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A Nest of Anarchists. By JBP.

These portraits are memories, not fiction, and not autobiography.

Memory is fallible and inadequate, but as the sole survivor of a community which seems to me significant and characteristic of its time I must use whatever store I have to tell its story.

 

* * * *

 

The Prophet.

    The first time I saw Fredrick Lohr he was poised like a sea-captain confronting a mutinous crew from the deck of his ship, voice pitched to cut through squalls. But he wasn't a sea-captain on the bridge of a ship, he was on a platform in Hyde Park. It was a bright, blustery day in 1941, not the most auspicious time to be asking prickly questions about war, power, the conduct of governments, and the crisis in history, but that's what he was doing.

    It wasn't a harangue he was delivering but something closer to an inquisition. He would pick on a particular heckler and fix him with a penetrating gaze, leaning forward as if trying to pierce the mask to reach the struggling infant inside. He would then submit the heckler's words, attitudes and assumptions to mordant scrutiny. As a rule the heckler reacted like a predator faced suddenly by a larger predator. He retreated warily or in haste.

    I don't remember how soon after this I got to know Fredrick and learned his story, but this is it.

    His father was a German who married an Englishwoman and became a British citizen. In 1915 he joined the British Army. As anti-German hysteria grew among civilians, the family suffered abuse from neighbours. One day, when his father was on leave, a crowd gathered on the stairs of the South London tenement, baying for blood. Fredrick's father came out onto the landing in uniform and carrying a rifle. He threatened to blow the head off the first person to take another step. No one did. Fredrick was five or six years old at the time.

    Lohr senior died in his forties and Fredrick inherited a moribund garage business and no money. First through specialist servicing and then through selling cars, he developed a thriving trade and became a Lancia agent in London, spilling cash on hunting with hounds, motor racing, and learning to fly an aeroplane. His favourite books were the novels of R.S.Surtees, whose character Jorrocks rollicked through the shires with huntsmen, trenchermen and bibbers.

    Once, when in full flow, he noticed my wife Gene in the crowd he paused, struck by inspiration. But instead of revealing an immortal thought he told the joke from Surtees about the man at the inn who asked what the weather was like outside. A fellow carouser pulled open the door of a cupboard, peered in and reported 'Filthy dark and smells of cheese.' The crowd received this news with respect and attention.

    Fredrick married a capable, ambitious woman who ran her own dress shop. They had a daughter who became an actress and sometimes visited Fredrick, wearing an expression of tolerant detachment.

    When, after ignoring reality for years, the newspapers began to press alarm buttons about Hitler, crisis, and carry rumours of war. Fredrick awoke to an odd thought. He had relatives in Germany. Were they going to fight him? Did they want a war? He decided to find out.

    What a crazy time to visit Germany, his wife said. If Hitler wants a war, and the politicians can't avoid one, you can't stop it. You're not attending properly to business now. Why waste time and money on a trip which can bring no comfort and no solution?

    They'll look at you like something the cat forgot.

    But Fredrick went. His relatives were warmly hospitable, and fed him rich cakes. No, they told him, they didn't want a war. In any case, they said, there wouldn't be one. How could there be? Hitler was a great man who admired the English, and loved peace.

    Fredrick returned home bewildered. If people in Britain didn't want war, and people in Germany didn't want war, what sort of system was it that allowed war to happen? He didn't believe that Hitler was a great man who wanted peace, but he didn't believe, either, that British politicians were wise man who knew how to avoid war. He didn't believe that any of them had the interests of their own people at heart, or had any real idea how to control events. Perhaps nobody can ever control events?
Perhaps there was something behind events, some secret which you could never reach. Was it all our fault, or God's? Or was everything a tissue of accident, and man a lost animal?

    He talked to customers, friends, business acquaintances, taximen, horse-trainers, shopkeepers, bankers, everybody. He tormented people for information they didn't have, and for thoughts they had never bothered to think. He read books on politics, economics, history and social philosophy. The only writers who struck home were Kierkegard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and the Russian thinker Berdyaev, who managed to be at the same time a Christian and an anarchist.

    Fredrick grew increasingly lonely and agitated. He could not sleep. He went for walks at night through streets populated only by cats, drunks and the homeless. He felt cut off from the world he had known. It was no longer a real world, but a dream. He felt ignorant, helpless, like a novice swimmer splashing in a rough sea.

    He could not navigate through a single day blown by a fair warm wind. He would start a conversation in one mood and end it in another. He would swing in minutes from being talkative, forceful, decisive, to being withdrawn, brooding and sunk in silence. His wife began to lose patience.

    One day, when pacing sombrely between tall buildings which frowned over him like a threat, he was struck alive by a poster demanding 'Why war?' Since this was the single question to which he most wanted a practical answer, he strode into the placarded building and emerged fifteen minutes later a member of the Peace Pledge Union, armed with a pamphlet and the information that a PPU speaker held forth every Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park.

    Fredrick went that Sunday to Speakers' Corner. A well-known pacifist priest was stating his position with sober confidence and Fredrick began to believe that perhaps he wasn't entirely alone after all.

    But when the priest finished, a young idealist in corduroy trousers, with long hair and an expression of arrogant timidity took his place. The crowd was immediately hostile. If they or their brothers and sons would have to join the Army and get shot, why should this weedy youth escape? Who was he to tell them what to do?

    There were then - and probably still are - ruthless and highly skilled hecklers whose hobby it was to harry and destroy speakers in Hyde Park. Once they got a victim on the run they chased him down with the concentration of a stoat after a rabbit. There was rich sport in baiting a novice whose delivery was hesitant and whose arguments under pressure became increasingly confused. The pack closed in for the kill. Every effort the stricken speaker made to marshal his thoughts was greeted with ribaldry, one heckler inciting another to feats of mocking abuse.

    In a final effort to gain some sort of control, the speaker raised his voice to what he hoped would be a commanding bellow, and produced instead a despairing squeak. A gale of laughter blew him away. He turned his back, fighting tears.

    Fredrick took off, barging his way through the crowd like a Rugby forward going for the line. He pulled the floundering youth down from the platform and leapt up in his place, a six-foot sea- captain looming above an astonishment of flushed faces.

    He didn't have to find words, words found him, and fired themselves at the crowd. He denounced them individually and collectively for malice, ignorance and stupidity. Were they so afraid of the opinions of a harmless youth that they had to attack him like wild dogs? Would any of them have the courage to stand up and face a hostile mob in defence of an unpopular cause. The boy was trying to confront real problems at a time of crisis and all they could do was play cruel games in the nursery.

    He began to describe the conflicts and contradictions which plagued his own mind, and how the coming war tormented his conscience. He challenged each member of the audience to face them too. Where was the truth? What was to be done? As he spoke he realised with amazement that he was saying what the authentic hidden Fredrick would have said if he had known how, and that the crowd had fallen silent. It was as if he were suddenly aware of the world, of everything around him, in a new way, alight with meaning. He had a sensation of tingling vitality.

    When he fell quiet the crowd waited in equal quietness. A drunk, slow to pick up the change of mood, tried to raise a shout. The surrounding charge of anger sent him shuffling off into exile.

    Fredrick knew with the clarity of sunlight on a startled lawn that he had found his vocation. This was why he was alive: to discover the hidden currents that move people and events and share what he had seen with those who would respond. There was no turning back.

    From then on he spoke regularly in the Park and at Lincoln's Inn Fields. He hired a room in Endsleigh Gardens for an indoor gathering which became known as the London Forum, and kept up its work for twenty years.

    When the war began his business died. Who wanted a Lancia when there was no petrol, no signposts, and nowhere to go? How could you import them, anyway? How was he to earn a living? Fredrick wrote later: 'Only in the utter acceptance of complete material insecurity can a man remain faithful to his vision' - a dictum easier to explain to the marines than to his wife.

    Collections were made at his meetings; people approached him at the Forum and offered him money. Whenever he lost faith, economic difficulties followed; when faith revived, cash came in. This way of life offended his wife's dignity and common sense. They lost friends and her own business suffered. She left, taking their daughter.

    It was not long after this that agents provocateurs managed to incense the crowd to the point of fracas. Fredrick found himself in court charged with breach of the peace. He served three months in Wormwood Scrubs. His account of the experience concentrated entirely on the ingenious efforts of fellow-prisoners to smuggle food to a man in solitary confinement.

    By the time I met him, Fredrick had moved from straight pacifism to the position of a thoroughgoing philosophical anarchist. He published a booklet, 'The Philosophy of Freedom', in which he wrote: 'Vocation must replace wage slavery, voluntary co-operation must replace governmental coercion, and so security will supplant insecurity. We must find again joy in activity. There is no other meaning in life. Man was once bound to the social herd by force of necessity, language has freed his personality from social compulsion. Now we must return by desire to a social community of free people.' But how?

    Although Fredrick's views changed drastically as time passed, his sense of the necessity for freedom and vocation, and his sense of the meaning of history were the fundamental issues for him until the end of his life. In 1941 he wrote:

    'All social issues narrow down to this conflict between authority and liberty. . . No government, whether it be the domination of one man over another, or of the State over the people, can exercise authority if it has no power to enforce submission to its rule. Therefore all authority in the final analysis proceeds from the threat of violence.' He was calling for a society growing naturally from the simple to the complex by the voluntary co-operation of free individuals.

    His contacts with Spanish anarchist refugees from the civil war in Spain, led him to believe that Spanish experience showed this to be possible. But the influential anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain had been crushed by Franco, and never achieved equal strength anywhere else.

    Fredrick became obsessed by a sense of the inescapable loneliness of the human ego, which gave rise to all the unanswerable questions in human life, and he was convinced that the desire for power is itself the result of inner isolation.

    His pilgrimage was an arduous one, and the Forum changed as he changed, concentrating on methods of transcending the ego to reach a state of objectivity and inner liberation, continually lost and regained. Fredrick was not an obvious candidate for arrival at this state, but it was his insatiable need to drive further that gave the Forum such intense vitality for so long. It is notable that Fredrick?s concentration on Western preoccupation with history made him indifferent to the meditation philosophies of the East.

    It must have been early in the war years that Fredrick met the mysterious Brown - a perfect name for a man in the shadows. Perhaps Brown sought him out after hearing him in the Park.

    Brown's own story was remarkable. He joined the Army in the First World War, and remained an unthinking and enduring soldier on the Western Front until one day, entirely normal in its bleak routine, he found himself sitting alone in the back of a truck carrying supplies to a forward depot. I say 'found himself because that's precisely what took place. One moment he was slumped in a state of weary torpor, the next he was startlingly awake and aware of his surroundings. He took in with a sense of revelation the blasted, desolate landscape with its blackened trees, shattered buildings and muddy craters, the lorry crawling like a lost insect on the rutted road. The whole area of madness, the enormous stagnant armies, the deluded Generals imagining that they could control events, the vast paraphernalia of war, and his own terrifying inner isolation from it all, struck home with painful, stark intensity. He realised as if a blazing word had been spoken that all these people were moving and planning and suffering in their sleep, that he too had been asleep and was now awake. He jumped off the back of the truck and out of participation in the war. Whatever happened, he was now no longer under orders. How he escaped court-martial, and how he survived the rest of the war I don't know, but here he was in London, in 1941, still walking and still speaking in very few words only what he felt to be necessary at the time.

