At last it happened. In early October 1931, I went up to Cambridge. I had to spend my first year in lodgings out of College so I found myself miles off, half way to Girton. To dine in Hall and then to have to slog back on a bicycle instead of continuing the evening more sociably was quite repugnant since all my instincts were towards as great an integration as possible into the life of the College. I immediately put my name down for a change of lodgings, and I can still see the face of that first landlady when I told her that I was moving; it was indeed a poor reward for the motherly cup of cocoa she had been giving me every evening at ten o'clock. I realised that what was hurting her was not merely the unfriendliness of my going, but also the loss of rent in mid-year when new lodgers were less likely to turn up. For the first time in my life I had to consider where money came from. Had that question arisen while I was still at school my reply might well have been: "from the bank with a cheque." So I did feel guilty at abandoning that landlady.
I was given a set of rooms in Sidney Street right next to Whewell's Court into which I moved in my second year when I was put on the same staircase as my half-brother's old rooms of thirty years before in which I could not be lodged because Professor Houseman now had them.

Such were the kind old elitist ways of humouring family sentiment. Trinity then was, as it is today, a place of reposeful beauty. It favoured, with a total generosity, both play and intellectual work. If one signed-off Hall, dinner could then be carried, hot in a head-tray, by the kitchen porters to one's rooms together with a wine of ones choice - all this at the age of twenty. In retrospect our life in those years seems unbelievably privileged - it is a wonder that we ever learnt to live in the real world. By today's standards, the University was small, a mere 6000 undergraduates. It was not therefore surprising that one day I should find myself face-to-face with my old Newquay beach playmate Donald Mclean, the son of our Member of Parliament. He was friendly, if a bit distant, and went on his way saying something about meeting later which indeed we did. During my first year at Trinity I realized that undergraduate society was composed of two fractions: the hearty and the aesthetes. I preferred the latter. I was living in that liberal Cambridge world still ruled by the Principia Ethica of G.E. Moore. Happiness lay "in the pleasure of human intercourse and in the enjoyment of beautiful objects." I valued what I saw as good which led me to the obligation to do what I judged as right. I saw right in actions which produced the most good to the most people. This sat well with Pater's aestheticism which had got into my mind earlier and which still hung around Cambridge: I really did try to sharpen my sensibilities so as not to look with the eye alone. I tried to see with my whole being the colours in nature or on canvass. I cared about the changes in a friend's expression, moods mattered.

Alongside all this, I had tried to maintain a physical and material competency, to be able to ride a motorbike as well as a horse. In part seduced by the free riding, I entered the OTC as an Officer Cadet in the Royal Horse Artillery. Eighteen months later I resigned, but only after I had completed the training that entitled me to a commission. What I learnt in the OTC was eventually to prove of immense value. I also joined the 1st Trinity Boat Club because I liked rowing and eventually was in a Lent boat coached by Erskine Childers. In 1931 we all knew his father had been shot by a Free State firing-squad we were correspondingly tactful. Thirty years later he vindicated his father's name by becoming President of the Irish Republic.

I became an active member of The Magpie and Stump; that old Trinity club had remained faithful to an elaborate Victorian ritual of debate. Professor Kapitza, then a Research Fellow, later better known as the father of the Soviet Atomic bomb, was the guest of honour at the first meeting I attended. Kapitza had realised that he was to face the traditions of former times and had prepared himself sartorially with an antique diner-jacket. Intellectually his speech was based on an incomprehensible Russian joke involving the Tsar which at any rate dovetailed with the Secretary's announcement that he was unable to report the payment of the Emperor of Germany's overdue subscription. This may have served to complicate poor Kapitza's Soviet record; he did have a lot of trouble when he went back for a holiday. The Soviet Government would not let him return to Cambridge.

University undergraduates, themselves then mostly the children of prosperous families were starting to have their consciences troubled by the plight of Hunger-Marchers and of those who, by the Means Test, were forced to sell their possessions before they could obtain the meagre dole payments. It was into this atmosphere that I emerged from the cosy shelter of my Cornish life. Ampleforth had in no way prepared me for this. I did not know what to make of it. Then one or two men in our year failed to return for the next term - their parents could not continue to finance a university education. I had never before been led to question the stability of the society into which I had been born.

America had been hit by the depression in 1930. In the following year the European banking system fell to pieces with the failure in Vienna of the Kredit Anstalt. Britain had a budget deficit, and there was a flight of capital from the City. Parliament was weak; the 289 Labour seats were not enough to give a working majority in the House so the 58 Liberals held the balance of power. Rising unemployment caused misery and alarm, the social and economic symptoms of a major depression had a decisive influence on the General election in the autumn of 1931 which left the Labour Party with only 52 seats. The Liberals were returned in 72 constituencies while the Conservatives won 473. Only 13 of the 558 National Government seats were 'National' Labour. These and the 72 Liberals joining the Government (puppet-led by Ramsay Macdonald) were accused by purists of deserting their liberal or socialist ideals.

The Labour opposition was led by George Lansbury who, as a sincere and devout churchman, did not hesitate to invoke Christian principles in his search for a solution to the problem of poverty. This led to the Tory riposte that "there is nothing in the Bible about a seven-and-a-half hour day." To the rising growth of left wing feeling, the Government replied in a way that failed to satisfy those who were worst hit - notably the unemployed who were soon to number three million. The problems arising from the international economic crisis touched every consumer in the country - some very cruelly. The middle and upper classes became troubled by the social unrest amongst the working-class unemployed, and many were finding it harder and harder to see the working-class reaction as altogether blameworthy. I was becoming aware that the world was subject to forces that hitherto had not been brought to my attention but which I could no longer ignore. I did in fact have one last try at doing so during the coming university long-vacation.

When the long summer came at the end of that first year I asked my father for thirty pounds to cover a return ticket to France plus a month's stay. He did not like the idea. It did not pay to argue so I produced my second project based on my current enthusiasm for Synge, Lady Gregory and Yeats. I proposed a walking tour in Connemara, crossing to the Aran Islands and returning by Dublin where I wanted to stay a few days to see something of the work of the Abbey Theatre. I had just discovered Sean O'Casey. I proposed to do this alone and my father approved. A week or so later I was on the heathland between Galway and Spiddle eating my supper at sunset alone and miles from the nearest roof.

