This account of a tormented family helps to explain its author’s political journey from Young Communist to Times columnist
Like David Aaronovitch’s parents, Sam and Lavender, my mother and father, Joe and Molly, were for many years members of the British Communist Party of Great Britain. As the CPGB declined from its high point of wartime popularity and followers gradually turned their backs on the faith, so the idea of the turncoat, the sellout, the apostate came more and more to dominate my parents’ state of mind.
Even when I was quite small, we would be out shopping and my mother or father would gesticulate towards some harmless-looking individual and say in a whisper: “See him over there trying on gloves? He left the party over Hungary in 1956 and now he’s ... ” Here they would pause before revealing the full horror: “... a Labour councillor!” Or, “Don’t look, but that woman by the bacon counter, she used to be in CND but now she’s … joined the Air Force!” At first I couldn’t see anything different about the people my parents pointed out, but over time it did seem to me there was a certain haunted quality, an air of sadness that hung over them. Their mood probably wasn’t helped by being whispered about in shops, but I sensed that the main critical voice was inside their heads, that they were aware on some level that they had abandoned their younger, more idealistic selves and it had corroded them from the inside.
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