Short story: ‘My First Communist’

For John Pym

The stars! How clear the night sky was then, when we moved into the still unfinished council estate, how deeply dark, and how bright the stars! On a cold winter’s night, you almost gasped when you saw Orion hanging there, magnificent, or, rather, striding across the universe, so in your face; whilst Rigel and Betelgeuse, or nearby Aldebaran, or Capella and Procyon, threw such long, steely shafts of light that they actually seemed close, seemed to be watching, or even watching over, or even communicating with the boy observer! I soon transferred the star-charts on the end-papers of The Golden Book of Astronomy to the heavens overhead. And then I got a two-and-a-half-inch refractor telescope. Poking it through a tall rose trellis between our house and the next, I followed after sunset the mysterious phases of brilliant Venus. I could discern the rings of Saturn, and discovered tiny glinting moons next to Jupiter. I peered into the Pleiades and tried to count how many ‘sisters’ it really had. Gradually I found nebulae and the great cartwheel galaxy of Andromeda – so clearly a galaxy, so clearly remote beyond imagining…and I stared at it through my telescope for minutes at a time, in awe that it was just like our own Milky Way yet only one of numberless galaxies… Although it was risky, I also tied layers of red cellophane over the eyepiece and squinted at the Sun. I could clearly see the burns on its face and great flaring prominences like hair, that dwarfed the Earth. I longed for a comet. Yet nothing, actually, could have compared with that simple experience, night after night, of the whole universe lying out there before me, of looking millions and billions of miles into its depths, and into time, yet knowing there was no end to it (and the idea of that endless void was depressing). The stars…the stars…the panoply of ‘our’ stars… Truly, they were the Firmament of Wonder to me.

In those days, hardly any astronomy was taught in schools. A girl at primary school who was keen on astronomy, and had been to the Planetarium in London, was obliged to show a teacher one of her books before he would believe that the Sun is only a ‘small’ star. At secondary school, I was the only person I knew whose hobby was astronomy, and I kept the fact to myself.

I was astonished, then, to see in the creative section of the school magazine a long piece entitled ‘Our Solar System’. In construction it was rather basic, even simple-minded. It began with a general descriptive paragraph, then went through the planets one by one, starting with Mercury and devoting three or four lines to each. These invariably began ‘X is the Nth planet and Y million miles from the Sun’. It looked boring on the page, but the string of figures given for each planet – diameter, density, rotation, length of year etc – was impressive.

It was written by someone in the class above me called Peter Frere. I had never spoken to him, but knew who he was because ‘Frere’ was the tallest boy in his form, if not the school. He was thin and subliminally gawky. His legs were incredibly long, his stomach rather hollow, his chest broad and quite deep, his neck thin, and his face cavernous. There was no mistaking that his rather coarse hair was greying. The eye sockets beneath it were enormous, but his eyes were so large and blue, with long lashes, that they seemed like a woman’s. His face was always pale. It tapered to a small, hard chin.

I gathered that Peter Frere lived on a corner in the oldest part of the council estate, so I waited outside the school one day for him to appear on his way home and casually joined him. No introduction seemed needed; I plunged straight in and congratulated him on his article.

‘Hm…’ he said, cocking his head at me slightly quizzically, flickering his eyelashes in a disarming smile, and holding a finger and thumb in the air. ‘It’s important for people to have the data. Did you know that Jupiter is big enough to contain over 1300 globes the size of Earth?’

‘No, I didn’t!’ I exclaimed in amazement at Frere’s knowledge.

As we walked along, he entertained me, between pauses, with a series of facts – usually statistics – which he introduced with the same words, ‘Did you know?’. I remember, for instance, hearing from him for the first time that an American rocket had recently passed close to Venus and reported that the planet’s rotation was ten times slower than previously thought and ‘retrograde’, i.e. ‘the wrong way’. Peter was sceptical, however, about the Americans’ data.

‘The Russians are much more likely to be accurate. Did you know that they estimate the number of asteroids at 200,000, whereas everyone else thinks it’s about 40,000?’

Again, this was completely news to me. I suddenly realised as Frere was talking, that he had already started shaving – and the light stubble on his cheeks was silver. Although only fifteen, he seemed older. Everything about him, including his woman’s eyes, seemed much older.

We carried on walking to his house and talk turned to the Moon.

‘Did you know that in 1958 a Russian astronomer at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory witnessed a volcanic disturbance inside a crater on the Moon?’

‘That’s incredible! No, I didn’t…’

‘Not to mention, of course, that in 1959 the Russians photographed the other side of the Moon for the first time, from Lunik Three.’

‘Yes. It was a strange photo, wasn’t it? You know, you just saw these big holes in it, like cheese.’

