Through Frosted Glass

By Robin Blick

To change the world, it’s a tall order, leaving little time for love. Passion must stand in line and wait its turn. This engrossing autobiography traces the path of a true love that never ran smooth, yet triumphed with the passing of time. The author’s Dark Lady is a constantly felt presence and a promise, parenthesising his hectic life of political engagement. Along this bumpy road the author has close encounters with the great, the good and the ugly of the political establishment and the world of entertainment, while somehow still finding the time to write three studies of 20th century totalitarianism and feature as a multi-instrumental Jazzer on BBC radio and at Ronnie Scotts, the Millennium Dome and Tony Blair’s Downing Street Christmas party. History teaches that rarely if ever does revolution measure up to the dream. But true love changed and fulfilled the author’s life where revolution failed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789551891

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I

I begin as I end, with Maureen, the love of my life. My enduring passion for Maureen was set ablaze one November day in 1957, when I glimpsed this gorgeous black-haired beauty as she sauntered up a flight of stairs of a cosmetic factory situated in what was then the London Borough of Tottenham…the sublime amidst the mundane. Her white overall was smeared down the front with what I took to be lipstick, and Puritan though I then was, my loins throbbed at the sight of her perfectly contoured legs. So unforgettable was this moment – I can see her just as clearly now – that I was able to relate this vision in every detail (save that is for the legs) in a love poem I sent Maureen when I found her again forty-two years later. From that instant, I was in her thrall for ever.

Maureen Joyce Griggs, as she was then, began life as I did a little more than two years previously in North Middlesex Hospital in the London Borough of Edmonton, on the 4 January 1939. And it was at Chase Farm Hospital, Enfield, a few miles further north, the hospital where my mother, Elsie, worked as a nurse before she married my father, Bill, and where she died of breast cancer a mere twenty or so years later, that Maureen, still only a baby, nearly died after an operation for acute peritonitis and where, some thirty years later, her only child, Andrea was born, who shares with me, her mother’s first and last lover, the same birthday, 19 October.

While both my parents were of cockney stock, Elsie from Stepney and Bill from nearby Shoreditch, Maureen’s beloved dad Freddy, one of a brood of eleven, hailed from what was at the turn of the century a still largely rural Enfield. Swansea-born Alice, Maureen’s mother, had a truly Celtic pedigree, part Welsh, and part Irish. In the thirties, like millions of others from similar backgrounds, both Maureen’s father and mine fell on hard times. Freddy signed up for a term in the army that took him to what is now modern Iraq, while Bill, a gifted multilinguist, came home after losing his job at a German shipping company in Bremerhaven, only to spend the next few years tramping the streets of London in futile pursuit of employment. It was this dispiriting experience – one he once told me haunted him in his dreams – that more than any other convinced him to become involved in far-left politics, a legacy that I inherited in full measure.

Those who specialise in such things assure us that the imprint of the family marks us for life. If true, and it probably is, it may well have contributed to Maureen as an only child being more self-reliant that most, and in later life, when she first knew and in time came to care for me, stubborn to the point of being reluctant to yield up any of her independence for the sake of love. It was a decision, or rather a lack of one, she later much regretted no less than myself. ‘I was stupid,’ she told me when we met again thirty-seven years on. But as we shall see, no more so than I was at the time. In fact, probably less.

I was the middle one of three boys, Peter, the elder, and Gerald. Peter was more Asperger’s than me by some distance, being totally immersed from an early age in sound reproduction. His obsession stood him in good stead in later years, when with several patented inventions to his name, he became a much sought-after sound engineer, travelling round the UK and the continent installing sound systems at elite cinemas, including Warner Brothers in Leicester Square. Gerald was the most ‘normal’ of the three. When his dream of becoming, a novelist came to nothing (he never got beyond the first few pages) he settled for a career as a librarian.

When our mother died in 1953, we three brothers, with me now in my middle teens, were augmented by the arrival of step-brother Chris, the only child of Gwen, a widow who had remained the best friend of my mother from their nursing days at Chase Farm. My father married Gwen, a decent sort, more out of dire necessity than love. But they rubbed along quite well, which is more than I can say for myself. I must have deep down resented her supplanting my mother, even though Gwen had shown great courage in taking on the care of four boys. When I related this phase of my life to Maureen some years later, she rightly berated me for my lack of gratitude. As for my dad, he loved and missed Elsie so profoundly that he even confided in me shortly after her death that but for us boys, he would have ‘done away’ with himself. I remember noticing one day that he had removed my mum’s photo from his wallet. His heart had been broken. How could I, a teenage schoolboy who knew next to nothing of life and nothing at all of the love of lovers, begin to comprehend his anguish? I only properly grieved for my mother when a full ten years after her death, my dad showed me a photograph of my mum in her pre-war nurse’s uniform. It was then that I shed tears for her for the first time.

