Neal Ascherson interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 14th December 2016
0:05:11 Born in Edinburgh in 1932 in Randolph Crescent, in what is now the drawing room of the French Institute; I am a complete mongrel; my name, Ascherson, is a German Jewish name and comes from a family of which is part of the history of German Jewry; they sent one of their boys, aged eighteen, to Britain in 1857, on his own; to find a job in shipping; he settled and then married an American lady and set about trying to pretend he was a British country gentleman; another part of me is Scottish through my mother who was a Macdougall Gilbertson; there was also the American strain and there was supposed to be some Irish ancestry too but I never discovered what it was; the only thing that is really missing is English but I can go back to an English person, Sam Whittemore, who in 1775 was a farmer in Massachusetts; at the age of eighty he went out and fought against the redcoats coming back from Concord - so an old terrorist or hero of the commonwealth; his jaw was shot away but he actually survived his wounds and lived to a great old age; I think it was a peculiarly English thing to have done; everybody said he was far too old but he was obstinate and took his musket and went out and fought; my father's mother died giving birth to him and he was put into the Royal Navy at the age of thirteen where he remained until the day of his death; in one sense I was brought up in a Naval family; we never had a home because we were continuously moving; it was only right at the end of his life that we decided to build a small house on an island in Argyll, and that was going to be our home at last when he retired from the Navy; unfortunately he died a couple of years later so it never really came to much
4:29:05 I was supposed to go to Edinburgh Academy which was in some ways more snobbish and exclusive than Eton; I owe everything really to Henry VI as Plantagenet charity educated me all the way through; I got a scholarship to Eton in 1946; in those days you had a nucleus of scholars who wore gowns & lived in the building called College which was the original fifteenth century building founded by Henry VI for seventy poor scholars; the rest who came to share the education were the great mass of Etonians; when I arrived the poor scholars didn't pay much; my parents paid something ridiculous like £50 or £60 a year without which such an education would not have been possible; from Eton I got a direct scholarship to King's, so I owe my schooling to an English Plantagenet king
6:24:16 I never really got to know my father as he didn't live long enough; he spent a lot of his life at sea; he was a very quiet, gentle person, in spite of being a Naval officer; he was a torpedo specialist; he was studious and well-read and used to urge me to read, and talked to me a great deal about things that he had done and interested him; he wasn't a forceful man and maybe occasionally things were put over on him which he shouldn't have put up with; he was somewhat left-wing, particularly before the 1939 war, was a faithful 'New Statesman' reader and there were one or two of his very close friends in the Navy who shared the same views, that the society they were living in had to come to an end, that we could not go on with the level of inequality and class division and it had got to change; they were not Marxists, and certainly had no sympathy for the Bolsheviks; my father had actually been involved in the Russian civil war, in the allied intervention in the Black Sea, as were his best friends; they were intensely interested by Lenin and Trotsky and Russian culture but they were social democrats, left-wing, Labour, rather Fabian perhaps; anyway, that was his character; he was axed by the Geddes Axe which was the moment when, in order to save money, the British Government fired a whole part of the Navy and reduced it suddenly in size in the late 1920s; for a time he found himself as a civilian with no idea what to do; he went back to Edinburgh and went into partnership with a man called How - still in business - How the silversmiths; my mother always said he was cheated by How which may or may not be true; I am sure he wasn't any good at business; he was intensely interested in science and in mathematics, and tried vainly to try to persuade me what he was talking about when he said mathematics was a language; I failed because my bent was quite different; he was a loveable, slightly ineffective man who had be not been just packed off into the Navy at the age of thirteen might have ended up as a lawyer, for example, as he had that kind of mind as well - possibly a scientist; my mother was quite different; she was an extremely forceful, dominating woman who lived to the age of ninety-seven; she was the youngest sister in a small family of Macdougall origins; she was born in London where her Macdougall grandparents also lived, an enormous unwieldy family, half of whom suddenly appeared revealing that the old great-grandfather had another illegitimate family who all got compacted into this; they all used to spend their holidays back in the ancestral land, Lorn in North Argyll where the Macdougalls come from; in those days a summer holiday used to last at least eight weeks, possibly twelve, and they would settle down in fishing hotels where they would spend their time trout fishing - I remember that there were a lot of them, old gentlemen in their tweeds, perfectly happy to catch nothing whatever, sitting all day with their feet in water surrounded by a cloud of