‘Ye-s – yes!’ said Peter, smiling broadly again and raising his finger and thumb. ‘But before long the Russians will be landing on the Moon. That is Khrushchev’s plan. Sorry, Khrushchov’s… N.S. Khrushchov. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchov…’

I was impressed by this precise enunciation of the Russian leader’s full name, but bemused. Peter bestowed on me a stream of figures about the heights of mountains and dimensions of craters, then commented casually:

‘The best time to look at the Moon, of course, is at the Quarters.’

We had reached his house.

‘Do you have a telescope?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, my father bought me one. You must come and see it…’ He looked down on me from his height, cocking his head to one side and addressing me as his junior. ‘I can’t invite you in now, as I’ve got to do my homework.’

It was a day in mid-January when I ‘went round’ to the Freres’ house for the first time. I knocked on the front door, was admitted by Peter, and directed by his outstretched arm straight into the front room to meet his father.

I was a bit taken aback at first that Mr Frere was so old (he was probably in his late sixties). As we entered, he put down his newspaper, which I could not help noticing was the Daily Worker. He was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room next to the window. The most arresting thing in his vicinity was a brightly lit aquarium with tropical fish sailing about in it. On the other side of the room a coal fire was burning and there was a television. He was wearing thick-framed glasses, a black jacket, flannel trousers, waistcoat, white shirt and tartan tie. There was a stick on each arm of his chair, and a mug of tea on a table beside him. He was evidently quite a short man, jovial, with more than a passing resemblance to Arthur Askey.

Peter announced me with a histrionic gesture.

‘Dad – Martin Barlow.’

‘So you’ve come to see Peter’s astronomical telescope. Are you interested in astronomy?’

‘Yes, sir, I am.’

‘No no no – we’ll have no “sirs” here, my boy! Do you know who Gagarin is?’

‘Of course!’ I laughed.

‘Isn’t he an amazing man?’

I agreed with Peter’s father, although I hadn’t really given Gagarin’s personal qualities much thought. With that, the interview was over.

‘Well, I am glad to meet you, Martin. Off you go, then, and Joy will give you something to eat.’

Mrs Frere was already standing in the hall. She was unmistakably Peter’s mother: her head was roughly triangular, her eyes large, and she had thick, greyish eyebrows. But she wore bright lipstick and looked no more than fifty. You could imagine there might well be something joyful about her, but at the moment she was anxious. She clasped her hands together and almost wrung them.

‘So you are Peter’s friend Martin… Hello, I’m Joy. Would you like me to bring your tea up to you, boys, or would you prefer to have it in the kitchen afterwards?’

‘Oh, we’ll have it later, Mom, thank you,’ said Peter with a flourish of his hand, and set off upstairs.

Peter’s bedroom was intriguing. It smelt less than fresh, and seemed almost that of an adult. For one thing, the bed was a double one, taking up much of the room. On the wall above it was a large poster of Valentina Tereshkova. The right hand wall bore a diagram of the zodiacal constellations with fanciful outlines, and next to it the Periodic Table. Beneath them, on a small trunk, lay a neat pile of the Daily Worker. The darkest corner contained what was evidently Peter’s desk, with a little shelf above it holding a multi-volume encyclopaedia. By the window was the telescope, with a map of the Moon sellotaped to the wall next to it. I was rather disappointed. The refractor was on an altazimuth mounting and proper tripod, but it looked only two inches across and was in black and white plastic. Peter explained that the big window slid back and he did all his observations from here, where he could always follow the Moon. Rightly or wrongly, I assumed this meant he never actually went outside to view the night sky, as I had to.

‘I’m studying the moon in detail,’ Peter told me, ‘because I think someone will make a soft landing on it soon, and I wonder where’s best. My own guess is between the Oceanus Procellarum and Copernicus…’

He showed me a small white cardboard box that he was setting up to measure the brightness of the night sky and individual stars. It featured a variable slit and thin vertical copper wire.

‘The…mm…mathematics of it are rather difficult,’ he said, pointing to an adjacent tome with a battered dust jacket, entitled Astronomer’s Handbook. ‘That belonged to my father.’

After this, we went downstairs, passed the open door to the front room, where Mr Frere was deep in his newspaper, and Peter opened the door into the kitchen.

It was almost stifling, but extremely light as there were windows all round overlooking the garden, which was small and wedge-shaped. Mrs Frere immediately fussed over making our tea. The source of the heat was prominent: a coal-fired range across one wall, complete with scuttle, tongs and fender. But the most unexpected thing was the sight of three medium-sized tortoises propped against the inside of the fender, soaking up the glare of the grate. Two more tortoises, large and very scrawny in the neck, were plodding awkwardly across the kitchen floor, whilst a small yellow one lay beside an open cardboard box snapping at some lettuce. Mrs Frere realised that I was surprised, so promptly explained, as she toasted our teacakes, that they had had the tortoises ‘for a very long time’ and hadn’t ‘the heart’ to put them in the garden shed every winter to hibernate. It was a good tea and I left by the side door, as I always did in future.

