the Youth Hostels Association, and the group hike, a way for the young and the Left to lay claim to a new kind of civic consciousness and a new kind of comradeship, leaving their footprints on soil that the great interwar aristocratic sell-off had liberated for the nation to enjoy, the age of the democratization of landscape. The author and rambling campaigner Tom Stephenson published The Countryside Companion in 1939, with its praise of “rugged peaks” and affirmation of the social virtues of the outdoors. How to See the Countryside came out the following year, reminding readers to dubbin their walking boots and take care of their maps. It was now that Dad began the hiking holidays that became an essential psychic safety valve in his life for the next decade, and it was no coincidence that it was happening as his own political commitment intensified. Barely a week goes by without him recording a serious walk in his diary, a good ten or fifteen miles is common, sometimes extended over a weekend, often longer, with an ever-changing cast of companions. At Easter 1943—in the vacation that followed his first term at Balliol—he kitted up much as Stephenson recommended, packed his rucksack, and headed for the Lake District around Derwentwater and Coniston Water with a group of fellow students as if to pay homage to the hills and mountains of his native land.
He was also exploring his connection with Russia in a more rigorous way. The middle of the war was the apogee of the Anglo-Russian alliance, a time when the United Kingdom and Russia briefly came closer than ever before or since. In the 1941 Hampstead by-election there was even an “Official All-Out Aid for Russia Candidate.” He did poorly, but that was partly because the Communist Party of Great Britain had thrown its weight behind the Conservative candidate for the sake of national unity, and admiration for the courage of the Red Army was widespread across the political spectrum. Oxford did not celebrate the USSR with the zeal it showed towards the United States and the Dominions, but the hammer and sickle did flutter alongside the Union Jack over Carfax in the town center during Help for Russia week. Dad now immersed himself for the first time systematically in the country and language of his parents.
The growing world importance of Soviet power had not yet really impinged on the university’s sluggish consciousness and would not for some time. (Two years later, Isaiah Berlin would write in tones of despair about the obstacles to building up Russian studies in Oxford and in England more generally.) Hardly anyone at Oxford read Russian in those pre–Cold War days, and the university’s tutor in the subject was lucky if he had a finalist a year. It was a quiet life for Sergey Aleksandrovich Konovalov, who had arrived in England at the end of the Great War, the son of a minister in the 1917 Russian Provisional Government. Imposing, elegantly dressed, reserved, he wrote about the minutiae of seventeenth-century economic history and his lectures were notoriously dull; against the odds he would later brilliantly engineer the expansion of Russian and Slavic studies at the university. But in 1943 his was still a one-man show. His deep voice lingered in Dad’s memory, as did his devotion to the Romanovs and his Orthodoxy, a different Russia from the one Dad had grown up with. Like many dons, Konovalov was not much of a teacher; like many Oxford students, Dad did not need one. A typical immigrant’s child, he had learned his parents’ language by ear; datives and genitives kept getting confused. All someone with his cast of mind needed to sort this out was time and now he had it. In 1944 he kept his diary in Russian for practice, and he did this for an entire year.
Russian brought together Oxford and his life at home. In early 1943 the British and Americans were still contemplating a landing in North Africa, as they viewed the epic struggle unfolding on the borders of the USSR. The launching of a second front was the question of the day and it split the university Labour Club down the middle: Communists and fellow travelers were backing Stalin’s call for immediate Anglo-American landings while Dad’s cousin David Ginsburg was running a breakaway Democratic Socialist group that represented those not so inclined to go along with the line from Moscow. Dad was not yet eighteen, but despite cheering on the Red Army, as almost the entire country was doing, he kept his distance from the Stalinists.
He had not forgotten the Hitler-Stalin Pact of only four years earlier. He knew too that his uncle Lev had disappeared in the Terror. And it was while he was at Oxford that the news broke that Bundist leaders Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter had died in Soviet detention. Maxim Litvinov, now the Soviet ambassador in Washington, D.C., announced to the world that the two men had been convicted of spying—ridiculous charges to anyone who knew them as the Mazowers did.
