A Life Beyond Boundaries Read Online Free PDF Page A

that we were innocent tourists, we finally persuaded the policemen to let us go, but not before they had marched us down to a clothing shop where we had to buy hideous one-piece swim-suits, covering our bodies from the shins to the neck. My first experience of puritanical dictatorship!
    Another strange experience occurred just after the bloody Soviet invasion of Hungary. The British Communist Party had chartered a train to take hundreds of young communists to the famous International Youth Festival of 1957 in Moscow. But general indignation over Hungary had affected the cadres, so that large numbers left the party, and of course pulled out of the trip. Since the BCP had invested a lot of money in the venture, they were forced to offer tickets to more or less anyone, regardless of party membership. My brother (by then at Oxford) and I leapt at this extraordinary chance to see fabled Moscow, the capital of the communist world. The package included free ticketsto the opera, the ballet, the museums and many famous historical sites. The BCP leaders were not interested in having outsiders attend the endless political meetings, so I had a marvellous week with Mussorgsky, Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov. I also managed to practise the little spoken Russian I had acquired.
    The time finally came for me to leave Cambridge. My senior friends had told me that the examination for a BA in Classics was easier than the entry examination three years earlier. So I was given useless first-class honours. There followed a difficult six months at home. My brother tells me that I actually rejected an offer to teach classical studies at the University of Edinburgh. That this incident never registered in my memory was a sign of how little I wanted to pursue the Classics, or indeed to stay in Britain.
    But I had no idea of what work I should pursue. My mother did her best to help. She had set her heart on my becoming a British diplomat, but I had no intention of ever working as a civil servant, let alone for the declining Empire. She then used the network of my father’s surviving friends (with commercial interests in the Far East) to look for a job for me in business. This prospect was even more unwelcome. As the months passed she became more and more impatient, and the tension between us steadily increased.
    Then, once again, I had a stroke of luck. I had kept in touch with a number of my Eton scholarship friends, and one day received a letter from one of them, Richard Kennaway, who held a position at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He told me that, while waiting for asummons from the British colonial service the following year, he had found temporary employment as a teaching assistant in Cornell University’s department of government (i.e. political science). Would I be interested in taking his place? I knew my mother would be supportive, if only to get me out of the house and into a job, even a temporary one. But I had never taken a single course in politics, and had no teaching experience at all. With cynical laughter, my friend replied that this would not matter. American students would be impressed with my English accent, and if I read intensively I could stay ahead of them by a week or two.
    At this point I talked with my brother, who had long been very political, and who knew much more about America than I did. Definitely I should go, he said. I should also read the newspapers and watch some television. A civil war was about to break out in Indonesia, where the local communist party (PKI) had the largest membership in the world outside the communist-ruled regions. However, the CIA was backing anti-communist warlords, and conservative regional politicians were trying to overthrow Soekarno, the left-leaning nationalist president. By chance, Cornell’s department of government employed a young professor, George Kahin, who was the world’s leading expert on contemporary Indonesia, and had been an active supporter of the