midges; in the evening they would sit drinking whisky in front of a roaring fire; that was their idea of pleasure; my mother had a really complicated set of beliefs and outlook; she was an Episcopalian; first of all she regarded herself as a Highlander in quotes which meant that she was not going to be insulted by anybody; she was very proud, very touchy, ever ready to scent some sort of insult or imagined slight; she was also incredibly funny, had an amazing wit; I thought up to the age of ten that she was the funniest person in the whole world; she could reduce me to helpless laughter; she was at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London with Miss Fogerty; she was training in elocution at the same time as Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft, and they all knew each other; that remained a sort of tenuous relationship in after years; she never did anything with that training; she worked briefly as a policewoman in the 1920s, then went out to Malta, accompanying a friend who was getting married, where she met my father; my father was already very unhappily married and had a daughter; his first wife hated being married and the marriage was really at an end when my mother turned up; after halts and hesitations they eventually got married; my mother retired to friends of hers in Kintail while my father was on the South China station in H.M.S. Suffolk; letters would arrive from the South Siberian Railway across the Soviet Union, but she did eventually agree; her family were disapproving because he was a divorcee and had a Jewish name, and there wasn't any money; they did get married in 1931 and I was born the following year; I had an elder half-sister, Pamela, and a younger sister, Katharine, who died a few years ago
16:30:00 Many of my first memories are actually imputed memories, that I was told at an early age that I had remembered but in fact I didn't remember; one of the things that I could not possible have remembered is a voice saying "Warm as a wee pie"; now I can't have heard that as a baby because I couldn't possibly have remembered or understood what was being said to me, so I must have been told that somebody holding me had said this; we came to London at one point - my father was in the Admiralty for a month or two - I must have been about three, and I do remember lying in a cot listening to the noise of traffic, and the strange noise of cars changing gear; I remember wondering what it was; I also remember pricking my toe on a piece of straw in the mattress; I was terrified by that for some reason and for years after slept with my feet drawn up; I remember vaguely following a pram and saying that I couldn't keep up
18:55:17 As a child I was always interested in dinosaurs and monsters, and stories about them; my elder half-sister was a wonderful artist, which she became in later life, and used to draw illustrated books for me, stories about monsters and dragons and dinosaurs; later on I became interested in drawing; it wasn't so much reading in those days although I did learn to read at a very early age; if there was something that obsessed me in that early age is was filling drawing book after drawing book, and when I learnt to write putting in speech bubbles
20:22:02 My father had gone back into the Navy before 1940 and as a torpedo specialist he was rather valuable; he didn't go back to sea after that but was put onto torpedo production and inspection; in 1940 he was attached to a huge factory in Peterborough called Peter Brotherhood which I don't think exists any more; that summer of 1940 was very exciting for obvious reasons; I was sent to a sort of dame school in Oundle; we rented a beautiful house in a village called Warmington; my mother was worried about the war as we were very exposed to air attack; I was machine gunned by a Dornier aged six or seven, coming back from school; they missed, but that's the sort of imputed memory because I am not sure how much I do remember of that and how much I was told about it by my mother and therefore reconstructed a direct memory; my memory false or real is the noise of that aircraft's engines; I had just got off the bus and was a solitary tiny figure in the landscape; for some reason this Dornier opened fire on me from a dustbin turret underneath; I didn't realize that it was shooting at me because the noise of the engines was so big; my mother had been watching from the window so knew what had happened; there were yellow scars in the trees where bullets had gone in; I suspect I don't really remember it but was just told about it; we were then posted to Greenock to the torpedo factory where my father was then chief inspector; my mother then got the insane idea that I would be safer in the south of England; it is true that the Luftwaffe were attacking Greenock and Clydebank at that time but it was nothing to what was happening down south; she then sent me to a private prep school; it must have cost them money and I'm not quite sure who paid for that, family somewhere I suppose, because the salary was not great; it was a school my mother's brother had been at and it was near Swanage in the Isle of Purbeck, a beautiful place; I was there for years at The Old Malthouse; it was run by an absolutely charismatic, terrifying figure, called Victor Haggard, who was at once a marvellous, magnetic teacher and a bit of a monster; looking back some at of the things that he got up to - not with me as I was rather large and not very attractive - I have a nasty feeling that things went on as you might say; anyway, it was very intense and he