In any case, the conflict was soon upon us. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. When Hitler refused to withdraw by 11 a.m. on Sunday 3 September in accordance with Britain’s ultimatum we were waiting by the radio, desperate for the news. It was the only Sunday in my youth when I can remember not attending church. Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words, relayed live from the Cabinet Room at No. 10, told us that we were at war.
It was natural at such times to ask oneself how we had come to such a pass. Each week my father would take two books out of the library, a ‘serious’ book for himself (and me) and a novel for my mother. As a result, I found myself reading books which girls of my age would not generally read. I soon knew what I liked — anything about politics and international affairs. I read, for instance, John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, which had first appeared in 1932. The contents of this fashionable communist analysis, which predicted that capitalism was shortly to be superseded by socialism, seemed to many of my generation exciting and new.
But both by instinct and upbringing I was always a ‘true blue’ Conservative. No matter how many left-wing books I read or left-wing commentaries I heard, I never doubted where my political loyalties lay. Such an admission is probably unfashionable. But though I had great friends in politics who suffered from attacks of doubt about where they stood and why, and though of course it would take many years before I came to understand the philosophical background to what I believed, I always knew my mind. In this I can see now that I was probably unusual. For the Left were setting the political agenda throughout the thirties and forties, even though the leadership of Churchill concealed it during the years of the war itself. This was evident from many of the books which were published at about this time. The Left had been highly successful in tarring the Right with appeasement, most notably in Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, the so-called ‘yellow books’. One in particular had enormous impact: Guilty Men, co-authored by Michael Foot, which appeared under the pseudonym ‘Cato’ just after Dunkirk in 1940.
Robert Bruce Lockhart’s best-selling Guns or Butter? appeared in the autumn of 1938, after Munich. Lockhart’s travels through Europe led him to Austria (now Nazi-controlled after the Anschluss) and then to Germany itself at the height of Hitler’s triumph. There the editor of a German national newspaper is reported as telling him that ‘Germany wanted peace, but she wanted it on her own terms.’ The book ends with Lockhart, woken by ‘the tramp of two thousand feet in unison’, looking out of his window onto a misty dawn, where ‘Nazi Germany was already at work’.
A more original variation on the same theme was Douglas Reed’s Insanity Fair. This made a deep impression on me. Reed witnessed the persecution of the Jews which accompanied the advance of Nazi influence. He described the character and mentality — alternately perverted, unbalanced and calculating — of the Nazi leaders. He analysed and blisteringly denounced that policy of appeasement by Britain and France which paved the way for Hitler’s successes. Written on the eve of the Anschluss, it was powerfully prophetic.
Out of the Night by Jan Valtin — pen name for the German communist Richard Krebs — was lent to my father by our future MP Denis Kendall. It was such strong meat that my father forbade me to read it — but in vain. When he went out to meetings I would take it down from the shelf on which it was hidden and read its spine-chilling account of totalitarianism in action. It is, in truth, an unsuitable book for a girl of sixteen, full of scenes of sadistic violence whose authenticity makes them still more horrifying. The appalling treatment by the Nazis of their victims is undoubtedly the most powerful theme. But underlying it is another, just as significant. For it describes how the communists set out in cynical alliance with the Nazis to subvert the fragile democracy of Germany by violence in the late twenties and early thirties. That same alliance against democracy would, of course, be replicated in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 to 1941 which destroyed Poland, the Baltic states and Finland and plunged the world into war. The book undoubtedly contributed to my growing belief that Nazism (national socialism) and communism (international socialism) were but two sides of the same coin.
A book which had a particular influence on me was the American Herbert Agar’s A Time for Greatness, which appeared in 1944. This was a strangely powerful analysis of how the West’s moral failure allowed the rise of Hitler and the war which had followed. It urged a return to Western liberal democratic values and — though I liked this less — a fair amount of left-wing social engineering. For me the important message of Agar’s book was that the fight against Hitler had a significance for civilization and human destiny which exceeded the clash of national interests or spheres of influence or access to resources or any of the other — doubtless important — stuff of power politics.
Agar also wrote of the need, as part of the moral regeneration which must flow from fighting the war, to solve what he called ‘the Negro problem’. I had never heard of this ‘problem’ at all. Although I had seen some coloured people on my visit to London, there were almost none living in Grantham. Friends of ours once invited two American servicemen — one black, one white — stationed in Grantham back to tea and had been astonished to detect tension and even hostility between them. We were equally taken aback when our friends told us about it afterwards. This sort of prejudice was simply outside our experience or imagination.
Like many other young girls in wartime, I read Barbara Cart-land’s Ronald Cartland, the life of her brother, a young, idealistic Conservative MP, who had fought appeasement all the way and who was killed at Dunkirk in 1940. In many ways her most romantic book, it was a striking testament to someone who had no doubt that the war was not only necessary but right, and whose thinking throughout his short life was ‘all of a piece’, something which I always admired. But the sense that the war had a moral significance which underlay the fear and suffering — or in our family’s case in Grantham the material dreariness and mild deprivation — which accompanied it, was perhaps most memorably conveyed by Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy. The author — a young pilot — portrays the struggle which had claimed the lives of so many of his friends, and which would claim his own less than a year later, as one which was also being fought out in the human heart. It was a struggle for a better life in the sense of simple decency.
