Ya ya ya, your father's a Communist! The girls at my school in Melbourne in the late 1940s liked to taunt the oddballs in their midst; other targets were orphans (Ya ya ya, your father died in the war!) and Jews. My father was not in fact a Communist, he was an independent, a maverick who ran the Australian Council for Civil Liberties as a front organisation for himself, I thought, though others said for the Communists. It might have been easier for us if he had been a Party member, since that would have provided ready-made comrades and perhaps even an income, which in my father's unemployed state was notably lacking. I asked him early on (though without getting a serious answer) why we didn't move to Russia, if, as he seemed to think, things were better there.

LRB 8 February 2007 | PDF Download