The Human Front, page 3
"Outer space," said Ian Boyd, confidently. Four or five of us were sitting out a free period on our blazers on damp grass on the slope of the hill above the playing-field. Below us the fourth-year girls were playing hockey. Now and again a run or swerve would lift the skirt of one of them above her knees. We were here for these moments, and for the more reliable sight of their breasts pushing out their crisp white shirts.
"What d'ye mean, outer space?" asked Daniel Orr.
"Where they came frae. The flying discs."
"Oh aye. Dan Dare stuff."
"Don't you Dan Dare me, Dan Orr."
This variant on a then-popular catch-phrase had us all laughing.
"We know there's life out there," Ian persisted. "Astronomers say there's at least lichens on Mars, they can see the vegetation spreading up frae the equator every year. An it's no that far-fetched there's life on Venus an a', underneath the cloud cover."
"No evidence of intelligent life, though," Daniel said.
"No up there," said Colin McNicol. "There is down there."
"Aye, there's life, but is it intelligent?"
We all laughed and concentrated for a while on the hockey-playing aliens, with their strange bodies and high-pitched cries.
"It's intelligent," said Ian. "The problem is, how dae we communicate?"
"No, the first problem is, how do we let them know we're friendly?"
"Tell them we come in peace."
"And we want to come inside."
"If," I said, mercilessly mimicking our Classics teacher, "you gentlemen are quite ready to return the conversation to serious matters--"
"This is serious a' right!"
"Future ae the entire human race!"
"Patience, gentlemen, patience. Withhold your ejaculations. Your curiosity on these questions will be soon be fully satisfied. The annual lecture on 'Human Reproduction In One Minute' will be prematurely presented to the boys later this year by Mr. Hughes, in his class on Anatomy, Physiology, and Stealth. The girls will simultaneously and separately receive a lecture on 'Human Reproduction In Nine Months' as part of their Domestic Science course. Boys and girls are not allowed to compare notes until after marriage, or pregnancy, whichever comes sooner. Meanwhile, I understand that Professor Boyd here has a point to make."
"Oh aye, well, if it wisni the Yanks an' it wisni the Jerries, it must hae come frae somewhere else--"
"The annual prize for Logic--"
"--so it must hae been the Martians."
"--has just been spectacularly lost at the last moment by Professor Boyd, after a serious objection from Brother William of Ockham--"
"Hey, nae papes in our school!"
"--who presents him, instead, with the conical paper cap inscribed in memory of Duns Scotus, for the non sequitur of the year."
Near the High School was a park with a couple of reservoirs. Around the lower of them ran a rough path, and its circumambulation was a customary means of working off the stodge of school dinner. A day or two after our frivolous conversation, I was doing this unaccompanied when I heard a hurrying step behind me, and turned to see Dan Orr catch me up. He was a slim, dark, intense youth who, though a month or two younger than me, had always seemed more mature. The growth of his limbs, unlike mine, had remained proportionate, and their movements under the control of the motor centres of his brain. His father was, I believe, an engineer at the Thompson yard.
"Hi, Matheson."
"Greetings, Orr."
"Whit ye were saying the other day."
"About the bombers?"
"Naw." He waved a hand. "That's no an issue. We'll never find out, anyway, and between you an me I couldni give a flying fuck if they were invented by Hitler himsel, or the Mekon of Mekonta fir that matter."
"That's a point of view, I suppose." We laughed. "So what is the issue?"
"Come on, Matheson, ye know fine well whit the issue is. It isnae where they came frae. It's where they go, and whit they dae to folk."
"Aye," I said cautiously.
"Ye were at that meeting, right?"
"How would you know if I was?"
"Yir face is as red as yir hair, ya big teuchter. But not as red as Willie Scott of the AEU, who was on the platform and gave a very full account o the whole thing tae his Party branch."
"Good God!" I looked sideways at him, genuinely astonished. "You're in the CP?"
"No," he said. "The Human Front."
"Well kept secret," I said.
He laughed. "It's no a secret. I just keep my mouth shut at school for the sake o the old man."