    I met Brown, a grizzled Scot, only once, and learned how simple and infallible his method was. He would address to you a pointed and definite statement, looking you coldly in the eye, and wait for your response. If it was not satisfactory he would say 'Either you see it or you don't', and if you didn't, he left. Each of us sees only what he is ready to see; a phrase may be forgotten and years after it was said it comes alive in the mind to reveal meaning.

    In a letter of 1949 Fredrick took exception to something I had written in an obituary article on Wilfred Ward Coupe (of whom more later). He thought I had over-emphasised the influence Coupe had in the London Forum, and on Fredrick himself. He set out to insist on his debt to Brown:

    'I react resentfully against any suggestion, however faint,' he wrote, 'that Coupe was the brains or the ideological spearhead of the forum. This merit, if it is merit, belongs to Brown, and Coupe's interest in the forum was due to something he recognised and acknowledged in me and which I received from Brown and have tried to expound. . .'

    Perhaps.
Coupe's contribution was scholarship, irony, a frame of reference. Fredrick's gradual movement away from humanist anarchism towards religious belief and then to the Catholic Church was not Brown's doing, and as a typical Coupian irony it was not Coupe's either. Coupe was a practising Catholic, but advised Fredrick not to join the Church because, he said, it would destroy his vocation.

    My guess is that Brown's esoteric view of history saw religious institutions as instruments for power and control rather than for liberation and enlightenment. What then was his revelation? Since I never heard him expound it, I can only suggest this, from secondary evidence: that there is a hidden current in history which will only reveal itself to the most penetrating and steady observation, and that this observation can only take place when the ego has freed itself from continual identification with doctrines and opinions which it has adopted for purposes of self-aggrandisement, and for which it has no authentic inner justification. Brown looked at events with a peculiar coldness of gaze, and saw an irrevocable tendency towards greater centralisation and control. Those whose aim it is to achieve world unity and to build man in a particular image (who are not the politicians who delude themselves that they manipulate events) correspond to Dostoevsky's view of the Grand Inquisitor, who saw his duty as protecting ordinary human beings from reality by refusing them freedom. This explains Fredrick's ongoing concern with that formidable apparition.

    Speaking personally, I suspect that esoteric explanations of historical development are highly suspect, and that life is a great deal more complex than any rational explanation of it.

    One regular attender at Fredrick's indoor meetings was Molly Warner, the determined daughter of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, who always remained precisely that, even when running a house frequented by failed priests, seekers, anarchists, nihilists, neurotics, the miserable, the frenetic, the desperate, the lonely, and the lost.

    Molly looked like a Renaissance madonna, douce, quiet and self-contained, but in fact she was deeply emotional, with a steely will. When her mind was made up, nothing and no one could shake her resolve. Once she had begun one of her rare discourses, interruption could not turn her aside. She would simply repeat the mantra 'You see," and carry on where she left off.

    Fredrick gained in Molly his most dedicated supporter and his most formidable opponent. After his divorce from his first wife Fredrick and Molly were married.

    In 1941 and 1942 I was a member of the Friends' Ambulance Unit, which I had left University to join, and worked during the day in the Receiving Room at Poplar Hospital, and in the evening at two Docklands Air Raid Shelters, one at each end of the Silvertown Bridge, each with a Boys' Club, one Catholic and one Anglican, both of which I was meant to superintend. I did this with notable inefficiency, but enjoyed playing chess with the Vicar. I never met the priest.

    I moved then to work in the TB Ward at Bethnal Green Hospital, an institution from which patients only emerged feet first, moving from bed to bed as their condition worsened until they reached the door.

    Finally I was occupied during the day at the Citizens' Advice Bureau in Whitechapel, my main job being to trace the whereabouts of bombed families who were being sought by friends or relatives. When found they had to consent to the information being revealed in case the seekers were creditors or worse. Responsibilities included being asked to rescue a beloved hat from a wardrobe perched on the second floor of a house from which a bomb had removed the entire side-wall. The wardrobe was in a distressed and drunken state. Since I was riding a bicycle back to base the only place to carry the hat was on my head, and a passing policeman opened his mouth to shout as I swept round the corner and vanished.

    The Citizens' Advice Bureau was run by two distinguished Communists, one who resembled a brisk and downright retired Colonel, and one whose motherly benevolence calmed many a bewildered pensioner. I gained for them both real affection and respect and they treated me with astonishing kindness.

    While working in Whitechapel I was among FAU members stationed at the London Hospital Students' Hostel. On several occasions I brought anarchist speakers to this establishment - the saintly and down-to-earth Matt Kavanagh, Bill Gape, organiser of the so-called Tramps' Union, and Fredrick. Fredrick aroused more interest and debate than anyone else. His integrity and total commitment produced the reaction, 'If this man believes that. it must be worth considering.'

    At one public meeting held, I think, in Wigmore Hall, various left-wing mavericks did their best to inspire enthusiasm for a new world beyond the war, and failed. Then Fredrick began pacing the stage as if trying to contain the electric energy which burst out in sudden spouts of words, something like this:

    'Why are we here? What are we doing in the middle of a war spouting rhetoric in a cold hall in a bombed city, when people are killing each other all over the world? What's the war about? It's a war between a murderous tyranny run by criminals and the complacent hypocrisy it's got by the throat. What's the hidden evil behind this war and all wars? Power. We're here to fight our own war against the delusions of power. People can seek power in order to do good. But once power swallows them^all they work for is to keep it. Why? '

    'It's a craving. It's the Devil's trick. The Devil tried it on Jesus. We've got to find a better way of organising so that no one has enough power to do harm, and everyone has enough influence to do good. '

    'We're in a war, in darkness. We've got to live in light. That's why we're here. Life can be a reign of terror, a deception, a routine of dumb stupidity, a nightmare of loneliness. Or it can be a rich and marvellous journey based on inner rules tested on your own integrity. Where do they come from? From the seed we were born with. We know what's true and what's false, we know what's right and what's wrong. When the rules are lost, balance is lost, meaning is lost.?'

    'I tell you this. Those rules are the living delineations of beauty. We're here to break out of prison. We're here to find out where we live, why we live, to discover the real world. Now! Wake up! Freedom is real!'

    After a moment of stunned silence there was a storm of applause. Some sensational event seemed to have taken place but no one could have told you what it was.

    When the noise died down Herbert Read, the anarchist poet, small, slight, neat and grey-haired, rose to his feet. 'What we need,' he said, 'is grace.' And sat down again. No applause was necessary.

    Late in 1942 I decided to leave the FAU and go to work in the coal-mines. First, I wanted to get married, and for that needed a regular wage, which the FAU couldn't provide. Second, there was a prolonged pause in the bombing of London, and I no longer felt useful. Third, I wanted to find out whether the syndicalism preached by Spanish anarchists was possible in Britain. Who better to tell me than coal-miners?

    I went with Gene, my future wife, to see Fredrick in Marchmont Street, where he and Molly rented a flat. Fredrick wrote to Gene later, when she was recovering from polio, to tell her the effect she had on him then: 'The glory of you filled that little room like a choir of Blake's angels.'

    Molly's sister Kate was there, at that time a Communist as fiery as her red hair, enthusiastically devoted to an entirely theoretical working-class, and the idea of propaganda in industry. She gave me vigorous support, whether I liked it or not.

    Fredrick didn't want me to go. He proposed to set up an agricultural community in Wales, and hoped we would join. Since I had only just managed to persuade a Tribunal to change my condition of service as a conscientious objector from work with the FAU to work in the coal-mines, I wasn't anxious to return for another bout. Besides, I didn't believe that the project would work, and it would certainly do nothing to hasten our marriage. Gene was not yet twenty-one, and how could we sell a community of eccentrics and no salary to her parents?

    Fredrick insisted that I could achieve nothing in the coal-mines and would end disillusioned. I went anyway, and in October 1943 Gene and I were married in the Registrar's Office in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. I didn't end disillusioned, I ended with a discharge from the mines because of a recurring and debilitating flu-like illness.

    I'm not sure now whether the community in Wales ever got started, but if it did, it didn't last as long as my sojourn in the coal-mines.

    While I was away Fredrick's ferocious debate with himself led him in the unlikely direction of the Catholic Church. He undertook a stay in Hawkesyard Priory. According to the journal he kept at the time, he took immediately to the Prior, who was young, intellectual, and sympathetic. But after the initial interview, the Prior did not appear again, and within days Fredrick's mood had slumped. He found the priests pleasant and polite, with an entirely conventional attitude to the war, and burst out in his journal: 'My very soul cries out that the touchstone of truth lies in one's attitude to this war.' As his mood sank lower he began to doubt his own intuitions.

    'Maybe my vision of Christ is wrong. Yet I find no beatitude in this transcendent God. . .Can I see Jesus plotting and conspiring with financiers and politicians? No. Can I see Jesus eating with publicans and sinners? Yes.'

    He was particularly incensed by their condemnation of the Spanish anarchists because they desecrated churches, while being quite happy to support Stalinists because they were allies in the war.

    'War is a spiritual affair,' he wrote, 'an irruption of disintegrated, disillusioned and vengeful spirit. . This frustrated vitality concentrates in unconscious hatred against the drab, colourless insignificance of modern mechanised society. . . Oh, war manifests spirit all right. Spirit frustrated in its drive for vocation and purpose. I am quite sure conscience cannot cope with it.'

    And this was true. Conscience could not cope with it. I knew of men who willingly joined the Army, then found themselves struck by a crisis of conscience, refused orders, and ended in the glass-house. Their superior officers could not understand their position. Surely they knew that Hitler was evil and had to be stopped? Yes, they knew that. But war too was a fundamental evil. What was to be done? I knew too of men who obtained exemption from military service on grounds of conscience, and then were driven by spiritual unease to enlist, only to find themselves unbearably distressed by the role of combatant. A woman of good-will asked me during the war, 'How can an intelligent young man like you, who cherishes freedom, refuse to fight the Nazis?' I could only reply, 'Somebody must.'

    Fredrick wrote later: 'If I really have no vocation - if there is no work I must do - then nothing seems to matter. I live and have reality only insofar as the work is there. . . I do believe that if I could only free myself from the idea (or perhaps it is egoistic obsession) of vocation - I could find a useful life.'

    But he didn't believe that in his heart.

    When I was invalided out of the coal-mines and Gene and I returned to London, we took a basement flat in Kentish Town and I had a job as Citizens' Advice Bureau organiser, advising people how to claim for war damage.

    Rockets had begun to fall on London. V1s, known as buzz-bombs, were cigar-shaped unmanned weapons which drowned over like devilish wasps, suddenly cut out, crashed and exploded. If you could watch them and note the cut out point, you could guess where they would explode, and shift.

