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the Establishment,’ I answered.
     
    As a matter of fact, the old boy’s desk had been covered by a mass of official-looking documents with some kind of test report in the middle of them and a formidable sheet of calculations. But I was not going to give him away. He had proved himself a lot more capable of looking after secret papers than any amount of security officers and barbed wire.
     
    ‘Have you any political affiliations?’ Counsel asked.
     
    ‘None whatever.’
     
    ‘You are not a member of the Communist Party?’
     
    ‘Of course not.’
     
    ‘Have you ever been a member?’
     
    Good God, I had completely forgotten it! It was no more important to memory than whether I had worn a red tie or a yellow one. So much had come between. Youth passing into middle age. Six years of exhausting service to my country. The death of my parents. It seems to me, now, impossible that I could have forgotten. Yet I had. The communism I knew was comparable to my other social or anti-social activities. In my conscious mind there was no association between the real, objective communism of every day and my own early follies. Suppression, because I was ashamed of them? It’s possible. In any case I had done my own brain-washing with an efficiency which startles me. How many other discreditable episodes have I conveniently forgotten?
     
    ‘Yes,’ I answered him, utterly horrified.
     
    ‘When did you resign from the party?’
     
    ‘I don’t know.’
     
    ‘I put it to you that you never have resigned.’
     
    My expression must have been guilty as hell - exactly that of a spy who had trusted that his political allegiance would never be ferreted out. In 1938, when I was twenty-one and up at Oxford, communism was a mere protest against Hitler and Mussolini. A fashionable protest. A jest, though an angry one. Some of my contemporaries, I suppose, must have taken it very seriously, for since then they have solemnly exposed the struggles in their blasted consciences. I have no conscience - politically, I mean.
     
    It was hopeless, in the atmosphere of to-day, to explain that I had never resigned my membership because I did not think it of sufficient importance. My silence was damning. I will give the rest of this appalling cross-examination verbatim. I can never forget it.
     
    ‘When did you join the party?’
     
    ‘In 1938.’
     
    ‘What were your activities?’
     
    ‘None - except that I once hoisted the red flag on Magdalen Tower.’
     
    ‘Secretly?’
     
    ‘Of course - though everyone knew I had done it except the authorities.’
     
    ‘That was on the instructions of the party?’
     
    ‘Lord, no! They were very angry. They said it was an irresponsible, diversionary activity.’
     
    ‘But they did not expel you?’
     
    ‘I don’t know. Not at that meeting, anyway.’
     
    ‘Why not?’
     
    ‘They probably thought I might be some use to them in Ecuador.’
     
    ‘And were you?’
     
    ‘No. The war broke out soon after my return, and I was much too busy to bother with them. I suppose they lost track of me.’
     
    ‘What did you do in the war?’
     
    ‘I formed and led an organization of dockers and airport workers on the Pacific coast of South America.’
     
    ‘For what purpose?’
     
    ‘Counter-propaganda and other pro-allied activities.’
     
    ‘And of course you found communists the most useful? Just as in Greece and Jugo-Slavia, for example?’
     
    ‘No. As a matter of fact we didn’t touch the communist organizations at all. Most of my men were Catholics, in name at any rate.’
     
    ‘From whom did you take your orders?’
     
    ‘May I write down the name?’ I asked.
     
    The court was full of newspaper reporters dashing off sheets of shorthand in hysterical excitement. I did not want to compromise the unsuspected and respectable Peruvian citizen who had been my immediate boss.
     
    I was permitted to write the name down, and it was handed up to the magistrates. The