by Mark Mazower
What made Mary Stapledon typical of the women he befriended in those years is that she was on the Left and intellectually inclined, and in these and most other ways the very opposite of his sister, Ira. His mother watched, and occasionally commented, with curious amusement at this new element in their lives. “Billy has many girl acquaintances and invites all the girls over to our house,” Frouma wrote to Vitalie. “They are all students, very serious girls, usually without heavy makeup and in low-heeled shoes, but so far he was never seriously involved with anyone. He told me once, in all seriousness, that he would not marry until the end of the war, having no desire to leave a widow.” The seriousness that Frouma highlighted was spot-on: Dad’s friendships in these years, both male and female, tended to be joined under the banner of a higher purpose. At university it was Labour Club politics, exciting and intense, on the ascendant against conservatives and communists alike, and this continued once he was back in London, where he joined the Labour Party in 1945 and that September was elected to the central committee for his ward in St. Pancras North. Like his father, Dad was a natural organizer with a calm, authoritative presence. By some mysterious alchemy he had transposed his father’s youthful commitment into a mid-century English key. The fight for socialism and the rights of labor went on, only now it was not part of an underground revolutionary struggle against Tsarist autocracy but an open electoral battle for control of the parliamentary democracy that presided over the world’s largest empire. Where his father had once mobilized the workers in the backstreets of Vilna, Dad now stood on voters’ doorsteps in Highgate and Kentish Town.
What remained of the Bund cheered on the party’s rise. They regarded Labour theoretician Harold Laski almost as one of them: an obituary of him a few years later noted proudly that his role in infusing the British Labour movement with the spirit of socialism could be attributed to the stories he had heard as a child of the Bund’s struggles in Russia. A Bundist journal expressed confidence that Labour would succeed in the all-important task of “peacefully reconstructing the oldest capitalist country into a social democratic one,” thus showing “all mankind the way to its socialist salvation.”
As his father had done half a century earlier, Dad found political engagement invigorating his personality: Socialism brought sociability and many if not most of his friends, male and female, came out of this milieu. There were evenings spent in now-forgotten Leftist youth organizations such as the 18 Plus Group and the League of Youth, earnest discussions and debates at the Fabian Society. There were the hikes, of course, and films and concerts, but this was the political core, exhilarating as they worried away at the shape of a better and more just future and felt the burden of responsibility on their generation’s shoulders. It is hard now, I think, to recapture what it must have felt like to have been twenty years old and to have gone—the sheer euphoria of it—in only a matter of months from the last terrifying German rocket attacks on the capital to news of total victory in Europe and then on to Labour’s triumph in the general election, a time like no other before or after.
One of Mary’s housemates was an ardent socialist named Lalage Sharp. Nearly four years older than Dad and active in Labour Party work, she was a comrade. On the afternoon of VE Day, May 8, 1945, the two of them and another Labour friend from Oxford, Marna Buckatzsch, walked together into Trafalgar Square through the flag-strewn streets and went on to Buckingham Palace to hear King George VI proclaim the end of the war. At Mansion House, Winston Churchill made a speech and the three of them were out in the celebrating crowds all night. Dad got back to Highgate only in the early hours of the morning, having walked the entire way home. The very next day they met up once more and caught the train to Seaford and went hiking along the cliffs before returning to the women’s lodgings on Ormond Street for dinner. One almost senses the energy coursing through them. A month later, he and Lalage were canvassing for the party ahead of the general election in the streets below Oakeshott Avenue, and after more tramping across Sussex Downs that first summer of peace, he was back in time to learn the great news that Labour had won. “Terrific excitement,” he noted in his diary. Their lives continued to intersect for the next six years, by which time both Lalage and Marna had become councillors on Holborn Borough Council—the firebrand Lalage pushing through the construction of new public housing. In the summer of 1949, she and Marna headed off to Tito’s Yugoslavia to build railways in the mountains of Bosnia, a project for idealistic young British socialists that for them and many others sharpened the contrast between the spirit and energies they found there and the disillusionment they had come to feel with the Labour government at home. Their generation was already feeling let down by the older figures running the show under the sober Clement Attlee. Like them, Dad continued his Labour Party work for five or six years. But in 1945 that sense of deflated expectations, which I think he came to share, lay in the future, and the Ormond Street house that Lalage and Mary lived in brought him in touch with a cluster of highly educated, internationalist women who embodied the possibility of change. They knew foreign languages, valued the arts and self-improvement, and took the politics of the public good seriously. Later Marna Buckatzsch was involved in the founding of Amnesty International. Magda Skoupilova had gone through the war in Prague before landing in Ormond Street as well; she married a British journalist and ended up writing about Europe for many years for the Financial Times. Lalage went on to join the staff of Political and Economic Planning, perhaps the most important British social-policy think tank of the mid-century, before marriage and children took her out of Ormond Street and Dad’s life.
