Autobiography is apt to be the last refuge of the self-important. I have tried, with doubtful success, not to write one. I have found it impossible to avoid some passages of personal reminiscence, but I claim that their purpose is always didactic or cautionary rather than autobiographical. Anyone who wrote his life-story without inhibitions, as psycho-analytic patients are theoretically supposed to talk, might write an interesting and useful book. But who would have the necessary courage, humility and truthfulness to write such a book? And who would dare to publish it? Without this complete candour, however, it seems useless to publish intimate personal details about oneself - unless, of course, one is convinced of being an exceptionally important or interesting person. I have therefore kept personal information about myself to the minimum that seemed to be relevant or necessary for understanding the intellectual experiences I have to relate and the theory which seems to me to explain them. That minimum has turned out to be more than I could have wished.

When my father died in 1922 I had just left Cambridge and, without intending any disrespect to the great university, or to Eton, where I had studied from 1914 to 1918, or to my parents, I attribute it to a kindly providence rather than to any of them that I was not recognisably a cretin. Emerging from a disharmonious family background, I was certainly a lamentable milksop; I was a mathematical dunce, which had seemed to worry nobody at Eton; I was slightly above the average in most other subjects; and I was a "problem-adult", though not immediately recognisable as such. All of which adds up to something very like the typical hero of the typical autobiographical novel of those days. But kindly providence stepped in again to prevent me from writing one....

My father's death left me, theoretically, free and independent; but it was almost a quarter of a century before I was able to shake off, or at least to come more or less to terms with, the after-effects of the disharmonies I have referred to; and it still seems to me almost miraculous that I was ever able to do so. The first use I made of my independence, after a year or two of feeble false starts, was to join the Labour Party. At the back of my mind was the idea that I would put in years of work if necessary to win some almost hopeless seat, which I would then resign. This would be a way of presenting what would have become, thanks to my efforts, a winnable seat to some hero of the Left who had been hitherto unable, for lack of my financial advantages, to fight an election.

Of the three most celebrated authors whom I have known well, R. H. Tawney, Middleton Murry and George Orwell, I shall particularly stress the importance of Murry. He possessed the most original and brilliant and in some ways the most penetrating mind I have ever known at close quarters; and it is a remarkable fact that, while I have had a number of friends who have been widely admired and lavishly and deservedly praised, Murry has been consistently and often venomously denigrated, misrepresented, or when possible - though this was not so easy - ignored. It is true that, unlike the others, he kept his worst faults on the surface, which may partly explain the amount of venom he aroused. Yet when I think of the faults that were so conspicuously on the surface of those who attacked him I am amazed that they could be so unconscious of the irony. But even if Murry had been wickeder than themselves, how could they fail to recognise at least his intellectual eminence? And it was not only his dishonourable critics who failed. Even such a fine critic as Dr F. R. Leavis, for example, has totally misunderstood Murry's relationship to D. H. Lawrence. If Lawrence was the one great original genius of English literature in my time, Murry was the one critic with the necessary combination of gifts for coping with him, and Lawrence was aware of this, off and on. In the process Murry sometimes made mistakes and sometimes made himself ridiculous. But how can anyone fail to see that this was inevitable in the circumstances?

Although I knew him well for nearly forty years, I find it difficult to describe R. H. Tawney. He moved in a more public and conspicuous field than Orwell or Murry, and I do not feel I ever properly understood or appreciated his achievements. He was only nine years older than Murry, but he seemed to belong to an earlier and less insecure generation. Probably I was too close and he was on too large a scale for me to estimate his true dimensions. As I saw him he was a lovable and nobly disinterested man, and in most respects a wise one; but I think it was a disadvantage that his mind was so serenely compartmented. This is not to decry the contents of the various mansions in his mind; though there were times when the lamb-like Christian humility and the lion-like political aggressiveness seemed to me to coexist rather incongruously. Of his great gifts as a scholar I could not judge, but he had superb taste in literature, and in spite of his prejudice against Murry he was won over when I made him read Murry on Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Rousseau. He also admired Orwell very much, though only up to a point, and Simone Weil almost unreservedly. But neither Murry nor Simone Weil could shake his religious orthodoxy, and he seemed a little uneasy at Orwell's individualistic indifference to political orthodoxy. His spiritual compartment was the Church of England and his political compartment was the Labour Party, and he would not be tempted outside them. Considering that he read very widely and judiciously it surprised me that he seemed to have no interest at all in oriental thought or religion; but perhaps this blind spot was connected with the normal filial resistance to paternal interests, for his father had been a distinguished orientalist.

