New Times,
New Thinking.

  1. Politics
  2. UK Politics
9 May 2017updated 16 Mar 2023 3:50pm

Moscow, my family and me

To grow up in the Communist Party of Great Britain was to be on the side of the future . . . or so it seemed.

By Martin Kettle

On Sundays when I was a small boy my family would sometimes go to Halifax for lunch with the Thompsons. On other Sundays they might come to lunch in Leeds with us. I enjoyed playing with the Thompson children in their garden, which I think had a swing and trees, while the grown-ups talked politics, literature and history indoors. One day in 1957 I asked my mother: “When are we going to go and see the Thompsons next?” I was seven at the time. “I’m not sure,” my mother rep­lied, and changed the subject.

My parents never visited Edward and Dorothy Thompson again. In fact, I’m not sure whether the four of them met at all after 1957; for there had been a parting of the ways. The Thompsons had been friends of my parents, Arnold and Margot, since their student days in the late 1930s. My mother had briefly lived in the same flat as Edward’s brother Frank, who was killed by the Nazis in Bulgaria during the war. But the Thompsons left the Communist Party over the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, while my parents stayed; and that was that.

Subscribe to The New Statesman today for only £1 per week
Content from our partners
Securonomics? Don’t forget UK agriculture
The future of exams
Skills are the key to economic growth
Topics in this article : ,