    On one bus trip in the East End the conductress stood on the boarding platform, leaning from the upright rail watching the sky, and shouting to the driver 'stop' or 'go', according to the cut out.

    After a month or two Fredrick told us he had found a three-storey house in Paddington, and would take it on if we would share the rent. Molly and Fredrick would be responsible for the lower floors, and we for top floor and attics. We agreed. That's how we got to Westbourne Terrace, and set up the nest of anarchists.

 

* * * *

 

170 Westbourne Terrace

     No 170 was at the wrong end of Westbourne Terrace. The respectable part of the thoroughfare linked Kensington Gardens with the Harrow Road. Kensington Gardens, home of Peter Pan's statue, was respectable and douce, the Harrow Road workaday and raffish. The other side of the Harrow Road was urban wilderness. That's where we lived, behind Paddington Station. The area should have been known as 'Lower Westbourne Terrace.'

    Lower Westbourne Terrace was demolished in the 1960s. It is impossible now even to imagine where it might have been. The houses have gone, the road has gone, the entire neighbourhood has gone, the relationship between neighbourhoods has gone. All that can be said is that once upon a time it existed somewhere between the Harrow Road and what has since become the opulent enclave of Little Venice. It was not an opulent enclave then. Its denizens tended to slink about after dusk beside a refuse-laden canal.

     On the corner of Lower Westbourne Terrace amid an even more raffish street which contained a Welsh Dairy and an off-licence, stood a pig-bin with its lid set at a rakish angle, overflowing with rubbish. On the wall behind the bin a local satirist had chalked a portrait of the contemporary hero known as Chad - sausage-nose and two eyes peering over a horizontal line - underneath the legend 'Wot, no pigs?' Chad lifted morale by asking 'Wot no' this and 'Wot no' that all over the country, his script written by hundreds of anonymous chalkers.

     Behind the wall was an ex-garden of trampled mud and a bombed house boarded up and peeling. Glass was scattered tactically, paper bags blew about. A dog like a threadbare hearthrug lay slumped in the gutter. Ladies in hair-curlers and carpet-slippers shuffled in and out of the off licence bearing jugs or bottles.

     No 170 was one of a row of tall, rundown houses built in the late 19th Century in the hope that they would be taken to resemble those l8th Century crescents in Bath. The basement flat was occupied by a railwayman, his Irish wife and three pale children. Once, when the lights failed and we knew the parents were out, we ventured into the basement with a torch and found the children cowering together in the dark.

    The ground floor entrance was a passage-way leading to are inner door and a flight of stone stairs. It was supplied with one  of those light-switches which are designed to turn themselves off at the most inconvenient moment. You pressed a flabby rubber button and fled for the inner door, evading if possible the parked bicycle. The light died with the ghostly shadow of a sound as you groped for the handle.

     The rooms on the first floor consisted of a kitchen and a bedroom off the landing, then a living room off the second landing ten stairs later. The living room was immensely tall with scrolls of plaster flowers on the ceiling. French windows opened onto a balcony which it would have been unwise for more than one Italian tenor to occupy at a time. It was visited regularly by Mickey the extremely mongrel terrier who liked to bark frenziedly at anyone wearing overalls. These rooms were inhabited by Fredrick and Molly.

     Off the third landing were two square rooms with sash windows, where perched ex-Dominican monk Anthony Elenjimittam, and ex-physicist Cecil Smelt.

     Our bedroom and sitting room were above these, and on the top floor the kitchen crouched  under a skylight, and two attics had access to the wide lead-lined gutters through tiny hinged windows. You could sit and sunbathe in the gutters because there was a low wall to prevent you from sliding into air.

      These attic rooms during 1945 were occupied at one time or another by Andre Wendt, deeply pacific German anarchist just out of Wormwood Scrubs; Stephen Peet, then still a member of the FAU but drawn and maigre after years in a German prisoner-of-war camp; Alfred Perles, man of all nationalities and none, released from the Pioneer Corps; and writer John Atkins, temporarily AWOL from the Army.

 

* * * *

 

The Cherub

     Fredrick had been accustomed to cite Anthony Elenjimittam as an authority on certain religious and philosophical topics long before the quoted scholar - small, plump, cherubic, and full to the brim with innocent benevolence - took up residence at 170 Westbourne Terrace.

     Anthony was born in Goa, the Catholic region of India originally colonised by the Portuguese. He entered the Dominican Order as if in the course of nature. He had completed his novitiate and was studying in England when some accidental encounter with Hindu literature led him for the first time to take an interest in the nationalism then rampant in his homeland. The encounters with London expatriates which followed set his whole way of life trembling. At last the bubble burst and by the time he took over a room on the second floor, Anthony had left the Order and was earning his bread as a clerk.

     You could not have guessed from his conversation that he was still a Catholic and a Thomist. His discourses on religion were florid, confusing, and all-embracing. His head teemed with golden abstractions, an amalgam of Hindu scriptures, Buddhist philosophy, and Christian theology, concepts from one tradition flung in pell-mell with those from another. It was as if instead of contemplating the realities on which the traditions were based, and the insights they share, Anthony had floated on a tide of universal good-will to an island where he was building a religious Tower of Babel.

     All the more surprising, then, when on one occasion he interrupted the disquisition of a wild enthusiast for something or other by saying, 'Would it be helpful if I explained what St. Thomas had to say on this point?' and ticked off a series of logical steps on his pale brown fingers.

     His intervention was even more effective when he made use of the technique learned from engagement with 'medieval disputation'. Presenting his victim with a syllogism, he induced a reply which elicited yet another syllogism until the victim fell into a hole and disappeared. His manipulation of this tool was accompanied by much benevolent glittering of spectacles.

     He took me once to meet a Professor Ganguly, who had become his Britannic guru. The professor proved to be an urbane authority on English literature, and the conversation was mainly concerned with the qualities and shortcomings of D.H. Lawrence. Anthony looked on, beaming his blessings on civilization and all who sailed in her.

     The furniture of Anthony's room consisted of a bed, a wobbly cupboard and a full set of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. He sat on the short pile while eating off the taller one. Crumbs were scattered on the uncarpeted floor as an offering to the mice. This generosity was not popular with Molly.

     He bought a primus stove on which to cook, but had no idea how to set about the job. He would call up the stairs to Gene asking what to do with the egg in one hand and the pan in the other in order to produce an omelette.

     Anthony was inclined when flush with money to spend it on unnecessary gadgets. He would buy the latest safety razor rather than a chair to sit on. He never needed to use the razor because his round face was completely hairless.

     Every chance encounter was a great adventure to Anthony. He came home one night speechless with excitement because he had talked to a bus conductress in a pub.

     He set off to work every morning dressed in a dark suit, and riding a bicycle. To do this even without an umbrella would have been hazardous enough, since he was never sure on which side of the road to wobble, but armed with an umbrella as an aid he found it almost impossible. He would either drop the umbrella or prod it inadvertently among the spokes, causing a general collapse, from which he extricated himself with amiable bewilderment. Once fully launched, he tacked like a yachtsman in a gale. The prayer went up 'Heaven help him on the Harrow Road', and Heaven must have done so, because he survived.

      

* * * *

 

The Nihilist

     Cecil Smelt, who occupied the next room to Anthony, looked upon him with satirical amusement. He reported that if you poked your head round the door and cried 'God!' Anthony floated up to the ceiling. Cecil was not accustomed to crying 'God!' except to achieve this result.

     He began to attend the Forum after hearing Fredrick in the Park. He saw Fredrick's desperate pursuit of truth and certainty as a form of entertainment. For him there was neither fundamental truth nor any prospect of certainty. Even doubt was doubtful.

     He enjoyed analysing into sub-atomic particles the statements and opinions of all those Forum members and attenders who could be induced to utter them. He then examined the self-deceptions which caused the disputants to hold those views in the first place. The pleasure he derived was similar to the pleasure others might gain from weeding a garden.

     In September 1945 Cecil gave a lecture to the Forum, which Fredrick summarised like this: 'We were told that it was useless to search for meaning and value in our knowledge of the universe. Neither science nor philosophy, working from phenomena and the experience of relationships, can provide us with proof that nature has a purpose. The universe cannot explain itself - and it cannot, ex hypothesi, be explained by anything outside itself. This is a fact, it was emphasised, if we are honest, we must accept. . . knowledge is analysis, and both word and matter analyse to nothing. Life, for all its richness and vitality, remains clothed in mystery.' It is easy to see why Fredrick found Cecil so useful. He was a starting point. Personally, I found Cecil's ruthlessness refreshing.

     In another lecture Cecil said that 'The play of assessment and merit constitute the make-up and activity of consciousness, for without these indications of worth, consciousness would suffer collapse into apathetic inertia and final extinction.'

     Cecil himself had ceased to be interested in playing the game of assessment and merit. As a result there were periods during which his consciousness did indeed collapse into apathetic inertia. He could lie in bed all day because there was no conceivable purpose in getting up. He could live for weeks without making any moral judgement either on his own or other people's conduct. A sceptic may doubt everything, including reason, but a nihilist lives in meaninglessness. The intellect succeeds in destroying each perception of possible meaning as it occurs, while the ego is exhausted and impotent, yet still functions sufficiently to preserve itself. The result is a kind of selfish selflessness.

     Cecil earned his living by marking physics papers for a crammer's college, although he regarded the theories of contemporary physics as mathematical constructs which could not be said in any meaningful sense to represent reality. He provided the proof that analysis is a tool which psychologically destroys the body of the world. Yet the body remains obstinately and enigmatically alive, fleas and all. And the world functions.

     Cecil did not look on first acquaintance in the least like a man who lives in such a state of deprivation. Dark, of medium height, with a square, rather heavily handsome face, and an easy, saturnine manner, he could laugh at jokes, didn't take drugs or get drunk, and would join in any lively conversation. He left work until the last moment, and then laboured night and day to complete it. This was no real hardship as he preferred to live at night, and often walked to Lyons' Corner House, Marble Arch, for a cup of coffee at three a.m. Coupe, Fred Perles and I joined him once, and spent an hour trying in vain to find any worthwhile book which Coupe hadn't read. Cecil's own reading could be surprising. I found him thoroughly enjoying C.S.Lewis's 'Screwtape Letters' for its acute analysis of the workings of the ego, while entirely distrusting the lessons Lewis was intending to draw from it.

     Cecil enjoyed the eccentric and meticulous scholarship of the predatory Coupe. He and Coupe became incompatible allies - to call them 'friends' would be to redefine the word - but they balanced and played off each other in a manner beneficial to the Forum insofar as it was a truth-finding organisation. The titles of the lectures they gave when Fredrick hired the Alliance Hall, Westminster, for a series of public discussions may give some idea of their different perspectives.

     Fredrick himself revealed his commitment, over-riding concerns, and state of soul, by contributing 'The Problem of Loneliness', 'Freedom and Charity', and 'Loneliness and Sanctitiy.'

     Cecil's talks were called 'Nihilism and Intellectual Honesty' and 'Word and Scientific Symbol.' They could not be readily taken in on a first hearing, but when studied on the page proved to be so precisely phrased as to make misunderstanding perverse.