A generation which, unlike Richard Hillary, survived the war felt this kind of desire to put things right with themselves, their country and the world. As I would come to learn when dealing with my older political colleagues, no one who fought came out of it quite the same person as went in. Less frequently understood, perhaps, is that war affected deeply, if inevitably less powerfully, people like me who while old enough to understand what was happening in the conflict were not themselves in the services. Those who grow up in wartime always turn out to be a serious-minded generation. But we all see these great calamities with different eyes, and so their impact upon us is different. It never seemed to me, for example, as it apparently did to many others, that the ‘lesson’ of wartime was that the state must take the foremost position in our national life and summon up a spirit of collective endeavour in peace as in war.
The ‘lessons’ I drew were quite different. The first was that the kind of life that the people of Grantham had lived before the war was a decent and wholesome one, and its values were shaped by the community rather than by the government. Second, since even a cultured, developed, Christian country like Germany had fallen under Hitler’s sway, civilization could never be taken for granted and had constantly to be nurtured, which meant that good people had to stand up for the things they believed in. Third, I drew the obvious political conclusion that it was appeasement of dictators which had led to the war, and that had grown out of wrong-headed but decent impulses, like the pacifism of Methodists in Grantham, as well as out of corrupt ones. One can never do without straightforward common sense in matters great as well as small. And finally I have to admit that I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leade
rship of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.
Our life in wartime Grantham — until I went up to Oxford in 1943 — must have been very similar to that of countless other families. There was always voluntary work to do of one kind or another in the Service canteens and elsewhere. Our thoughts were at the front; we devoured voraciously every item of available news; and we ourselves, though grateful for being more or less safe, knew that we were effectively sidelined. But we had our share of bombing. There were altogether twenty-one German air raids on the town, and seventy-eight people were killed. The town munitions factory — the British Manufacturing and Research Company (B.M.A.R.Co., or ‘British Marcs’ as we called it) — which came to the town in 1938, was an obvious target, as was the junction of the Great North Road and the Northern Railway Line — the latter within a few hundred yards of our house. My father was frequently out in the evenings on air raid duty. During air raids we would crawl under the table for shelter — we had no outside shelter for we had no garden — until the ‘all clear’ sounded. On one occasion, coming back from school with my friends, carrying our gas masks, we made a dive for the shelter of a large tree as someone called out that the aircraft overhead was German. After bombs fell on the town in January 1941 I asked my father if I could walk down to see the damage. He would not let me go. Twenty-two people died in that raid. We were also concerned for my sister Muriel, who was working day and night in the Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham: Birmingham was, of course, very badly bombed.
In fact, Grantham itself was playing a more dramatic role than I knew at the time. Bomber Command’s 5 Group was based in Grantham, and it was from a large house off Harrowby Road that much of the planning was done of the bombing raids on Germany; the officers’ mess was in Elm House in Elmer Street, which I used to pass walking to school. The Dambusters flew from near Grantham — my father met their commander, Squadron Leader Guy Gibson. I always felt that Bomber Harris — himself based in Grantham in the early part of the war — had not been sufficiently honoured. I would remember what Winston Churchill wrote to him at the end of the war:
For over two years Bomber Command alone carried the war to the heart of Germany, bringing hope to the peoples of Occupied Europe and to the enemy a foretaste of the mighty power which was rising against him…
All your operations were planned with great care and skill. They were executed in the face of desperate opposition and appalling hazards. They made a decisive contribution to Germany’s final defeat. The conduct of these operations demonstrated the fiery gallant spirit which animated your air crews and the high sense of duty of all ranks under your command. I believe that the massive achievements of Bomber Command will long be remembered as an example of duty nobly done.
Winston S. Churchill
In Grantham, at least, politics did not stand still in the war years. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 sharply altered the attitudes of the Left to the war. Pacifist voices suddenly became silent. Anglo-Soviet friendship groups sprouted. We attended, not without some unease, Anglo-Soviet evenings held at the town hall. It was the accounts of the suffering and bravery of the Russians at Stalingrad in 1942–43 which had most impact on us.
Although it can now be seen that 1941 — with Hitler’s attack on Russia in June and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor which brought America into the war in December — sowed the seeds of Germany’s ultimate defeat, the news was generally bad, and especially so in early 1942. This almost certainly contributed to the outcome of the by-election held in Grantham on 27 February 1942, after Victor Warrender was elevated to the Lords as Lord Bruntisfield, to become an Admiralty spokesman. Our town had the dubious distinction of being the first to reject a government candidate during the war. Denis Kendall stood as an Independent against our Conservative candidate, Sir Arthur Longmore. Kendall fought an effective populist campaign in which he skilfully used his role as General Manager of British Marcs to stress the theme of an all-out drive for production for the war effort and the need for ‘practical’ men to promote it. To our great surprise, he won by 367 votes. Then and later the Conservative Party was inclined to complacency. A closer analysis of the limited number of by-elections should have alerted us to the likelihood of the Socialist landslide which materialized in 1945.