It was clear to me that Mrs Frere was concerned about Peter’s friends and that he probably had few. This was dramatically borne out a couple of months later, when I was going home at the end of the morning and passed the large windows of an isolated form-room near the school library. I could clearly see Peter lurching about the room between desks, pursued by three of the worst bullies in the school – ‘Crudmore’ (I don’t remember his real name), Wilkins and Webb, who were shorter and stockier than him. Peter was trying to treat it as a game, emitting mock cries, dodging and even leaping in the air. But one of the bullies was standing by the closed door and hit him in the back whenever he passed, whilst the others punched him as hard as they could whenever they got close enough. When this happened, he uttered real screams. They grabbed his satchel and threw his lunch on the floor. Peter did not see me. Then I caught sight of the faces of other members of his form watching in horror through the pane in the door, and continued on my way fast.

I was shocked, of course. Why had they picked on Peter? Why didn’t he defend himself, seeing as he was so much bigger than them? I realised that he probably annoyed them as a ‘freak’. He was ‘too tall’ for his age, his head was a funny shape, his eyes were not ‘masculine’, yet he could already grow a beard; and he was too clever. Yes, he was eccentric, ‘weird’…

The next day, in the morning break, I went to see a young teacher who had a daughter of my own age and seemed to me protective and likely to do something about the bullying. He was well known to be left-wing and was said to have stood up to the acting headmaster even physically after the latter beat a boy in front of the school. He listened attentively, but said nothing. I couldn’t work out whether he was going to take the case up; also whether his silence betokened that he thought I was just ‘telling on’ the perpetrators. The boys in Peter’s form who had witnessed his torment through the glass told a friend of mine that they had reported it, but it had been going on for weeks in that classroom after the last morning lesson. I also heard on the parental grapevine that Joy Frere was in tears about it and had gone with her invalid husband to complain to the new Head. The ‘Crudmore’-Wilkins-Webb ritual certainly stopped, but I sensed that a different form of bullying took its place: ostracisation because Peter hadn’t ‘stood up for himself’ and everyone knew that his mother, for goodness’ sake, had had to do that for him.

Since he was in the year above me, I had no contact with Peter at school, and never mentioned the bullying to him. There also seemed no call for me to go and look through his telescope, or for him to come and look through mine. I was much more interested in persuading Charlotte Greene, the daughter of the local chemist, that she ought to come and view the moons of Jupiter through my telescope. It was set up on a tripod now in our back garden, and round the eyepiece I thought I might be able to get close enough to her face to kiss it.

It was a bright Saturday in early April when I next visited the Freres. I bumped into Peter as I was coming home from town and he invited me to carry on walking with him and drop in.

We entered by the front door again, and as we passed the front room I could see Mr Frere in his armchair smoking and watching the television.

‘Hello there, my boy!’ he waved at me, and we went straight through to the kitchen. It was full of sunlight and they had the back door open, through which the tortoises were laboriously stumbling in and out.

‘We are letting them into the garden now,’ Peter’s mother explained, ‘but we bring them in again at night in case there is a frost.’

She rapidly provided Peter and me with drinks and biscuits, which we took up to his room.

Because of the size of the bed, and the fact that the trunk with the newspapers practically blocked one side of it and the telescope the other, I hadn’t actually been able to sit down on my first visit. But the telescope on its tripod had now been propped in a corner, and there was a small stool under the window. Sitting down on it, beside the bed, I immediately noticed that the zodiacal figures on the wall opposite had been replaced by a poster of a heavily bearded gentleman with an eyeglass on a cord, and the Periodic Table by a chart of the Russian alphabet.

‘Are you learning Russian?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I’m teaching myself.’ Then he added lightly: ‘I think it’s quite important… I think given the superiority of Soviet science, Russian is likely to become the new lingua franca. But in any case it’s the language of the future.’

I didn’t question this, but made a few jokey remarks about the new headmaster and the quirks of some of our teachers.

‘But what do you expect, Martin? The school is just part of the establishment…the bourgeois establishment. I’m completely alienated from it, but I’ve got to get my O Levels. “The social life from which the worker is shut out is life itself, human activity, human enjoyment, real human existence”.’

I looked at him.

‘Marx,’ he informed me, pointing at the bearded gent. ‘Forwards, 1844.’

‘Ah.’

‘As Marx and Engels say in the Manifesto, “the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”…’

I was very impressed, but reacted to the quotes as if they were simply facts Peter was spouting like the astronomical ones earlier. Yet he delivered them differently, somehow. He looked at me from the semi-darkness of his chair, flickered his eyelashes, spoke, then gazed beyond me out through the window.

‘The triumph of socialism and then communism is historically inevitable.’

