PARTISAN REVIEW
51
did they have in common, these sinister ones whose OpInlOns were
such a threat to the budding Southern Rhodesian State, then still
in the Lord Malvern phase of the Huggins/Lord Malvern/Welen–
ski/Garfield Todd/Winston Field/Smith succession? After months,
indeed, years, of trying to understand what could unite them, we
had simply to give up. Of course, half were on the left, kaffir lovers
and so on, but what of the others? It was when a man wrote a letter
to the
Rhodesia Herald
in solemn parody of Soviet official style–
as heavy then as now, urging immediate extermination by firing
squad of our government, in favour of a team from the Labour
Opposition, and we heard from our contact in the post office that
his name was now on the Black List, that we began to suspect the
truth.
Throughout the war, this convenient arrangement continued.
Our Man in the Post Office - by then several men, but it doesn't
sound so well, kept us informed of what and who was on the Black
List. And if our mail was being held up longer than we considered
reasonable, the censors being on holiday, or lazy, authority would be
gently prodded to hurry things up a little.
This was my first experience of Espionage.
Next was when I knew someone who knew someone who had
told him of how a certain Communist Party Secretary had been ap–
proached by the man whose occupation it was to tap communist
telephones - we are now in Europe. Of course, the machinery for
tapping was much more primitive then. Probably by now they have
dispensed with human intervention altogether, and a machine judges
the degree of a suspicious person's disaffection by the tones of his
voice. Then, and in that country, they simply played back records
of conversation. This professional had been in the most intimate con–
tact with communism and communists for years, becoming involved
with shopping expeditions, husbands late from the office, love affairs,
a divorce or so, children's excursions. He had been sucked into active
revolutionary politics by, as it were, the back entrance.
"I don't think you ought to let little Jackie go at all. He'll be
in bed much too late, and you know how bad tempered he gets
when he is overtired."
"She said to me No, she said. That's final.
If
you want to do
a thing like that, then you must do it yourself. You shouldn't expect