     Coupe's first lecture, on the other hand, announced as 'Staudenmeir and the Reversibility of Perception' was typical in that no one present had heard of Staudenmeir and to most this German savant remained impenetrable. I have never encountered his name since. I found each paragraph as delivered very intriguing, but could not now give any idea of how his perceptions had been reversed, or what Coupe actually said about the process. Gene tells me that it did something to explain the nature of apparitions.

     On another occasion Coupe launched into 'Nietzsche and the Reversal of Values', a popular subject with the Forum because whatever else he may have been, Nietzsche was a brilliant psychologist who analysed better than anyone else the ability of the ego to deceive itself. As can be seen, Coupe was fond of reversing things.

     Cecil was dangerously attractive to women. Each one in turn hoped to fill a vacuum. Since his actions could be physically positive but psychologically negative, the results were usually disastrous. He attached no value to ideas of permanence in relationships, and might vanish at any moment like a shadow when the sun goes in. You could never rely on Cecil's sun shining, no matter how bright the day. At least one of his girl-friends tried suicide. Midge threw herself out of a window and broke her fall on a dustbin, surviving with severe bruises.

     Soon after the end of the war in Europe, Cecil took Midge to Cornwall for a holiday, more as an acceptance of the inevitable, I imagine, than a gesture of contrition. After they had been there for a few days and he reported favourably about the sands, rocks and lodgings, we followed, staying in the same town. Cornwall in 1945 was not rife with tourists, many of the bays were covered with barbed-wire and overlooked by concrete pill-boxes on the cliffs, but the pounding waves and lively air were a burst of freedom after confinement in battered London.

     Cecil might seem an unlikely candidate for the post of lifeguard, but he saved us from drowning. Until the day on which the North Cornish coast showed its teeth and the sky turned dark we enjoyed the ripples of sunlight in clear pools, and the random music made by water dripping on floating tins in a disused quarry.

     On a clear day we swam out towards nowhere, and only when we began to paddle round for the return journey did we realise that we had dreamed a great distance too far. A wind had begun to blow, waves were heaving at the rocks, and the tide had turned. Instead of moving inshore as we swam, we saw that if anything we were drifting away. There was a nightmare quality in the sensation that we were exhausting ourselves simply to stay at the same distance from the shore. The mind was slow to accept the obvious: if we didn't soon reach the projecting strip of rock where the waves were breaking, we should drown. Gene says she thought 'I must help John', and then realised that she couldn't. It's amazing how long it took to sacrifice pride and dignity and yell for help. When we did begin to bellow and shriek in harmony the figures on the shore continued to move placidly, intent on affairs which did not contain us. They were as remote as pictures on a wall. No one turned his head.

     And then we saw Cecil, in shirt and trousers, slipping and scrambling on the rocks. If we didn't reach him he couldn't reach us, but the sight of him plunging about on the jagged lumps and edges of black rock, now just under water, revived strength we didn't know we had. Cecil stood waist deep on the farthest rock, hanging on. We were struggling and falling amid the breakers. One by one he hauled us out.

 

* * * *

 

The Wandering Scholar

      Wilfred Ward Coupe was designed for the job of eminence grise. An observer, an adviser, a commentator, an analyst (who denounced analysis) he resembled a bird of prey - a mild vulture, with a cock of the head like a robin's. He lived alone, permanently poor, reading everything worth reading in English, Spanish, German, Greek and Latin, and spent a great deal of time at the .Forum and in Fredrick's spacious, ill-furnished sitting room, perched on a hard chair, sucking at a pipe.

     He would remove the pipe from his mouth, shut his nutcracker jaw, nod his narrow skull, and his grey-blue eyes would twinkle frostily as he spoke. He relished discussion, detailed attention to words, ideas and motives, but he would not argue. If asked a question he would answer, given an opening he would contribute, and his capacity to observe while listening was formidable. His interest was in what he regarded as truth, not in people for their own sake. Where truth was hinted at, or could be pursued, he was a terrier after a rat, but if truth was entirely hidden beneath opinion, he would twinkle and say nothing, he would simply listen, for as he said, 'all conversation is equally revealing'. By this he meant that underlying what people say are a series of perceptible assumptions which they prefer not to recognise. That he had a strong ego and a self-image of himself as a sage will become obvious when we look at the pamphlets called 'Coupologues' which he wrote and the Forum published.

     Molly did not like Coupe. She suspected him, I think, of secret Catholic motives, as if he were a spy. Fredrick found his scholarship and intellectual clarity invaluable, and enjoyed his eccentricities and ironic humour.

     I imagine, although without evidence, that Coupe had a vital and reckless youth. Whatever official qualifications he had, he didn't mention them, but his mental equipment and his knowledge were prodigious. He was, I believe, at Oxford, but left under a cloud, and then spent time teaching school Latin.
     In the early nineteen-thirties he took off for Spain, and stayed, teaching English, until the Civil War chased him over the border. He was deeply read in Spanish literature, particularly Calderon, and was fond of contrasting Calderon's uncompromising saying, in one of autos sacramentales, 'Do what is right, for God is God', with Nietzsche's tortured declaration that 'God is dead.' There's little doubt in my mind that for different reasons he was as fond of Nietzsche as of Calderon.

     It did not occur to me that Coupe was a practising Catholic until one day a rosary fell to the floor when he pulled out a handkerchief. He was a believer who remained at arm's length. When in the late Forties Fredrick was on the edge of asking to be received into the Church, Coupe advised against it, because, he said, it would be bad for the health of the Forum. Fredrick took his advice for three years. And then, from the time he entered the Church, work in the Forum grew less authentic.

     When members of the Forum decided on one occasion to entertain themselves at Christmas with charades, they chose, with typical eccentricity, to perform Dostoevsky's 'Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
     This appears as a story told by Ivan in 'The Brothers Karamazov.' It supposes that Jesus returns to earth when the Inquisition rules, is immediately arrested, and taken before the Grand Inquisitor. The Legend would be a dialogue if Jesus spoke, but although he is questioned and challenged by the Inquisitor he does not answer a word.

     The Inquisitor, in a speech of great length and subtlety, explains that Jesus's wish that people should awaken to his message freely and follow his teaching through understanding and choice was a mistake based on a delusion. Human beings, he insisted, are not as perceptive and well-intentioned as Jesus imagined, but base, venal, ignorant and selfish. They require to be led and controlled by the wise, who know that peace and prosperity are more important to their welfare than freedom, which leads only to division, strife and eventual disaster. Jesus, says the Inquisitor, cannot be allowed to raise again the hopes and longings in these flocks of sheep and goats which have been ordered into acquiescence by the benevolent rule and restriction of the wise, and so protected from the bitter experience of responsibility.

     The Inquisitor explains that he and his elite company have undertaken the terrible and lonely task of accepting responsibility on behalf of those who could not bear its weight.

     There was no doubt in anyone's mind as to who should play the part of the Inquisitor. Coupe was designed for it.

     Who should play the part of Jesus was the problem. It is a part that no one is capable of playing. Actors who have attempted it have betrayed their misunderstanding of the world. The fact that in Dostoevsky's 'Legend' Jesus remains silent throughout requires an actor who can establish a presence that is attentive, alert and robust while using neither words nor gestures. The fact that I cannot remember who did in fact play the part of Jesus shows that he must have performed either very well or very badly.

     The rules of the charade were that no known language can be employed by the Inquisitor, either. He must express himself only by uttering the word 'Rhubarb' with every possible variation of emphasis and meaning.

     The moment Coupe fixed his eyes on the prisoner and began to expound his thesis, we realised that we were in the presence not merely of a Master but of the Grand Inquisitor himself, despite the fact that he was dressed in a white sheet with black shoes peeping out below. He had an air of magisterial authority, appalling sincerity, and ruthless pragmatism, which for its effect of threatening power was more alarming that all the efforts to frighten us of Boris Karloff as the Mummy and Bela Lugosi as Dracula.

     'Rhubarb'm he said. 'Rhubarb, rhubarb', and with each rhubarb and with each pause between rhubarbs his lonely and ascetic dedication became more deadly. But however forceful and logical these rhubarbs became, the prisoner uttered not a single rhubarb in reply. The effect was to cause us to question the role of authority in the world once and for all, and to realise that freedom is the most precious of human possibilities, to be gained and maintained only by dedicated attention to the world as it is, and the most subtle and determined resistance to those who would rob us of it. This, of course, was precisely against the intentions of the Grand Inquisitor. Was it, however, the exact intention of Wilfred Ward Coupe?

     Dostoevsky's Legend runs to a great many pages and if Coupe had delivered as many rhubarbs as Dostoevsky delivered the contents of his dictionary, we would have been there for more than an hour. Coupe engaged us for no more than ten minutes. It was enough.

     At the end Jesus performs his one overt action. He moves swiftly towards the Inquisitor and gives him a gentle kiss. The Inquisitor in this case started back in a kind of fear, then opened the available door and Jesus departed into the dark streets of the city - or, in point of fact, into the kitchen.

     It seemed to me that in Coupe's performance the Inquisitor's suffering was in exact proportion to the authority he wielded, that he knew he was working in the service of the Great Antagonist, and did this for what he regarded as the benefit of his flock. Jesus, the Inquisitor's rhubarbs implied, should have accepted the Adversary's temptation in the wilderness, and taken upon himself the regulation of the world. Freedom, he insisted, was a terrible delusion, leading only to an increase in suffering for the ordinary, the ignorant and the innocent. But we were all aware that the powerful invariably abuse their power, and that their efforts at total control had over the last few years come close to destroying the world.

     We were left with a disquieting thought. Could we any longer trust Wilfred Ward Coupe to be the wandering scholar in whom we had believed? What was the true extent of his ambition? Could it be that an actual Inquisitor was moving among us in disguise?

     Coupe's part in the Forum, and in its demise, will be examined under that head, but at this point it may be helpful to summarise his own thesis, as presented with some ironic chicanery, in the series of 'Esoteric Coupologues' which he wrote between 1946 and '47, and which Fredrick published and sold in the Park.
     Since life. Coupe claimed, is its essential nature in a state of flux, and the intellect can only perceive by arbitrarily and artificially arresting the flow, converting it into static concepts, the intellectual account of the world cannot reflect reality. The intellect works in this way because the ego - the will - seeks always to establish its own continuity, as a single entity, out of the multiplicity of responses to events. To Coupe the one fundamental psychological reality is the soul, which is not susceptible to definition. The failure to understand this leads to inner crisis.

     He maintained (a legacy from Brown) that the mind of man is being built for him by outside forces, and that freedom can only be achieved from this relentless assault by the restoration of innocence at the level of wisdom: that is, as the result of by- passing the ego. The first necessary step along this way is to gain a clear view of the origin and development of words.

     His use of the word 'esoteric' to describe his Coupologues reveals his delight in what is hidden. He would love to have been Grand Mast of Something or Other, influential but invisible.

