“Claud Cockburn and I had become probationary members of the Communist Party at Oxford, and I held a Party card containing three or four sixpenny stamps which represented my monthly contributions. It was a very small branch, though it served both city and university; I doubt if there were more than half a dozen members, and Cockburn and I, with no scrap of Marxist belief between us, joined only with the far-fetched idea of gaining control and perhaps winning a free trip to Moscow and Leningrad, ...cities which six years after the Revolution still had a romantic appeal. Our mercenary motive was seen through almost at once by a very serious Australian Rhodes scholar who was much older than ourselves and we soon ceased to attend meetings.1 But I still kept my card as a souvenir, and with it in my hand I visited the Communist headquarters in Paris, where they were equally puzzled by my youth and my bad French. However I was invited to a meeting that night somewhere around Menilmontant. The working-class quarter was full of policemen in blue steel helmets and Gardes Mobiles who carried rifles, but the meeting nonetheless bored me to exhaustion.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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