Unusually, I took little part in the campaign because I was working very hard, preparing for examinations which I hoped would get me into Somerville College, Oxford. In particular, my evenings were spent cramming the Latin which was required for the entrance exam. Our school did not teach Latin. Fortunately, our new headmistress, Miss Gillies, herself a classicist, was able to arrange Latin lessons for me from a teacher at the boys’ grammar school, and to lend me her own books, including a textbook written by her father. The hard work helped keep my mind off the ever more dismal news about the war. In particular, there was a series of blows in the Far East — the loss of Malaya, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, the fall of Hong Kong and then Singapore, the retreat through Burma and the Japanese threat to Australia. One evening in the spring of 1942 when I had gone for a walk with my father I turned and asked him when — and how — it would all end. He replied very calmly: ‘We don’t know how, we don’t know when; but we have no doubt that we shall win.’
In spite of my efforts to get into Somerville, I failed to win the scholarship I wanted. It was not too surprising, for I was only seventeen, but it was something of a blow. I knew that if I was not able to go up in 1943 I would not be allowed to do more than a two-year ‘wartime degree’ before I was called up for national service at the age of twenty. But there was nothing I could do about it, and so at the end of August 1943 I entered the third-year sixth and became Joint Head of School. Then, suddenly, a telegram arrived offering me a place at Somerville in October. Someone else had dropped out. And so it was that I suddenly found myself faced with the exciting but daunting prospect of leaving home, almost for the first time, for a totally different world.
CHAPTER II
Gowns-woman
Oxford 1943 to 1947
Oxford does not set out to please. Freshmen arrive there for the Michaelmas term in the misty gloom of October. Monumental buildings impress initially by their size rather than their exquisite architecture. Everything is cold and strangely forbidding. Or so it seemed to me.
It had been at Somerville during bitterly cold mid-winter days that I had taken my Oxford entrance exams. But I had seen little of my future college and less still of the university as a whole before I arrived, rather homesick and apprehensive, to begin my first term. In fact, Somerville always takes people by surprise. Many incurious passers-by barely know it is there, for the kindest thing to say of its external structure is that it is unpretentious. But inside it opens up into a splendid green space onto which many rooms face. I was to live both my first and second years in college, moving from the new to the older buildings. In due course, a picture or two, a vase and finally an old armchair brought back from Grantham allowed me to feel that the rooms were in some sense mine. In my third and fourth years I shared digs with two friends in Walton Street.
Both Oxford and Somerville were strongly if indirectly affected by the war. For whatever reason, Oxford was not bombed, in spite of the presence of the motor works at Cowley which had become a centre for aircraft repair. But like everywhere else, both town and university were subject to the blackout (‘dim-out’ from 1944) and much affected by wartime stringencies. Stained-glass windows were boarded up. Large static water tanks — as in Somerville’s East Quad off the Woodstock Road — stood ready for use in case of fire. Most of our rations were allocated direct to the college which provided our unexciting fare in hall, though on rare occasions I would be asked out to dinner. There were a few coupons left over for jam and other things. One of the minor benefits to my health and figure of such austerities was that I ceased having sugar in my tea
— though only many years later would I deny my ever-sweet tooth the pleasure of sugared coffee (not that there was over-much coffee for some time either). There were tight controls over the use of hot water. For example, there must be no more than five inches of water in the bath — a line was painted round at the right level — and of course I rigidly observed this, though coming from a family where the relationship between cleanliness and Godliness was no laughing matter. Not that we ever felt like complaining. After all, we were the lucky ones.
Moreover, though I was not the first member of my family to go to university — my cousin had gone to London — I was the first Roberts to go to Oxbridge and I knew that, however undemonstrative they might be, my parents were extremely proud of the fact. Before I went up to Oxford, I had a less clear idea of what the place would be like than did many of my contemporaries. But I regarded it as being quite simply the best, and if I was serious about getting on in life that is what I should always strive for. There was no point in lowering my sights. So, excellent as it was, particularly in the sciences, I was never tempted to opt for Nottingham, our ‘local’ university, even though I would have been able to live so much nearer my home, family and friends. Another aspect of Oxford which appealed to me then — and still does — is the collegiate system. Oxford is divided into colleges, though it also has some central university institutions such as the Bodleian Library. In my day, life centred on the college (where you ate and slept and received many of your tutorials) and around other institutions — church and societies — which had more or less a life of their own. As a scientist, my life probably revolved more around university institutions and facilities, such as the chemistry laboratories, than did that of students in other disciplines. Still, my experience of college life contributed to my later conviction that if you wish to bring the best out of people they should be encouraged to be part of smaller, human-scale communities rather than be left to drift on a sea of impersonality.
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