My parents didn't tell us which of their friends and relations
were Communists and which weren't,
so we had to do it ourselves.
A group of teachers and their partners came over
from my father's school,
Len got out his guitar and they sang,
'I'm the man, the very fat man who waters the workers' beer'.
They must be Communists, I thought.
A group of teachers came over from my mother's school,
and a man called Wally told stories about an engraving firm
controlled by 'the masons', he said.
My dad was fascinated by Wally's stories and kept saying,
'Christ, would you believe it?!'
So I asked my mum if Wally was a Communist
and she said, 'Of course not, you mustn't ever say that.'
Then we went on a camp with the Hornsey Communists
and a woman spilt meths on her groundsheet
and it burst in to flame.
My dad said she was a bloody fool
so I reckoned that though she might have been a
Communist once
she wasn't one now.
We went camping with Fred and Lorna,
and when we sang 'I'm the man the very fat man
who waters the workers' beer' Lorna didn't join in
and said, 'Oh Fred, come on, there's no need to
sing that one,' so Lorna, I thought, was not very Communist.
Sometimes we went to see two families who
lived upstairs and downstairs in a house.
Upstairs was Francis the Armenian who was so Communist
quite often he wasn't there - he was working for peace
in Czechoslovakia. Peggy, his wife, though
was very Communist, I thought, because
she not only talked about peace, she talked about
peace-loving peoples.
My father said that she sounded like a bloody gramophone
record, but as we often used to listen to bloody gramophone
records of the Red Army, I didn't know why there
could be anything wrong with that.
Downstairs there was Roy who was the most miserable
man I have ever known. Even his hands was miserable.
He said that everything was bad. As my parents
said some things (but not everything) were bad as well,
it was possible, I thought,
Roy was more Communist than them.
Roy's wife, was sometimes ill and had to go to bed for
months. But when she came out of the bedroom
she was very smiley and seemed to say that
everything wasn't as bad as Roy said it was.
I wasn't sure if that meant she was more or less
Communist than Roy.
There was Moishe and Rene who weren't just
Communists they were almost my parents.
Moishe went to school with my father and
Rene went to school with my mother.
They had even camped together.
When they talked it was like they were
a moishe-rene-my mother-my father Communist camping club.
Then there were the relatives or 'meshpukkhe' as
my father called them.
My father's mother was so old and so Communist, she was the first
Communist. And her father they said, was a
Communist-before-there-even-were-Communists.
My mother's mother, 'Bubbe', kept
chickens and said the woman who did the 'bag wash'
was trying to diddle her. My father said that she
wasn't a Communist, she just 'kvetshed' (complained)
but she made the best shmatena (a kind of yoghurt)
in London so maybe that made her some kind of
a Communist without knowing she was.
I asked my mother if 'Zeyde' (her father) was a
Communist and she said very angrily that he was
'some kind of Trotskyist'.
That sounded terrible. And yet he was so nice.
He took me to Hackney Downs where he
showed me to his friends who said, every time,
'Is that your Grandson, Frank?'
'Yes,' he said every time,
'He's a nice looking boy,' they said every time,
and went on talking in Yiddish.
As i didn't speak Yiddish I had no way of knowing
whether they were Trotskyists too.
In 1957, we went to Communist East Germany
and there was a row between everybody on the
delegation about whether Stalinallee (Stalin Alley)
looked like a public lavatory or not.
We saw the Carl Zeiss camera works,
Frederick the Great's house,
Goethe's house, Schiller's house, Bach's house,
Luther's castle, Buchenwald concentration camp
and Hitler's bunker.
When we got back, my parents stopped being
Communists.
They called me and my brother in and said
that they didn't agree with the Communist Party
and democracy.
I had no idea what that meant. Not a clue.
The ones who were Communists went on being
Communists and now we weren't Communists.
Every so often Roy came over and said
everything was getting worse.
