1 .sx THE END OF THE FORTIES .sx 1 .sx I CAME out of the Navy in 1946 possessing two suits of clothes , plus the 'hacking jacket' and grey trousers picked up at Olympia as part of the civilian outfit made available to all servicemen on demobilization .sx One of the suits even pre-dated my joining the Woolwich in December 1938 .sx Made of dark-brown Manx tweed , laboriously chosen , it had always been a favourite of mine .sx In a novel I had to abandon when called up in April 1941 , I had clad my dapper hero in it .sx During Navy years it had been attacked by moths , but in 1946 I had it 'invisibly mended' , a service still available at a modest price , in which patient ladies darned the holes with threads drawn from interior seams of the garment in question .sx The other suit was of a thicker but still plain tweed , of a subdued green , the colour nevertheless quite avant garde for its time .sx This had been stout enough to survive the war intact .sx Two suits of such antiquity were plainly inadequate for the resumed life of a lawyer , and I eventually went to a quite small shop called Austin's at the bottom of Shaftesbury Avenue with the intention of buying another off the peg .sx I must have seen in the window something that took my fancy .sx It was a shop that later , possibly even at that time , sold shirts from the USA with button-down collars , and other items of a quite novel or show-biz character , appropriate to its location .sx It was run by two men I took to be Jewish brothers , though one was bald , the other gingerish ; agreeable , but unlikely to let someone escape who had set foot over their threshold .sx On this occasion it turned out they had nothing to fit me that I liked .sx I succumbed to their offer to make a suit for me .sx My hesitation may have been on account of the price , probably anticipated more than actual .sx But I was pleased with the product that emerged .sx The material was a soft , grey , herring - bone tweed , the coat cut longer in the body than any suit I had ever had - in fact , in the style familiar from American films of the day - the middle button of the three , the one intended to be fastened , situated accurately in the waist .sx Did I think the trousers slightly too wide , the two pleats at either side of the waist-band too generous ?sx Not to begin with , I feel sure , but fashion changed in those regards .sx Certainly I came to possess two suits for which I had much less affection .sx Clothes rationing was still in force , and my mother , in the north , had acquired a suit-length on the black market .sx I had it made up by the sort of tailor willing to work on such extraneous material .sx I chose a double-breasted style , but the coat was ungenerous in length , and the dark-blue cloth itself of indifferent quality .sx Parsimony and compassion for my mother's enterprise compelled me to persevere with the thing until it could be decently interred .sx The other suit that I wore with misgiving was a much superior affair , but in truth it was too big .sx My brother gave it to me when he departed for a tour of duty in Singapore , as totally unsuitable for the climate anticipated .sx During the war he had served in the catering branch of the RAF , had been persuaded ( with promise of rapid promotion ) to stay on in peacetime .sx Immediately before Singapore he had been at the Air Ministry :sx hence the civilian suit , which he had had made at Simpson's in Piccadilly ; nutty , like all his garments .sx Proof that I wore it on more than everyday occasions is afforded by a photograph in Picture Post of 19 February 1949 , which shows me with the poet Laurie Lee , eating some snack , garbed in the suit in question .sx But surely anyone interested in sartorial matters can deduce that the suit was not made for me .sx At a rather later date , I too had a suit made at Simpson's , a distinct success - double-breasted , like the black-market affair , but properly cut , and in dark-grey flannel , a material not then the New York executive clich e it subsequently became .sx However , thereafter , until I retired as solicitor to the Woolwich Equitable Building Society - when I ceased to wear suits as a diurnal practice , and had accumulated enough to last me through the formal occasions of the rest of my life ( unless they were amazingly prolonged ) - I patronized the ample ready - made department of Aquascutum at the bottom of Regent Street .sx Suffering , then unbeknown to me , from hyperthyroidism , I had lost weight , but Aquascutum did a 'young man's fitting' , the thirty-seven-inch chest size which usually fitted me without alteration .sx ( Incidentally , Aquascutum , like Burberry's , had , as the name indicates , originally been celebrated for raincoats :sx in his immediate post-First War diaries Sigfried Sassoon refers to an Aquascutum as familiarly as he might a Burberry , and indeed there is a similar reference in A. C. Benson's journal for 1902 .sx So it is odd the word is not in the OED , even the Supplement .sx ) .sx Apropos of Austin's , that portion of Shaftesbury Avenue was also familiar through visiting the Trocadero opposite , part of the J. Lyons & Co empire , like the Regent Palace Hotel nearby , in which conglomerate my brother had done some of his training before the war .sx For a spell he had accompanied the Lyons meat buyer to Smithfield , and I had been impressed by his telling me how the best meat had been insisted upon for the Lyons hotels .sx Occasionally , I must have just gone into the Troc for a drink , because I remember seeing in the deserted lounge , at a fairly early hour of the morning , Sid Field talking earnestly to a lady I doubt was his wife .sx ( Sid Field died prematurely :sx some of his comic routines are preserved on film but give no idea how laughter-achingly funny he was 'live' , in contact with the audience that night after night packed the Prince of Wales Theatre to see the series of revues in which he starred , all at once promoted