I got all the Celtic twilight I could possibly have asked for. In the middle of the night I woke up to hear heavy breathing next to my ear on the other side of my light-weight tent. This was followed by a strange rasping noise at my feet; then, suddenly, the tent was pushed in on me. This put me into a panic and I was out in an instant. I was relieved to find myself facing a cow that had been using the tent as a salt lick. Next night I made it to the village of Costello where there was no inn. I treated myself to a room at the Blacksmith's. The women were wearing red frieze skirt; bare feet were not uncommon. This was truly the old Ireland for which I had been looking. There was a new baby in the house that the neighbours were all coming to see; they would stop and coo at it, but I noticed that some of them spat beside the cradle, others said a short phrase in Erse, one of them said in English "what an ugly little heathen". Later on the blacksmith's wife explained that you just had to give a pretty new baby like that a playful curse. I asked why and was told that the "little people" (the fairies) could be listening. Were the baby to be praised they might become jealous and might harm it out of spite. I knew then that I had really come to Ireland but my amazement was increased when I learnt that the wife had been born and brought up in New York. She showed me her American certificate as a trained Nursery Help. She had come back to her mother’s family when she became an orphan at the age of eighteen.

I crossed to the Island of Aran in a turf boat. Hidden amongst the turf there were a few bottles of potheen which I soon saw was an essential factor in Aran social life. They seemed to be living on lobsters. In the evenings they sat around, drank and talked; there was nothing else to do. I have never seen such cliffs, such waves and such a sense of vast space. I found my way to Dublin where I saw The Playboy of the Western World and The Plough and the Stars, but Dublin was too expensive for me as there was nowhere for me to camp. I arrived back in Cornwall ready for the comforts of home and with a preference for sleeping-bags in the shelter of a wood rather than tents in the middle of a heath.

As I came into uncushioned contact with a wider environment, I had to match what I had learnt at school and at home with the facts of real life. The second half of my time in Cambridge was marked first by the Hunger Marchers coming through the town and second by my very nearly dying of septicaemia. I am quite unable to say how it ever came about that the Student Christian Union, the University Socialist Society, and a number of other University groupings - including even the Buchmanites, all united to receive and give hospitality to those Hunger-Marchers on their way from the North to present a petition to Parliament. The Cambridge Town Council had allowed the Guildhall to be converted into a dormitory with an improvised kitchen for a hot meal and a first-aid post.

Helping the Marchers must have been the subject of general consensus as I do not remember any arguments about the involvement of the University community. This Hunger March reception must have been a "popular front" effort though I do not think the term had yet been coined. It was certainly not a sectarian activity of the extreme left and it was indeed a solid success. The Marchers were met on the main road a few miles outside Cambridge. The undergraduate group fell in with them - a Buchmanite Peer, Lord Phillimore, beating the Hunger Marchers own big drum. They had a brass band and, shades of 1914/18, they marched in fours to the tunes many of them had known in France. The column paraded over Magdalene Bridge and on through the Town to the Guildhall. That evening I washed and dressed blistered feet, applying Dr Scholls patches supplied free by a local chiropodist. Local Doctors gave free medical help to the many marchers who were in poor shape. A number were wearing their war-medals, which engendered a sense of remorse amongst those who remembered that the men who returned in 1918 had been promised "a land fit for heroes to live in." Though I did not then realise it, this was my baptism into socio-political activity.

I can still feel the friendly bustling atmosphere inside the Guildhall as we were all setting up the installations. In particular I remember the strapping fresh-faced girl from Newnham who was working at the soup cauldrons and getting vegetables and meat chopped up on a trestle table next to the space reserved for the First Aid Post. I said, rather enviously as she clearly had her job well in hand, that I wished that I knew my job as well as she did hers. I can see that flushed slightly freckled face, with reddish hair pulled back, a most attractive vigourous sight as she looked up to say laughingly, "Well, all I've done in the past is set up plenty of Sunday-school picnics." One does not have to be Cornish to know how much the Labour movement owes to John Wesley.

A banal visit to the dentist to have a tooth pulled gave me an infected jaw. I contracted Ludwig's Angina, a condition now rendered obsolete by antibiotics. In the University Nursing Home everything was done to get rid of the poison; live leeches were even applied to my vastly swollen neck. My tutor Mr. Dykes said that I owed my recovery to the fact that I was as tough as a horse and that his dosing me with champagne had made me realise that it was worthwhile holding on. There were rival explanations. My mother said I owed it to the superb professional care given me by the special Nurse, Kathleen O'Shanaghan, who had kept up the endless treatments with skillful patience. Father Gilbey, the University RC Chaplain and not yet a Monsignor, said I owed my recovery to the prayers of my mother and to his own timely intervention with the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. Kathleen O'Shanaghan, a vigourous thirty year old, stayed on the case after its acute phase, saw me through my convalescence and, when I was fit and well, very sweetly seduced me. I was sitting up in bed after supper on my last night in the Clinic when she came in to say good night. I was due to leave the next day, to drive with my mother to Cornwall. She started the usual routine of taking my pulse, our hands joined and our eyes staying fixed, we must have moved towards each other as we ended in each others arms. Her Nurse's cap fell off onto the floor, in a good-order-and-discipline reflex she broke away to pick it up, and to put it on again - a capless Nurse is unthinkable. I had not consciously perceived her as a woman before and started to stammer out that I was sorry but that I simply could not help it. Kathleen cut me short: "Neither could I - they would murder me if we were caught, but I'm not a bit sorry," she added with a wonderful smile. I said that I wished that I was not going on the next day. She replied "I'm glad you are, because the sooner you go the sooner you will be back. "Fourteen days later I returned to finish the Cambridge term. I had written from Cornwall asking Kathleen to dinner the next evening as I had my Mother's thank-offering (an antique bracelet) to give her. On my arrival back in Trinity, I had found a discrete note waiting for me in the Porter's Lodge saying, “Yes.” Twenty-four hours later, exactly on time, she knocked at the door of my rooms. I had never before seen her out of uniform, she was looking very pretty, appropriately enough in Donegal tweeds. We were back in each others arms instantly but we could not count on more than very relative privacy. The College regulations provided that the oak could not be "sported" with a female guest inside the room; in any case, she had to be through the Great Gate and out by 10 p.m. Soon the kitchen porter brought our dinner, but Kathleen was firm about refusing furtive love-making on the sofa. "We will have to find a way of being together properly – “You may call me a brazen hussy, but I want you for the whole night," was her parting shot as we walked to the Gate just before the statutory hour.

