PARTISAN REVIEW
61
We congratulated him, and urged him to keep us informed
about how people were trained as censors, and he agreed to do
this.
Shortly after that the war ended, and
all
the camaraderie of war–
time ended as the Cold War began. The
fe~ent
of left activity
ended too.
We saw Tom no more, but followed his progress, steady
if
slow,
up the Civil Service. The last I heard he was heading a department
among whose duties is censorship. I imagine
him,
a man in his fifties,
husband and no doubt a father, looking down the avenues
of
lost
time to those dizzy days when he was the member of a dangerous
revolutionary organisation. "Yes," he must often say, "you can't tell
me anything about them. They are idealistic, I can grant you so
much, but they are dangerous. Dangerous and wrongheaded! I left
them as soon as I understood what they really were."
But of our three post-office spies Harry was the one whose
career, for a while at least, was the most rewarding for humanist
idealists.
He was a silent, desperately shy schoolboy who came to a public
meeting and fell madly in love for a week or so with the speaker,
a girl giving her first public speech and as shy as he was.
His
father
had died and his mother, as the psychiatrists and welfare workers
would say, was "inadequate." That is to say, she was not good at
being a widow, and was frail in health. What little energy she had
went into earning enough money for her and two younger sons to
live on. She nagged at Harry for not having ambition, and for not
studying for the examinations which would take him up the ladder
into the next grade in the post office - and for wasting time with
the Reds. He longed to be of use. For three years he devoted all his
spare time to organisation on the left, putting up exhibitions, hiring
halls and rooms, decorating ballrooms for fund-raising dances, getting
advertisements for our socialist magazine - circulation two thousand
- and laying it out and selling it. He argued principle with town
councillors - "But it's not
fair
-
not to let us have the hall, this is
a democratic country, isn't it?" and spent at least three nights a
week discussing world affairs in smoke-filled rooms.
At the time we would have dismissed as beyond redemption any–
one who suggested it, but I dare say now that the main function
of those gatherings was social. Southern Rhodesia was never exactly
a hospitable country for those interested in anything but sports and