"Does he know about it?"
"Oh, aye, sure. He's Labour, but kindae a left-winger. Anyway, Matheson, what did you think about what Dr. Lynch had tae say?"
I told him.
"Well, fine," he said. "The question is, d'ye want tae dae something about it?"
"I've already put my name down to raise money for Medical Aid."
"That's good," he said. "But it's no enough."
We negotiated an awkward corner of the path, leaping a crumbled culvert. Orr ended up ahead of me.
"Dr. Lynch," he said over his shoulder, "had some other things tae say, about what people can do. And we're discussing them tonight." He named a cafe. "Back room, eight sharp. Drop by if ye like. Up tae you."
He ran on, leaving me to think.
Heaven knows what Orr was thinking of, inviting me to that meeting. The only hypothesis which makes sense is that he had shrewdly observed me over the years of our acquaintance, and knew me to be reliable. I need not describe the discussion here. Suffice it to say that it was in response to a document written by Lin Piao which Dr. Lynch had clandestinely distributed during his tour, and which was later published in full as an appendix to various trial records. I was not aware of that at the time, and the actual matters discussed were of a quite elementary, and almost entirely legal, character, quite in keeping with the broad nature of the Front. It was only later that I was introduced to the harsher regimens in Dr. Lynch's prescription.
We started small. Over the next few weeks, what time I could spare from studying for my Highers, in evenings, early mornings, and weekends, was taken up with covering the town's East End and most of Port Glasgow with the slogans and symbols of the Front, as well as some creative interpretations of our own.
FREE DUBCEK, we wrote on the walls of the Port Glasgow Municipal Cleansing works, in solidarity with a then-famous Czechoslovak guerrilla leader being held incommunicado by NATO. To the best of my knowledge it is still there, though time has worn the "B" to a "P."
And, our greatest coup, on the enormous wall of the Thompson yard, in blazing white letters and tenacious paint that no amount of scrubbing could entirely erase:
FORGET KING BILLY AND THE POPE
UNCLE JOE'S OUR ONLY HOPE
The Saturday after the last of my Higher exams, I happened to be in the car with my father, returning from a predictably disastrous Morton match at Cappielow, when we passed that slogan. He laughed.
"I must say I agree with the first line," he said. "The second line, well, it takes me back. Good old Uncle Joe, eh? I must admit I left 'Joe for King' on a few shit-house walls myself. Amazing that people still have faith in the old butcher."
"But is it really?" I said. I told him of my long-ago (it seemed--seven years, my god!) playground scrap over the memory of Stalin.
"It's fair enough that he killed Germans," Malcolm said. "Or even that he killed Americans. The problem some people, you know, have with Stalin is that he killed Russians, in large numbers."
"It was a necessary measure to prevent a counterrevolution," I said stiffly.
Malcolm guffawed. "Is that what they're teaching you these days? Well, well. What would have happened in the SU in the '30s if there had been a counterrevolution?"
"It would have been an absolute bloody massacre," I said hotly. "Especially of the Communists, and let's face it, they were the most energetic and educated people at the time. They'd have been slaughtered."
"Damn right," said Malcolm. "So we'd expect--oh, let me see, most of the Red Army's generals shot? Entire cohorts of the Central Committee and the Politburo wiped out? Countless thousands of Communists killed, hundreds of thousands sent to concentration camps, along with millions of ordinary citizens? Honest and competent socialist managers and engineers and planners driven from their posts? The economy thrown into chaos by the turncoats and time-servers who replaced them? A brutal labour code imposed on the factory workers? Peasants rack-rented mercilessly? A warm handshake for Hitler? Vast tracts of the country abandoned to the fascist hordes? That the sort of thing you have in mind? That's what a counterrevolution would have been like, yes?"
"Something like that," I said.
"That's exactly what happened, you dunderheid! Every last bit of it! Under Stalin!"
"How do we know that's not just propaganda from our side?"
"Here we go again," he sighed. "It's like arguing with a Free Presbyterian minister."
