My father was an anarchist, which was pretty consequence-free for him, because all you have to do is not agree. But my grandfather was a communist, which had all kinds of ramifications. Big stuff like, I don’t know, living in a caravan once and receiving the side-eye while out and about. I never had this first-hand; I only met him once in adulthood, shortly before he died, when I was 17 and he poured me a gin and tonic with so much gin in there wasn’t any room for tonic. “You’ll have to drink some first and then I’ll give you some tonic,” he said, all tetchy, like I was a spoilt young person who wanted their pudding before they’d finished their main course.
At some point I formed the view, almost certainly because my dad said it, that he was the leader of the Communist party of Great Britain, and that persisted until I went to university and met a smartarse who said that over the time period in question – the 20s and 30s – it was a closed organisation of revolutionary cells, and all the leaders ended up in prison. A couple of years later, Google was invented, and this same smartarse said he found it unlikely that my grandfather was in the party at all, unless he worked in heavy engineering, textiles or mining. I took this information back to my father and said, “This didn’t happen, did it?” And he said, “What on earth can you mean?” And I said, “I mean, is this like the time you told the insurance man you’d been burgled when really your stereo was on top of your wardrobe covered in a blanket?” And he said, “Not the Communist party, you nitwit! The Young Communist League.”
Fast-forwarding 20 years, my father is dead, and I wouldn’t be without his mysterious untruths for the world, especially the time he stole some sausages from my mother’s freezer and nobody could work out why, until after sustained interrogation it turned out that he had also stolen a bottle of wine and wanted to keep it cool on his journey home.
Unrelatedly, I was researching Margaret McKay, the Labour MP for Clapham 1964-70, for a compendium of every female MP ever, celebrating 100 years since women’s suffrage. Aged 20, she’d bunked off her weaver’s job, celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Russian revolution from the balcony at the world’s finest ballet, met Lenin’s widow, stayed in her first hotel, and for why? Because she was a member of the Young Communist League. Presumably they had a flat structure because they were communists, but also a very strict unspoken hierarchy because they were Communists, so just from the cargo lists of their boat to Russia in 1927, she was in the top 10.
Anyway, I can now report with complete certainty that my grandfather was not the leader, and with relative certainty that nor was he a member. Thinking maybe the dates were off, I checked the 30s, when he was also not a member, and didn’t bother with the 40s, as by that time he would no longer have been young. I checked whether there was a children’s division – maybe he was leader of the Communist Cubs League? – and there was not.
Myth-making is universal: your grandad wasn’t in the war, yours was not that shoulder you can see in a picture of the Beatles, and oi, over there, yours didn’t have an allotment. If, in some peculiar fetish of middle age, I want the Communist party in my family tree, I’ll have to join it myself.
