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there were some scuffles,
but one mustn’t exaggerate, there was nothing like Hitler.
    A letter arrived from Eton saying that Jolyon had disappeared,
leaving behind a note saying that he was off to the Spanish Civil
War, signed, Comrade Johnny Lennox.
    Philip used every influence to find out where their son was.
The International Brigade? Madrid? Catalonia? No one seemed
to know. Julia tended to sympathise with her son, for she had
been shocked at the treatment of the elected government in Spain,
by Britain and the French. Her husband, who was a diplomat
after all, defended his government and his country but alone with
her said he was ashamed. He did not admire the policies he was
defending and conducting.
    Months passed. Then a telegram arrived from their son, asking
for money: address, a house in the East End of London. Julia at
once saw this meant he was wanting them to visit him, otherwise
he would have designated a bank where he could pick up the
money. Together she and Philip went to a house in a poor street,
and found Jolyon being nursed by a decent sort of woman of the
kind Julia at once thought of as a possible servant. He was in an
upstairs room, ill with hepatitis, caught, presumably, in Spain.
Then talking with this woman, who called herself Comrade Mary,
it slowly became evident she knew nothing of Spain, and then
that Jolyon had not been in Spain, but had been here, in this
house, ill.
    â€˜Took me a bit of time to see he was having a bit of a
breakdown,’ said Comrade Mary.
    These were poor people. Philip wrote out a fair-sized cheque,
and was told, politely enough, that they did not have a bank
account, with the only just sarcastic implication that bank accounts
were for the well off. Since they did not have that kind of money
on them, Philip said that money would be delivered, next day,
and it was. Jolyon, but he was insisting on being called Johnny,
was so thin the bones of his face suggested the skeleton, and while
he kept saying that Comrade Mary and her family were the salt
of the earth, easily agreed to come home.
    That was the last his parents heard of Spain, but in the Young
Communist League, where he now became a star, he was a Spanish
Civil War hero.
    Johnny had a room, and then a floor, in the big house, and
there many people came who disturbed the parents, and made
Julia actively miserable. They were all communists, usually very
young, and always taking Johnny off to meetings, rallies, weekend
schools, marches. She said to Johnny that if he had seen the streets
in Germany full of rival gangs he would have nothing to do with
such people, and as a result of the quarrel that followed he simply
left. He anticipated later patterns of behaviour by living in
comrades’ houses, sleeping on floors or anywhere there was a corner
for him, and asked his parents for money. ‘After all, I suppose
you don’t want me to starve even if I am a communist.’
    Julia and Philip did not know about Frances, not until Johnny
married her when he came on leave, though Julia was familiar
enough with what she described as ‘that type of girl’. She had
been observing the smart cheeky flirty girls who looked after the
senior officials–some were attached to her husband’s department.
She had asked herself, ‘Is it right to be having such a good time
in the middle of this terrible war?’ Well, at least no one could say
they were hypocrites. (An ancient lady, standing to spray white
curls with a fixative and peering at herself mournfully in a mirror,
said, decades later: ‘Oh, we had such a good time, such a good
time–it was so glamorous –do you understand?’)
    Julia’s war could have been really terrible. Her name had been
on a list of those Germans who were sent off to the internment
camp on the Isle of Man. Philip told her: ‘There was never a
question of your being interned, it was just an administrative
error.’ But error or not, it had taken