was a brilliant teacher of English and I owe a lot to him for that; we never learnt any English grammar but he would just read to us, and as he was the man who gave the sermons as well as beating you if you misbehaved, as well as being this gigantic figure who was wonderful at all sports - he was like God the Father in a way; at the time I didn't know there was any other world possible so thought you just had to put up with it; as I grew older and got to the top of the school I began to feel that this was out of order; I remember I was made a prefect or something and I refused to beat boys because I thought it was wrong; if I hated that being done to me why should I do it to other people; by the end of that I had seen some really cruel behaviour, some of it by the Headmaster, some of it by other boys, you know, the usual kind of bullying; I think there were probably about sixty or seventy boys; English was my best subject, but we were all being taught Latin and Greek; I went straight from there to Eton
28:15:13 About ten years ago I went to an exhibition of Holbein portraits in London; these were the portraits that Holbein had done of characters, almost all of them of young men at Henry VIII's court; I looked at these faces and I knew them all, because I had known them at Eton; the only thing that was different was the fear in their eyes; there was this easygoing confidence; one shouldn't exaggerate the difference, but there was a big difference; we in College were a slightly different tribe; the rest of the school outside, broadly speaking, despised us; we were dressed differently and it was suspected there was a class difference, that we might not be quite out of the top drawer, also it was suspected that we might be Jewish because we were clever, brainy, which was a very bad idea; also, if you were in College you were automatically one class higher than your contemporaries in the school outside; but I did learn, and I made friends with quite a lot of people in the outside school; it did teach me a lot about that easy assumption of entitlement which is so extraordinary about Etonians, a sort of good-natured tolerance of other people because they can't possibly offer you any competition; I also observed shocking - well the previous school I had been at there was a certain amount of sadism, but Eton was something else, I'm talking about the brutal sexual abuse of attractive junior boys by senior boys; the Headmaster was Claude Aurelius Elliott, the father of Nicholas Elliott the spy; the Provost was Sir Henry Marten who was the tutor of the two young princesses at Windsor Castle and taught them history, to what effect I am not quite sure; they used to appear - a huge black car would drive into the yard and they would go to the Provost's Lodge to be taught; there was also at Eton something which I did find really moving and impressive which was a real connection with a very, very distant past; for example, there were ceremonies concerning Henry VI - I was chosen once as being the youngest Colleger, to do this - in the middle of a frosty black night with practically no street lights, I had to put on a special gown and go all the way to Windsor Castle, about a mile away, and up a special path through a wicket gate, as it was the anniversary of his death; you went into St George's Chapel, which is like King's, of course, in architecture; there were just a few people around; I was carrying these huge lilies which I think are a Plantagenet symbol; there was a special service and a small choir singing with just a few candles in bitter cold, and you lay these flowers, and at that point I felt this is for real, it's not a Victorian recreation; perhaps it was but it didn't feel like that; that was impressive; I was in Long Chamber which was the only surviving medieval dormitory in England, probably, but it was divided into stalls which were put in in the Victorian period; you had a stall to yourself with a curtain that you pulled across for privacy; there was a huge oak round table; there you are getting into Etonian folk lore and traditions, which was very rich; there had been a thing called "Chamber revolution" in the Byron period - 1820s or something - in which they suddenly went all Jacobinical and barricaded Chamber and demanded their rights; I think they had to bring in troops; the staff at Eton would never talk about this, it was legend that used to pass around Chamber that once we had risen up; then there were all these extraordinary rituals; one boy was appointed to be Captain of Chamber and he had a thing called a syphon which was a piece of rubber with which he would belabour boys if they misbehaved and disobeyed his orders; nobody respected him because he was just one of us
35:35:19 I had been taught to play the violin at my first school and I carried that on very briefly; I was taught by a young man, very young and shy, called Neville Marriner; I was useless so gave it up; it was obvious to me even at that age that it was either the violin or talking to your friends in one's spare time; you had to do some sport; I was never much good at any of it; I was quite strong but it didn't really interest me; reading and arguing were my hobbies because College, this little group, was quite a hot-house, all these clever boys wrestling with the pressure from these thugs out there, the Etonians, and each other; some remarkable strange characters all full of ideas and ribald essays and theories about this that and the other, there were some brilliant boys there, extraordinary when I look back at what went on; in those days