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.