     Ironically, he makes a point of denying this in the opening of the first Coupologue, 'On Innocence.' These odd works took the form of dialogues between an imaginary 'Honest Enquirer' and 'London Forum Member', who, of course, is Coupe himself at his most tricky and authoritative, always well supplied with the last word.

     'H.E. I understand that you are an initiate of the London Forum. I should be most grateful if you could spare the time to make my mind clear on a few points.

     'L.F.M. I will do all I can to help, but allow me to say that you start off under a misapprehension. I not an initiate of the Forum. In fact the Forum has no initiates. The term would imply that the Forum is in possession of some sort of secret doctrine, some occult wisdom,, hidden from the generality. That is not so; the London Forum makes no such claim. The esoteric it expounds is simply the obvious.

     'H.E. Then, if the esoteric is so obvious, why do I not see it?      'L.F.M. The best way to hide a thing is to put it in the most obvious place.'

     Certainly the Forum had no initiates, but it contained those who had some idea of what was going on and many who didn't. Why, in any case, did Coupe choose the word 'esoteric' in his title.

     I'd better say here that I don't know if I was an actual member of the Forum or not. I can't remember attending its meetings more than two or three times, but being so closely acquainted with those who did regard themselves as regulars might constitute some sort of membership.

     Coupe starts the process of explanation, typically, by confounding the Honest Enquirer with the aphorism 'All use of the intellect is a misuse.' Nothing is needed, he insists, except the ability to stop the intellect from showing you what is not there.

     At the end of the pamphlet he summarises the argument. The mind is being built by those who pursue knowledge (which of course is power). For understanding to be possible knowledge has to be repudiated in favour of innocence, which at that point becomes wisdom. Innocence allows the intellect simply to perceive what is already given in the nature of things.

     'H.E.I take it then that knowledge exists for the sake of freedom, which is fundamentally consciousness, and that the outcome of this work of the builders is that innocence passes from unawareness to wisdom.

     'L.F.M. It as you say, but it is not done with the intention of the builders, who reject innocence, which none the less becomes the cornerstone.'

     That vision of the builders is the message originally conveyed by Brown, and must be considered the basis of the Forum's work.

     Running through the Coupologues is a sly joke in which Coupe himself is seen by the not-always-honest-enquirer as a sinister presence, twisting the work of the group for his own secret purposes.

     In 'On Innocence' we are told of 'a Jesuit in disguise', with Coupe referred to as 'being numbered among your innocent ones, I suppose?' To this 'Forum Member' replies 'Well, not exactly. That is not how I should describe him.'

     In the pamphlet 'On Casuistry' the Honest Enquirer tells us that 'Casuistry is verbal trickery . . .' used by regular twisters 'like that fellow Coupe in your Forum.'

     'L.F.M. You don't seem to like Mr Coupe.

     'H.E. Oh, I have nothing against him personally. Besides, he might be quite nice to know. Jesuits generally are. . .'

     Forum Member assures Honest Enquirer that Coupe is not a Jesuit, and that the word casuistry has specific reference to cases of conscience.

     Coupe in these pamphlets enjoyed a sense of his significance in the Forum, which brought with it some power, even if only exercised over a phantom enquirer. That, of course, confirms his view that the ego must of its nature insist on asserting its own identity.

     Indeed, this is the very point he makes at the end of 'On Casuistry'.

     'H.E. What then is Mr Coupe? Is he a casuist in the good or bad sense of the word?

     'L.F.M. Insofar as he endeavours to decipher the meaning of words in order to know what they really have to reveal, and differentiates one from another without confusing them with the implied reality, he works for clarity of vision, and is thus a casuist in the good sense.

     'H.E. Well, I think he is not only a casuist, he is an egoist.

     'L.F.M. Possibly - especially if he makes his own ego one of his cases. Every attempt at limitation is, with more or less subtlety, turned into a defence. I should not be surprised, indeed, if Mr Coupe is not striving to make - or shall we rather say to make out - a case for his own ego and, like the rest of us, can't quite manage it.'

     I can only applaud.     

 

* * * *

 

The Joker

    Laurie Hislam was Fredrick's oldest friend among the anarchists. He had dark red hair, a red beard, blue eyes, and rebellion written into his genes. If born in hospital he probably howled violently at the nurse because she was wearing a uniform. It was a hazardous venture to go out with Laurie. He argued with bus conductors, insulted train guards, riled commissionaires and resented policemen. All this he did with great good cheer.

    Although one of the few practical men likely to accompany Frederick on his abortive community project, Laurie's tendency to attack any proposition which was advanced even when he agreed with it, would make arriving at decisions an arduous process.

    Laurie had a vigorous and macabre sense of humour. At the time of the Munich crisis he went to Downing Street carrying a small attaché case. There was a crowd waiting for news. Laurie opened the attaché case, shouted, and threw it without letting go. A policeman shouted 'Get down' and everyone fell to earth. A dozen tennis balls with 'Why war?' painted on them with great care sailed into the air and bounced harmlessly on the road. The magistrate took a jaundiced view of this incident and Laurie spent a month in jail.

    He could not resist baiting the authorities. Conscientious objectors were given a card to return to the place of issue if they changed their name, job, or address. Where the card read 'I have changed my name to . . .' Laurie wrote 'Bamboozle.U' and put it in the post box.

    The jokes were not all Laurie's. Fredrick had an old corduroy jacket of a faded green of which he was very fond. At one point Laurie was devoid of a wearable jacket and had no money to buy one. Oxfam shops did not exist in those days. Fredrick knew that Laurie was both a devoted admirer of Tolstoy, and too prickly to accept cast-off clothing. In a burst of inspiration he found a method of ensuring that Laurie would take the jacket. He told him that the jacket had been a gift from a Russian refugee who swore that it had once belonged to Tolstoy. Laurie wore the jacket until it dropped to pieces.

    When we left for Scotland in January 1946, Laurie moved into our flat. His adventures when he visited us in the Highlands will be recounted later.

 

* * * *

 

The Forum

    Fredrick gave different accounts of the origins and intentions of the Forum. He said at the 1959 debate which proved to be the beginning of the end, 'The original idea of the Forum was - speak your mind.' It was to be a psychological and spiritual exploration conducted in total freedom. 'The Forum was the one place where we need not worry about expediency of conduct. That was the condition of Forum membership.'

    In Fredrick's view it must never be a conventional discussion group, run on the lines, as he put it, 'We have a little time to spare and go along for a chin-wag. I do not regard that as valid. What I believed about the Forum was this. There was a radical experience which could be assisted provided it germinates in a person coming to the Forum. My idea of the Forum is that there comes out of it a capacity to see in a way that cannot be contradicted.' This did not mean the establishment of some formula of belief or practice, but the effort, through examination of the ego at work, to achieve the state of 'innocence' described by Coupe - that is, the willingness to see what is in fact the case. A permanent ego by-pass was never attained by anyone present, but the process certainly increased awareness.

    Fredrick's own starting-point was the state of crisis in which he envisaged Western society to exist in 1941. He made several efforts to describe the situation as being 'a collapse of belief and any sense of meaning, brought about by the will . . .in its attempt to dominate life by the intellect alone.'

    'It is quite clear,' he wrote, 'that by intellectual process we shall never get beyond the fact that matter disappears upon analysis, that consciousness is reduced by questioning to a dubious hypothesis, and that all expressions of Being, Form, and Meaning are purely arbitrary devices of the ego seeking to escape loneliness.' He probably saw Cecil as a living embodiment of this state.

    He likened the mood of the Forum to that of existentialism - a deep disenchantment with accepted explanations of the world in the face of war, oppression, holocaust and the collapse of Europe, and an insistence on relating intellectual explanations of phenomena to the reality of emotional life. 'The whole man is the primary truth,' he said. 'Intellect must serve life, not destroy life by analysis. Man is a responsible creature.' Coupe might have replaced thee 'whole man' with the word 'soul.'

    Fredrick's 1945 lectures, and his eventual pamphlet 'The Grand Inquisitor', which embodies them, confronted the problem that if meaning is not to be found in investigation of the self, which disappears on examination, then it must be found outside - but where? Not in science, not in nature: then in faith? But faith must be based either on the discovery of objective vision, or in revelation and the authority built on revelation.

    Fredrick's psychological situation was therefore complex, and contained intense contradictions. His sense of vocation was the result of inner recognition, of personal insight, a liberation into a perceived state of authenticity. This insight is seen as having a source other than the ego. What source?  There is no need to interrogate the state too closely while the sense of vocation remains strong. Coupe asserted that 'The service of one's vocation is a service of one's real and true self.' And Cecil? Did he have a vocation for the destruction of illusory concepts?

    If the realisation of vocation is a birth into freedom, then any movement towards dogmatic doctrines and obedience to a Church or outside authority may prove to be a denial of vocation itself.

    The method which the Forum employed was to explore the identification principle - that is, the ego's identification with doctrines, ideals, opinions, codes, crusades, organisations, and explanations of the world. This identification is seen as a way of self-aggrandisement.

    That is where the contributions of Cecil and Coupe were particularly useful. Cecil's scientific knowledge, and Coupe's scholarship, could be relied upon to provide food and fuel. Cecil's relentless examination of statements and concepts.. which invariably denied them reality and meaning, reinforced the message. His nihilism seemed in itself symptomatic of the peculiar swing into spiritual crisis.

    Coupe's interrogation of words, separating their original and developed meanings from the way in which they were carelessly used, led in the same direction. It often seemed that Coupe found some sort of esoteric concealed in words themselves.

    A few examples can be drawn from the 'Coupologues'. Forum Member (i.e. Coupe) remarks, 'The London Forum never invents anything, unless you use the word 'invent' in its original meaning of 'to find', from the Latin 'invenire.' The London Forum simply finds what is before it.' Again, 'the root of the word 'innocence' is the Latin intransitive verb 'noceo' and means 'I hurt', or rather 'I am harmful', but cannot have an object, so that the sense is indeterminate. 'Innocens' is the adjectival present participle with a negative prefix, and means to be harmless and aimless.' Fredrick himself referred to 'primordial intuitions expressed in language.'

    The Forum approach was once defined by Fredrick as 'provocative contradiction, drawing the ego into the open.' That was certainly achieved. The wildest and most direct expressions of opinion resulted from the process of interrogation - Communists, nationalists, racists, anarchists, Zionists, humanists, atheists, pacifists, occultists, religionists of all kinds, expressed increasingly ferocious views and doctrines as they grew more intense. One particularly vocal individual was devoted to the blood-and-race expositions of D.H.Lawrence, refusing to see anything in them which resembled the doctrines of the Nazis. He returned again and again to the place from which he started no matter how many times he was diverted into other channels. Eventually he grew so excitable and frustrated that he stormed out after a final explosion and was seen no more.

