1938–1939

Some time later I made a move to track down the Communist Party. It proved more difficult than I had expected. There were no addresses in telephone or street directories. I asked around among people who might know. Most of them were rather cagey.

Someone suggested that I try the People's Bookshop. A single small shop front window gave into a shop not much wider than a passage, immediately next door to the Kerk Street entrance of the Labour Party Club in central Johannesburg, which, in turn, adjoined the Trades Hall, HQ of the Trades and Labour Council. The shop window held a collection of sun-yellowed pamphlets with curling pages and faded copies of some of the ‘Little Lenin Library’ series. Inside, the shelves held Left Book Club publications, copies of Labour Monthly, China Today, Moscow News, works by Marx and Lenin in English, German and Russian … and not much else.

Its staff of young women regarded me with caution, as if I were there for dubious purposes. I made some small purchases and then broached the subject of the Communist Party. The woman I asked looked somewhat startled, but said she would try to get word to the district secretary. I left my phone number, and a man calling himself Jack Watts duly phoned and suggested we meet at the bookshop at closing time. He turned out to be perhaps a few years older than I, a recent arrival from Britain. We fenced. I wanted to know all about the party and he wanted to know all about me and why I wanted to know. I must have established my bona fides because he identified himself as the district secretary and agreed to pass on my application for membership.

I had expected the party secretary to be someone fairly well-known in Left circles, but none of my colleagues had ever heard of him. It was a long time before I discovered that Watts was a pseudonym, or ‘party name’, as I learnt to call it. His real name was Gathercole and, like most of the white party members at the time, he considered himself to be semi-underground – or, as the jargon had it, ‘concealed’.