An gry Y o ung Man by the same author * autobiography THE LIVING HEDGE (Faber & Faber) HERON LAKE: A NORFOLK YEAR (Batchworth PresJ) on the crisis THE ANNIHILATION OF MAN (Faber & Faber) THE J\.IEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE (Faber & Faber) THE AGE OF TERROR (Faber & Faber) no veis FUGITIVE MORNING (Denis Archer) PERIWAKE: HIS ODYSSEY (Denis Archer) MEN IN MA Y ( Gollancz:.) on the youth movement THE FOLK TRAlL (Noe! Douglas) THE GREEN COMPANY (The C. W. Daniel Co.) REPUBLIC OF CHILDREN (Alten & Unwin) poems EXI LE AND OTHER POEMS (The Caravel Press) LESLIE PAUL ANGRY YOUNG MAN F ABER AND F ABER LTD 24 Russell Square London First published in mcmli by Faber and Faber Limited 24 Russel! Square London W.C.I Second impression mcmlii ' Printed in Great Britain by Page Brothers (Norwich) Ltd All rights reserved To my brothers and sisters, above all to the youngest, J OAN and DouGLAS Contents I. THE BOY ON THE BEACH I p age I Il. A YOUNG CHAP IN FLEET STREET 32 ' ' Ill. oH YOUNG MEN OH YOUNG COMRADES 50 IV. THE COUNCIL OF ACTION 75 V. DEATH OF AN INFORMER 92 VI. THE DEDICA TED LIFE I0 3 VII. DEATH OF A SPACE SELLER I27 VIII. EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES I39 IX. THE LENINIST CIRCUS I 55 ' ' X. NOTHING IS INNOCENT I 78 XI. DECLINE OF THE YOUTH MOVEMENT I 96 XII. DEATH OF A CHAR 20 7 XIII. RED POPLAR - GREY UNEMPLOYED 2I7 XIV. FESTIVAL AND TERROR 238 XV. THE NIGHT OF THE LAND-MINE 258 XVI. THE DAY OF THE SOLDIER 273 XVII. DIALOGUE OF THE HEART 284 XVIII. NOT MY DESERVING 297 9 CHAPTER ONE The Boy on the Beach n my youth Aldgate High Street had a character it has now I almost lost. Despite the traffic roaring through it, all dazzle, fu me and fu ry, which made it impossible to see it as one calm whole except on idle and drowsy Sunday afternoons, it was as �hough, early in the morning when the streets were still half-empty and the shadows long, one had walked out of the throbbing city and stumbled upon the High Street of a seaport or prosperous country town. A handpump still stood at the City end, where the High Street bifurcated, and Petticoat Lane, the most remarkable Sunday market in the world, at the other. Closing the street in the northern distance was the parish church of Whitechapel, now a shell, but then raising a graceless Victorian steeple above its own oasis of plane trees and poplars. The little old pub called Ye Hoop and Grapes, with its wrought-iron lamp bracket and coloured plaster mouldings of grapevines, and bright square windows, looked across paving stones to the toffee and fa ncy goods stalls standing in the gutter. Muscular carmen and porters stood in its tiny fo recourt drinking great mugs of beer just as they must have done in the eighteenth century when the waggons fr om Poplar shipyards stopped outside its doors. And, towering above all, rose the handsome church of St. Botolph's at the corner of Houndsditch: there had been a church of St. Botolph on that corner since the twelfth century, perhaps even since the last of the Danish kings-in the days indeed when Houndsditch was no street of clothing warehouses, but a filthy open sewer. It was an eighteenth-century church, much restored, raising above the street a curiously fashioned spire, punched through l l THE BOY ON THE DEACH with rounded lanterns like great portholes. Green-painted tubs of geraniums stood in its square of grimy garden in brilliant contrast to the handsome blue doors set in porches of cream. Behind the church, in the cool waving shadow of plane and acacia trees, the poor clerks, like myself, came at midday to eat their sandwiches: in the afternoon and evening the unemployed crawled out of the sun to drowse in the shade. Even the ornately tiled Metropolitan railway station, a fe w yards away, had a provincial look which has since disappeared, and the trams from Poplar and Bow, Stepney and East Ham, which had their noisy terminus at one end of the street, did not destroy its parish snugness, for, alighting from them, it was possible to imagine that one had arrived at the country rather than the city end of their journey. Y et in the course of time the small parish outside the old city gate had become the heart of a vast hinterland, of street upon street of unending slum, of grimy courtyards, of decaying merchants' houses where hob-nailed boots had splintered Adam doorways, and soot obscured lovely ceiling mouldings, and sweatshop candles guttered down Italianate marble mantel-pieces. There were alleys stinking of cats and piss and human vomit where Jack the