On one occasion, in 1960, when he was approaching his eightieth birthday, I took him into the country and we passed some little girls riding ponies. I commented on the prevalent revival of interest in horsemanship and the proliferation of pony clubs and riding competitions.

"Very nice for those that can afford it," he growled.

This exhibition of truculence would have been intelligible if we had been looking at a new block of luxury flats, or the cars outside an expensive West End hotel (though it is true, of course, that he might not have thought these things "very nice") but as a reaction to the sight of three little girls on ponies it seemed quaint. I can only account for it as the product of some deep-seated sentimental prejudice, similar to Theodore Dreiser's hostility to "horseback-riding British aristocrats".

And there was something a little unimaginative about Tawney's interpretation of the Christian injunction to visit the sick. In a general way he was disinclined to pay visits and extremely averse to small-talk, but he had only to hear that any of his friends was at home with influenza or ill in hospital and he offered to come and pay a visit. When I was well I could seldom persuade him to come to my house, but when I was ill it was difficult to keep him away; and it is precisely when one is ill and alone in a house that one can most easily dispense with a visitor who is so absent-minded that he is liable at any moment to set himself on fire with his pipe or to burn anything within reach and who, when one is clearing up after his visit, will probably be found to have left his hat or his raincoat behind.

I have said that my re-entry into politics was unimpressive. With my political experience from the 1920s I was well aware that, from any practical point of view, Murry was making an error when he joined the I.L.P. at the end of 1931. But since I was at that time playing Engels to his Marx I was obliged to follow suit. A few years earlier the I.L.P. had been the fashionable headquarters of intellectual socialism. It was believed to wield great influence in the inner councils of the Labour Party and in its paper, The New Leader, all the leading progressives exhibited their talents. (Nobody seemed to mind that it sometimes caused embarrassment in the loyal socialist working-class homes in which it circulated, more especially when it extolled Russia as a paradise of divorce, progressive sex and abortion.) The New Leader in those days was very much what The New Statesman was later to be. And the I.L.P. itself had something of the atmosphere of an Aldermaston march. It even had Bertrand Russell. But by 1931 all this glory had departed, and the I.L.P. was becoming an isolated and rather eccentric body, ripe for Communist infiltration and splitting, both of which were soon to occur. The experience was probably educative for Murry, but for me it was a foregone conclusion. Murry sometimes appeared to me a rather naive Johnny-head-in-air.

I arrived in Barcelona in April 1937 in a mixed state of exaltation and despair and wearing a brand-new ambulance driver's outfit in which a cynical friend in London had pretended to mistake me for one of Hitler's Brownshirts. My exaltation sprang from the thought that I was preparing to risk my life for socialism, or the European working class, or something, and my despair from a more down-to-earth appreciation of my motives: I was making use of Spain as an escape from an impasse in England. I was in Barcelona just long enough to learn that Orwell and his wife were in danger of imprisonment or worse as "Trotskyists", and then proceeded to Valencia where the comrades in charge of the British medical aid services turned out to be an English peer, who might have come straight from Pall Mall, and an Anglo-Italian peeress, who might have come straight from the Lido. With an English friend, Robert Wheeler, I was drafted to an American-run hospital about fifty miles from Madrid, and for the next month or so I spoke to scarcely anyone except Americans, nearly all of whom came from New York and, to my surprise, talked Yiddish among themselves. There were not many patients in the hospital, but there was one whom everyone dreaded handling and of course it was to Robert and myself, as newcomers, that the job was given.

