Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (81 page)

By November the Greek-Italian dispute was still provoking such inveterate enemies of Geneva as the Duke of Northumberland and Mr J. L. Maxse to make furious attacks on the League, but during that autumn the limelight of publicity shifted from South-Eastern Europe to the Franco-German boundary owing to the new menace of separatist movements in Bavaria and Saxony. Although the cessation of passive resistance in the Ruhr and the new committees created by the Reparations Commission had now relieved the fierce tension which followed the Essen riots in March, every country was paying in loss of trade and falling exchanges for the French occupation. The fear of complete political disruption and economic collapse in Germany diverted Europe’s interest even from the new experimental republicanism of Mustapha Kemal in Turkey, and caused Lord Birkenhead’s expressed approval of ‘glittering swords’ in his Rectorial address at Glasgow to be received somewhat coldly by an anxious England which would gladly have seen them all turned into ploughshares. Even quite moderate left-wing French opinion was now, it appeared, shocked and disturbed by the consequences of the Ruhr invasion; ‘France,’ M. Guyot had written in
L’Ère Nouvelle
in December 1923,

‘is isolated in a system of thought which Europe refuses to share. Poincaré prides himself on his immobility, whilst the tide of facts mounts further around him every day . . . Reason applauds the rock-like stand of this Lorraine attorney, but “our nerves and our blood, everything in us that makes us live, revolt against the feeling that we are remaining stationary while the whole world around us is moving.” Shall France move on up the high road along which all is life and movement, or shall she stand fast - and perish?’

When, exactly a month after the trial of Hitler and Ludendorff for leading the separatist movement in Bavaria had begun in Munich, I went north at the beginning of April 1924, to carry out a lecture tour for the League of Nations Union among the small towns on the Scottish Border, practically every audience asked for an address on the Ruhr occupation, although both Council and Assembly had hitherto carefully avoided the subject. The situation in Germany seemed a curious comment, I thought, as I moved from town to town between the snow-covered Cheviot and Lammermuir Hills in the bitter cold of that pipe-freezing spring, on the Centenary Debate which had just been held by the Union at Oxford: ‘That civilisation has advanced since this society first met.’

By the time that I had lectured at Ayton and Duns and Norham and Coldstream on Reparations, and passive resistance, and the similar ‘incidents’ in the Saar Valley under the pro-French Governing Commission, and the trial of the Krupp directors, and the epidemic of unavailing Notes between the Allies and Germany, and the collapsing mark which had descended, in September 1923, to 800 million to the £, I began to feel that I should never really speak effectively on these complicated topics until I had been in the occupied areas, sensed their bitter psychology, and seen at least the external aspect of post-war hostilities for myself. Winifred, as it happened, was spontaneously coming in her own lectures to the same conclusion, for though she was speaking that year for feminist organisations as well as for the League of Nations Union, her attention had been diverted from such topical events as the Second Reading, on Leap Year’s Day, of Mr Adamson’s Equal Franchise Bill, and the Six Point Group’s mass meeting in March to demand Widows’ Pensions, by a correspondence with Gerda von Gerlach, the daughter of a conspicuous Berlin Socialist who had been the first German girl to go to Somerville after the War.

‘One [letter] from the von Gerlach girl,’ Winifred wrote to me from Yorkshire on April 16th, while I was still in the north, ‘to say that her father has got safely out of Germany, and that if the elections go right he may not be tried for high treason even now. Poor things! What a hell of a time most European countries give their best citizens - the Liberals in Hungary, the anti-Fascisti in Italy, the pacifists in Germany, the liberty-loving in Russia - and all for what? I can still see the little von Gerlach girl leaning across the table at Pinoli’s with her big tear-filled eyes and her fierce little voice. “Oh, you in England don’t know what Europe is! How can you? You’re so
safe
!” I thought of her as I came up in the train yesterday riding along the side of a tranquil sunset over this dull, placid, strangely untroubled country that lies from London to the Humber—

And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man!

