it too and, worse still, knew German. A furious â I heard that â, hissed into my passing ear, confirmed it.
This time the government car was waiting for us. But Erler preferred the walk, head down, hands linked behind his back, eyes fixed on the pavement. Back in Bonn, I sent him a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , which had just come out, and confessed my authorship. When Christmas came round, he spoke kindly of it in the German press. That same December he was elected the official leader of the German parliamentary opposition. Three years later he had died of cancer.
5
To whomsoever it may concern
Everyone over fifty remembers where they were that day, but stretch and heave as I may, I donât remember who I was with. So if you were the distinguished German guest sitting at my left side in St Pancras Town Hall on the night of 22 November 1963, perhaps you will be kind enough to make yourself known. You were undoubtedly distinguished, for why else would the British government have invited you? It is also my memory that our visit to St Pancras Town Hall had been billed as a bit of relaxation for you at the end of a tiring day, a chance for you to sit back and observe our British grass-roots democracy at work.
And grass roots they surely were. The hall was packed to the eaves by a lot of angry people. The yelling was so loud I could barely make out the insults that were being hurled at the platform, let alone translate them for you. Grim-faced stewards with arms folded stood along the walls, and if anyone had broken ranks we could have been in for a free-for-all. I believe we had been offered Special Branch protection, and that you had declined it. I remember wishing I had overruled you. Squashed into the centre stalls, we were a long way from the nearest bolt-hole.
The object of the crowdâs outrage stood on the platform, giving as good as he got. Quintin Hogg, formerly Viscount Hailsham, had disclaimed his peerage to fight the St Marylebone seat in the Tory interest. A fight was what he liked and what he was getting. A month earlier, Harold Macmillan had resigned. A general election loomed. Though the name wonât ring many bells these days, least of all abroad, Quintin Hogg, aka Lord Hailsham, was in 1963 thepugnacious British archetype of a bygone age. Etonian, classicist, wartime soldier, lawyer, mountaineer, homophobe and vociferous Christian conservative, he was above all a political showman, famous for his bombast and pugnacity. In the thirties, in common with many of his party, he had toyed with appeasement before throwing in his lot with Churchill. After the war, he became that archetypal nearly-man of politics everywhere, constantly tipped for high office, only to be left sitting in the waiting room â but tonight, and to the end of his long life, the upper-class British brawler the electorate loved to hate.
I no longer remember Hoggâs points of argument that night, if I even got to hear them above the tumult. But I remember, as anyone would in those days, his red-faced truculence, his too-short trousers and black lace-up boots set apart like a wrestlerâs, his puffy, agricultural face and curled fists; and, yes, that booming upper-class roar prevailing against the crowdâs howls that I was trying to translate for the benefit of whoever I was accompanying.
Enter left of stage a Shakespearean messenger. I remember a small, grey man, half on tiptoe. He sidles up to Hogg and murmurs into his right ear. Hoggâs arms, until now flailing in remonstrance or derision, flop to his sides. His eyes close, and open. He tilts his strangely elongated head to hear again the words that are being murmured to him. The Churchillian glower is replaced by disbelief, then utter surrender. In a humbled voice he excuses himself, and with the erectness of a man going to the scaffold, exits, followed by the messenger. To a few hopefuls he has quit the field, and they scream their
This time the government car was waiting for us. But Erler preferred the walk, head down, hands linked behind his back, eyes fixed on the pavement. Back in Bonn, I sent him a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , which had just come out, and confessed my authorship. When Christmas came round, he spoke kindly of it in the German press. That same December he was elected the official leader of the German parliamentary opposition. Three years later he had died of cancer.
5
To whomsoever it may concern
Everyone over fifty remembers where they were that day, but stretch and heave as I may, I donât remember who I was with. So if you were the distinguished German guest sitting at my left side in St Pancras Town Hall on the night of 22 November 1963, perhaps you will be kind enough to make yourself known. You were undoubtedly distinguished, for why else would the British government have invited you? It is also my memory that our visit to St Pancras Town Hall had been billed as a bit of relaxation for you at the end of a tiring day, a chance for you to sit back and observe our British grass-roots democracy at work.
And grass roots they surely were. The hall was packed to the eaves by a lot of angry people. The yelling was so loud I could barely make out the insults that were being hurled at the platform, let alone translate them for you. Grim-faced stewards with arms folded stood along the walls, and if anyone had broken ranks we could have been in for a free-for-all. I believe we had been offered Special Branch protection, and that you had declined it. I remember wishing I had overruled you. Squashed into the centre stalls, we were a long way from the nearest bolt-hole.
The object of the crowdâs outrage stood on the platform, giving as good as he got. Quintin Hogg, formerly Viscount Hailsham, had disclaimed his peerage to fight the St Marylebone seat in the Tory interest. A fight was what he liked and what he was getting. A month earlier, Harold Macmillan had resigned. A general election loomed. Though the name wonât ring many bells these days, least of all abroad, Quintin Hogg, aka Lord Hailsham, was in 1963 thepugnacious British archetype of a bygone age. Etonian, classicist, wartime soldier, lawyer, mountaineer, homophobe and vociferous Christian conservative, he was above all a political showman, famous for his bombast and pugnacity. In the thirties, in common with many of his party, he had toyed with appeasement before throwing in his lot with Churchill. After the war, he became that archetypal nearly-man of politics everywhere, constantly tipped for high office, only to be left sitting in the waiting room â but tonight, and to the end of his long life, the upper-class British brawler the electorate loved to hate.
I no longer remember Hoggâs points of argument that night, if I even got to hear them above the tumult. But I remember, as anyone would in those days, his red-faced truculence, his too-short trousers and black lace-up boots set apart like a wrestlerâs, his puffy, agricultural face and curled fists; and, yes, that booming upper-class roar prevailing against the crowdâs howls that I was trying to translate for the benefit of whoever I was accompanying.
Enter left of stage a Shakespearean messenger. I remember a small, grey man, half on tiptoe. He sidles up to Hogg and murmurs into his right ear. Hoggâs arms, until now flailing in remonstrance or derision, flop to his sides. His eyes close, and open. He tilts his strangely elongated head to hear again the words that are being murmured to him. The Churchillian glower is replaced by disbelief, then utter surrender. In a humbled voice he excuses himself, and with the erectness of a man going to the scaffold, exits, followed by the messenger. To a few hopefuls he has quit the field, and they scream their
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