On my convalescence Father Gilbey led a pursuit of my soul that reduced me to a state of near paranoid suspicion. It all started with his invitations to drink sherry, the refusal of which would have been churlish. It continued with the dangling of career prospects and then veered into seemingly unconnected invitations to Country Houses where there were attractive young people of my own age. These weekends turned out to be contrived to land me into the family chapel for Sunday Mass followed by a wonderful Sunday lunch after which I would find myself cornered by some selected priest for a good talk. At Ampleforth Father Paul had done little to make me confident about the Church's care for my soul, so I consequently took maximum evasive action. Post-Gilbey, I decided to let my parents down lightly and always took them to mass when I was at home until my father's death in 1939 at the age of ninety three. Then my widowed mother reverted to the Presbyterianism of her youth and for good measure joined the Labour Party becoming a Parish Councilor. I have retained an affectionate respect for the Benedictine monastic tradition. Peace, thoughtfulness, work as an aspect of prayer, true scholarship, practical and humane community organization - everything is in the Rule of Saint Benedict. But the Roman Catholic Church, as a social institution in the 1930s, displayed a preponderant emphasis on intellectual obedience and had shown so little concern for the social problems of its flock that I had to find my own way. At the end of term, I had to go to London to be interviewed by the Dean of St. Bartholomews Hospital about my clinical studies. After much anxious discussion, Kathleen and I got the first of our nights together by the simple expedient of meeting in London at the Regent's Palace Hotel and booking in to two separate single rooms. Arriving together perfectly legally and openly, we were put on the same floor. Kathleen would not let us travel up from Cambridge on the same train in case someone from the University Clinic staff spotted us. This made our trip seem more dangerous than was in fact the case.

I was not at all sophisticated, so for me all this was a nervous business. I was afraid that somehow we might fail to meet at King's Cross. My relief was immense when, I saw those Donegal tweeds under the clock. I do not believe she herself was all that experienced. Certainly hotel intrigues of this sort troubled her though she helped me regain my equilibrium by saying that there could be nothing more ordinary than two family friends traveling together and arriving at an hotel to spend a night.

All I can now say is that the relief, the wonder of being alone without interruption or constraint, gave perfection and naturalness to our abandon. I had never been so close to a woman before. Kathleen said, "I don't believe that the Good Lord could see it as a sin, it would have been a sin not to, we both needed it so much, oh Kenneth boy, come here."

Of course she was an Irish Roman Catholic, but little she had in common with Father McGuiness, that enemy of “Konk-You-Pissance.” Her inspiration was more that of Sir John Harington's: "For that same sweet sin of lechery, I would say as the Friar said : "A young man and a maid in a green arbour on a May morning, if God do not forgive it, I would.’"

I had been introduced to James Elroy Flecker at school; no one has ever called him a difficult poet, but Kathleen brought me to understood him better:

We that were friends tonight have found
A fear a secret and a shame:
I am on fire with that soft sound
You make, in uttering my name.
Forgive a young and boastful man
Whom dreams delight and passions please
And love me as great women can
Who have no children at their knees.

I must have been ten years younger than she, and we had both been enjoying every minute of our time together, limited as it was by her refusal of hasty or furtive love-making. We had found occasional refuge in the flat of one of her nurse colleagues; otherwise she came to Trinity or we drifted into backwaters in a punt.

Not long afterwards it was Kathleen herself who put our relationship onto a more distant footing. One day, without previous warning, she got herself another job in the Midlands and told me that we must stay friends for ever (which indeed we did) but as lovers we must accept that, just as the present seemed perfect, the future inevitably could not be so. We simply had to face our futures separately. She stayed on in her profession, progressively gaining more responsible appointments. When I tried to contact her in 1945 after the war by ringing her hospital, I was told "Matron died last year." Kathleen O'Shanaghan's gifts, (amongst them I should include my survival) are things for which I am for ever grateful.

My new Tutor was Mr Kitson Clarke, with whom I got on very well because, on our respective levels, we shared the same tastes. He loved good food and good wine; sitting down to dinner in his magnificent lodgings over the Great Gate was an experience that made me quote the old scholastic definition of happiness as "the perfect possession of all good things at the same time without fear of loss". His rejoinder was, "Thank you, thank you, yes, it is true, it is true, I am a life Fellow." Trinity certainly was (and still is) flourishing in happy security, a totally self-sufficient Foundation. Kitson Clark's specialty was the history of the Victorian period which, after the delights of the table, was the second of our shared tastes.

My time-consuming illness, unless I chose to stay up an extra year, had spoiled my chances in the Tripos. I dropped my sights and took a Special Degree in psychology and sociology. With this less exacting academic burden, I had more time for my friends amongst whom was Joan Oppenheim. She had come up to Newnham the same year as I myself to Trinity, but we did not meet until we were both about half-way through our three years . We found that our families shared an Indian background which undoubtedly helped us to become each other’s steady date. There was a reciprocal tenderness in our relationship that, in all logic, should well have impelled us to become lovers, particularly as Kathleen had by now left Cambridge, but as things turned out, we did not. Joan and I enjoyed the same things, for example whoever first saw the advertisement for a concert automatically bought two tickets. We went together to parties, and we also spent a lot of time alone. I had moved to Great Court, Joan often came there between lectures and we would do our separate work, breaking off to share a picnic lunch or a set meal sent up from the College kitchens. Joan did not share Kathleen's rejection of the hurluberlu de la chaise longue. We certainly shared the sofa; technically speaking she was a virgin and, technically speaking, she maintained that status. By 1932, Joan's father had become a Judge in the Indian High Court; he may have entered the Indian service the year my own father left it. Her father's English home was in Norfolk, and one week end we went down there in a borrowed car. I got on very well with her mother, and we drove back most happily just managing to get Joan into Newnham before lock-up.

A few weeks later, her father came back on leave from India and, we all had lunch at the Blue Boar. At the time I did not appreciate that this family lunch had also been the occasion of an appraisal in which I must have gained a pass mark as Joan later told me that her father would be very happy were I to spend a week with them in Norfolk at the end of Term. On the last night of this Norfolk visit, Mr. Oppenheim produced a precious cognac and the two of us sat on in the dining-room cosily smoking cigars. He told me that his family had come over from Hanover in the time of George the Third, and that later they had helped finance the British reply to Napoleon. "We were of course Jewish," he said "but we rapidly became anglicised and my Grandfather married outside the faith." He went on to say that his father had been brought up as an Anglican so he himself had been sent to Hailbury rather than to Clifton. He had now decided to carry the process a final step further and to change the family name from Oppenheim to Osborne. This change was based on his wish to spare his children certain inconveniences that had cropped up in his own earlier career. He felt that, in the nature of things, it was more important for his son to avoid pointless and preventable anti-Semitism. He had less concern for Joan as "anyway most girls do change their names". I was enchanted by this mature man discussing such very personal matters with me. We went on to have a fascinating talk about India, about the presence of palaeo-christians converted by St Thomas. We went on about the movement for Dominion Status, about my father being right to have kept me away from India; such times as his would never come again. Then we turned to the problems of Europe - little likelihood that Hitler would infect England and so on, all over a wide, urbane, old-fashioned, friendly, liberal range of topics on which we seemed to share the same sympathies. We separated to go to bed without my realising that I had completely missed the point. It was only some time later that I recognised my failure to reciprocate his confidence. I should have sought his approval for my courtship of his daughter. Was this paternal attitude perhaps a hangover from his families Hanoverian past? At the least I should have revealed my interest when that question of girls changing their name on marriage had come up. I would then have become a candidate member of their cosy and cultivated clan.