to West End fame from a long apprenticeship in provincial music-halls .sx ) Later , it may have been that lounge that was turned into a restaurant , still under the aegis of the Troc , named the 'Salted Almond' - the d e cor modern , especially compared with the traditional Troc appearance , and the menu on the whole light , suitable for women shoppers , and executives wanting to break out of the chop-house mould .sx But my patronizing it surely indicates a lingering provincial attitude to the West End .sx The sight of the private Sid Field making such an impression - and , indeed , the whole business of those Kleinian Good and Bad suits - brings home to me , writing towards the end of 1988 , the extraordinary remoteness of the first post-war years .sx In his excellent book of 'autobiographies' , Time and Time Again , Dan Jacobson describes the London of those days as it seemed to a South African new-arrival :sx long quotation .sx I doubt if we who had lived in London during the latter year or so of the war felt all this anything like so acutely ; in fact , the West End and many of the suburbs seem to me now more squalid than they did then .sx Yet certainly the joy at the war being over , interrupted life resumed , a Labour government voted in , was tempered by a number of factors difficult now to recover in their intensity .sx Foremost was the conviction that a Third World War was quite on the cards , an atomic conflict between the late allies , the Soviet Union and the West .sx And perhaps in other cases than my own was the sense that , after all , one wanted more than the simple return to pre-war existence ; that the bouleversements of the war should have resulted in the leading of a 'different' life ; in my case the achievement of a higher level of artistic creativity - in the famous words of Henry James ( which in fact one read for the first time when the Notebooks were published in 1947) :sx " To live in the world of creation - to get into it and stay in it - to frequent it and haunt it - to think intently and fruitfully - to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation - this is the only thing .sx .. " But that one never achieved this was in fact due as much to lack of genius as of opportunity in the life embraced .sx 2 Addressing envelopes in Labour Party committee rooms in the 1945 General Election was the only direct form of political action undertaken since I left Blackpool in the mid-Thirties .sx " I'm overfond of Uncle Joe " , I wrote in the dedicatory poem of my collection of 1949 , Epitaphs and Occasions , but the verb was really determined by the metre :sx 'Too lenient to Uncle Joe' would have been more accurate .sx In the immediate post-war years I still sympathized with the Soviets ; thought the 1917 Revolution a gain not to be surrendered , despite its plainly having gone awry .sx Strange to relate , the crimes of the Stalin era had not really made their mark on me :sx the idea of bourgeois propaganda or the notion of the 'necessary murder' still prevailed over the evidence coming in .sx Because of this , and the alarm about another war , I became a member of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR ; indeed , served on its committee .sx I suppose in America 'the SCR' would have been labelled a Communist Party front organization , but it was not so in any conspiratorial sense .sx For instance , we sent a quarterly selection of new English books to our Soviet counterpart ( or the Writers' Union , I forget ) , the choice being free from political bias , in fact positively challenging censorship .sx When a delegation of writers came from the USSR - including the ( then or subsequently ) notorious apparatchik Surkov - I remember asking them why the fiction they sent us was always ideologically simplistic ; why didn't we receive 'neurotic' novels ?sx The question betrays my naivety , but it was also typical of the 'cultural relations' we were trying to establish .sx ( Incidentally , we had better visitors than Surkov :sx I recall being in a group round Pudovkin - whose films I had gone to great lengths to catch in the Thirties - feeling a sense of awe ; but what fell from his lips has gone from my mind .sx He was of ordinary , not to say common-place appearance , absolutely not acting the great man .sx ) .sx Indeed , most SCR activity has been blanketed by time .sx Compton Mackenzie was President ( or whatever the figurehead was called) .sx I see him at some gathering half seated on a table , silver , brilliantined hair brushed straight back , grey imperial beard wagging as he gassed .sx In my youth I had borrowed from the Blackpool Public Library , and read with absorption , the Sinister Street series and other novels :sx at the SCR he was to me still a figure of charisma , though I had long moved away from the kind of literature he represented .sx I suppose if confronted with a list of my colleagues on the SCR committee memories would return :sx little has stuck - though I easily summon up David Magarshack , man of sound views , likeable , though with the dogged irritability of some character in the Dostoevsky he translated so well .sx Presumably it was through the SCR that other leftish characters entered my life .sx The threat of a Third World War became so acute that there were several small ad hoc meetings of writers to take some action , perhaps somewhat Learish ( " What they are , yet I know not , but they shall be /The terrors of the earth " ) .sx Private houses were the venue :sx into one such meeting came one night Reggie Smith and his wife Olivia Manning , between them a half-comatose individual who , dormouse-like , sat between them but added nothing to the proceedings , and was later discovered to be Dylan Thomas .sx How amazed I should have been then had I been told I should live through more or less peaceful times into the second half of my seventies ( to say nothing of the amazement that Dylan Thomas should continue to be thought a 'great' poet) .sx