Eton didn't teach English which is almost unbelievable really; when I left Eton I had heard of Dickens and Thackeray, never heard of George Eliot, modern novels apart from the usual kind of Readers Digest things; occasionally your tutors would try to remedy this by trying to introduce you to some bits of literature; one of them once took me and some of his other pupils, about four of us, and he drove us in his car to London to hear T.S. Eliot lecturing on Dante; that was extraordinary because T.S Eliot I hadn't heard of because other masters had said there was this poet who wrote verses which don't rhyme and don't scan - rubbish; meanwhile, far from learning Tennyson or Browning, let alone T.S. Eliot, we were being intensely taught to write both Latin and Greek verse, an utterly useless accomplishment; a lot of us in College were real autodidacts; there was a huge library - still is, no doubt - and we had the run of that; you could go into the school library, so the sort of stuff I read was absolutely bizarre; the poetry I read by Heredia, a nineteenth-century French sonneteer; I also read the book of the Dean of Lismore which was a translation from the Gaelic epics, all kinds of weird stuff; I developed an obsession with Masefield and to a lesser extent with Chesterton; I read everything of Masefield and was terribly moved and excited by him; I think Masefield has come out of the other end of the tunnel now in estimation; he was regarded for a long time as mawkish, sentimental; now I think people begin to see something of value in the prose, a bit less in the verse; another book I read was called 'Le Sacrifice du Matin'; remember this was just after the war and this was a book by Guillian de Bénouville who had been in the conservative part of the resistance, and it was about the resistance; the little group of my friends in College, we were obsessed with the Resistance and out of it we developed - typical of this hot-house - a theory of life where the ideal is to become a maquisard, meaning you travel light and put down no roots and everybody is equal and all inherited hierarchies are nonsense; the Cadet Corps was important at Eton and we had to do Field Days when we went out with old rifles and did exercises on some blasted heath somewhere; we formed a People's Section in which we completely disobeyed orders and we wore our rifles slung instead of carrying them, and tried to wear ammunition belts to look like resistance fighters, and we refused to obey the orders of our non-commissioned officers and elected our own; in a way we were self-satirizing them, in a way not
43:27:01 I was Confirmed; You had to be as far as I could see; I was not Jewish but much later I tried to find out if I was, and among other places I went to Israel, and I wasn't; I do have a religious instinct deep down but I'm not a believer and I don't think I ever was; I remember my father saying to me - he was not a believer but very cautious about pushing agnosticism on me; I have been impressed by religion in later life; by the time I was here at Cambridge I was certainly a vigorous atheist, but at the same time became obsessed with Presbyterian theology because it seemed to me that the more that I studied it, the more I looked at Calvin and books of discipline and catechism, these were a terrifying but very intellectual image of human beings' relationship to their environment and the forces of nature; there seemed to be nothing to say for Anglicanism, as far as I could see, which seemed to me to be an Erastian creation of English monarchs; that was my feeling at the time; as a child and a teenager, puberty, I don't think I thought much about I don't believe this; it didn't make much impression on me; my father would praise the wonderful words of the King James Bible and the terrific music, his kind of way of not discussing it; at times of great stress as a teenager I'm not sure that I prayed or asked for help; Confirmation was just something you had to do and was done en masse at Eton, squad by squad we were marched up to the altar
47:02:24 In those days there was National Service; I originally wanted to do it in the Navy because of my father; he said that if I did National Service in the Navy that it was very unlikely that I'd ever get to sea, I'd just be in some sort of stone frigate ashore doing nothing much; he thought that if he could help to get my into the Royal Marines that would be more interesting but they were extremely hostile to taking National Service men and would do everything they could to avoid it; that is what I did; at the end of 1950, having done preparatory training periods at Lympstone in Devon, I joined up; I went through the basic training and then was transferred to the Army for officer training at Officer Cadet School at Eaton Hall near Chester; that was seeing an unlovely side of England because for the first time I was seeing the Brigade of Guards kind of ethic which was horrible; I passed out a Lieutenant and went to Commando School; I shouldn't really have passed Commando School but they were in a hurry; I was drafted to 42 Commando who were in Malaya during the Malayan emergency; I went out in a troop ship which took a month to get to Singapore, and then was for a couple of years in active service; it had an impact on the rest of my life - as they say, I wouldn't have missed it; I hadn't seen the outside world before, and South East Asia, Malaya, an incredible place; I soon realized this unbelievable, awful, social system; it wasn't long before I began to think, not exactly that I was fighting on the wrong