But I run ahead. Within a year of the outbreak of war in September 1939, Maureen and I had become not so distant neighbours in the rural backwaters of Buckinghamshire. Maureen had been sent by her parents to stay on a smallholding with family friends, a childless couple, to recuperate from her traumatic operation, while I was just one of thousands of London evacuees fleeing the blitz. Whereas Maureen’s guardian was strict, and not averse to dealing out the occasional hefty slap, I was billeted with Lilly, one of my mum’s two sisters, a fat, rumbustious, easy-going, jolly woman who dwarfed her quietly spoken and rather fastidious husband Tom, a technician with the Pye radio firm. They had two boys, John, about my age, and David, a bit younger, whom they had adopted. When after our re-union, Maureen and I compared notes on our war-time experiences, we found that we had been living but few miles apart, she in Buckingham, I just a few miles down the road in a village outside Aylesbury. In the summer of 2000, we revisited each of our country retreats, and discovered, much to our pleasure and surprise, that they were both as we remembered them.

While Maureen spent the whole of the war in Buckingham, after a no less blissful two year with Lilly and Tom, I was shunted off to my mum’s other sister, Gladys, who lived in Upminster, Essex, with her husband Bert and their sexually precocious daughter Valery, who was a little older than me. She seemed to know all there was to know about what she called, quite accurately on reflection, ‘baby making’. And it was not only talk, because one night in our shared bedroom, she attempted with my assistance to give a practical demonstration of what was involved in this undertaking. Seeing that I was only seven years old at the time, it was only to be expected that for all her encouragement, I failed miserably to rise to the challenge. Perhaps together with my mild Asperger’s, this experience accounts for my later inhibitions when it came to acting on my amorous feelings.

There was also in residence a rather mysterious and youthful ‘Uncle Claude’, whose relationship to the rest of the family I at first could not quite work out. I learned in time that he was the over-indulged baby of my mum’s family, never lasting in a job more than a few weeks, sponging off his sister Gladys, and full of talk about what he was going to do next but never did.

Unlike Maureen, who for the duration of the war was totally unaware of the epic battles being fought out around the globe, my memories are very different. There was an anti-aircraft gun battery situated just down the road from my home in Edmonton, North London, where on most nights, the air raid siren would begin to wail, and the guns open on the Nazi bombers above. On the way to school next morning (this was just before my evacuation), I and other boys would pick up shrapnel and swap unwanted items as we would in peace time cigarette picture cards.

My next encounter with the realities of war came when I was shunted from Aunt Lilly’s cottage in sleepy Buckinghamshire to Upminster, which just happened to lay directly under the flight path of Luftwaffe bombers making for London, and Allied bombers heading the other way to Germany. It so happened that to get to and from my new school at Upminster Bridge, I had to travel eastwards one stop on the Essex branch of the District Line. One day after school, instead of catching the usual electric train home, I climbed aboard one pulled by a much more inviting steam locomotive. Packed to bursting with servicemen in full uniform, it roared past my stop heading full speed for London. Seeing my obvious state of distress as my train whizzed by station after station, some kindly soldiers put me off at Barking, the final stop before London, and helped to set me on my way back home via the less glamorous District line. I can recall quite clearly that I was aware that travelling with me on that train were men who were headed for some distant battlefront, some of them for sure never to return.

Then there was Uncle Claude’s map. It was pinned up on a wall in the living room. Again, I can clearly remember Claude triumphantly tracing the movements on the Eastern front – this must have after the battle of Stalingrad – as the Red Army began to drive the Nazis back to Berlin. But clearest of all in my memory, and I can still picture and hear it now, was the evening of 30 May 1942. Double British Summer-Time operated then, and being a sunny day, it was still very light. Uncle Bert was, like his brother-in-law Tom, a very reserved man. His hobby was making model war-planes, bombers mostly as I recall, out of scraps of metal and the like...there were no kits to buy in those times. And he was very good at it. I can still remember the acrid smell of the glue and paint he used. That evening, Bert was out in the garden, and I was indoors, in the back room that looked out to where Bert was standing, looking up at the sky. Then I heard a rumbling sound that had become louder and louder. It was real bombers, hundreds in strict formation, weighed down with their bomb loads as their engines roared flat out, struggling to gain more altitude. As I have said, Bert was a reserved man. But there he was, brandishing his fist, and bellowing above the din, ‘Give it to them, give it to them.’ And give it them they did. One of the few buildings left standing the next morning in Cologne city centre was the magnificent twin-towered Cathedral, which Maureen and I admired and photographed from across the Rhine sixty-one years later. After more than year of being blitzed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe, and just as Bomber Harris had promised, the Nazis were being given a taste of their own medicine. What I had seen and heard that evening in Aunt Gladys’ back garden was the beginning of the outward journey of the first one thousand bomber raid in history.