"Come on," I said. "We know that a lot of what we're told in the press is lies. Look at the rubbish they were writing about how France was pacified, right up until the May Offensive! Look at--"
"Yes, yes," he said. He pulled the car to a halt in the comfortable avenue where we lived, up by the golf course. He leaned back in his seat, took off his driving gloves and lit a cigarette.
"Look, John, let's not take this argument inside. It upsets your mother."
"All right," I said.
"You were saying about the press. Yes, it's quite true that a lot of lies are told about the war. I'll readily admit that, however much I still think the war is just. It was the same in the war with Hitler. Only to be expected. Censorship, misguided patriotism, wishful thinking--truth is the first casualty, and all that. So tell me this--who, in this country, has done the most to expose these lies?"
"Russell, I guess," I said. After that I could only think of exiles and refugees from the ravaged Continent. "And there's Sartre, and Camus, and Deutscher--"
"That's the man," he said. "Deutscher. Staunch Marxist. Former Communist. Respected alike by the Daily Worker and the Daily Telegraph. Man of the Left, man of integrity, right?"
"Yes," I said, suspecting that he was setting me up for another fall. He was. When we went inside he handed me a worn volume from his study's bowed bookshelves.
Deutscher's Stalin, published in 1948, was a complete eye-opener to me. I had never before encountered criticism of Stalin or his regime from the Left, nor so measured a judgement and matchless a style. It seemed to come from a vanished world, the world before Dropshot, before the Fall.
"Fuck that," said Dan Orr. "Deutscher's a Trotskyite, for all that he's all right on the war. And Trotskyites are scum. I don't give a fuck how many o them Stalin killed. He didnae kill enough. There were still some alive tae be ministers in the Petrograd puppet government, alang wi all the Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists and NTS trash that the Yanks scraped out o the camps where they belonged."
I didn't have an answer to that, at the time, so I shelved the matter. In any case we had more urgent decisions to make. Although we had not had our results yet, we both knew we had done well in our Highers, and could have gone straight to University the following September. This would have deferred our National Service until after graduation. Graduates could sign up for officer training. Most of our similarly successful classmates rejoiced at the opportunity to avoid the worst of the hardships and risks. Orr was adamant that we should not take it. It was a principle with him (and with the Front, and with the Young Communist League of which, unknown to me at the time, he was a clandestine member).
"It's a blatant class privilege," he said. "Every working-class laddie has tae go as soon as he turns eighteen. Why should we be allowed tae dodge the column for four mair years? What gies us the right tae a cushy number? And think about it--when we've done our stint that'll be it over, we can get on wi university wi none o that growing worry about what's at the end o it, and in the meantime we'll hae learned to use a rifle and we can look every young worker in the eye, because we'll hae been through the same shit as he has."
"But," I said, "suppose we find ourselves shooting at the freedom fighters?"
Or shot by them, was what was really worrying me.
"Cannae be helped," said Orr. He laughed. "I'm told it seldom comes tae that anyway. It's no like in the comics."
My mother objected, my father took a more fatalistic approach. There was a scene, but I got my way.
We spent the summer working to earn some spending money and hopefully put some by in our National Savings Accounts. In the permanent war economy it was easy enough to walk into a job. Orr, ironically enough, became a hospital porter for a couple of months, while I became a general labourer in the Thompson yard. We joked that we were working for each other's fathers.
The shipyard astounded me, in its gargantuan scale, its danger and din, and its peculiar combination of urgent pace and trivial delay. The unions were strong, management was complacent, work practices were restrictive and work processes were primitive. Parts of it looked like an Arab souk, with scores of men tapping copper pipes and sheets with little hammers over braziers. My accent had me marked instantly as a teuchter, a Highlander, which though humiliating was at least better than being written off as middle class. The older men had difficulty understanding me--I thought at first that this was an accent or language problem, and tried to conform to the Clydeside usage to ridiculous effect, until I realised that they were in fact partially deaf and I took to shouting in Standard English, like an ignorant tourist.