When Joan and I met next term, I was to find that there was an at first insensible decline in our easy amourous friendship. It only began to register when I asked her to do the First and Third Trinity May Week Ball with me, and I was told that she had already accepted to join someone else’s party. This was the rupture of a partnership that had been the stronger for it being unspoken. Joan had been a wonderful person with whom to go around; she was far more adept socially than most of her contemporaries. Had the conversation with Papa in Norfolk taken a different turn, not only would I have ended up with a charming fiancée, but I would also have found myself on the assembly line for completion as a standard liberal prop of the established order. With Joan I would have been launched for navigating safely with the current. The suspension of my relationship with Joan had certainly been none of my own seeking. That my failure to ask Papa for the hand of his daughter may have had something to do with it was not a notion that would have occurred to me before I came to analyse the reasons for the collapse of our special relationship . Here were virtually eighteenth century attitudes that I had only known through Dickens, but, even then, surely it was the daughter who rushed off to see whether Papa would bless the young people's projects? Maybe she had done so and maybe Papa had felt that she could do better.

My conventional May-Week plans had to be abandoned so I decided to put my money into a bicycling trip through Germany - to ride from Hamburg to Salzburg. I started to look around for a German-speaking companion. I had not far to go. Meeting the man I will call Matthew was due to the administrative accident of his sharing a very large double set of rooms in Great Court with my friend Richard Bennet. Matthew was the son of a distinguished British lawyer. His background was impeccably correct in the sense that he belonged to that section of society in which patriotism, honesty and discretion were regarded as inherent. His Public School and University career admirably fitted him for an honourable and rewarding role in the upper reaches of the governing class. He was bilingual. German and English, thanks to an intense affair he had had with the wife of his Heidelberg professor. He did well enough later on, though somehow he did not quite manage a knighthood. There remain good reasons for not mentioning his real name. I also have a number of disobliging things to say about him but nothing detracts from the value of his eventual brilliant war-service which fully challenged his linguistic abilities.

It is a tribute to the civilized tolerance of the early 1930s that the proto-fascist Matthew and the idiosyncratic left-liberal Richard were able to share a set of rooms peacefully. The calm and friendly magnificence of their corner of the Great Court, the whole feel of the place, certainly made for harmony. I owe a great debt to Richard Bennet. He was a classical scholar, with that mastery of the choice of words which the loving usage of Latin and Greek so favours. He went on to help make the Hulton Press a unique success in those far-off days of Lilliput and Picture Post. To Matthew, I owe a modest knowledge of German and an early distaste for fascism. I barely knew him when we went off on that summer trip. For me the decisive factor was that he was a brilliant German scholar and that he was ready to travel on a modest budget.

Matthew and I left Hay's wharf in the SS Kooperatzia. The cheapest way of getting to Hamburg was in a Soviet ship. All was austere on board, with clean white-scrubbed mess-tables and plenty of bread, butter and caviar. It was a short thirty-six hour passage but long enough for me to meet Truda Raabe, the daughter of a classic Hanseatic family - liberal, upright, independent with whom I was to fall in love. She had been learning English, and we liked each other from the instant of our first meeting at sunrise over the North Sea.

What was it that hit me? To do the rounds of the empty decks at first light around five in the morning and to find in the only spot sheltered from the early morning breeze a flaxen-haired blue-eyed girl made a moment of mutual surprise which melted as we smiled at each other. I said something about not wanting to disturb her, that we must be the only passengers who had wanted to see the sun come up over the ocean horizon. She was completely natural within an initial reserve, in halting but accurate English she said that we must have been meant to meet or else it would not have happened. We exchanged names and started to explain ourselves and our travels. Half an hour later we embraced. It was in no way a first move towards an instant seduction but there was a very real and instant assurance of mutual understanding. We each felt the same need to extend the frontiers of an emotional contact that astonished us both; it was the discovery of a Platonic pair.

I would hesitate to say that it was a case of love-at-first-sight because there was a clear headedness in Truda that matched something in my own make-up. I had never before experienced such an immediate equality in the company of a girl of my own age. The girls I had known had always been trying to be a step ahead of me; they needed to maintain the initiative the better to control the situation. Girls had previously been either overwhelmingly sexual in their impact or had put me onto a competitive footing by inserting some element of insecurity into my share of the relationship. The two of us having met by chance - or as Truda seemed to think because our separate paths were such that they simply had to cross - we were neither of us prepared to wait for another happy accident to bring about our next meeting. Coming up the Elbe, Truda pointed out her home in Blankenese on the Northern bank and gave me her address for sending news of my trip. She lived in Wedigenstrasse, I asked who Wedigen was; she blushed and said that he had been an heroic U boat Commander in the Great War. She added "Why must we have wars? It is so stupid. Surely our generation must quite simply say no." Everybody in her neighbourhood was very much out of sympathy with the Nazis.

On landing in Hamburg we had agreed to go our separate ways in order to give her the time to create the right atmosphere for me to be introduced to her family on my way back to England. We agreed to meet under the clock in the Hamburg main station on my return from Salzburg. I promised to send her the exact date and time. Matthew and I walked out of the Port with our packs on our backs to buy our bicycles in Hamburg. According to my travel notes they only cost about three pounds each. We got onto the road and headed south. With his perfect German, Matthew was very much in charge. A few hours later we were desperately pumping along a bad road (a short cut) over the Luneborge Heide. Matthew, who had taken the map, had chosen it for the scenery, not the surface. Soon we got the first of a series of punctures. When we ran out of patches we exchanged our German tyres for Dunlops on the advice of the deaf and dumb owner-mechanic of the bicycle shop in Soltau, a village with an oddly sinister atmosphere, a potential stage-set for a gothic horror play. That night, some kilometres on in an immaculately clean country inn, I went up the stairs on my hands and knees. I was so stiff that I could hardly stand. We soon toughened up, and I learnt, meanwhile, that the difficulties of the trip were going to be more psychological than physical. It had always been clear to me that Matthew knew the country and language extremely well but I had not realised that he was such a chameleon. All this was in 1934, the year of Hindenberg's death when Hitler finally gained total control of the Reich.

My own background did not differ greatly from that of Matthew except that for several generations my family had exercised direct command, either at sea or ashore in India. This had meant an entirely different linking with those with whom they served than must have been the case with Matthew's forbearers in the Home Government. If you make a mistake in writing a minute you do not in consequence get yourself killed along with the person to whom it is addressed, which is exactly what happens through a mistaken order in naval or military situations.