Once back at home at the war’s end, I closely followed news of the arrest and then trial of the top Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. I remember reading accounts of the court proceedings in the Communist Party’s Daily Worker (now Morning Star) and seeing their newsreel coverage at our local cinema. Ten went to the gallows, nearly all of them unrepentant, while hundreds more, mostly smaller fry, escaped the noose via the Vatican’s ‘rate line’ to South America and the Middle East. While I have always been opposed to capital punishment for what might be best described as ‘civilian’ crimes, I feel compelled to make an exception in the unique case of those responsible for the calculated extermination of six million human beings purely on account of their ethnic origins. No prison term, however long or harsh, can possibly atone for a crime of such monstrous proportions.

And what, as the question used to go, did our fathers do in the war? As I was indulging the boyish pursuits of shrapnel-swapping and bomber spotting, and Maureen serving her time as an apprentice farm-hand, my dad, by now too old for the call up, was drafted into the fire brigade and despatched to the London docks to dowse the infernos of the Blitz, while Maureen’s Freddy was helping to build bombers to dish out the same treatment to port cities like Hamburg.

By another quirk of fate, it was again the war, only this time its conclusion that brought Maureen and I with our parents to Trafalgar Square to celebrate VE Day on 8 May 1945. Maureen was six years old, I was eight. With the peace that followed began what some would say was my political mis-education. And since it was my political commitments that were in large part one of the causes of my parting from Maureen, their story needs to be told. Perhaps I should point out that the year of my birth, 1936, was one punctuated by a series of momentous political events, all them heralding the war that was to come three years later, events which I was to write about decades hence in the course of my twin careers as academic and political activist.

In the March of that year, Hitler called the bluff of Britain and France by marching his army into the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. In May, rioting Arabs foreshadowed the Holocaust by staging a pogrom of Jews in the Palestinian British Mandate. In the same month, defying a toothless League of Nations, Mussolini proclaimed the creation of his Fascist empire in Abyssinia. In July, General Franco, with the backing of the Vatican, Hitler and Mussolini, launched his civil war against the Spanish republic. In August, Stalin staged the first of his infamous show trials of Lenin’s old comrades. Finally, in October, Mosely’s black-shirted fascists and leftists clashed in the East End ‘Battle of Cable Street’. What a year! And there was much worse to come.

My father was like me one of three sons, the others being Eddie and Bert. Eddie became a fireman and a communist, and Bert a white-collar worker and closet Tory. There was also a sister, Flo, who had, as they say, ambitions above her station, and fulfilled them by marrying the brother of the radio comedian Sam Costa. By the time I knew her, she was talking posh, wearing black netting around her face, and painting her fingernails a bright red. Their dad, also William, was a compositor in the print trade, and as an active trade unionist, held the highly responsible post of Father of his chapel. Born at the turn of the century, William junior grew up not only in a family where political matters were an everyday topic of conversation, but in a world torn apart by war and its ensuing political and social upheavals. In Britain, the Labour Party, founded in 1900, was beginning to supplant the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives. Industrial militancy surged, climaxing in the General Strike of 1926. Abroad, even greater changes were in train. There was the ‘Great War’, and in its wake, upheaval, much of it violent, right across Europe. Monarchies fell, to be replaced by democratic republics in Germany and Austria, and by a totalitarian version of communism in Russia. In Italy, the far right won out as fascism beat back the leftist challenge. Not surprisingly, all these historic changes left their mark on my father. Just before the war, he had won a free scholarship to the elite fee-paying Enfield Grammar School, five years later matriculating in all seven compulsory subjects. Finding himself in a class composed almost entirely of boys from wealthy homes and opinions to match, he rather naively set about trying to convert Tory toffs to a rather leftish version of socialism. They replied by squeezing him between two classroom benches.