This man was an American International Brigader at whose feet a grenade had exploded. His eyes, I think, were destroyed, as his face certainly was; and there appeared to be no part of the front of his body from head to feet that was not disfigured and in pain. It had been decided that he should be carried down to the courtyard every day to get the sun, and Robert and I had to do it. He kept up an almost ceaseless and barely intelligible lamentation even when undisturbed, and I find my memory jibs at recalling the effort it required to grasp him round the waist and haul him from his bed on to a stretcher. In pulling back the bed-clothes, if the sheet brushed against his foot he would scream, "My toes! My toes! Damn you!" and it seemed beyond the limit of horror that a man whose face and body had been pulped should be sensitive even in his toes. This was my first lesson, which was later to be heavily reinforced at the front, in the distinction between squeamishness and sympathy. I never lost my squeamishness about wounds, but my capacity for sympathy became almost atrophied. What I felt was more like horror than sympathy or pity. Or rather, I learned to my shame, that pity is not incompatible with a feeling of reproach against a man for having got wounded. He seems a bird of ill omen, a bearer of evil tidings. "Look what has happened to me. It could happen to you too."

During the next three weeks the Popular Army made a flank attack upon the forces investing Madrid. The attack was successful at first and captured three villages, but two of them were lost again when Franco counter-attacked. By any standards this was a considerable battle, with very large numbers engaged on both sides and with artillery barrages, tanks and large-scale fighting in the air. According to Mr Hugh Thomas the Republican losses were 25,000 men killed around Brunete and 100 aircraft shot down. This means, according to his figures, that one in seven of all the Republicans killed in action during the two-and-a-half years of war were killed in this battle of three weeks.

Most of the time I had a fairly clear idea of what I was supposed to be doing. There was a headquarters for ambulances among some trees outside Villanueva de la Canada, one of the three captured villages, where there were some abandoned fascist trenches which made a useful air-raid shelter. From there I would be sent to dressing stations to collect wounded men and drive them to one or other of the Escorial hospitals about twenty miles away. The badly wounded were usually more or less comatose, either from shock or from injections given them at the dressing station. Many of my journeys were at night; it was a second or third class road, filled with shell holes and usually thronged with military traffic; and lights were forbidden. Since I got no regular sleep during the whole three weeks I was sometimes obliged to pull up and go to sleep in order to avoid dozing off at the wheel; and I did this with complete callousness, giving no thought at all for the state of the wounded men in the ambulance. If an aeroplane flew over, the more conscious among them would begin shouting to me: "Hombre! We shall be bombed! Drive on! Do you want to kill us all?' But I was at a point of fatigue where I believe I wouldn't have stirred if I had been sitting on a bonfire which I knew someone was setting light to.

Being halfway between Valencia and Madrid, the hospital was often used as a port of call by nondescript people who had come to Spain with vaguely helpful or cryptically political intentions. One of these, a young English Communist or fellow traveller, found some priest's vestments in our disused chapel. He amused himself by dressing up and playing the fool in them, intending no doubt to do some anti-religious propaganda. Then he began to ring the chapel bell. Whereupon an old man working in the garden rushed in with bulging eyes, chattering teeth, almost foaming at the mouth, and snatched the rope away from him. This presumably showed that the bell was an intolerable reminder of hated religious tyranny. But I suppose it is also possible that it was a protest against sacrilege. If it had merely been because the bell was normally used for some other purpose, such as a fire alarm, the old man's frenzy would be inexplicable.

After six months in Spain I was beginning to feel that there was no place for me as an organiser unless I was a Communist or prepared to be a Communist stooge. It would have been easy to get back into the front line ambulance service before the battle of Teruel, and equally easy to take the frequently offered advice: "A man like you is wasted out here. You ought to be back in England doing propaganda." In the end I did neither. I went back to England, but not to "do propaganda", an activity for which I had developed an insuperable distaste. I got in touch in London with the Quakers' Spanish relief organisation and returned to Barcelona to work for it.

Looking through my correspondence of 1937, I acquit myself of exaggerating the awkwardness and ambiguity of my position at the convalescent hospital. Was I a lieutenant of the International Brigade Service Sanitaire or was I a civilian representative of the voluntary British medical aid Organisation?