I learnt from my father a closer, a quicker, empathy in human contacts than Matthew's own social education seemed to have given him. The successful exercise of command creates a bond between those who give and those who execute orders. Esteem, affection and trust cement this bond. Matthew clearly worked best solo. I had to master my reactions to his bossiness but the trip, touristically speaking, was always tolerable; at its best moments it was a delight.

The two of us managed well enough until we got close to the newer Germany. I can still feel the surprise that shook me, in Bach's own town of Luneburg, when Matthew gave the Nazi salute on turning to leave the improvised shrine containing a bust of the recently deceased Hindenburg. It had been set up in the main square to give a secular focus to the mourning ceremonies for the Field Marshal President - the last of the Junkers. Matthew dismissed my questioning of his gesture. For him, so he said, it was a simple act of politeness like taking off one's hat when going into a church. My reply did not please him: for me the hat gesture was one of neutral respect but his salute was a gratuitous act that indicated an endorsement of the Nazi Code. Hindenburg would have taken off his hat but would never have made a Hitlerian salute. I was told to postpone my judgments until I had gained at least a modest understanding of what was going on around me. That evening, our third in Germany, Matthew said that this was the last occasion on which he himself would order our evening meal. I should at least master the language of the speisekarte so next evening I must speak for myself or go hungry. He was entirely correct, the only way to learn a language is to use it. The basic menu vocabulary has about two hundred words, so even with thirty or forty, no one need starve. Mathew's next move was more drastic: he produced a little school text of Goethe's verses, bought in the village shop. "You must learn ten lines every evening over our beer, and I will help you pronounce and understand them. At breakfast next day we will check that you have got them right." Though I soon got the number of daily lines reduced to five. I am truly grateful that by forcing me through these steps he brought me to gain a modest competence in the German language. I had not appreciated the fantastically rich cultural heritage of that country because, as an immediate post-1914/18 schoolboy, I had been educated in an atmosphere that excluded Germany.

Matthew, who throughout our trip felt happy with the Third Reich, failed to get me to share his sympathy for the NSDAP. He liked the work-parties building the autobahn. The "discipline" that he felt was so lacking in England was for him pleasingly evident in Germany. It would be wrong to view Matthew as a solitary eccentric. In 1934 the movement in Britain in favour of the "New Germany" attracted more people than it is now comfortable to remember. Matthew and I were beginning to ride steadily over some 100 kilometres per day. We had stopped for a breather on some heath-land when Matthew looked up from the map and said, "Lets do the next ten kilometres without a halt. If we are stopped just leave me to do the talking." He got on his bike saying, "Why are we hanging around here?" After ten kilometre’s ride through the empty heath the countryside became more inviting; Matthew slowed down, smiling and relaxed. I was a bit huffed at this peremptory marshalling and asked what it was all about. Matthew explained that at our last halt he had noticed from the map that we were near Dachau. As the name meant nothing to me, I asked "So what, are we planning to go there? Matthew, with a certain patience, then explained that the NSDAP was directing a drive against wasters, idlers and social undesirables, Jewish profiteers and rif-raf. They were brought to Camps like the one in Dachau and re-educated through work: Arbeit macht Frei. For Mathew this was a German domestic matter of no concern to foreigners like ourselves. The words concentration camp had no sinister meaning in the current English of those earlier 1930s. We were born, after all, in a relatively innocent epoch. Matthew, sensing my lack of sympathy, had a word of explanation, "I know you are given to asking questions and I did not want you to risk putting your foot in it once again." This was a reference to a pick-up we had made a few days before

We had been sitting on a café terrace in one of those little Hartz Mountain towns when an officer in SA uniform, greeted us in English and very civilly asked us to join him in another coffee. He turned out to have been an English teacher. He was about the same age as my half-brother, and he too had been through the 1914/18 war. This café acquaintance was my first direct contact with an active member of the Nazi movement . He had good manners, initially showed considerable charm and could have been classed as an intellectual. But he turned to the Nordic unity theme: the Germans and the British were brothers in blood and should be brothers in action. We shared an inherent superiority which gave us both the capacity, and the social duty, to dominate. He expressed relief that the former German colonies were in our good care, and praised the British Empire saying that, were we to march together, the whole world would be at our feet. He was going on about the British Empire as a demonstration of Nordic superiority when I managed to get a word in. My father had often said that it was a misnomer to call the Empire British. It had been brought into being by the Scots, with occasional help from the Irish. In my father's view, so far as the actual work of Empire building was concerned, the English had played but the relatively small part of accepting the tenancy. I played my father's ideas back onto the Sturmbannführer (who had been getting more and more under my skin) asking him first what he thought of the Celts. He said that they had been put in their place by the Anglo-Saxons and that there was no reason to believe that their blood-line, now much diluted, was seriously contaminating. My part in these exchanges cooled the atmosphere, and we had said goodbye without making any arrangements for meeting that evening which had originally been the plan in Mathew's mind.

Touristically our journey was a success but socially it led to a parting of our ways - Matthew and I saw very little of each other after we got back to England. A certain latent anti-Semitism had been brought out in him, like a photographic plate in a developing bath, by the simple fact of his once again in Germany. As we traveled south we saw signs outside small Bavarian resorts announcing such things as Bad Adlerheim being "Judenrein". Then we came upon public gardens with notices forbidding the entrance to dogs and Jews. These petty gestures of Nazi Village Councils Matthew admittedly found tasteless, though when I asked whether he would like to see a notice like that in Grantchester, he thought I was being obtuse.

We eventually got back to Hamburg. Matthew went off to see friends in Lübeck and I went to the rendezvous at 1600 hours on the 18th of August 1934 under the clock at the Hauptbahnhof as confirmed to Truda in my postcards. No Truda. After some anxious minutes a young man, a couple of years older than myself, came up and addressed me by name. It was Rolfe, Truda's brother whom of course I had never met before. He told me that Truda was in the Eppendorfer hospital with appendicitis. It was a terrible disappointment. We went round to the hospital; Truda was recovering from a routine appendicectomy. I'm not sure to what we had been looking forward, but whatever it was, we both very much wanted to travel the same road. Truda was charmingly direct; she lacked Joan's social finesse but had a larger, firmer dimension in her thinking. I went back to the hospital every day, and she got better quickly being discharged about a week later.

When Truda came out of the hospital, I got to know something of the old liberal North German atmosphere. I was forced to improve my still very elementary German and in so doing so I learnt that Truda and her father despised the "new Germany" though her brother, who had not been a success at the University, was showing a leaning towards it. For Truda and her friends, the centre of intellectual life in Blankenese was the Richard Dehmel Haus, the old home of that poet. His widow had turned it into a Youth Club for discussions, concerts and poetry readings. Dehmel, or Frau Dehmel, may have had Jewish blood; in any case the relaxed atmosphere of the Dehmelhaus was seen, in terms of the local Nazi kulturschlacht, as something to be put down.