    Nobody was immune from investigation. Indeed, it was dangerous to make a statement. 'The ego,' Coupe wrote, 'wills above all to assert itself. Frustrated in its direct assault, it resorts to cunning.' The efforts of opinionators to dodge and twist in order to retain self-respect in the fact of relentless probing was often a sad, painful, or embarrassing spectacle. But it was soon realised that to humiliate a participant was to lose his attention forever; and whenever a speaker felt triumphant, authenticity was lost. Pride, vanity, despair, struggled in the dark. Many - most, I think - did not fully understand what was going on. They wanted to be told to believe and what to do, and when they were not told, resented it, and grew angry. They flew up against analysis when it was directed against their own views, and since analysis as a method was continually criticised, they had ample justification. Justification, of course, increases resentment, and the most dangerous form of indignation is the righteous kind.

    How much good did all this do? How much light shone on the assembled company? Not much, in many cases, because the ego is adroit at rebuilding shattered walls in different designs. Destruction of opinion only leads to authentic insight when a gift arrives suddenly 'from the ceiling', as Thornton Wilder put it. Coupe said that he regarded the work of the Forum as 'the recovery of lost innocence.'  He never achieved such innocence himself, and I certainly didn't. But awareness increased, and the possibility of waking up and seeing something as it really is became more than a possibility. Fredrick referred to the work as the process of 'breaking open mind.' This is revealing and accurate. Speaking personally, I took away from the Forum a habit that has proved invaluable. Let's call it the pursuit of uncomfortable light.

    Always painfully honest, Fredrick remarked, 'From the beginning I hoped that the Forum would reveal something which I lacked', and 'The Forum is a living thing. We are all subject to our own natures and temperaments. I do not think anyone here is a standard for anyone else. I am subject to moods and doubts; as we develop in understanding the ground can often be shaky.'

    At its best the Forum was undoubtedly a living thing - living noisily at times - which in its acrobatic performances gave attenders unforgettable visions of the ego at work. They could not afterwards free themselves from the inner witness which observed the play. Indeed, the discovery of that inner witness in individuals was the purpose of the community. 

 

* * * *

 

The Idealist.

     André Wendt was born in Germany of a German father and a French mother. At the time when it was fashionable for young Germans to join a youth movement and roam the countryside wearing shorts and a rucksack, singing open-air songs, André joined the Röte Falken, a Leftish body soon to be attacked by the Hitler Youth.

     André was a determined idealist whose heart refused to countenance evil. He was drawn towards the anarchists because they believed obstinately in the natural goodness of man and his ability to co-operate in freedom. André's hero was Erich Müehsam, an anarchist poet who' ended his days hanging in a lavatory after being interrogated by the Gestapo.

     When Communists and Nazis fought in the streets André didn't join in. He didn't believe that fighting solved problems. Hitler was voted into power, and that was the end of voting. Before long everyone connected with the German anarchist movement, or with Rote Falken, or with pacifism, was arrested. André, not one to conceal his opinions, was eventually sent to the concentration camp at Dachau.

     Dachau was not then the hell-hole it later became. Clandestine contact with the outside world as still possible. André received word through the grapevine that any inmate who volunteered for the Army would be released from the camp. Once in the Army, the underground would be able to smuggle him out of Germany. André, the most unlikely possible recruit, was nonetheless accepted, and became a temporary soldier. A few months later he was spirited over the border into the Netherlands.

     To be in the Netherlands was one thing. To be accepted by the Dutch authorities was quite another. André had no papers, the Dutch did not feel safe with an aggressive German regime as neighbour, and anti-Nazi refugees without papers were not joyfully received.

     The Dutch put him in jail for a month, then pushed him across the border into Belgium. The Belgians thought this procedure neat, and repeated it, making a present of André to the French, who popped him into prison for a month and then slid him back into Belgium. Soon after this the German invasion began nd in the confusion no one cared about papers. André^ found himself on a boat for England. The British authorities, with iron lack of humour, interned him as an enemy alien.

     André was an authority on the prisons of Europe. His blithe innocence and optimism were proof against bureaucratic efforts to destroy illusions and he did not dwell on hardship. His comments on the European prison systems were brief and to the point: the Dutch were harsh and Germanic; the Belgians slovenly; French prisons freer and more careless, but dirty; the food in Wormwood Scrubs (which he eventually visited) was poor, but the warders were 'human beings.' André^ had an odd guttural trick in pronouncing the word 'human' which gave it impressive emphasis.

     Released from internment, André was set to work on the land, and found friends in Derbyshire. While labouring for a local farmer he lived with Jeanne and Peter Ecker, near Breaston. Jeanne was Dutch, and Peter's father had been German. I met Peter while working in the coal-mines. We lived in a back street by a railway-line in Nottingham, and Peter was manager of a firm which manufactured electrical wiring, a few hundred yards from our house,

     Jeanne was the warmest and most hospitable woman in the Midlands and André was in rich clover. Working on a farm didn't trouble him at all. What did trouble him was the future of humanity. He wanted to cure the race of its inclination to internecine murder and its persistent power mania.

     We were back in London when André decided that with the war in Europe drawing to a close he must set out at once, immediately, or sooner, to reform the world. While hoeing, digging, humping and heaving, he had dreamed himself into the notion of setting up a community in the German wilderness known as Luneberg Heath, which he had explored while tramping with the Rote Falken in his youth. This was to be the Headquarters of his crusade. He did not know that the place had been transformed since he visited it. André would not have been impressed by ironises of that kind.

     Not being accustomed to waiting for official permission before taking action, he disappeared from Breaston and reappeared on the doorstep of our basement flat in Kentish Town. He was armed with the English text of the pamphlet which was to launch 'Freundschaft', his movement of transformation. This pamphlet was to be printed in London and distributed to everyone everywhere. Who was to pay for the venture? Well, all and sundry. He had enough money to print a thousand copies, so why worry?

     What he had not paused to consider was that by leaving his authorised occupation he immediately became an enemy alien on the loose, and our address was on the pamphlets.

     One day as he was entering Kentish Town underground station with a pile of pamphlets under his arm, two large plain-clothes police officers approached and took him into custody. André^ was eventually consigned to Wormwood Scrubs for three months.

     We had a visit from Special Branch. When they arrived I was wearing a dressing-gown and felt like a poor man's Noel Coward. The Inspector was all in brown - brown hat, brown overcoat, brown suit, brown shoes. The Sergeant was all in grey. My dressing gown was blue.

     The Inspector was matey and did all the talking. The Sergeant was impassive and took notes. When at last they reached the point which they had been approaching by a circuitous route, they both became exceedingly grave, as befits guardians of the law investigating a possible underground network of Nazi agents.

     The Inspector had in his possession, he said, a signed statement by Peter Ecker to the effect that he and I had conspired to conceal the whereabouts of André Wendt. I did not have the sense to ask to see the document, which did not exist, but any cunning plan to conceal Andrés whereabouts would be doomed to failure by our address on the pamphlets.

     The policemen decided that we were not after all Nazi conspirators, and cast about for another scenario. They began to question us on the lines that we must be Communists. This did not draw blood. When the Inspector leaned forward and shot out the accusation 'So you're a Trotskyist!' I began to see the humour of the situation; he looked so proud at knowing the word.

     In the end the Inspector decided that I was a harmless lunatic and abandoned the case to his Sergeant, who arrived one day at the Citizens' Advice Bureau where I was working, and presented me with a summons.

     He was very affable while we waited outside the Court room. The magistrate asked me why I had done what I had done and I replied that André was a friend, and we had put him up. Although his proposed crusade was unlikely to transform the world, it would have been ungenerous to discourage him. I don't know what the magistrate thought of this, but he fined me more than I could afford.

     By the time that a bearded André, looking like a dedicated monk, emerged from Wormwood Scrubs, we had moved from Kentish Town to 170 Westbourne Terrace, and he joined us there, occupying the attic next to Stephen Peet, and immediately proved his usefulness by providing the recipe for a form of potato cake with onions which he called Reibekuchen, and cooking them himself.

     André's peaceful recuperation in a congenial nest of anarchists was invaded suddenly by a tempest from the Continent in the form of Leah van Loen. Leah was the only person I've met who really frightened me. Her very presence petrified André, rendering him helpless, a rabbit confronted by a stoat.

     She was intense, dedicated, and a Communist. Her face was a thin slice of determination, her gaze targeted. If you were her target - look out! Her will-power would shake down pyramids. What she wanted, she got. No power, organisation, individual or code of behaviour would stand in her way. It's lucky she didn't want to be dictator of the world.

     At that moment she just wanted André. To Leah, he was lost property. As soon as the war in Europe ended she made plans to invade Britain and recapture him. She had worked throughout the German occupation in the Dutch resistance, and survived. She was accustomed to finding unorthodox means to an end. She learned that a batch of Dutch children were to be sent to Britain to recuperate from near starvation. A few adults would accompany them as supervisors. She determined to be one of those adults.

     As soon as the group reached London she found some excuse for leaving her duties and made herself inconvenient to both Dutch and British authorities. She was temporarily free in London and descended on André like a fiery angel. How did she find him? I can only guess that he must have made the mistake of writing to her, and when she pounced on André she pounced on us.

     The moment Leah appeared André became a helpless passenger on her battleship. Laughter and good cheer vanished. He stopped making toys and telling stories, he stopped cooking Bavarian dishes of ineffable plainness. He awaited the inevitable like a zombie in thrall to a wizard.

     To share a dwelling with Leah can Loen was like having a djinn in the house. Her eyes were black and glittering, her nose and intellect sharp, her determination as hard as basalt. She not only besieged the representatives of the Dutch government, she haunted the Home Office. I can imagine how she dealt with the efforts of dedicated procrastinators to thwart her intentions, and to stall the engine of her will. She simply bent on them the full intensity of her regard. There was no hiding place in the Ministry of Circumlocution. She was not one of those egoists who refuse to listen to what you say. She listened with glittering restraint, then simply demolished your arguments, cutting through verbiage like a demonic chain-saw.

     André had no passport, no Dutch papers, no rights, no proven nationality. All the same and notwithstanding she took him to Holland where he had no right to be, and established him there whether he or they liked it or not. She taught everyone who encountered her that the impossible can not only be done but can be achieved at speed. It was simply easier to accede to her request than to endure her unrelenting assault. Our sympathy with André was swept aside by relief at seeing the back of Leah van Loen.

     What happened to André? Peter and Jeanne Ecker tracked him down some years later and reported only that he was no longer the André they had known - full of energy, idealism and goodwill. He had been sucked dry. No Freundchaft, no Luneberg Heath, no salvation for mankind.

 

* * * *

 

A Floating Life.

     Alfred Perlès was born in Vienna in 1897. His father was Austrian, his mother French. Fred claimed, too, 'a considerable number of Jewish grandmothers.' What better recipe for a cosmopolitan wanderer, who said that as a boy he had lived in a big house which he could never think of as home. He insisted that he had never had a home since. Maybe. But he had a remarkable ability to attune to any atmosphere, and to settle down anywhere, like a chameleon that can grow visible or invisible at will. That is a talent which could be called 'making yourself at home.'