Nothing daunted, my dad joined the Labour Party in his late teens, and was instrumental in founding the party’s first youth section, which in later years served chiefly as a battleground between any number of leftist factions. On his return from Germany, he, like many others of his generation across Europe, became convinced that the only answer to the failings of capitalism and the menace of fascism was communism. I am not sure when exactly he joined the Communist Party, but he told me that he took part in a bid to disrupt Sir Oswald Mosely’s black shirt rally at the London Olympia stadium in 1934, and but for his family obligations, would have volunteered to fight in Spain against General Franco’s fascists in 1936. Both were primarily communist initiatives. Certainly, by the end of the war, my dad must have become a highly-trusted party member, because, posing as loyal Labourite, he was one of a select few trusted to participate in a typical clandestine leftist infiltration of the Labour Party.

In my father’s case, this did not go entirely to plan. Bill was anything but a yes-man, and he did not take kindly to the Communist Party’s advocacy of continuing the wartime coalition under Churchill. I recall him proudly showing me the copy of a letter he wrote to the then leader of the communist party, Harry Pollitt, in which he argued cogently, and as it proved, correctly, that Labour would win the upcoming General Election and so be able to form a government of its own. Again, I do not know precisely when or why my dad left the Communist Party, but I do remember that when, in my later teens, I was considering following in his footsteps, he without trying to dissuade me stated with some vehemence that the Communist Party placed no confidence in the capacity of the working people to think for themselves. How right he was, even though it would take me a good few more years before I found it out, the hard way. And I should here make it clear that at no time did my dad try to impose on me his own political views. It was rather that I grew up in a home where my parents and the occasional guest discussed politics and current events, and where from quite an early age, I used to listen to what they had to say about them.

Nevertheless, there are several political events from my childhood that I can still recall quite clearly. The earliest occurred at what proved to be one of the great turning point in British history. On the day the results of the 1945 General Election were being announced over the radio, my mother for some reason had to go out, so she left me with pencil and paper, and strict instructions to write them down, though without explaining to me why they were so important. I don’t remember how I coped with this task, but I do recall being aware that something important was happening. And indeed, it was. Labour won by a landslide, with a majority of one hundred and forty-six. Five years later, on the eve of the next General Election, my dad took me to a Tory election meeting at the local town hall. Edmonton, where we lived, was a safe Labour seat, so a squad of Labour supporters, no doubt augmented by communists, decided to have some fun at the doomed Tories’ expense by occupying the un-reserved places in the balcony, there to unleash salvoes of barracking and heckling that at times rendered the speakers inaudible. I loved it, as by now I was fully aware of which side we, that is our family, were on, and why. But on the way home, my dad offered words of caution. ‘Don’t be impressed by who makes the most noise, but by what they say.’ And again, he was right. I can also remember my dad having a letter published in the local paper during the time of the Korean War. Without saying it in so many words, the purpose of my dad’s letter was to defend Stalin’s foreign policy, being one which, unlike that of the United States, was supposedly entirely devoted to the cause of world peace. Looking back, I can now see that he must still have been operating inside the Labour Party as an under-cover communist, a tactic that later become known as entryism when deployed by the Communist Party’s deadly rivals, the Trotskyists. Little did I know that ten or so years later, I would be joining one of their many fractious grouplets, all of whom then engaged in exactly the same duplicitous undertaking, my first step along a path that would tear me away from my beloved Maureen.

Then of course there was – and still is I regret to say – religion. Like many parents in those days, devout or not, mine, who belonged to the latter category, packed me off to Sunday School so they could indulge in one of the seven deadly sins. As for me, all I can recall is a room above a shop at the end of our road where a lady related what I am sure would have been morally edifying stories from the Bible. Another contact with religion, apart from school assemblies, was compulsory monthly attendance at church parades when I was briefly a member of the boy scouts. Briefly, because I found the services so mind-numbingly boring and a total waste of time that I started to dodge them, which led rapidly to my expulsion. This of course was a time when membership of the boy scouts required the taking of a religious oath. However, my heathen tendencies did not prove an obstacle to my continued selection for the troop football team. My only really serious encounter with organised religion occurred in my third year at grammar school, when a friend died of a sudden brain haemorrhage. The presiding clergyman at his funeral intoned that it was not his place to explain why one so young had been taken from those who loved him. I remember thinking to myself, ‘But it is. That is your job’.

At home, I can recall only three occasions on which religion ever became a subject for comment by my parents, and one was at my own instigation. I must have been around sixteen years old at the time when