At first I could not identify the all pervasive element in the Dehmelhaus activities; it was something that made a happy unity within the very real diversity of its young membership. During a reading of Goethe, I realised that the single element that bound them all together was a love of peace; this was not so much political as deeply emotional. It was an appreciation of peace as an essential component of love and social happiness. I believe this concept is profoundly inserted into the German cultural inheritance, and it was no surprise that Hitler wanted to eradicate it. The upshot of Truda's faithful participation in these old-fashioned cultural activities was that her father, who was Professor of Botany, received an official warning that, should his daughter continued to frequent the Dehmelhaus, he himself would have trouble in the University.

Matthew got back from his side trip and his judgment of the Dehmelhaus was that it brought together a group of rather scruffy people for whom finding something better to do was indeed a good idea. He continued to resonate in sympathy with Germany's new regime, echoing his earlier reactions when a group of obviously well-to-do young people, staying at the same hotel as ourselves, monopolised the terrace, noisily lounging around over two or three cafe tables. I thought they behaved, mutatis mutandis, very like the well-indulged self-confident members of the Pitt Club in Cambridge. Matthew found that they must be Jews, as no true German could have been so pushy. Not liking my Hamburg friends, Mathew went back to London in a huff while I stayed on as long as I could.

Eventually I went back to Plymouth in the SS Bremen, the pride of the German Trans-Atlantic Fleet. It was a total contrast to our outward journey in the Soviet freighter. As I was sailing from Bremerhaven, I had to say goodbye to Truda and her family in Hamburg when I took the train to Bremerhaven. I was therefore alone and free to concentrate on the stately ritual departure of a great ship from it home port. When we cast-off from the quay the ships band played "Muss i'denn, muss i'denn zum Staedtele hinaus”. As the paper streamers linking the departing passengers on deck with their relatives on the quayside finally snapped, men and women alike had tears streaming down their faces. A number of those leaving for the States were Jews. Very few of those left behind will have lived to enjoy the later reunion promised with ironic poignancy by that song.

There was plenty to think about on going home, and even more to consider on my return to Cambridge. I had, in fact, chosen on which side I was to be. Without really knowing it, I had chosen the left-hand side of the road nor did I have any idea where this decision might lead me, I was barely aware that I had taken it. I started to show more political curiosity; I wanted to understand how Germany had got into its present state. I had learnt from my little contact with the hunger marchers that, unless something was done about unemployment, our own country could not maintain that serenity which I had always considered to be its normal state.

With certain regret, I resigned from the University Officers Training Corps, but the psychological atmosphere inherent in the social side of the OTC had become too “Matthew-like.” What I learnt as an Officer Cadet in the Royal Horse Artillery was to serve me very well in the future, indeed it most probably favoured my own personal survival (and that of those for whom I was responsible) both in Spain and later on in the Balkans. I was never in any sense a pacifist. The militarism of Germany had not yet been directed against the British but, only four years later, at the time of the Munich Agreement I was entirely prepared to face Germany with armed force.

In the autumn of 1934, I went to a meeting chaired by a Trinity College contemporary called Guy Burgess. I was mildly surprised to see him accompanied on the platform by the extremely good-looking Lord Duncannon, heir to the Earldom of Bessborough. Guy, as usual, was looking pretty scruffy, but his companion was superbly turned out. I can still remember the large silver buckle on his cowboy belt. The meeting was concerned with the effects of chemical warfare. Professor Bernal, then a rising guru of the left, later to be one of Churchill's scientific advisers, gave a dramatic presentation. There was no nonsense about his approach.

Bernal had a sealed glass laboratory flask half full of a brownish liquid in his hands as he spoke, "Were I to throw this flask into the body of the hall the results would be lethal for many of you and lastingly unpleasant for the remainder (first slide please)." The screen then showed the seating plan of the lecture-room with a central circle delimitating the zone of lethal effect. "That, comrades and friends, is what half a litre of mustard-gas can do." We then had a look at what a bomb would have done had it been dropped on the area where we were sitting. Today it may sound trite but it went over well in the 1930s. I knew Nigel, Guy's brother, much better. He had a nice, easy manner with the piano and really had a tunesmith's talent. He thought I had a good ear and he used to get me to listen to his work in order to spot unconscious plagiarisms. This sort of thing did not interest Guy, who was then known in the College more for his sexual voracity than for his politics.

My first meeting with James Klugman had been when he and Haden Guest had been doing a recruiting drive the year before. Klugman had tripped up coming into my room and twisting his ankle. He had had to sit down, and I noticed that he was wearing heavy leather shoes while his companion, Haden Guest, was wearing rubber-soled gym-shoes.

They started to tell me that anyone who had helped with the Hunger-Marchers should obviously be a member of the Socialist Society to which the growing political awareness of those times had given more weight. As I was a chronic non-joiner, we failed to find common ground. The footwear is relevant because, in a rather touching way, it served as a paradigm. Haden Guest had tried to smooth over the minor contretemps of their clumsy entrance by remarking, "The bother with James is that he will wear those great heavy things, it's much better like this," showing his own gym shoes. I had asked why he preferred them, as they had no heels they could not have been comfortable for walking. "That's the whole point," said Haden Guest, "I don't want to walk, I run. I reckon I win one hour per day for something useful by running. I run everywhere; I cover twice the ground in half the time. While old James is plodding along, I can be reading." It was almost Aesopian - Haden Guest's race was to be but brief. He was killed in Spain. James Klugman had not been a volunteer for service in the Civil War; he became prominent in the Communist Youth Movement.

After 1939 he was conscripted and, surprisingly, was eventually transferred into SOE Jugoslavia. He plodded on within the PCGB leadership surviving the tergiversations of fifty years until his death in 1977. Our paths were to cross when he was with SOE and UNRRA. My second meeting with James Klugman must have been after my return from Germany. He was accompanied by John Cornford. As contemporaries we all knew each other by sight, and Klugman remembered his previous recruiting visit. They said, very reasonably, that it was only by working together that people sharing the same goals could hope to achieve them, so I really could not do other than join the University Socialist Society. I had already told James the year before that I was not a joiner. His manner had a hint of recognition that at last virtue was starting to prevail, that I was beginning to see the light. This was too reminiscent of Father Gilbey, and it triggered my renewed refusal.

