I CAME to England from the West Indies to go to university in 1946, just after the second world war. I chose Bristol, and decided to do philosophy, botany and chemistry. I was very interested in philosophical questions; I wasn’t particularly interested in botany but I had been impressed by my botany teacher in Trinidad. I can’t imagine why I chose chemistry. I wish I had chosen history: I don’t think politics was on the curriculum in 1946.

By November 1947, I was studying Marxism and complaining that Marx, Engels and Lenin wrote very badly although Stalin wrote well. Of course, it was their translators who deserved the credit or blame. Fortunately, Professor C E M Joad, in his books, explained the philosophy of dialectical materialism very clearly.

In December that year, I read The Socialist Sixth of the World by Hewlett Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury, also known as the Red Dean; the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, and The Case for Conservatism by Quintin Hogg. And my uncle Rufus sent me a copy of Professor A N Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas for Christmas. It had taken him 15 years to read and understand, and he wished me luck.

I was so impressed by the Red Dean’s book that I wanted to go to the Soviet Union and see for myself. I wrote to the author, and he suggested I got in touch with the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR.

They told me that there were, at that time, no facilities for visits to the Soviet Union because of the devastation caused by the war. So I wrote to Stalin, asking him if he could use his influence to get me a visa. The bastard never replied. By the time I got to Moscow in January 1956, Uncle Joe had been dead for nearly three years.
 
On 13 March 1948, I wrote to tell my parents that I had joined the Communist Party. I had joined after a meeting in February about the Czech crisis addressed by D N Pritt KC MP.
 
A Conservative to begin with, Pritt had moved steadily leftwards. He had joined the Liberal Party on 1914, and the Labour Party in 1918. In 1935 he was elected MP for Hammersmith North, and in 1936 he was made a member of the Labour Party’s Executive Committee. In 1940, he was expelled from the party for defending the Soviet invasion of Finland but continued to sit as an independent Labour MP. At the 1945 general election, he was re-elected to Parliament with a large majority. I remember him well.

Today Bristol University is huge, with about 5,000 students. In my day, it was quite small. I was soon the secretary of the 26-strong student branch of the Communist Party, and I sold my wife-to-be a copy of the Daily Worker on her first day at the university.

She soon joined me in the student branch of the party and became a committee member of the Socialist Society, which we called SocSoc. We have now been together for 70 years, and have had an exceptionally varied and interesting, sometimes dangerous, communist life together. More in a fortnight’s time.