‘Am I growing hysterical? Sometimes I look into the sunset and see only the blood spilt from bodies that might have been godlike and wept from hearts that have at least potential divinity. We could be so happy. There is such beauty, and such kindness . . . even in this unbeautiful place the crocuses, late flowering this year, and the very small buds upon the hawthorns have an almost disquieting loveliness. If only the birds would sing loud enough to drown the cry that rises from the folly, folly of people in this stupid planet!’

But we knew, with our heavy memories of the past ten years, that for us no beauty of spring flowers could blind us to the tears of the bereaved, no song of melodious birds extinguish the heartbroken mourning of the conquered, and when we both returned to London at the end of April, the opening of the Wembley exhibition, with its meretricious architecture and its exploited workers, seemed a vulgar display of national self-satisfaction when contrasted with the sorrows of prostrate Germany. So we decided to pool our savings and go that autumn to the occupied areas and bankrupt countries of Central Europe, in order to learn for ourselves what the War had meant to those peoples whose agony had been even more cruel and more prolonged than our own.

7

Between 1922 and 1925, my numerous meetings for the League of Nations Union gave me acquaintances belonging to every social class from earls to dustmen, every shade of religious conviction from Roman Catholicism to Christian Science, and every type of political opinion from true-blue Diehard Toryism to blood-red Bolshevist Communism. Among the many and varied men and women who acted as my chairmen, one of the few with whom my connection outlasted the occasion of the meeting was Mr - now Sir - Percy Harris, an industrious member of the London County Council, a former M.P. for the Harborough Division of Leicester-shire, and at that time Liberal candidate for South-West Bethnal Green.

Before I went down to the Party headquarters in the Bethnal Green Road to address his small gathering of poverty-stricken but extremely vital and intelligent Liberal women, Mr Harris invited me to supper at his flat in Westminster, and shared with me, in the belief that I should speak more effectively for the knowledge, some of his earnest hopes and anxieties for the crowded working-class constituency which he had represented on the L.C.C. for fifteen years. This first expedition of mine to Bethnal Green occurred in the autumn of 1922, only a short time before the famous meeting of the Carlton Club engineered the long-anticipated downfall of the Coalition Government. A few days after I had heard the secretary of the Six Point Group breathlessly announce the resignation of Mr Lloyd George to the small audience of feminists which assembled at the Group’s office for fortnightly lectures, Mr Harris wrote to ask me if I would act as his secretary during the coming election.

At that time I still belonged to no political Party, for my interest in politics was chiefly international; I knew that I was not a Conservative, but beyond this somewhat elementary certainty my Party loyalties remained undefined. I had, however, been agreeably impressed by Mr Harris’s disinterested and benevolent understanding of the poor people in Bethnal Green; it seemed unlikely that they would find another Parliamentary representative who combined so long an experience of their needs with such human and intelligent sensitiveness to their psychology, so I agreed to give all my spare time for the next few weeks to helping him in his election campaign. I could not actually become his secretary because at that time my two weekly days of teaching prevented the acceptance of full-time work, and in the end Winifred, whose own engagements were for the moment less rigid, took over the secretaryship and spent the greater part of the next month in the crowded and dusty office half-way down the Bethnal Green Road.

As October slipped into chill, murky November, the excitement of the first General Election in which I had taken an active part excluded all other interests, and every evening found me rushing for the first ’bus that would take me from Bloomsbury to join the dramatic, turbulent contest in the East End. Mr Harris, who was being opposed by a conventional Conservative and an equally typical Communist, described himself as the Liberal and Labour candidate, and on his behalf I acquired a new facility in the rapid composition of enthusiastic arguments and speeches with a vague Radical-Socialist bias. Long, damp afternoons of canvassing, attended by strident platoons of small boys, in the mazy darkness of unlighted winter slums, culminated each evening in an adventurous walk down the vivacious Bethnal Green Road, with its open-air stalls, its flaring gas-jets, its coster cries and its thronging, voluble population of Cockneys, Jews and Poles, to some riotous meeting in an elementary-school room or municipal hall.