There was even one occasion when the long arm of the NKVD reached inside the house on Oakeshott Avenue. Needing money, and with the war having temporarily stifled the influx of refugees, Dad’s parents had begun taking in lodgers from the Soviet trade delegation, which had been set up across the road from them in Highgate. Their first guest, a captain in the merchant navy, was a handsome, sociable man who rolled up his jacket sleeves when he met them to show off the collection of wristwatches that he was going to sell back home. They got on well, kept off politics, and said nothing about their family in Moscow. He stayed some months, and when he left, they decided he had been sent to test the waters and to see whether Oakeshott Avenue was a subversive environment. Others followed, so apparently it had been deemed safe. Frouma provided Sunday lunch, cooked dishes from her childhood, and made a fuss at Easter and on weekends. When he was down from college, Dad would be deputed to escort the visitors in groups around the sights of London; on a visit to Hampton Court he took a picture of them posing politely in front of this relic of British feudalism. Normally tightly chaperoned—most weekends they were bused to a house in the countryside to avoid forming close friendships with their hosts—his guests enjoyed themselves and taught the young Oxford undergraduate R
ussian obscenities that were unknown to his college mentors. Politics remained untouched: “We were very aware that they were walking on eggshells and one didn’t want to embarrass them.”
So no one in the family forgot the occasion when one of their lodgers, who had been living with them for some time, knocked ashen-faced at the front door in the middle of the day. Flanked by two unsmiling heavies, he went upstairs, packed his things, and left, never to be heard from again. “Are you leaving?” Frouma had asked him from the landing. And he, looking like death, said, “Yes, I’m going back to Russia.” They never found out what he had done, but it is not surprising that the more pro-Soviet members of the Oxford Labour Club struck Dad as naïve: He was immersed in Stalinist realities to a degree that not even his tutors could match.
One more thing came out of Oxford, the most important. Before 1943 the pages of Dad’s photo album take us past childhood scenes of life in Highgate into Minehead in winter, the loneliness of a schoolboy far from home staring out of his bedroom window across the fields. There are the wartime backstreets of the once bustling seaside town where nothing seems open. There are boys, of course, in groups or alone, and some men, teachers too old to fight, others in uniform or hiking in a line across muddy fields.
And then we turn the page and there is a dark-haired girl, or really she is a young woman, unnamed, curled up in a chair and holding a cat in the garden at Oakeshott Avenue; and then there is a cluster of fellow students from one of the women’s colleges sunning themselves on the steps at the end of the spring term. And then a whole gaggle of college friends, male and female, are boating on the Norfolk Broads, and there is that Easter hiking tour in the Lake District, eight of them in shorts and walking boots high above Coniston Water. Next summer, we glimpse outings and picnics in Hitchin and Cockfosters. Dad is usually behind the camera, but one senses the change in mood and possibilities. A few faces would remain, but mostly they come and go—laughing as they pick grapes after the war in the south of France, browned by hard walking in the Dolomites, later on framed by quiet Oxford rooms or the Devon coast. Some pose carefully; others smile politely or laugh or grin because they are friends and like him and the sun is shining. One or two are saying something else, something more.
Who these girls were and what they meant to Dad were not matters that could easily be discussed between him and me. Perhaps this was out of a kind of mutual discretion or shyness, and there was maybe also some feeling that broaching the subject meant being disloyal to Mum, even though she did not come into his life until many years later. At school I had been taught always to avoid the first person singular—we were told that one of the virtues of Latin was its impersonality. If I was not the right person to probe my father about his early encounters with the opposite sex, he was not a man to volunteer such things. Yet once we started our conversations about his early time in Oxford, the subject came up, as it was bound to. In fact, it was initiated by him, amid pauses for thought and recollection:
Dad: “Now social life was quite good. We had play readings with women from women’s colleges. Society functioned more or less. The Labour Club functioned.”
Me: “To what extent was social life an extension of what you were used to at school? To what extent were you entering new worlds?”
Dad: “Oh, it was a completely new world.”
Me: “In what kind of way?”
Dad: “Well, in school I hardly knew any girls at all.”
It was in Minehead, he said, that he had first kissed a girl. But Oxford was where it all began really. At a play reading, he met Patty Nichol, whom he remained friendly with for the next few years. A fellow student tried to warn him off; she was Bert Parnaby’s girl. Dad thought that was a matter for her—she could make her own mind up. His world was not one in which men spoke for women; he was drawn to women who spoke for themselves.