The Party branch at the yard must have known I was in the Front, but made no effort to approach me: I think there was a policy, at the time, of keeping students and workers out of each other's way. This backfired rather because it enabled me to encounter my first real live Trotskyist, who rather disappointingly was a second-year student working there for the summer. We had a lot of arguments. I have nothing more to say about that.
Most days after work I'd catch the bus to Nelson Street, slog up through the West End to our house, have a bath and sleep for half an hour before a late tea. If I had any energy left I would go out, ostensibly for a pint or two but more usually for activity for the Front. The next stage in its escalating campaign, after having begun to make its presence both felt and overestimated, was to discourage collaboration. This included all forms of fraternisation with American service personnel.
Port Glasgow is to the east of Greenock, Gourock to the west. The latter town combines a douce middle-class residential area and a louche seafront playground. Its biggest dance-hall, the Cragburn, a landmark piece of '30s architecture with a famously spring-loaded dance floor, draws people from miles around.
Orr and I met in the Ashton Cafe one Friday night in July. Best suits, Brylcreemed hair, scarves in our pockets. Hip-flask swig and gasper puff on the way along the front. The Firth was in one of its Mediterranean moments, gay-spotted with yachts and dinghies, grey-speckled with warships. Pound notes at the door. A popular beat combo, then a swing band.
We chose our target carefully, and followed her at distance after the dance. Long black hair down her back. She kissed her American sailor goodbye at the pier, waved to him as the liberty-boat pulled away. We caught up with her at a dark stretch of Shore Street, in the vinegar smell of chip-shops. Scarves over our noses and mouths, my hand over her mouth. Bundled her into an alley, up against the wall. We didn't need the masks, not really. She couldn't look away from Orr's open razor.
"Listen, slag," he said. "Youse are no tae go out wi anybody but yir ain folk frae now on. Get it? Otherwise we'll cut ye."
Tears glittered on her thick mascara. She attempted a nod.
"Something tae remind ye," Orr said. "And tae explain tae yir friends."
He clutched her hair and cut it off with the razor, as close to the scalp as he could get. He threw the glistening hank at her feet and we ran before she could get out her first sob.
I threw up on the way home.
Three days later I overheard two lassies at the bus-stop. They were discussing the incident, or one like it. There had been several such, over the weekend, all the work of the Front.
"Looks like you're in deid trouble fae now on," one of them concluded, "if ye go out wi coons."
Call-up papers arrived in August, an unwelcome 18th-birthday present. After nine weeks' basic training I was sent to Northern Ireland, where I spent the rest of my two-year stint guarding barracks, munitions dumps and coastal installations. Belfast, Londonderry, south Armagh: the most peaceful and friendly parts of the British Empire.
Orr was sent to Rhodesia. His grave is in the Imperial War Cemetery in Salisbury.
I was demobilised in September 1974, and went to Glasgow University. My fellow first-year students were all two years younger than me, including those in the Front. The Party line had changed. Young men were being urged to resist the war, to refuse conscription, to take any deferral available, to burn their call-up papers if necessary, to fill the jails. This was not because the Party had become pacifist. It was because the Party, and the Front, now had enough men with military experience for the next step up Lin Piao's ladder.
People's War.
It is necessary to understand the situation at the time. By 1974 the United States, Britain and the white Dominions, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Belgium were almost the only countries in the world without a raging guerrilla war. Although nominally on the Allied side, the governments of France and Italy were paralysed, large tracts of both countries ungovernable or already governed by the Resistance movements. Every colony had its armed independence movement, and every former socialist country had its reliberated territory and provisional government, even if driven literally underground by round-the-clock bombing.
"The peoples of the anti-imperialist camp long for peace every day," wrote Lin Piao. "Why do the peoples of the imperialist camp not long for peace? Unfortunately it is because they have no idea of what horrors are being suffered by the majority of the peoples of the world. It is necessary to bring the real state of affairs sharply to their attention. In order for the masses to irresistibly demand that the troops be brought home, it is necessary for the people's vanguard to bring home the war."