All of them were, in one way or another, the sort of women you would have expected a young man of Dad’s background to have been drawn to. Yet his longest-lived friendship of all was with someone who, although she was certainly on the Left, had not studied at Oxford and was neither a Londoner nor middle class. She was a Yorkshire woman from the collieries called Megan Bentcliffe, and they had met in 1944 at a student conference when she was in her early twenties. For the next few years, they were in close touch, and as they were more often than not living in different places, letters went between them, a correspondence that lasted into his time in the army and beyond. He used to see her when he was doing his officer training in Yorkshire as she was teaching by then in Doncaster. But she often came down to London too and was at Oakeshott Avenue when Dad and Ira gave a New Year’s Eve party at the end of 1947. Their closeness seems to have ended only in 1951.
The distance between Oakeshott Avenue and the working-class northern streets where Megan had grown up was more than just a matter of miles; her world and his could scarcely have been more different. The mining villages of the Dearne Valley were closed South Yorkshire communities, isolated and rural, which had unexpectedly found themselves at the heart of the mid-nineteenth-century industrial revolution. Several generations of their men had labored in the rich coal seams. Her father had fought on the western front with the Yorks and Lancs, and then, a colliery clerk, he had brought his daughter up in one of the two-up two-downs that fringed the nearby pits. Her mother, a miner’s daughter, had died before Megan was ten, and so had a younger brother; she grew up with a stepmother and a much younger sister. This was a world with a strong sense of class and intense local pride, clogs for shoes, and a dialect on the streets so impenetrable it kept away foreigners—a category that to the villagers of Brampton, Wombwell, and Wath-on-Dearne meant chiefly the men from Scotland or Newcastle or Staffordshire who were coming down in the 1920s looking for work. The Asian corner shops would not arrive for another half century, and the few Jewish peddlers and pawnbrokers in nearby Barnsley were mistrusted.
That Megan’s path had ever crossed with Dad’s was owing to two things. One was the grammar school down the road from her home. Like its partner school in Mexborough that produced the poet Ted Hughes only a few years later, the school at Wath-on-Dearne had been set up after the First World War for miners’ kids, boys and girls tog
ether, grouped into houses called Athens, Sparta, Carthage, Rome, and Troy. The West Riding Education Authority was a renowned pioneer, admirably reluctant to accept the low expectations inbred into the English class system and their schools showed the result: Against the odds, a handful of Wath’s smartest boys were sent on to university each year. But a girl was a real rarity and Megan must have had drive and intelligence and independence of spirit to kick so hard against expectations. Prefect and house captain, she matriculated at sixteen, got a scholarship earmarked for the children of miners, and left Yorkshire to travel south to study at Bedford College.