side, but the grievances of the other side were very sound, that British policy was wrong and that the people we were defending were a battery of largely Scottish tin miners, rubber estate owners; the fact that half the population, because they were ethnically Chinese, were systematically denied citizenship - they weren't given the vote, didn't have any schools or hospitals - the whole thing was completely lopsided; that had a big effect on me politically; then the experience of active service and shooting and all that; you learn things; I was very good at finding my way in the jungle; I did come across the 2nd 2nd Gurkhas; at one time we were in Selangor and the next unit to us was a Gurkha battalion; I remember them well, they were wonderful; we had a cocktail party in which our troop and their battalion met, and the cocktail consisted of Navy rum mixed with local lager - it was terrible; I realized how little I really needed; you can live eating almost nothing, not changing your clothes, with very little sleep, drinking out of ditches more or less - how much do you need to live? You were coming out of a society, even in the 1950s, incredibly encumbered with possessions that you think are indispensable, and suddenly you are living a life where you realize that almost everything is dispensable; you don't need any of this to be yourself or do what you want to do; that rather permanently influenced my attitude when I came back; the other stuff about killing people and all the nasty, awful things that are involved in any war which you see and are involved in - the impact of that may have been subconscious; its only now when I'm old that I feel bad about it, it haunts me; but it didn't haunt me much at the time
55:04:23 My first impression of Cambridge was before I did my National Service; I was accepted at King's as a scholar, and again I had this strange feeling that I'd had when I went to Henry VI's death day in Windsor Castle; I remember kneeling in the Chapel, again frosty, unheated in those days, completely unlit, and again doing this feudal thing; I was on my knees and the Provost was sitting on a chair, and I had to put my hands between his hands and take an oath; I remember being very impressed by that; I didn't feel satirical about it at all; then I came back and it was absolutely wonderful; I had spent my whole life, in one sense, in monastic institutions, but I knew some people already, many of whom had been through the same kind of experiences as I had doing National Service; some had fought in Korea; a lot of people I had known didn't come back, a lot were killed in Korea, particularly young officers; anyway, here I was; the first thing that happened was that I had a monumental row with Eric Hobsbawm in this building; it's an example of how mixed up I was; the first few weeks of that Autumn term there was some sort of feast though I can't remember what it was; a lot of people dressed up and I didn't have anything very much to dress up in; I felt somewhat aggressive about it and did something stupid; I had a National Service medal and put that on; we had quite a lot to drink and then afterwards some undergraduates I knew said we were all going to Eric's room; there were a lot of undergraduates all drinking large quantities of red wine and smoking hard; eventually this very thin beaky figure came across and inspected me; I realized that this was Eric Hobsbawm; he looked at my medal and asked what it was; I said it was for my part in the Malayan Emergency; Eric then said I should be ashamed to wear it; years after I realized that I had put the thing on because I wanted somebody to say that; what happened was I left, marched out of the party into the quad, it was pouring with rain and very dark; I walked round and I remember crying; eventually I took the medal off and I didn't wear it again; afterwards I met Eric again and neither of us ever mentioned it, but it was very important to me; the man [Daniel Ellsberg] who published the 'Pentagon Papers' was briefly at King's; he knew Isabel, my wife, and years later he came to see us in London; we got talking about Eric Hobsbawm and I said he was a real friend of mine, as he became; he said that he could be very cruel; then he recounted being at the same party and seeing how Eric had treated me; I didn't know him then but got to know him all those years later
1:01:23:20 I would have benefited from Eric actually teaching me but when I came to supervisions I would give him what I had written, but we spent a lot of the time just talking about politics and the imperial world particularly; thedissolution of the Empire was a big subject; we did not talk much about Communism though he would talk about Marxism; if you wanted to discuss the present French Communist Party he wasn't too keen on talking about that but would talk a lot about Marxist historical theory as applied to recent French history; the position was really that most of my contemporaries at King's were intensely proud of the College and ourselves that he was here and that he wasn't being persecuted although he was an avowed member of the Communist Party; we felt this was a huge feather in King's cap that we could put up with him and protect him and treat him like anybody else for his own intellectual value; I remember saying something about his problems with the Communist Party and he said the point was never to resign, always to wait until their threw you out; the Mccarthy trials were going on at the time and all that un-American activities hysteria lasted for a very long time; in this room I was taught