John Cornford then took over asking what I saw as the most important thing for the next decade. To me avoiding the 'New German' road was the first priority along with beating unemployment. I was ready to share activities bearing on these ends, but I was not ready to spend time in debate or in 'study group' activities. Though I was not a pacifist, I also believed that war and militarism were neither a cure for unemployment nor a substitute for using the League of Nations. I therefore agreed to be in the group that, on Armistice Day, would lay a wreath of white peace poppies on the Cambridge War Memorial. On November the eleventh 1934 I joined the peace procession to the War Memorial. There was a fracas near Peterhouse where a large group of undergraduates did not approve of the banner "Workers by Hand and Brain Unite against War". There is a good photo of this in Stanski and Abrahams "Journey to the Frontier" (1966, Constable) showing the faces of a future UK High Court judge and two Colonial Governors. Unfortunately, one face is lacking. It is that of a young man who did not share my views but for whom I retain an affectionate respect. His reactions, just as he was facing up to strike out at me, were a part of a now-vanished code. He had pushed me round and was gathering up his punch when he suddenly dropped his guard and said, "No, I can't, it's Loutit; after all we have rowed in the same boat." We exchanged a brief uneasy smile and, sadly, our paths have never crossed again. This is an example of that 'Old Boy' system so disliked by Peter Wright, but should Beale, the stroke of that boat we shared with seven others, ever read these words he will know that his forbearance has never been forgotten. It had in it something noble and eminently civilised. I was mildly disappointed in the lack of interest in me shown by my old beach playmate, Donald Maclean. I recognised that he was living on a plane to which I did not aspire and that, reciprocally, he did not consider me to be worth much notice. We did have the chance of meeting later, when he certainly made up for this earlier neglect. In fact it was from him, in Moscow sometime in the 1960s, that I learnt of the Stanski and Adams book. He gave me his copy - after cutting out the fly-leaf that must have borne a private inscription. I did not know John Cornford well, as this was impossible without following him into his Party life. I believe that his version of that life was pretty idiosyncratic. Had he not died in Spain, he would certainly have got into trouble with the Party orthodox. As things were, I saw enough of him to respect and to like him. John had a middle initial to his name - 'R'. It stood for Rupert - his mother was of the Rupert Brooke generation and had been one of the "neo-pagans" who had animated Cambridge life in the decade before the 1914 war. They had in fact done much more than live their own lives in their own way. They provided a franchise for us who were to come after; they showed that young people could be both independent and responsible.

The quicksilver rapidity of John's emotional and intellectual appreciation did not come from his Marxist companions, from Klugman's faith. It came from his mother's generation, from that generation of uncles peopling the 1914 war cemeteries, those who did not live to tell us their tales personally. Not for nothing had John been nurtured with Darwins, Raverats and Keyneses. It was no accident that he, like many of his contemporaries, had been at that Malting House School created by Susan Isaacs and Geoffrey Pyke, whose pioneering genius (from which I was later allowed to benefit myself) has been so insufficiently appreciated. Afterwards John went to Dartington; his life and way reflected more that of his Rupert namesake's than that of any CP stereotype. He was more true to the Rupert heritage than the left has ever conceded. The approval of the political left shown by the older Cambridge intelligentsia, was due to their seeing it as a continuation of the intense liberal generosity of their own youth. They saw exactly this in young people like John Cornford; but from their Cambridge Elysium, that older generation was sensitively fearful of the emergence of both the aparatchik and Stalinism. It all seemed to them as but shadows fleeting over the back of their safe cave.

I have little to add to the speculations about the recruitment of the Cambridge moles, but I do have one freakish memory concerning Kim Philby. It is interesting as much for its manner as for its substance. A young American called Michael Straight had invited me to a sherry party. He was very much better off than most of my friends, but we had noticed each other around the place and I assumed that he was another unattached left-leaner like myself. As it happens I was wrong. It was he who, years later, fingered Anthony Blunt, and his book shows that he was much more attached than I had then thought, indeed he had been recruited. Re-reading Straight recently, I was reminded of an emotionally charged exchange at that 1933 sherry party concerning the "treachery" of Kim Philby who, as it then seemed to his left-tending Cambridge friends, had just turned fascist. A girl at Straight's party, whom I had never seen before and whose looks I very much fancied, would not leave the subject of Philby alone. This was too bad so far as I was concerned because I had been hoping to qualify for her attention. Someone was insisting that Philby had "sold out", that all he wanted was to get on and up , devoured as he was by ambition. The girl, in one of those sudden silences that occur in crowded rooms, said quietly with great and telling emphasis, "You are all wrong, Kim could never sell out. I know it's not true but I can't say more. Just remember Kim is all right and you will all know this for yourselves one day." The girl got up quietly and left the room. Someone made the obvious comment that it was clear enough how Kim Philby had come to leave such a very firm imprint: "parties like this are not really her line because there is only one line for her and that's the Party line."

In my last year I worked hard and kept up a close correspondence with Truda. With her encouragement, I revised my anatomy at Easter-time instead of going to Hamburg. As I was going on to St Bartholomew's Hospital after getting my Cambridge BA, I did this revision in London staying at the Junior Constitutional Club, opposite the Green Park, while looking for rooms which I eventually found in Ebury Street. In those days most London Clubs gave attractive entry rights to young men leaving Oxford and Cambridge. So, with an umbrella on my arm and a bowler hat on my head, often enough with a flower in my button hole bought from one of the flower girls (in fact they were substantial cockney matrons) stationed near the Ritz or at Piccadilly Circus, I would get down to Barts by ten. I lunched in the canteen and stayed on until about five o'clock. My revision went well enough but what was really important for the next decade was the friendship that sprung up between myself and Lionel Grunbaum. He was a late starter in medicine so we were at the same level in our studies.

Lionel had come up to Jesus College three years earlier than my own arrival at Trinity. He had meant to make his career in music but he had became convinced that he would never reach the standard of perfection needed in a concert pianist. He had not enjoyed being the Daily Telegraph's music critic so he settled for medicine instead. Lionel had been a contemporary of Alistair Cooke's at Jesus College, and with the help of these two I soon had a number of windows opened onto a wider world than that seen from Barts, from Trinity or from the Junior Constitutional Club. The Grunbaum family had been transplanted from Lemberg to London at the beginning of the century bringing with them an amalgam of Hapsburg and Polish culture set in an orthodox Jewish mould from which Lionel had broken free. The critical faculties of these two first class minds, the urbane breadth of vision that has always characterised Alistair Cooke, together with Lionel's lightening insight and sensitivity, were exactly the stimuli needed to wake me up.

In Cornwall, apart from my own generation, I had only been meeting frankly elderly people. Those who had fallen in 1914-18 and who would have been in their forties while I was becoming a young adult were largely missing; this had left a gap in the whole structure of the society of the 1930s. There is a process of friendly transmission, a fraternal or avuncular learning process that ensures the continuity of a culture. For those of my age such mature leadership was in short supply. In Cambridge there were survivors of that generation of uncles but when I went on to London, I began to appreciate what I had been missing.

