Usually, when he talks, he talks blind, his eyes blank, he is talking to himself. Only when his whole personality swung into line behind his cool grey eyes did I realize how used I have got to this way of his — talking to himself, hardly conscious of me. He said: ‘What do you mean?’ I realized it was the first time I had thought all this so clearly, having him here makes me think clearly, because so much of our experience is similar, and yet we’re so different as people. I said: ‘Look, take us, there isn’t one of us who hasn’t done this thing, saying one thing publicly and another privately, one thing to one’s friends, another to the enemy. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t succumbed to the pressure, fear of being thought a traitor. I remember at least a dozen times when I thought: the reason why I’m terrified to say that, or even think that, is because I’m frightened of being thought a traitor to the Party.’ He was staring at me, his eyes hard, with a sort of sneer. I know that sneer, it’s ‘the revolutionary sneer’, and every one of us has used it sometime, and that’s why I didn’t challenge it but went on: ‘So what I’m saying is that precisely the kind of person in our time who by definition might have been expected to be fearless, outspoken, truthful, has turned out to be sycophantic, lying, cynical, either from fear of torture, or prison or fear of being thought a traitor.’ He barked out, an automatic bark: ‘Middle-class talk, that’s what that is, well your origins are showing at the moment, aren’t they?’ I was stopped short for a moment. Because nothing he had ever said to me, no tone he had ever used, could have prepared me for that remark: it was a weapon from the armoury, jeering and sneering, and it took me by surprise. I said: ‘That isn’t the point.’ He said, in the same tone: ‘The fanciest bit of red-baiting I’ve heard in a long time.’ ‘But your criticisms of your old Party friends I suppose are just dispassionate comment?’ He did not reply, he was frowning. I said: ‘We know, from looking at America, that an entire intelligentsia can be bullied into routine anti-communist attitudes.’ Suddenly he remarked: ‘That’s why I love this country, it couldn’t happen here.’ Again the feeling of jar, of shock. Because what he said was sentimental, stock from the liberal cupboard, just as the other remarks were stock from the red cupboard. I said: ‘During the cold war, when the communist hue and cry was at its height, the intellectuals here were the same. Yes, I know everyone’s forgotten about it, now everyone’s shocked at McCarthy, but at the same time, our intellectuals were playing it all down, saying things were not as bad as they seemed. Just as their opposite numbers were doing in the States. Our liberals were mostly defending, either openly or by implication, the Anti-American Activity Committees. A leading editor could write a hysterical letter to the gutter press saying if only he’d known that X and Y, who were old friends of his, were spies, he’d have gone straight to MI5 with information about them. No one thought the worse of him. And all the literary societies and organizations were engaged in the most primitive sort of anti-communism — what they said, or a great deal of it, was quite true of course, but the point is, they were simply saying what might have been found any day in the gutter press, no attempt to really understand anything, they were in full cry, a pack of barking dogs. And so I know quite well that if the heat had been turned on even a little harder, we’d have had our intellectuals packing Anti-British Activity Committees, and meanwhile, we, the reds, were lying black is white.’