by Christopher Morris; he was in some ways an infuriating person to be taught by because he was provocative and sharp, he needled his students and he also took a pride in being unfashionable in his opinions; I remember him saying "Well, it is very unfashionable to say this now but I actually think the middle-class is rather a good thing"; he was a scrupulous teacher and you didn't get away with things; at that time I felt very left-wing in a rather muzzy, unattached way, and so I didn't like his opinions and thought he was absurdly liberal; Noel Annan was exciting to be taught by but slightly alarming because he could quite suddenly become angry and start booming and shouting at something that you said which he regarded as lacking in rigour or honesty; he was alarming but he was fun and I really liked him; with John Saltmarsh what you saw was what you got; he was earnest, in some ways a very unsophisticated, deeply learned man, who gave you all he had to give about medieval history; there was nothing provocative about him; he seemed a slightly comic figure to people of my age; I think we were all fond of him, admired him and respected him, but he was not one of the people who influenced how we thought; on lecturers, I went to listen to Jack Plumb who dealt largely with personal relationships in the late seventeenth century, and felt really out of tune with that kind of interpretation; I couldn't understand why he thought that it mattered; on medieval history, I remember David Knowles' teaching us about functional qualification, and it was very illuminating at the time; he was very good; on visitors who lectured, I remember Robert Graves, and Isaiah Berlin talking inevitably about Alexander Herzen; those I remember vividly
1:09:50:07 My interest in Eastern Europe started in a number of ways, partly my father talking about the Black Sea and his experiences there in the intervention in Crimea and Ukraine, partly being a boy in the west of Scotland in wartime and seeing the Poles who were so exotic and extraordinary; they wore these cloaks and capes and spoke this incomprehensible language, and were extraordinarily friendly and demonstrative; I was fascinated by their otherness and wanted to know a bit more about them; when I was at Eton I remember picking up in a street stall in Windsor a little Ministry of Information booklet about Polish history; I read this through and thought it incredible, that it was the other side of the moon, because they had a history that nobody I know knows anything about, yet it was a elaborate and thrilling as ours, and in some ways it was the inverse of it, that their victories were our defeats and things they regarded as disasters were our triumphs; it related and yet was utterly unfamiliar and I became fascinated; I thought in an adolescent way that if I knew all about this it would be my own as nobody else knew anything; nobody else was going to tell me what to think here; there was also the feeling that Eastern Europe was exotic, strange, unusual, fantastic, that was an influence on me; then it was happenstance; my first job was on the Manchester Guardian in Manchester; I became very depressed because Manchester was a very depressing place in the fifties; I was a reporter and found that my memory was beginning to go and I couldn't remember the day before; on the other hand, my dreams suddenly became consecutive, like a serial, where a dream began where the previous night's dream left off; I became quite worried by this and felt I needed to re-establish mental discipline and probably the best way to do so was to learn a language in the old grammatical way, and decided to do so with Polish; at that time, 1956, everybody was talking about Poland as huge events were taking place there; they were throwing off direct Stalinism and direct rule by the Soviet Union, the 'Polish October'; luckily Polish, like most Slav languages its structure is very much like Latin or the classical languages which helped; you can't really learn the Romance languages like that but you can certainly learn a Slav language like that; the roots are all different but the general broad structure and architecture of the language isn't; I then became obsessed with the idea of this Poland which I didn't know anything about; I remember writing short stories about it even when I was at King's, about what I imagined Poland to be; there was a Polish student here at the time who read one of them and said it was utter rubbish, it was not like that at all; it was 1956 and I went to the Editor and said I wanted to go to Poland but he said certainly not; the following year, after a facility trip to Canada where they had dished out lots of money, I had 300 Canadian dollars so I made my own way to Poland; I arrived in Warsaw in November 1957; I had one or two contacts and I absolutely fell in love with the place, not least because I was living on black market exchange money in the best hotel in town; by that time I could both write and speak some Polish; later on, on 'The Observer' I was made German correspondent, then the Central European Correspondent, so I was able to carry on systematically visiting, not only Poland but both German states, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the rest; I don't speak many languages - French, German, I can do Spanish with practise, Polish, though now, one of the nasty things about getting deaf is that your foreign language capacity diminishes as you can't quite understand what people are saying to you any more; your capacity to talk is potentially still there, it's not as though your vocabulary deserts you, but your interpretation gives way; Russian I can read with difficulty, and it's not too difficult to make one's way in Moscow because it is another Slav language