     Fred said that not only did he serve as an officer cadet in the Austrian Army during the First World War, but had been court-martialled for not giving the order to fire during an enemy attack. He explained that he did not want to mow down his mother's relatives. If that is true then the story contains multiple ironies, because this natural pacifist and Taoist managed to serve in three armies in one lifetime - Austrian, British and American, without either shooting anyone or even going so far as to shout rude words at the foe. He wrote of personal conflict, 'Fighting never settled anything, it only leaves a bad taste in your mouth.'

     Fred's father chanced to be born in a part of Austrian territory which after 1918 was transferred to the newly-invented Czecho-Slovakia, so conferring on Fred a Czech passport, with which he travelled from Vienna to Paris. He travelled to Paris because ration cards in Vienna failed to secure enough food to make you spry, and because money bought nothing as there was nothing in the shops.

     He learned with alacrity how to live on his wits, and how to do so in French. Getting food was his problem, women were his resource. He did not so much exploit them as appreciate their generosity. Also, he washed up in restaurants, served as a barman, sponged on friends, wrote pieces for transitory journals, edited the magazine of a Golf Club, destroying it in the process by printing the poems and jokes of literary acquaintances, acted as agent for a cabaret dancer, then as secretary to the backer of an unsuccessful revue, and eventually as proof reader on the Paris edition of the 'Chicago Tribune.'

     Some time in the late 1920s he suddenly, as he put it, 'came to'. He was moving about as usual, in pursuit of the wherewithal, when he found himself wide awake, alarmingly aware of his position in the world, of his surroundings both immediate and distant, and therefore of the inanity of his life. He had described himself on his passport as 'homme de lettres' because he thought that would boost him in the eyes of the French authorities, but what, he asked himself, was he doing about justifying the claim. What had he written except begging letters, an outline story for a comic film, and fugitive pieces about fugitive subjects in fugitive periodicals? Nothing.

     The decision to take literary action was not a financial one, but a declaration of intent, the announcement of inner need. As he said in his article 'Why I Write' - written for another fugitive periodical - 'The vocation of the writer is so deep-rooted, so deeply embedded in the fabric of the unconscious, that no radar can locate it.' 'Its chief concern,' he added, is 'to sponge on the Source'. God is the only genuine creator, and our job is to 'give Him a hand.'

     Embarking on a literary as distinct from a merely Bohemian life (for which a Czech passport must be some excuse), was helped by his meeting with Henry Miller in the year 1928. Miller at that time was a tourist jaunting through Europe. In 1930 when he returned to settle in Paris and began banging away on his ancient typewriter, they formed an alliance, sharing money when they had any, and inventing schemes to get it when broke.

     Fred started writing in French, which he found elegantly congenial, and published two books in Paris. Neither provided more than a few square meals, but at least they proved him both 'ecrivain' and 'homme de lettres.'

     Shortly before the Second World War broke out, he crossed to England, in pursuit of the latest young woman. Miller, who disapproved of the land of warm beer, 'gentleman's relish', immigration officers and hypocrisy (he was officially regarded in Britain as a pornographer) took off first for Greece and then the U.S.A.

     Fred stayed in London, and in less time than it takes to read 'Through the Looking Glass' became, as he put it, 'British to the core', buying a tweed jacket, a country landowner's hat, and a reassuring pipe. He grew fastidious about pipes, frequenting a famous shop in the West End and gathering about him a varied array of these expensive ornaments. He was always alert about clothes and social customs, not only becoming a connoisseur of beer, but thoroughly approving tea, going to the length of learning an ancient Chinese poem in English translation celebrating the fluid for its spiritual qualities.

     He wrote, tongue in cheek, in one of those lengthy open letters to Henry Miller, that tea, after hemlock, was the most important beverage concocted by man. Once, in Paris, when we experienced withdrawal symptoms at four in the afternoon, he despatched us immediately to the cafe above W.H.Smith's bookshop, where we were revived by supplies of the brew, accompanies by squashy cakes. Fred did not join us.

     He skated with consummate ease into writing idiomatic English, with a perfect ear for what are Americanisms and what are local oddities of dialect. His facility with languages was uncanny - a word which he would greatly appreciate. To argue with him about the meaning or spelling of a given English word, or about the grammatical construction of a sentence, was to invite humiliation. Recourse to the dictionary or Fowler always proved him to be right. He cherished cliches and common phrases, which he used continually, sprinkling his conversation with satirical but affectionate locutions such as 'now, at once, immediately', or 'I, myself, personally,' or 'You've got to use your noodle'. He was fond of saying with supreme dignity that 'a man of my standing' could not stoop to this or that. He called florins 'big white ones', and shillings 'little white ones.' He enjoyed 'come uppance', 'make no bones about it' and such like. As soon as we landed in a foreign country he would say 'Let me do the talking', and did so, whatever the language required. He spoke fluent German, French, English, and Greek, and impressed the natives in both Spanish and Italian. The only language he refused to learn was Turkish, because the Turks pinched his typewriter when they invaded northern Cyprus, where Fred was living at the time.

     He was adept at acquiring an affection for whatever place he found himself in, and wrote about England that while in France you are always 'un sale etranger', in London you are a friend, claiming that it was wonderful being an alien in that city. I doubt if this was ever true. It certainly isn't today, but it was for Fred. He always found treasure wherever he looked.

     He had no sympathy at all for the Nazis, but refused to see an enemy in every German. Nonetheless, in 1940 he joined the British Army, and wrote an account of his experiences in 'Alien Corn' (1944). Since he was not a British subject he was directed into the Pioneer Corps, where he served his time.

     Typical of his attention to social detail, he reported for duty carrying a copy of the populist Daily Sketch, in order to be inconspicuous, only to find that the other distinguished foreigners gathered for enlistment were reading The Times, The Manchester Guardian or The Daily Telegraph.

     One of the many and varied places in which his section of that strange company were stationed was a camp in southern Scotland, between Dumfries and Moffatt. There he met Anne Barrett from Patna in Ayrshire, a shrewd, forbearing and downright woman of high intelligence and great efficiency, who guided him through many difficulties for the rest of his life, in particular steering him away from any alcohol overdose which would make him ineffably amorous in an unsuitable quarter.

     The members of the coterie to which Fred had belonged in Paris did not approve of Anne. Henry Miller disliked her, possibly because she considered Fred's admiration and affection for Miller himself to be excessive. Lawrence Durrell went further. He despised her. They thought she constricted Fred and drained him of his creative juices. There was in this an element of contempt for bourgeois respectability, and an element of jealousy. His friends tended to underestimate Fred. He gave no sign of resenting this. Anne resented it on his behalf. As her influence waxed, theirs waned.

     Fred knew very well that his days as an amoral predator were over, and accepted Anne for what she was - a sharp/a practical observer with a keen, ironic sense of humour and both feet firmly on the ground. He remained, as always, loyal to his friends, and discarded no one. But he kept the balance. He knew when he was well off. Many otherwise intelligent people never make that discovery.

     They did not marry until 1971, but when he went overseas with the Army, and was instructed to adopt a British surname in case he was captured by the Germans, Fred chose 'Barret', removing a 't' from the name of Anne's former husband, always referred to by Fred as 'my predecessor', but rarely referred to at all by Anne. She herself was referred to as 'my spouse'. As a writer he remained Alfred Perlès. Dual identity suited him.

     The only thing of practical value he learned in the Army was how to clear windows. Once when I was cleaning ours in Scotland, Fred clapped his hands over his ears and begged for mercy. The excruciating squeak-expletives of leather on glass set his nerves twitching. Ordered to clear windows in the Pioneer Corps he discovered that wet newspaper followed by dry newspaper rendered windows non-squeaky clean at unlikely speed. I've used the method myself ever since, and never clean windows without thinking of Fred. (A spoonful of vinegar in the water helps).

     In 1940 I read Fred's highly autographical story 'I Live on My Wits' in the newly established literary monthly 'Horizon.' Its insouciance, humour and vitality were engaging. In 1943 came his novel 'The Renegade', again a short whisker from being autobiography, which had the same affable, anarchistic zest.

     Back from the coal-mines and working in London in 1944, I started my own short-lived review (which Fredrick sold with some success in the Park) and wrote to Fred, via his publisher, for an article on Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the literary outlaw whose 'Voyage au Bout de la Nuit' had blown a hole in French literary tradition during the nineteen-thirties. Celine had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis, which I found at once distressing and incredible. Fred seemed to me the only man in the country likely to write with knowledge and understanding about Celine. Although immersed in the Army, without books or facilities, he wrote the article, and was paid.

     When we first met he was in uniform - small, spry, light-bodied, impish, amiable, with delicate hands and a sensitive, expressive face. The Miller circle regarded him as a clown, and called him 'Joey'. He could certainly behave as a clown for their delectation, but he wasn't one. Indeed, he proved wiser than any of them. He was a combination of chameleon and kelly. A kelly is a lead-weighted toy which bounces back if you try to push it over. As Gene said 'a chameleon changes colour but is still a chameleon.' Fred remained exactly Fred whatever colour he took on.

     Discharged from the Pioneer Corps in 1945 he had nowhere in London to live, and was content to occupy one of our spartan attic rooms at 170, Westbourne Terrace. He as accustomed to attics, but not to civilian rations, and was shaken when confronted with sober delicacies like Marmite and André's reibekuchen. This was a time of radical rationing, when Chancellor Stafford Cripps took great pleasure in lecturing people on tightening their belts, even if they were female or wearing braces.

     Fred swiftly adapted to his habitat, and settled down to produce his four pages a day, which he announced to be the correct output for a man of his standing. The problem was to earn some money now, at once, immediately. He published a story or two in the popular pocket magazine 'Lilliput', famous in its day but forgotten now, but plots were not his metier, and he got a job as an international telephone operator, slipping niftily from language to language, and keeping scrupulously under his country gentleman's hat all the highly confidential information he gained, which included the contents of conversations between members of the Royal family. He often worked on the night-shift and since Gene and I both had day jobs we often saw him only for his toast and Marmite.

     Fred took little interest in the activities of the Forum, and treated Fredrick with caution, as one should avoid dangerous fireworks, but individuals who appeared and disappeared were appreciated for whatever oddities they offered. He particularly enjoyed Cecil Smelt, although I'm not sure why, referring often in later years to Cecil's exposition of entropy. I think the word appealed to him. Besides, the idea of the world running down was stored away for use at appropriate moments as metaphor or fairy lore.

     Fred didn't need to count his blessings, he just accepted them as free gifts from above, but was determined that we should celebrate ours when the chance came. Fred was present when I got a letter telling me that my first book had been accepted, with some misgivings, by the Bodley Head.

     'We'll go and tell Gene,' he announced. 'Now, at once, immediately, without delay.'

     We set out for Farringdon Street, where she was working for the Amalgamated Press. We waited until she emerged for lunch, then. Fred not only made the announcement, but executed a short, extravagant dance in the street, which involved extensive use of arms as well as legs.

     One day out of the blue he told us that he had joined the American Army. When he appeared in uniform, he looked for the fist time since we had known him unsuitably dressed. In British uniform he was anonymously unsoldierly, but at ease. In American uniform he became, incredibly, "a foreigner.'