Looking back I believe that it was in the Café Royal that I first came to measure the intellectual loss of the war because it was there that I met some of the survivoirs. When Lionel Grunbaum first took me there it was reasonably full. As we were about to sit down a heavily built man a few tables away greeted Lionel. After a splendidly vigorous conversation in which Lionel was congratulated for having had the good sense to abandon the piano, I discovered that we were talking to Mark Hambourg, who was just coming up to his prime as a concert pianist. Later we met James Agate and Desmond McCarthy of whom I was to see more later on at Ham Spray. These two were then persons of immense authority. Agate was overpowering in that he punished, with deliciously concise severity, most statements other than his own. He was the dramatic critic of the Sunday Times and knew everybody. Desmond McCarthy was perceptive and kinder to younger persons, who like us, were nearer to the "New Statesman" than to the Sunday Times.

The man whose friendly fastidiousness was completely captivating was Lord Berners. Lionel, as an educated musician, had a special link with him; I therefore was able to feed on the crumbs that fell from such rich tables. That Easter revision certainly helped me to grow up. Back I went to Trinity for my last term. In May of 1935 Truda came over and joined my mother. They both watched me kneel before the Vice-Chancellor and receive my not very good degree. Just as many others before and since, I was convinced that I had written some strikingly good papers; not all the examiners took the same view. The invitation of Truda to this degree ceremony was recognition by my mother of her having a special status. I certainly felt this to be the case, so I was correspondingly put out when my mother was categorical in her refusal to have Truda come down to Wareham for that part of the summer that I was not going to spend in Hamburg. I suppose my mother was afraid that Truda would stay on forever in a premature marriage or distract me from my career. She may have been right, but for the wrong reasons. All human beings have multiple possibilities; we could all of us perfectly well lead a dozen alternative lives. At the time I was not a bit satisfied with my mother's attitude. I had to accept it out of family discipline. I was entirely dependant on my parents. I had already understood that there would be decisions that only I could make, and that they would indeed alter my life. I resented them being made for me, imposed by parental force majeure.

Since Truda was not staying in England, I went back with her for an all too short month to Germany. Her family, with its weekly string quartet playing Beethoven to good amateur standards, was a haven, but it was a culture in turned upon itself; it was more than a bit airless. The isolation of this group was sadly understandable as the full force of Nazi social policy was becoming nauseatingly pervasive. One day her father came down to a leaden breakfast wearing in his buttonhole the swastika of the Nazi Professors Organisation. He could no longer avoid joining, since his pension (and his wife's pension should he pre-decease her) would have been forfeit had he persisted in his liberal refusal. For any but the very courageous, it was already too late to resist. The reaction of this good and quiet household was not political - it was motivated by fear. The price of opposition was too often expressed in very brutal terms. As a means of forgetting the hostility of the Nazi world, Truda's family indulged in that specifically German weakness for the transcendental. Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy became their refuge, and the older members of the family avoided real trouble for the household by giving just sufficient passive consent to the Third Reich. The only place, so Truda told me, where one could still feel sane was on the Island of Sylt. This is a glorified sand-bank with a special ecology and few enough inhabitants for the Nazis to have left it alone. I believe it is quite wrong to view the German spirit as being from its nature conformist or leader-oriented. There is certainly a respect for order, cleanliness and the civic virtues, but, all this being granted, there is a great spirit of philosophical exploration in the German national culture. This has led to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bach, as well as Marc and Klee. The Nazis were imposing by force a unity that was utterly foreign both to the good Protestant conscience (and that of Catholics too for that matter) as well as to that vast liberal wave nurtured by the Germany of 1920s. To make everyone act in a clone like unity, to gleichgeschalten, was what the local Nazi party wanted, and they extended this even to the way a girl should dress, to the books she should admire and to the company she kept. For the Raabe family , with the exception of their mediocre failure son Rolfe, this was suffocating, as it was for all their quiet liberal friends in Blankenese.

With uncharacteristic brutality, thinking of her brother, Truda had once said that the Nazi SA (storm-troopers) liked failures - "Their silly uniforms make them feel that they are a success." This turned out to be only too true in Rolfe's case; he did indeed end by joining the SA. Ten years later, at the war's end, I was to get a letter from him in classic terms stating that he had held but a minor position in the Admiralty and consequently he had no guilt for any of the bad things that seemed to have happened behind his back. Rolfe insisted that he had fought a clean war. He had always felt a profound feeling of friendship for England in general and for me in particular. Could I please find him a job in the British Zone? When I went to see Truda in 1947, she told me that Rolfe had been insufferable during the war. He had saved all his possessions from bomb damage by a timely evacuation (using Navy transport) to a Holstein village. His membership of the Nazi movement may have been largely conditioned by self-interest, but he had done little or nothing to help those less well placed than himself. She had not been sorry for him when his removal van was emptied while it traveled after the Armistice by slow train through the Soviet zone to Berlin where he had managed to get himself a job with the Americans.

I had not become an anti-fascist in the 1930s by reading books. I had seen what Fascism was doing to people I liked. It invaded every part of their lives. Neither their work, nor their leisure nor even their home life, had remained untouched. The University vacation lasted a bit more than three months. It was dawning on me in 1935 that an immensely privileged period of my life was ending. My father was getting much older; much of the money we used would die with him on the final settlement of his Trust. I had to buckle down and get qualified quickly. I left Hamburg to start life in London with my German much improved and an informed detestation of fascism. Truda was going to come to London as soon as possible. In the event her return to England was long delayed; we wrote a great deal but it was not until six months later that she was able to get away. Even then she was unable to stay with me as she was accompanied by family friends. An element of imbalance, felt by us both, had crept into our relationship. We had met when she was seventeen which, in 1934, would have been an early age to start a serious love affair. She was a tall, blond, physically active North German. She was very well-read; she looked outward to life with an active hunger for experience of every sort that, when we shared things together, made life a cascade of discoveries. The bother was that the two of us had had so little time for that sharing.

For at least the past year Truda had been refusing invitations to go out alone; she was still a virgin and that was how she wanted it to be until we could get together. But we were seeing each other only at absurdly long intervals. She knew that I was not isolating myself and that I was leading a normal student life. There was no sort of inquisition about girl friends; she knew well that my life was fuller than hers.

When she eventually made that promised visit to London, Truda had dutifully admired the eighteenth century paneling in Bedford Row, which I had restored to its pristine cream and green colours, but she also knew that my lodgings were too uncomfortable for two people to live in. So during that brief chaperoned visit we agreed that she would have to come to England as soon as possible and that next time she would make arrangements for staying. She had decided to push her English language degree on to Doctorate level and to do this in London. I very joyfully undertook to find a place we could share while we both completed our studies.

 

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