The second thing that brought her and Dad together was the war. By the time she and Dad met, she had already spent several years in the southeast of England, had a degree in English, and spoke more than passable French. In 1945 she returned to Yorkshire to train as a teacher, and when Dad was posted to Germany for his national service, she bought him a German grammar, a teacher’s gift. I have no idea how close they were because no letters have survived, but his diaries record that plenty were going in both directions. She and Dad remained in touch until 1952. After they went their own ways, she married an engineer and spent the next half century with him. To the best of my knowledge, she and Dad never saw each other again. She became a teacher, as she had planned, and in retirement lived in a neat brick semi, hydrangeas in the front garden, in the village outside Rotherham where her father had lived before her. A stone’s throw away were the pits at Cortonwood where the epic struggle between the miners and Mrs. Thatcher began in 1984; the tussle must have erupted more or less outside her house. Today an ASDA supermarket sits atop the old shaft, King Coal looks like a parenthesis of a century and a half in a much longer rural South Yorkshire story, and kingfishers have returned to the Dearne. Somewhere in the back of my mind is that signpost at the top of Highgate West Hill with its arrow pointing to “The North.” One of the roads not taken was where Megan had returned to her roots. In the late 1940s, Dad had sometimes visited her at Brampton and Wath, enduring the bumpy drive over the moors by bus from Doncaster, but he never talked about the impression those mining villages, still not far removed from how life had been half a century earlier, had made on him, a North Londoner, Oxford educated, the son of foreigners.
When I came across Megan Bentcliffe’s name in his diaries, I hoped to find her and talk with her. I wanted to take the whole thing out of the realm of feeling, to gauge the impact of the times, the countervailing pull of place, the Brownian motion of human beings. In the summer of 2015 I found her address and wrote but there was no reply. When I tried the phone, a voice message warded off incoming calls. Then this stopped and there was a busy signal instead and after this continued for more than a day I got to thinking about all the reasons why a ninety-two-year-old woman’s phone would be left off the hook for so long, and eventually I found the number of her local police station. The duty sergeant on the other end heard me out politely. It felt absurd to be ringing from New York about someone I had never met who might have known my father seventy years ago. It turned out that having your phone off the hook was insufficient reason for the police to act. The following day, the busy signal was still there. Only some weeks later did I discover that she had moved a couple of years earlier into a nursing home—I had been telephoning an empty house—and a little after that, the carer at the home felt able to tell me that she had died at about the time I had written to her. That was coincidence but what struck me as more than this was that like Dad she had passed away less than a mile from where she was born.
I can’t now remember whether it was at the bottom of our garden or in the garden next door—in those days it was all a bit overgrown back there—but in the early 1960s when I was very small there was a massive wartime concrete bunker we used to sometimes play in. The walls were rough and thick, and I remember the total blackness inside, the low ceiling just above your head that seemed to press down, the smell of musty decay, like something once monstrous, out of time. I was four or five, I suppose, and I never dared to go very far in. The war was less than twenty years in the past and remains of this kind could easily be glimpsed amid overgrown nettles through broken fences in the North London backstreets. Today they are mostly gone. The bunker certainly is; it had served its purpose and was not worth keeping. Oddly, I don’t remember its demolition.
Dad’s experience of military service also served its purpose. There was, in the end, not a great deal of glory in it, and much being moved about thanks to a series of training stints and exercises that equipped him with a formidable array of practical knowledge but dragged on so long that his real period of soldiering did not begin until the fighting in Europe was over. The endlessly deferred horizon of expectation, the frustration and uncertainty, and not least his protracted contact with the officer class—crusty, small-minded, inhabiting a xenophobic country all its own—contributed to a gnawing sense of wasted time as the decade progressed. It was not as though the army took him to the battlefield or to any kind of ultimate test: The reality was much more prosaic. First stop was a technical college in Wandsworth where he also served out the final year of the war in the Home Guard; then, in March 1946, after his selection for officer cadet training it was on to Bodmin on the Cornish moors for the basics; and then to the huge prisonlike Marne Barracks at Catterick in Yorkshire, where after a brief stay at Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the Royal Corps of Signals before being posted to Hamburg as a second lieutenant in the spring of 1947.