It seemed that I was registered as the former at the International Brigade headquarters, though without ever having enlisted or, still less, having sought promotion. I have copies of letters I wrote insisting that I must know which of several warring organisations was really responsible for the hospital. But I never found out. However, I must also acquit the International Brigade Service Sanitaire of any attempt to coerce me personally. I returned to England with a handsome testimonial from them in which I am thanked for `very good work on all the fronts' and for being "a very good anti-fascist" and further, by what I hope is a typing error, for "very good work in building up the English convalescent hospital".

Since I was there in April 1937 Barcelona had had a civil war of its own within the civil war. The best description of this is in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Its immediate result was the liquidation of an independent communist party, the P.O.U.M. But its ultimate effect was the destruction of the widespread and powerful Anarchist movement. After which Stalin, the real author of the war within the war, had the remainder of the republicans under his thumb. His sale of munitions to the republican Government had been made conditional upon this purge....

Within Spain, however, from mid-1937 to the end of the war in the spring of 1939, the prestige of Stalinism was such that any foreigner who was not a Communist was made to feel at best an outsider and at worst a potential victim of the political police. In this shadowy and impalpable but all-pervading reign of terror the business-like Quaker organisation was an oasis of sanity. Its atmosphere was not particularly inspiring, but it was almost the only foreign organisation in which you knew for certain that everybody had a definite job and was doing it and in which there were no nondescript hangers-on with nominal jobs or none but who nevertheless seemed to be in some mysterious way "on the inside". It was the one organisation in which you felt sure that nobody was a Stalinist heresy-hunter.

The Quakers were running milk canteens for mothers and children in Barcelona and throughout Catalonia, which required a well-organised transport and distribution system. In addition to their own vehicles they had eighteen lorries driven by Spanish carabiniers who had been put at their disposal by the Government: and it was my job to organise the transport service. There was also a very large consignment of flour, a gift from America, to be collected from the railway goods yard and delivered to the available bakeries. As a result, we were able to provide a substantial bread ration every day to about 80,000 schoolchildren. In 1937 I had had a brief glimpse during the Brunete battles of the exciting aspect of the war. Now I was to see for months on end the other and less publicised aspect. The million or more inhabitants of Barcelona were living mainly on chick-peas and dried cod. (The sight of enormous cakes of powdery dried cod being dumped on to the pavement from lorries in a cloud of mixed dust and cod-powder was enough to destroy the appetite of anyone not on the verge of starvation.) There was hardly any soap or tobacco. How it is possible to keep oneself or one's clothes clean without soap I do not know, but on the whole people did not look dirty, though faces had a dry papery look and white clothes became a tired-looking pale grey. Cigarette ends were hoarded and men combed the streets for them. I was sometimes reduced to buying asthma cigarettes from a chemist's.

He (Stalin) dispatched to Spain, together with military instructors, agents of the political police, experts at purging and heresy-hunting, who established their own reign of terror in the ranks of the republicans. . . . The prime motive behind all these doings was Stalin's desire to preserve for the Spanish Popular Front its republican respectability and to avoid antagonising the British and French governments. He saved nobody's respectability and he antagonised everybody.

The intellectuals were hard at work everywhere. Ernest Hemingway also wrote a Spanish war novel, and one of the products of his tour of Spain in 1937 was an inspirational article describing the poor man whom I had had to carry up and down stairs at the American hospital. "We must organise the intellectuals" was the slogan of Willi Muenzenberg, a famous or notorious character of those days, a one-time agent of the Comintern and the great expert at launching innocents' committees or `fronts'. These were committees formed for some worthy ostensible purpose - to feed refugees or help the victims of fascism - but whose real purpose was Communist propaganda, the placing of trusted Communist supporters in key positions, and sometimes more especially the vilification of any anti-fascists who proved refractory to Communist control. Thus George Orwell, for example, would be described as a man who mistakenly considered himself a democrat but who was "objectively a fascist". Needless to say, the great majority of so-called progressive intellectuals were docile clients, offering no sales-resistance to the products of the Comintern's lie-factories. I think I first became fully aware of all this after the war was over when I saw the shameless over-emphasis upon the importance of `los intelectuales' by all Communists and fellow travellers concerned with relief for the Spanish republicans in the French concentration camps. Another feature of innocents' committees was the list of sponsors on their note-paper. Well-known people in every walk of life would be persuaded to lend their names in support of the worthy ostensible cause ("All we want is your name.") These lists of names, usually an almost identical list, appearing again and again for committee after committee, were described by a sceptic as `the stage army of the good'. It will probably occur to some readers that a similar phenomenon is not unknown in the 1960s.