I stared at him.

‘Marx has proved that scientifically.’

After failing to seduce Charlotte Greene to the science of astronomy – and having exhausted almost all I could do with my telescope – I had become more interested in natural history. So I asked Peter a few questions about the family’s tortoises. They were indeed of different species, he said. Mr Frere had first become interested in the creatures when he fought at Gallipoli (‘like Clement Attlee’). He had watched heavy armoured vehicles lumber over them in the sand, only for the tortoises to get up again and walk away. When I left, Joy Frere was carrying the tortoises, who helplessly worked their legs in the air, from the garden into the kitchen.

It was interesting to talk to Peter every so often, there was no doubt about that, as he was so different from everyone else I knew; in a word, he was unconventional. But I could not work out what it was he ‘knew’ that gave him such an essential apartness, a condescending yet dreamy remoteness that he had not possessed during his astronomical phase, but which made me convinced we weren’t really on the same wavelength. There was an elephant in the room, I sensed, but I couldn’t see it.

At school, the interdict on bullying him stood, I think, but whenever I heard his name mentioned it was with amusement, as if he were a ‘crank’, or lived with his elderly parents in a world that no-one recognised or understood. Some boarders from my form had been over to the next town one Saturday afternoon, wearing uniform of course, and seen Peter in jeans, denim jacket and a red shirt selling the Daily Worker on the street, which they found hilarious. I was going to Germany that summer as part of the school exchange, but Peter wasn’t, as he didn’t ‘do’ German in the Lower Fourth. Nevertheless, I heard the German master telling a colleague in the corridor that he gathered ‘Frere’ was going to East Germany for the equivalent period, which the German master found ‘most peculiar’. My mother mentioned to me later that all the Freres had gone and Mrs Frere had had ‘a wonderful time’.

Altogether, there was no reason for me to visit Peter any more, but I still bumped into him out of school, particularly on Saturdays. One such Saturday in November, by which time I was in the Fourth Form and Peter in the Fifth, I was coming home from the centre of town when I saw him ahead of me in a gabardine mac. I could hardly walk past him, so I drew level.

‘Oh, hello,’ he smiled faintly, and cocked his head at me graciously. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages. Do you want to call round for tea tomorrow? I can’t invite you this afternoon, I’m afraid, we’ve got a meeting.’

I said that I could not make the next day, as it was Remembrance Sunday. I offered no further explanation, because I reasoned that if he knew I was taking part in church services for Remembrance, he might sound off about religion being ‘the opium of the people’ (the only quote from Marx that I knew).

‘Mmm…’ he said. ‘Commemoration of the victims of imperialism!’

‘What?’

‘The so-called “fallen” and “Glorious Dead” in both world wars were the victims of imperialism – which is just the highest stage of capitalism, can’t you see that, Martin?’

‘Well…I can see they were the victims of German and Nazi imperialism, I suppose.’

‘No. They were also the victims of British imperialism. French imperialism. American imperialism. Both wars were wars between capitalist imperialists for the control of economic resources. The proletariat was so weak then that it was manipulated by British, German etcetera bourgeois capitalists into going to war.’

‘You mean the soldiers didn’t know who they were fighting for?’

‘Precisely, my dear Martin: they were fighting on both sides for their masters, the monopolist capitalists…’

‘Hang on, I don’t think you can be right there, Peter, because I know my grandfather joined up to defend his country – to stop it being taken over by the Germans…and my father hates Hitler and the Nazis even now.’

‘No no,’ Peter laughed, ‘they may have thought that’s what they were fighting for, but only the capitalists profited from it. I’m a pacifist. As Marx and Engels said, “the working men have no country” – patriotism is bourgeois indoctrination. When the new proletarian era comes, there will be no more wars. How could there be, after socialist revolutions in every country?’

‘So in Britain, for instance, the people who were killed in two world wars won’t be part of the nation any more, so to speak…they’ll just be victims of the past, kind of lost..? After the revolution, we won’t feel anything for them any more, no pity, no gratitude, no sort of…connection? We won’t remember them?’

‘Pity we shall feel, my father always say that. But pity for them as working men who were duped – who didn’t really know what they were fighting for.’

‘You mean they were duped because they were only “working men”? That’s a bit snooty, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all, Martin. That’s just how it was. There is going to be a proletarian revolution – it’s historically inevitable – but they didn’t know that. “We’ll make Winston Churchill smoke a Woodbine every day, when the Red Revolution comes!”.’

I found Peter’s certainty about these matters unsettling, indeed slightly frightening. After all, could he be right? But it was obviously impossible to argue with him, because his belief in this stuff was now so complete; almost as though it were a religion, I reflected ruefully. I decided not to make any effort to talk to him again. Circumstances, however, soon changed that.

(To be concluded 12 June)

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.