17:31:01 National Service gave me a taste for this huge world out there which was so unlike the grey world of Britain as it was in the 50s, and I couldn't wait to get back to it; I felt very affectionate about King's but I didn't think staying on was right; to be honest, I did try to have an academic follow-up which ended in farcical disaster; it was partly Eric's fault; I had asked whether I should do some research after I had got my degree; Eric said there were things that I could do and he could fix it; one of the Annales historians (Louis Chevalier) who had written a book on the 1848 revolution in terms of examining all the prisoners arrested and killed to find what part of Paris they came from, and whether you could see in those arrondissements a concentration of particular professions who came from particular parts of France; he needed someone to study the immigration of Corsicans in particular parts of France in the last decades of the nineteenth century to see whether they influenced patterns; it seemed exciting, an in no time they got me a scholarship from the French Government and I was assigned to the University of Aix, Marseilles, and went down there; what I hadn't realized was what Corsicans were like; the first thing is that Corsicans regard their own history as their own affair; they do not like other people putting their noses in because they might find something to disadvantage somebody; I also didn't realize that everybody in those departments, particularly in the Marseilles-Aix area who had any junior authority was going to be Corsican; I soon discovered that the Departmental archives were staffed by Corsicans who once said to me that the archives didn't exist as they were burnt for fuel during the occupation; this was untrue but I couldn't get past it; then the word got around - this sounds like paranoia but it's not; in the University suddenly the grant stopped; the University was terrorised by a Corsican student society called the Etudiants Corses, which expected to be paid by any other society which wanted to hold a meeting; if they didn't pay them they broke it up; I knew a Jewish girl who had a red winter coat with brass buttons, imitation coins of Louis Napoleon; the Amicale found out about this; they didn't attack her exactly, but kept going up to her and look at the buttons, then look at her; in less that a week she was a nervous wreck; at that point I realized I was not going to get anywhere and I was beginning to get into fights with people; I ran away to sea, went to the docks in Marseilles and found a ship leaving for Africa; in King's one of my greatest friends was a wonderful man from Uganda called Erisa Kironde who had one leg but was an irrepressibly funny, creative intellectual; I thought that I would go and see him and some of the other Ugandans I had known here; we used to sit up all night here writing new constitutions and then submitting them to a solemn constitutional committee which was sitting in the Colonial Office in London; I took this ship and ended up in Mombasa, went across to Uganda and spent the best part of a year there; I hadn't been to Africa before but knew a lot about Ugandan politics and got mixed up in that; so that was the end of my brief excursion in being academic; not until much later in the 1990s did I become associated for different reasons with the Institute of Archaeology at UCL and did ten years there; although I had always been interested in archaeology, had done a little fieldwork and followed archaeological events, in 1986 I was on 'The Observer' when an extraordinary event took place; it was the Southampton Congress of the organization of world archaeologies, the Union Internationale des Sciences Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques; it was a vast, deeply sleepy, reactionary old body which had a congress every four years, very conservative in its views; French was its primary language and it took no notice of archaeological developments in any other language really; it so happened that the professor at Southampton who was asked to organize this conference was Peter Ucko who was a revolutionary in archaeological theory who believed in what he called world archaeology, which is as much about the living as the dead, the now even more than it is about the past, its highly political and not just a dry academic subject in any way, and that the people best equipped to forward it theoretically and practically are indigenous archaeologists in both colonial continents, places where the past is organically involved in what they think and what they do; Ucko agreed to hold this congress and managed to say that he wanted to do it on world archaeology lines; the Association, though puzzled, agreed; at the last moment just before it was due to open, to which he had invited all these indigenous, post-colonial archaeologists, the legend says that it was one of the dinner ladies in the senior staff room in Southampton University who asked him if he had invited South Africans; he said he had and asked why; she reminded him that there was an academic boycott and we could't have anything to do with them; it then went like wildfire and within a week all the municipal organizations in Southampton were withdrawing all officers, there would be no public transport or accommodation, and the staff in all university buildings would go on strike; Peter had