It is easy to be wise after the event, however, and I am the last person who should throw any stones. I look back with shame and disgust upon my own state of mind in 1938-9, which I had manufactured for myself without the help of any Muenzenberg propaganda. It was not unnatural that I should feel the situation in Europe to be apocalyptic, an irreversible drift towards Armageddon; but what shocks me is that my chief concern was to cut a heroic figure in my own eyes. The fact that in working for the Quakers I was for once doing something useful weighed nothing against my vanity. I had maneuvered myself out of the ambulance service, and had I not done so I should probably have been dead already, killed at Teruel or on the Ebro, which would have fitted better into the heroic pattern. Therefore, as usual I had an uneasy conscience. One day I saw some insults chalked on the wall opposite the Quakers' villa, directed either against us or our carabinero drivers. Their gist was that it was the job of a milksop, an hijo de mama, to distribute milk to children and that it was of no assistance to Barcelona in the struggle against fascism. This filled me with selfish embarrassment and shame. The Government forces were rapidly retreating towards Barcelona, and it was chiefly in order to convince myself of my own bravery that I tried to manufacture pretexts for visiting Quaker installations as near as possible to the danger zone. But in reality, apart from occasional air raids, there was very little military activity at this stage of the war.

My time in Spain came to an end soon after the fall of Barcelona at the end of January 1939. About half the personnel of the Quaker organisation remained behind while the other half, including myself, left for France before Franco's army arrived. We spent about a week or ten days on the roads between Barcelona and the Pyrenees, and we did one useful thing in setting up roadside canteens for the refugees. Apart from the entire republican army from the Ebro front there were nearly five hundred thousand civilian refugees.

I finally disembarked from this cruiser at Naples in the summer of 1945, some time after the end of the war in Europe. During nearly two years of psychological strain and social ups and downs in the French Navy I had been a passive spectator at the almost bloodless "liberation" of Corsica in 1943 and the almost equally bloodless landings in the south of France in 1944. One of our contributions to the latter was a bombardment of the harbour of Cannes. An obvious target appeared to be a concentration of armoured vehicles on the quay, but we learned afterwards that we had damaged some of the Cannes municipal dust-carts. For all this I received two promotions and a Croix de Guerre. When I recollect that during 1944 we were frequently alongside at Mers-el-Kebir and that our gangway was precisely opposite the monument to the French sailors killed by Admiral Somerville's bombardment, and that I was his scapegoat, I feel that perhaps I did really deserve both the medal and the promotions. Anyway, I was in a state verging on nervous collapse when I finally disembarked at Naples.

He (Julian Bell) mentioned that Richard Rees had "had his dose of horrors, evacuating badly wounded patients to a rear hospital about a hundred miles off. It was a grim story-not possible to write." What he chose not to let her know was that this was one of the occasions when he had shared the driving with Rees... Julian, with his exuberance and vitality and unflagging spirit, brightened his life immeasurably. Rees, of course, saw him much more often, and he was similarly impressed. It seemed to him that Julian was having the most wonderful time of his life. He was extremely serious about his work - down to the smallest details - determined to do whatever had to be done with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of fuss. At the same time he was enjoying it all, observing, making suggestions, explaining to Rees his idea of "Socialism from above" as they drove across the battlefields, being unmistakably "upper class" in his manner-but Julian never tried to be anything other than what he was, and he felt no need or desire to pretend to be a member of the proletariat. He had come to Spain, hoping to be in the midst of a major battle, and it turned out that he was in a better position as an ambulance driver to see what was going on than if he had been a soldier in the British Battalion.