Ripper had disembowelled his women victims, and uniform rows of uniformly dingy cottages facing streets down which soiled fish-and-chip papers sailed in the wind like gulls and children chalked their naive confessions of love on fe ncc and pavement-all this stretching for mile upon mile like those vertiginous lines of perspective which meet only in eternity; every main road vanished far, fa r away in some human swamp. Sometimes I penetrated to East Ham or Leytonstone, Barking or North Woolwich, ridingwith my friends in the frontofswaying and groaning trams past incalculable miles of street lamps made starry by the blurring rain and unsteady by gusts of winter winds. Aldgate High Street had become the city approach of one quarter of London, the East End, the fu nne! through which everything was driven to reach Lombard Street, Cornhill and Thrcadneedle Street in which all the power and wealth of the British Empire had crystallized into fr owning and opulent facades of Aberdeen and Cornish granite, Bath or Portland stone. It had suffered, too, an invasion still more exotic, for it was the heart of a fo reign quarter. The Jews were everywhere: 12 THE BOY ON THE BEACH shy rabbis with chestnut beards and downcast glance slipped gently past: daring Jewish beauties with long raven tresses and melancholy eyes and jumpers of scarlet and gold, and swinging ear-rings, were always walking in twos and threes to and from the gown and shirt-making workshops. Squab, hairy Jewish merchants with gesturing hands like captive birds, picked gold teeth, which matched their gold watch chains, on the kerb out­ side Lyons' Tea Shop. They carried on their deals outside and played chess endlessly and emotionally inside. Along the east side of the street ranged the kosher slaughter-houses where early in the morning the priestly ceremonies of cattle slaughter which go back to the days of Abraham were performed, and rivulets of blood and water flowed across the paving stones into the High Street gutters. Chinamen with pigtails tripped humbly along, hand in hand with rosy, bright-eyed half-caste children, and it was rare not to see a group oflascars walking down with wondering and catlike tread, their bodies frail and under-sized like the bodies ofboys, their eyes sharp and clear, and their faces so gentle and effeminate that moustaches seemed out of place upon them. In the winter they looked blue, shrivelled and frightened, like lost monkeys. Sometimes they wore fe zzes, or blue side caps, and argued in haunting flute-like tones, and with the movements of ballet dancers, outside the slop shops patron­ ized by seamen. There were mad denizens ofthis humanjungle, like the man I used to see striding blindly along with a lion's mane of crinkled tawny hair which had never been cut through­ out his whole life and which he protected fr om rain with an umbrella; or 'Shouting Jack', the man whose progress city­ wards consisted of leaps and contortions and wild swipes at invisible enemies (rather like that madman Rilke describes with such compassion in Th e Notebooks qf Malte Laurids Brigge) against whom he kept up a tirade of a buse which no one could understand fo r it was in the language of the Polynesian island from which he had sprung. Aldgate was an important part of my education: I could not tear myself from its polyglot flowagainst the background of its ruined I8th-century beauty. I loved the sprawling and teeming as much as I hated the boring and ugly and meaningless suburbs. I swelled and choked with impotent rage on my daily passage through them, desperate always to escape. I used to clench my fists and mutter to myself, like some young Wellsian 13 THE BOY ON THE BEACH hero, 'Why on earth do they put up with it? 1'11 not put up with it, you'll see.' But who the 'you' was, who was to be made to 'see' -unless it was God-I have no idea. In my brieflunch-hours in the East End, when, with perhaps only eightpence or ninepence to spend I could not afford to buy a meal unless I went to a workman's eating house (which I was often too timid to do) I would walk round the streets with my pockets stuffed with broken biscuits or fruit and stare at the junk shops, brood over the J ewish beauties displaying their oriental charms in the photographers along the High Street, or browse through a vast, dusty book warehouse at the top of the Minories, dreaming of all the hooks I should like to possess, or one day to write. One day I should no longer be lonely, underfed and discouraged, and achieve something which would make the world accept me.