It was his fretful, resourceful mother who had been responsible. In Minehead he had dreamed of joining the air force. Frouma had not, however, gone through war and revolution and exile, brought up her son in England, and seen him admitted to Oxford, only to face losing him to the RAF. Knowing his mathematical mind, she persuaded him to apply for a War Office engineering cadetship and thus diverted him away from the front. It meant more studying, but at Wandsworth Technical College, not Oxford. His parents were relieved. Not only was he back living with them but the path before him seemed to be heading in a familiar direction. They gave him an Engineer’s Diary for 1944 to help him along. There were after all plenty of engineers in the Mazower family—among them Frouma’s brother Vitalie, her brother-in-law Yasha, and half the Toumarkines in Moscow. There was also Vera Broido’s older brother, Daniel, a remarkable man who among other things invented the first bar-code system and was prominent in the prehistory of analog computing. So it is not surprising if writing to Vitalie in February 1945 Frouma told him with evident relief that “engineering definitely captivates [Bill] and if God willing, he survives the war, it will be his future profession.” It was her hope, clearly, although this was not how it would turn out, even if in later life Dad retained the engineer’s love of precision and rationality and utility.
Enrolled at his college on the other side of the war-damaged capital, he left home before the trolleybus began running, to reach Wandsworth for classes that started at six. In 1944 and early 1945 German rockets were raining down on London, but he never spoke about them. As formative in its way as Oxford, the college gave him the rudiments of a proper scientific education—serious chemistry and physics, which he had not studied at school, combined with the practical business of using lathes in an engineering workshop. I realize now that his extraordinary skill with all things electrical, not to mention woodworking and construction, was the product not only of talent and inclination but of targeted wartime training as well.
Back at home, and not, I think, unhappily, he dismantled the bomb shelter, took down the blackout curtains, and resumed his life as a vegetable gardener. He noted the milestones, the political landmarks interspersed with the weather and holiday plans: “April 17: Heatwave still continues. Buchenwald unearthed.” “May 24 (Empire Day): Wrote to Devon. Alfriston fixed. Himmler se suicide.” He was waiting for the interviews that would determine whether he would get an officer’s commission or something less prestigious, and whether he would be sent to India or closer to home. In Novem
ber he received a letter from the War Office asking him if he intended to remain an Englishman, as both his parents were foreigners when he was born, or if he intended to take a second citizenship. He replied that he had no such plans, and shortly after that he finished his exams and was quickly approved for officer training. But one detects an undercurrent of restlessness that no amount of Labour Party work assuaged. He was walking long distances whenever and wherever he could. He also now became obsessed with radios, as if they were a vital lifeline to a world cut off by the war. “My personal life consists of two things,” he wrote his uncle Vitalie, whom he was missing, “radios and politics.” He would build increasingly complex valve radios and take them apart again, as if to focus on things that could be mended, not those that could not. At one stage there were no fewer than six homemade sets lying around the house, testimony to an underlying dissatisfaction. Rio de Janeiro, Delhi, New York, Madrid, Warsaw, Danzig: On November 19, 1945, he noted he had managed to listen in to them all that day. Meanwhile he awaited the army, and travel abroad was all but impossible.
At the beginning of 1946, his fate passed into the hands of the War Office and the round began of provincial camps and parade grounds, checkpoints, barrack duties, and weekends off. He was not learning about lathes now but about grenades and Bren guns. I remember my surprise after his death when I opened his bedroom cupboard and there behind his jackets I found a baseball bat, a last-ditch defense against intruders who had never materialized. Weapons and aggression of any kind had seemed so foreign to him. But a son’s imagination is limited and I now see that thanks to the army he knew how to box, ride a horse, shoot deer, and drive a lorry along with the other things that are easier for me to visualize: more radio sets for his Signals training, forced marches through the Yorkshire snow followed by snowball fights or—when the weather improved—a tug-of-war. Although he formed few friendships with the other men, he was not a loner, and he often hitched into the nearest town with one or two of them to watch films or to while away a weekend afternoon on the beach at Whitby. But apart from brief leaves that he spent at home, or in France, he was stuck in Catterick through the terrible winter of 1946, a time of peeling potatoes, of monotonous futility.