Jean Barker. Wife of minor Party official. Aged thirty-four. Small, dark, plump. Rather plain. Husband patronizes her. She wears permanently, a look of strained, enquiring good-nature. Comes around collecting Party dues. A born talker, never stops talking, but the most interesting kind of talker there is, she never knows what she is going to say until it is out of her mouth, so that she is continually blushing, catching herself up short, explaining just what it is she has meant, or laughing nervously. Or she stops with a puzzled frown in the middle of a sentence, as if to say: ‘Surely I don’t think that?’ So while she talks she has the appearance of someone listening. She has started a novel, says she hasn’t got time to finish it. I have not yet met one Party member, anywhere, who has not written, half-written, or is not planning to write a novel, short stories, or a play. I find this an extraordinary fact, though I don’t understand it. Because of her verbal incontinence, which shocks people, or makes them laugh, she is developing the personality of a clown, or a licensed humorist. She has no sense of humour at all. But when she hears some remark she makes that surprises her, she knows from experience that people will laugh, or be upset, so she laughs herself, in a puzzled nervous way, then hurries on. She has three children. She and her husband very ambitious for them, goad them through school, to get scholarships. Children carefully educated in the Party ‘line’, conditions in Russia, etc. They have the defensive closed-in look with strangers of people knowing themselves to be in a minority. With communists, they tend to show off their Party know-how, while their parents look on, proud.

Jean works as a manager of a canteen. Long hours. Keeps her flat and her children and herself very well. Secretary of local Party branch. She is dissatisfied with herself. ‘I’m not doing enough, I mean the Party’s not enough, I get fed up, just paper work, like an office, doesn’t mean anything.’ Laughs, nervously. ‘George —’ (her husband) ‘says that’s the incorrect attitude, but I don’t see why I should always have to bow down. I mean, they’re wrong often enough, aren’t they?’ Laughs. ‘I decided to do something worthwhile for a change.’ Laughs. ‘I mean something different. After all, even the leading comrades are talking about sectarianism, aren’t they … well of course the leading comrades should be the first to say it …’ Laughs. ‘Though that’s not what seems to happen … anyway, I decided to do something useful for a change.’ Laughs. ‘I mean, something different. So now I have a class of backward children on Saturday afternoons. I used to be a teacher, you know. I coach them. No, not Party children, just ordinary children.’ Laughs. ‘Fifteen of them. It’s hard work. George says I’d be better occupied making Party members, but I wanted to do something really useful …’ And so on. The Communist Party is largely composed of people who aren’t really political at all, but who have a powerful sense of service. And then there are those who are lonely, and the Party is their family. The poet, Paul, who got drunk last week and said he was sick and disgusted with the Party, but he joined it in 1935, and if he left it, he’d be leaving ‘his whole life’.