     It was in this disguise that he returned to the broken countries of Europe. He had joined for a specific job, which he must wear uniform to perform. He was interpreter from German and French into English, from English into American, and from American into German, making as usual no bones about it.

     But as the weeks and months went by he suffered from increasing bewilderment and unease about American extravagance and profligacy. The Army kitchen threw out good food while all around them in ruined German cities people were close to starvation. This was not due to cruelty, or even indifference, but, according to Fred, just lack of imagination. They could not, he said, conceive of endemic shortages, and, besides, this food was the property of the Army and could not be awarded to civilians. Fred was not impressed by these rules. He spirited away tins of meat and fruit and awarded it to civilians. No one seemed to notice. Or perhaps they winked one eye at a time.

     When he came home he awarded us the Iron Cross. He had found a drawer full of these items in an abandoned German Army office. In the book he wrote about this trip, 'Round Trip' (1946) he describes a conversation with a Belgian intellectual who was investing spiritual capital in the healing power of democracy. Fred told this political gentleman that every free human being must be an anarchist at heart, able to envisage the possibility of order without rule. But of course, he said, it won't come about. We would all have to have grown into balanced beings to make a theoretical possibility solid. So he finished by telling the Belgian that although the concept of anarchy is born from spiritual wisdom, it itself is neither politics nor wisdom, adding that the greatest criminals of all time were despotic rulers, but these deluded fellows were just shadow actors in a nightmare. They have, he declared, no power over the spirit. Fred was always willing to play the fool by being serious.

     By the time he returned from his second sojourn in shattered Europe, we had left Westbourne Terrace for the Highlands. His adventures there will be described later.

 

* * * *

 

The Film Man

     Despite being the younger son of the editor of that sober Quaker journal 'The Friend', Stephen Peet never became a Quaker, but he sojourned, as I did, at a co-educational Quaker boarding school in Somerset, called Sidcot.

     This is not the place to examine that interesting and benevolent establishment, the interior life of which was so different from that which its mentors imagined it to be.

     It was an institution which suited Stephen. He was allowed to be what he was, and not someone else's stereotype. He and Taffy Morgan drew a huge and accurate map of Spain in the Sixth Form room, and daily moved a string skewered by pins to indicate the changing (and deteriorating) position of the Republican lines in the Civil War as reported to the News Chronicle.

     Stephen was also one of the main contributors to the enormous blackboard covered with cartoons, jokes, verses, and comments, all welcome provided that someone thought them funny or enlightening. Inferior efforts were dustered off as a replacement became available, and the changing magazine was the first thing to be examined by anyone who came into the room. All contributions were anonymous. No teacher had the heart or the courage to wipe away such creative extravagance in order to further orthodox learning.

     Stephen also managed to make a film which he showed at a school entertainment. It was a precursor of Disney's Fantasia, in that it consisted of a series of patterned shapes and colours which jerked and oscillated across the screen. It indicated things to come since Stephen remained a film-maker all his wandering life.

     He not only married Olive Newbery, a beautiful and highly intelligent girl who was a younger contemporary of ours at Sidcot, he kept in touch with old scholars everywhere, and since he visited everywhere, this enabled him to find a bed and breakfast in the wildest, weirdest and most unlikely places on the globe.

     When I say 'kept in touch' I don't mean by writing letters. Never. He was a dedicated telephonist and when he rang up out of the ether after an absence of a month, a year, or three years, the question 'Where are you?' might be answered 'At home' or 'Rhodesia', 'Norway', 'Sudan', 'Germany' or - well, anywhere.

     When War began Stephen joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, and for some months we shared a room in the London Students' Hostel until I went into the coal-mines and Stephen departed as a uniformed medical orderly to Crete.

     He remembered with the clarity of a recurring dream a stark picture of the German invasion of Crete. He stepped out of a building into the sudden snap of rifle fire just in time to see a German soldier take aim at a British soldier running for refuge beside a wall. The German fired. The British soldier fell and rolled over. The German threw down his rifle and pelted through the firing to lift the British soldier on his back and carry him to safety.

     Stephen was taken prisoner in Crete and worked first as a medical orderly in a hospital for the wounded, and was then transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. A few months ago he sent back to me the letters I had written to him in the camp.I did not remember them or even that I had ever written letters to the camp. They were full of jokes, often bad.

     The camp was like other camps and the events like those recorded by many prisoners-of-war. But as the conflict moved in jerks and bursts towards its hungry end, the inmates grew increasingly worried by the fact that they were closer to the advancing Russians than to the advancing Allies. The German guards were even more jumpy than the inmates.

     One day the inmates awoke and there was no roll-call, no guards, no food. The Germans had fled in the night.

     This was a time now forgotten. The stories of those who lived through it have not been recorded; they have vanished into the limbo where all untold stories, and therefore true history, must vanish. Poland, Germany and Russia were ravaged by war and tainted by mass murder. Forced labourers, concentration camp survivors, foreign conscripts, prisoners-of-war, civilian refugees, lost bodies and lost minds were criss-crossing Europe in search of food, safety, troops of their own nationality, or simply someone or some place they recognised from a broken past. Home to one group was alien territory to another; they passed and re-passed each other on their trek to anywhere which was not the place where they stood.

     The British prisoners wanted to move West before soldiers from the East reached their camp. If Russians marched in, how long would it be before anyone informed the Allies of their existence? Would the Russians bother to repatriate them at all?

     Poles in the camp, and the local villagers were even more worried, and with good reason. Both groups shared a common fear of the Russians. In the circumstances the British and the villagers saw each other as neighbours rather than enemies. The villagers took prisoners into their homes and fed them.

     Then by one of the accidents that war makes easy, fire broke free in the forest. Every dwelling in the area was threatened. The flames licked and leapt towards farms and homes, clouds of smoke hung in the air, and the acrid smell of burning penetrated walls and minds.

     Villagers and prisoners began to work together to cut firebreaks, dig trenches, carry water, organise men into gangs and columns, feeding the firefighters to battle against an enemy older and more terrible than soldiers.

     To Stephen the days that passed were a barely credible procession of fleeting hours, with Germans, British and Poles, who did not share a language, sharing work, food, exhaustion and lack of sleep with an unquestioning dedication which seemed as natural as breathing.

     Once the fire sank back into sullen malignancy, the prisoners were directed on their way, laden with food and farewells. Stephen stumbled into a unit of the British Army and was returned to England, to London, and the Friends' Ambulance Unit. Although officially attached to the section established at the Middlesex Hospital, he took up residence in our second attic, which was richly furnished with a camp bed and a chest of drawers. This gave him more freedom to roam. He was lean, gaunt, with sunken cheeks and a haunted look, but otherwise did not confess to having changed, and accepted Fred Perlès and Marmite with the offhand elan he always used as his disguise.

     Among the girl-friends he brought to 170 Westbourne Terrace was a dark and comely one with an interesting gap in her front teeth. Her name was Denise Levertov. She wrote poetry and was training to be a nurse. I persuaded her to write an article on her experiences in this profession for the literary journal I was editing at the time, and which Fredrick was selling profitably to his followers in the Park. It was a good article, vivid, perceptive and sensible. Denise went to the U.S.A. where she became an accomplished and notorious poet and radical protester, marrying Mitch Goodman, and providing Stephen with yet another point of contact on his world itinerary. She died a year or two ago.

     Stephen spent most of his time officially collecting and preparing photographs for a history of the F.A.U., but did not spurn odd jobs which came his way, the odder the better. The magazine for which Gene worked wanted male models for knitting patterns, and Stephen obliged for a pound a time. He was mortified to find his picture labelled 'A pattern for Daddies.'

 

* * * *

 

Absent Without Leave.

     John Atkins had worked for Mass Observation and Tribune, and published poems and stories before before the war pitchforked him into the Royal Artillery.

     He was willing to fight Hitler but found the Army intolerable. As he put it himself: 'I have very few good points but perhaps the best is a love of life and especially of free life. This, as you can imagine, made it impossible for me to become a satisfactory soldier. It was obvious from the first that I would not find fulfillment in marching up and down a parade ground saying 'Yes, sir' and 'Very good, sir.' In the end I went for a rest to a detention barracks where I had a perfectly jolly time. . . One little incident I cannot forget. An old soldier, ending his days as a Regimental Policeman, told me that he had finally come to the conclusion that the best part of the Army, speaking in a qualitative sense, was shut up in the guard rooms and detention barracks. He meant the only part that believed literally all that stuff about freedom that our great leaders talked. This naturally pleased me very much.'

     He had plenty of opportunity to check the truth of this observation. When things became too much for him, as they frequently did, he went absent without leave. Absence without leave becomes desertion after twenty-one days, so he used to go back on the twentieth day.

     He was stationed in Bradford when in 1945 he took off for a burst of freedom. He borrowed enough money from our mutual friend John Braine, then a librarian in Bingley, to get him to Bristol, where his wife was living, and arrived at Westbourne Terrace a few days later wearing a pair of her trousers. The difficulty was their shortness and lack of fly buttons, which he felt might make him conspicuous and attract the attention of military policemen. We tried on him various pairs of trousers, and the pair that fitted him best belong to Stephen Peet. Stephen was repaid later when Atkins had a job teaching English in Khartoum and Stephen, always adept at making use of such coincidences, stayed with him while filming in the Sudan.

     That evening we went to the cinema. We had to queue to get in, and when a pair of military policemen had walked past the queue twice in a heavily booted manner, we decided that the film wasn't really as good as all that, and nipped home for a cup of tea.

     Atkins fitted admirably into the community of 170 Westboune Terrace, enjoying everything that was laid before him, until the requisite number of days had passed, when he returned to the Army.

     The Army did not know what to make of him. After he had been in and out of the glasshouse several times they placed him before an interviewing board, and asked him if he would like to become an officer. When he said no, they delivered him to a psychiatrist, on the ground that he must be unbalanced. The psychiatrist proved to be round the bend himself, and the experiment was not a success. John Atkins was discharged from the Army as soon as the war in Europe ended. The military had had their fill of him, although they realised very well that he was a nice, intelligent chap.

     Since the many books he published in later years did not make him a decent living, partly owing to the fact that his distinguished publisher neglected to pay him the royalties owed, he taught by arrangement with the British Council first in Libya, then in the Sudan, and finally in Poland, where he learned to pronounce Lodz as Wudge, and to appreciate the works of Lutoslawski. I noticed that whatever country he visited, whether for work or a holiday, suffered some sort of a revolution soon afterwards, but I continue to regard this as a coincidence. We wrote one book together, which was intended to be funny. Whether the noble fellow who published it, whose name was Bernard Hanison, and the few citizens who bought it, found it so, we could never be sure.

     We also produced in partnership a satirical review about the literary world which we distributed free to those who might find it salutary. Many readers applauded the merry quips about their contemporaries, but never the merry quips about what Fred Perlès used to call 'their own selves'. Over the years, too, we have played innumerable games of cricket, fives and tiddley-wink football, considering these activities to be a necessity of civilised life.

 

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