strong sympathy with this of course, but he deliberately pushed it to the back of his mind and said he hoped this would not be an issue, but it did; he had only about a couple of months to go, so what was he going to do; he thought that world archaeology was so important that it was worth creating a terrible storm; he dis-invited the South African archaeologists and at that point all hell broke loose and just about the entire archaeological establishment of Britain and the United States dumped on him and said it was an outrageous interference with academic freedom; science and research have nothing to do with politics, we resign and will have nothing to do with this congress; eventually, a few weeks later, the Association itself said they repudiated him and said the congress was no longer anything to do with them; however, Peter Ucko persisted and said he was going to hold the congress anyway, the invitations still held; at that point I was brought in on this; I was writing pieces in 'The Observer' saying everybody is attacking Ucko, I think he was right and the choice he had to make was worth making; academic freedom is misunderstood, particularly in archaeology, and it can't be an absolute if it is standing in the way of a cause like this; anyway the congress was held and out of this enormous explosion, phoenix-like arose a new organization called the World Archaeological Congress, because all the people from the post-colonial continents came; the congress itself was a huge success; out of the lectures and presentations the series of books which emerged was being published for ten or twelve years afterwards; the WAC emerged with huge enthusiasm from the husk of the old world organization; at that point I got to know Peter directly and a little later he was offered the directorship of the Institute of Archaeology at UCL which is really the premier appointment in British archaeology, certainly in teaching and training; he accepted this and then wrote to me and said he'd like me to come and join him, just to back him up because there were a lot of people in UCL who really hated him; so I came in on the basis of helping to create the public archaeology course and editing an academic journal which I started called 'Public Archaeology'; so I was there for about ten years, and then Peter prematurely died unfortunately; he was never really well, but a passionate man who burnt himself out
1:34:33:11 Aleppo came into a strange focus very much for me a few weeks ago here; I was at the Advent carols and the theme of that was the Book of Lamentations about Jerusalem, and about the city which has fallen and its gates are thrown down, their people killed or driven into exile, and all the weeping for this city; I was intensely moved, much more than I expected by that, partly because there are other Jerusalems, particularly the city of Lwow which used to be in Poland and has had so many names; it has been a city loved and desired by so many different people who hated each other and so much blood has been shed for it; for the moment its in Ukraine but its been Lemburg Lviv and Lvov and Leopolis, so many other names for this great city; its pretty desolata - they sang that Latin psalm about Jerusalem as well; I was moved by that; the fall of a great city seems an old-fashioned concept but of course it is not, it still happens; this is what has happened in Aleppo, and you see it again, the gates are overthrown, they burst through the walls, they kill everybody, they massacre, and some are led out into slavery; the human race has been living with this kind of thing since the bronze age and its still happening; that was my feeling about Aleppo; obviously the wider questions about the Middle East; it is true but not helpful to say that it all goes back to colonialism, the fact that the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and was then replaced by a series of shaky colonial endeavours - French, British, and of course Greek for one moment; that was a disaster that was soon over; there has been no satisfactory solution, who is to rule, what is to be the nature of this place, and interventions end in disaster; when I was on 'The Observer', the diplomatic correspondent, many years ago, was a very wise man called Bob Stephens; I don't ever think that he's been a diplomat but he'd certainly been associated with British policy in the Middle East, and had been in Egypt during World War II with that association with bright people; I remember him talking about Palestine and Israel; he said he thought the only hope is Berlinization; it is that the two superpowers at that time got so deeply involved that they are nose to nose across a line between the contestants, and the slightest move would threaten a nuclear war; at that point the thing stabilizes just like the cold war did, and you are relatively safe; we are a very long way from that; I'm not sure that isn't right, for example if you saw a Russian influence, an almost colonial type of influence over Syria and Iran, and that was then countered by belligerent, dominating American presence in Lebanon, Israel of course, possibly Saudi, the danger of that confrontation would actually be a stabilizing effect, that ordinary people could live ordinary lives; however, in some ways it is much too late for that partly because of America's disinclination to do this, partly because of the awful experience of doing it halfway as in the Iraq invasion, partly because I don't really think that even the Russians want to get involved that deeply in the region, they are just playing for influence.