He had grown to just over six feet tall and by the early 1940s was losing his slight boyish chubbiness and was in good shape. Dark-haired, with the sensitive Toumarkine mouth, he was a handsome young man, sure of himself without being overly assertive. Slightly reserved, perhaps, outside the family, but a man of obvious affections and kindness, not underhanded. And unlike many Englishmen, especially the tongue-tied public schoolboys whom an American undergraduate at Balliol of those years remembered being hopelessly ill at ease around the opposite sex, Dad had grown up in the company of women.
First and foremost, there was his mother to whom he was tied so close. She missed him when he was in Minehead as much as he missed her, and she was aware of the strength of her feeling for him. “I’m still in love with my son, though I know he is far from perfect. He is very morally clean, serious and always diligent about his work,” Frouma would write to her brother in 1945. “My son is not bad at all, and he turned twenty; I could really say I am grateful to my fate for these twenty years of joy.” In Paris there was his aunt Niura and Alice, Vitalie’s wife, to whom he was also very attached. There had been few girls his own age at home, apart from one or two of the Oakeshott Avenue lodgers. But after he arrived at Oxford, his circle of women friends began to expand and college beauties gaze fondly into the lens for the seventeen-year-old freshman.
Cleo, Patty, Magda, Lalage, Barbara: names on the pages of his diary. None of them meant anything to me. I was curious to find out more about that phase of his life in which nothing was determined or decided, in which all outcomes seemed possible, especially since in every case he had allowed these ties to wither and had not shown any interest in returning to them. What had happened between them was not something it seemed likely could ever be reconstructed, nor did it seem the most important thing to try. In connecting them to other unguessed and later buried dimensions of my father in those years—the new energy manifested in his sudden talkativeness, interest in poetry, dabbles in acting, and other aspects of his youth that melted imperceptibly into what became a more retiring personality with age—what I was after was something else: a provisional sketch of the road map of the emotional landscape of England in wartime that he had known and traveled, the intersections that had brought him and these shadowy figures together for a while, and then their separations, the circles their own lives turned out often to have traced back to their points of origin in ways that seemed not unlike his own.
Cleo, it transpired, was a young woman called Cleome Birkinshaw, a spirited undergraduate a little older than Dad, who was reading English. They were both part of the group of students that went walking in the Lake District over the Easter break. He was smitten and later he remembered her very high forehead and long black hair—that and the fact that her father was in the colonial administration in Malaya had given her an aura of exoticism. Her mother and sisters lived on the south coast, and after Coniston and Derwentwater the two of them hitchhiked back to London and because there were no trains for her to catch by the time they got there she spent the night at Oakeshott Avenue before heading down to Bournemouth. Frouma, he remembered, had not entirely approved—she thought the girl had been allowed to run wild—but he had not cared and letters passed between them until after 1945 when they lost touch. Dad’s memory was good: Her father, who had trained at Kew Gardens before the First World War, was indeed in the Malay service—a botanist, he had named all three of his daughters after plants—and he was then starving in a Japanese internment camp and barely survived the experience. Years after Cleo and Dad had gone their separate ways, tragedy blighted her life. I discovered that she had married an army man, a British intelligence officer who served in Malaya as her father had, and shortly after they went out there together, he was killed, blown up by a roadside bomb during what was generally referred to at that time as the Emergency. She never spoke about it and never remarried, and curiously spent her last years in a nursing home in North London, barely half a mile from Highgate. So far as I know Dad never saw her again and I doubt he had given her another thought until he and I began talking and her name came back.
Then there was a
group of young women, mostly four or five years older than him, who went down to London after Oxford and roomed together. One of them was Mary Stapledon—“intellectual, kindhearted, feminine,” as another friend recalled her. Her father was the philosopher Olaf Stapledon, then perhaps at the height of fame as the author of Last and First Men, the first novel of his Future History/Last Man series, and his astonishing 1937 novel Starmaker, a story spanning two billion years which Jorge Luis Borges later acclaimed and which inspired generations of science-fiction writers. Never I think more than a friend with whom Dad shared teas and walks and concerts, Mary later married a young Indian medical student and became a doctor, and after Dad died and I found her name in his old diaries I traced her to an address in Belsize Park, only to find she too had died a few months previously.