But the method I adopted to survive both my parents’ political fanaticism and its subsequent very obvious collapse was to go straight to the second stage I developed an eye for the more farcical side of their politics.
For my parents, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a tragedy that brought their entire belief system tumbling down. The gaffer, the boss, old Karl Marx himself wrote in his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” words to the effect that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. If my mum and dad could somehow be brought back to life and the three of us visited a place where Aaronovitch hangs out – an Islington sports centre, perhaps, where he plays in a five-a-side football team that also includes Chuka Umunna, they would point at him and say: “See that bloke in the unflattering T-shirt, his father was an important party official, SE regional organiser and culture secretary, but now his son is.
Their mood probably wasn’t helped by being whispered about in shops, but I sensed that the main critical voice was inside their heads, that they were aware on some level that they had abandoned their younger, more idealistic selves and it had corroded them from the inside. a Labour councillor!” Or, “Don’t look, but that woman by the bacon counter, she used to be in CND but now she’s … joined the Air Force!” At first I couldn’t see anything different about the people my parents pointed out, but over time it did seem to me there was a certain haunted quality, an air of sadness that hung over them. ” Here they would pause before revealing the full horror: “. As the CPGB declined from its high point of wartime popularity and followers gradually turned their backs on the faith, so the idea of the turncoat, the sellout, the apostate came more and more to dominate my parents’ state of mind.Įven when I was quite small, we would be out shopping and my mother or father would gesticulate towards some harmless-looking individual and say in a whisper: “See him over there trying on gloves? He left the party over Hungary in 1956 and now he’s. L ike David Aaronovitch’s parents, Sam and Lavender, my mother and father, Joe and Molly, were for many years members of the British Communist Party of Great Britain.
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