Farewell to the Fifties

By CYRIL RAY*

IDE to the sound of the guns!' was the

counsel offered to aspiring war correspon- dents by William Howard Russell, of Printing House Square, Balaclava and Bull Run.

All very well for the Crimea, but I hadn't expected that four and a half years after VE-Day the fag-end of the 1940s would find me follow- ing, precisely, that resoundingly romantic advice. I was on a mule, and the guns were on a mountain —shelling the Greek Communist rearguard as it fell back on an Albanian village that seemed near enough, through the glasses handed to me by the Greek Royalist colonel, to chuck a stone into.

It was all a bit bewildering to a Western- European radical newspaperman who had covered, much of it for the Manchester Guardian, a war that had been fought against Fascism. The colonel called his Communist fellow-countrymen klephies, bandits—the name that the Greek guerrillas had adopted as a title of honour under which to carve up the Turkish garrisons in those parts in Byron's time. But the colonel spat when he spoke the word. He was a Fascist if ever there was one : the soldiers he really admired—and had probably collaborated with—were the Germans (though he couldn't abide the Italians). The klephts we were shelling, the evidence of whose looting and butchery I had seen in one Epirote and Macedonian village after another, we had only four or five years before been calling 'the resistance,' and plying by parachute with men, money and arms.

Bewildering, because a fresh pattern was form- ing as the new decade slid into the world calendar. 1 don't like much better now than I did then

the Greek Royalist colonel and what he stands for, but European history might have taken a different, and a disagreeable, turn if, by the end of 1949, he and his fellows hadn't licked the Communists in the Grammos mountains. For Czechoslovakia had already fallen, in 1948; the NATO treaty had only just been signed and the Berlin blockade only just been broken. On Sep- tember 22, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb; the United Kingdom's first diplomatic act of 1950 was to recognise Com- munist China; and before that year was out Communist Chinese troops were in action against those of the United Nations in Korea.

For part of that year I was travelling in Central, East and South Africa. In Nairobi, a settler told me, in the hearing of a dignified Kikuyu driver, to check the tool-kit of the car he was handing over to me, because 'they're all thieves, these black bastards.' I don't know whether that particular settler has changed his tune during the 1950s, but some of the Kikuyu driver's relatives or friends exacted a bloody, if indiscriminate, revenge. In South Africa, an uncle of mine, a Jew, asked me, 'How would you like a Kaffir doctor to examine your wife?' My uncle is now deceased, but I fear that there are still many Johannesburg Jews with similar words on their lips, in spite of the hard work I put in among my relatives, prophesying, 'It's down with the black man now, and the coloureds, and the Indians—the Jews come next.' I'm still to be con- vinced otherwise: presumably the form you fill up at the Union frontier still draws a racial dis- tinction between 'European, Asiatic and Hebrew.'

After the South Africa of those days—Malan had just come_to power, and 1950 saw the enact- ment, in rapid succession, of the Immorality Amendment Act, the Population Registration Act, the Group Areas Act and the Suppression of Communism Act—Moscow in the last weeks of the year seemed not quite such a life-denying city as I would otherwise have thought it. But Stalin was glowering suspiciously in the Kremlin; censorship made serious journalism impossible; security denied citizen and foreigner alike such minor amenities as a telephone book and a street plan; and along with assorted Western diplo- matists, embassy typists and American news- papermen I dined, drank and danced out the last days of the old year as though 1 were a member of a beleaguered garrison. 'American boys,' as the phrase is, were dying in Korea; the MVD was kidnapping the Soviet wives of British sub- jects in broad daylight in the streets of Moscow; Pravda and hvestia were spitting their hatred of us; and my opposite number, the Tass corre- spondent in London, was reporting that bare- footed unemployed were droPping dead on the Embankment, either wasted away by tuberculosis and hunger or clubbed to death by the Metro- politan gendarmerie. From boredom, frustration and mild persecution-mania, Westerners in Moscow tended to become balletomanes, neuro- tics or engaged to be married.

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*Foreign Editor of the Spectator. . Senator McCarthy, though, was doing as much in those days as Stalin did to pattern American behaviour. While the youngsters at the British Embassy were being urged by the Ambassador to talk to as many Russians as they could, United States diplomatists were being threatened with professional disgrace and disaster if they so much as passed the time of day with the man in the next seat at the. Bolshoi Theatre. At a party I gave in Moscow for all my colleagues, the United States chargd d'affaires refused, very ostentatiously,. to meet the one Communist present, Joe Clark of the New York Daily Worker—who was eagerly snapped up by Lady Kelly, wife of the British Ambassador, anxious to compare notes on Byzantine architecture and ikons.