From confused memories of earnest, conscientious speeches made by Mr Harris and Winifred and myself in determined resistance to Tory and Communist interrupters amid the concentrated fumes of Cockney tobacco, one large eve-of-the-poll meeting emerges at which the chair was taken by the Rev Stewart Headlam, the veteran Fabian who shared with Mr Harris the representation of South-West Bethnal Green on the L.C.C. The sitting-and-standing crowds in the hall, largely drawn from opposing Parties and now almost beside themselves with partisan excitement, were waiting to heckle the candidate, and had little patience to spare for a portly and somewhat prosy speaker sent down by Liberal headquarters. It was some moments before he could take advantage of a brief interval of comparative silence to open his speech.

‘My friends,’ he began sententiously, ‘each one of us here is his brother’s keeper, and—’

But the rest of the sentence was drowned by a chorus of jeers and cat-calls. Twice or three times the speaker endeavoured to make himself heard, but even the intrepid old chairman, with his noble white head and his long history of service in unpopular causes, could not succeed in quelling the tumult. Finally Mr Harris leaned across to me and whispered: ‘Could you just get up and try to say something? They’re decent fellows on the whole - if a woman gets up they’ll probably quieten down a bit.’

So the sententious one was induced for the moment to give me his place, and I struggled to my feet, inwardly scared almost to the point of extinction, but determined somehow or other to penetrate the clamour.

‘’Oo’s
your
keeper?’ immediately demanded a voice from the back of the hall with decisive irony.

At this the long-suffering candidate sprang to his feet, his benevolent dark eyes blazing with outraged indignation. He was prepared to tolerate any number of innuendos against his past, his future, his fine public record and his own impeccable character, but this insult to a young feminine supporter was more than the Harrow and Trinity tradition could endure.

‘You’re a cad, sir; you’re a cad !’ he shouted, shaking his fist at the unseen interrupter. ‘It doesn’t matter about me, I can look after myself, but—’

I could not, however, allow him to go on. By an active feminist this protective line, though I recognised the generous chivalry of its intention, was not to be borne. Still standing at my corner of the platform, I bellowed above the din: ‘So can I!’

The audience rocked with applause and laughter. When the noise had died down they gave me a tolerable hearing while I made the time-worn plea for fair play to opponents. After that evening, Bethnal Green always listened to me with good-humoured tolerance, though my persevering arguments in favour of Free Trade and a pro-League policy must have been far too academic and generalised to appeal to their racy notions of an entertaining address.

Mr Harris won the election with a comfortable majority, and has remained ever since the Member of Parliament for South-West Bethnal Green, keeping by means of his personal popularity that small corner of the East End faithful to Liberalism through election after election, while almost the whole of London has now divided its allegiance between Conservatism and Labour. When the poll closed and the count began, Winifred and I and the small band of canvassers went to Trafalgar Square to watch the sky-sign results of that significant election, which left the Conservatives in power but doubled the number of Labour representatives, and returned such ex-conscientious objectors as Ramsay Macdonald and Philip Snowden to become leaders of the second largest Party in the House of Commons.

My recollection of the scene in Trafalgar Square in November 1922 merges into that which followed the General Election of December 1923, for on each occasion I worked for Mr Harris, saw him elected, went to the same democratic spot to learn the results, and realised, with a half conscious feeling of triumph, the growth of Socialist influence in an electorate which now numbered over twenty million. If I close my eyes I can still see the dark massed humanity in that midnight square, flooded like a stage crowd with purple light from the sky-sign apparatus, while the brilliant letters and figures flashed intermittently between heavy banks of rolling fog. With half-blinded eyes straining through the mist, I watched for the results of our own election, and fought hard for my foothold in the jostling, excited crowd. All around me, ragged men and women with shrunken faces, livid in the unreal, fog-obscured light, frantically cheered each Labour victory as though the millennium had come. One of the earliest results on each occasion arrived from the Sutton Division of Plymouth; ‘NANCY IN’, read the shrieking sky-sign, momentarily clear against the turgid night.