The last time I saw Joe was in 1958, on the boardwalk at Coney Island, and he told me how things had gone with him since he left his paper and his party over Hungary. Not well, for it wasn't much more agreeable for an American, he told me, to have been a Communist than to be one, unless he took up ex-Communism as a profession, sell- ing his recantations by the column, with a profitable sideline in informing on former com- rades. But he had come to hate Stalin more than he had ever hated McCarthy.

Long before Hungary I was back in London, arriving in 1952 and being promptly invited to luncheon by some notability or other who added, impressively, that it was to meet Gilbert Harding. So impressively, indeed, that I couldn't bring myself to reveal that the name of Gilbert Harding had not been on every Moscow lip, and I had to ask round London, 'Have you ever heard of Somebody called Gilbert Harding?'

Though I now know him well, I cannot recall whether it was sound radio or television that had made the fame of Gilbert Harding by the spring of 1952. Some of.the other television 'personalities' of those or of even more recent days are forgotten; some are dead; some are Members of Parliament. Some of the tunes, some of the events, some of the applied ornament of the decade that has just slipped through our fingers have slipped through our fingers with it. I remember that I visited the Festival of Britain when I was on leave from Moscow, and wrote about it, and yet it has passed me by, save that I find references to it in superior magazine articles about design. But I remember the Davy Crockett craze, because by then I was living in Islington, next door to a family of Sikhs, and I used to see one small Sikh with a 'coon- skin cap perched on top of his light blue turban stalking another who had a feathered head- dress stuck precariously into his. I was the first, think, to report in the public prints on the spread of the espresso coffee bars, and I was closely interrogated by an Ambassador's wife in Paris about the London launderettes that I had written about under the title of 'The Ladies' Local.'

Some of us cared deeply, during the 1950s, about capital punishment, and in 1956 I left the paper I had long been working for, though had made many friends there, and received many k indnesses—becaUse in the great debate that was then raging it came ,out strongly for hanging. 1 need have been in no hurry.. Those papers that supported hanging naturally enough supported Suez, and if 1 hadn't walked out of the Sunday Times in February I would certainly have galloped out in November. Sarah Gainham, inci- dentally, now our Central European correspon- dent, was lying face downwards, at Suez-time, on a Legation floor in Budapest, listening to the whine of Soviet bullets and saying to herself, she told me later, 'Christ, if only our hands were clean !'

I haven't mentioned hula-hoops or Lolita, sputniks or—more significant even than sputniks —the Kiev-made espresso machine from which I took coffee at Moscow airport in 1959, where in 1952 I had drunk tea from a samovar.

Perhaps 1 ought to remember being pro- fessionally excited in Libya in 1954, as I began to piece together the extent of Egyptian infiltra- tion and influence, but I think now that the editor was right who told me that it wouldn't, in the long run, matter very much. I remember Paris in the May of 1958, as the Republic fell, with queues in the Champs Elysees for Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle, and troops and armoured cars round every corner. But I had almost forgotten having to dodge round the barricades and t armoured columns in Brussels, in 1955, and th the rioting was over State subsidies to schoo I hope others will forget that, cabling fr Amman, in September, 1958, I gave King Husse only a few more weeks of power after the Britt had withdrawn.

I landed in Cyprus the day Mrs. Cutliffe w murdered, and I was in Malta for some of Mintoff's tantrums, and yet what I will alwa remember best about the 1950s was sometht that happened at home, not abroad—and reme ber it best not because it is so near in time, b because I think it the most shameful memo of the decade—not more dastardly than Bud pest, but we cannot be held directly responsib for Budapest; not more stupid than Suez, b Suez was plotted without our knowing about I not more cruel than the hanging of Mrs. Ell or Marwood, but more shameful, because we much more positively, share the shame : the fa that for the shabbiest of shopkeepers' reaso the free electors of Britain sent back to offi in October, 1959, the hangers and floggers a let's-bomb-the-woggers. It's been a frightento an all too enlightening, and an exciting decad but to some of us this was when it turned intik a grubby one..