My father's favourite bookshop was owned by his blind friend, Mr Garvie, but it was some years before I appreciated the kind of books he stocked. I did get round to it later on. We became good friends. I enjoyed reading to him from A History of the Working Classes Throughout the Ages and listening to what he had to say. He provided the kind of literature the book-hungry activists of the local Labour and Trade Union Movement could find nowhere else.

The local ILP, with the redoubtable David Kirkwood from the Clyde as a speaker, decided to hold a "peace by negotiation" meeting outside a military camp in Kinross. There were both soldiers and civilians gathered around their soap-box platform. As soon as my father, who was chairing the meeting, mounted the box, a red-faced, burly figure stalked to the front and literally threw him over the heads of the crowd. David Kirkwood at once jumped on the soap-box and with a voice of thunder shouted, "If there is a better man than me among you, let him come and take this platform." Davie was the hero of the hour: I loved his form of "pacifism". Many ILP members were pacifists, in the strict sense, but others, including my father, took the same stance as a nineteen-year-old South Wales miner, Aneurin Bevan, who, when brought before the local magistrates' court for failing to respond to his call-up papers said, "I am not and never have been a conscientious objector. I will fight, but I will choose my own enemy and my own battlefield and I won't have you do it for me."

Although the General Strike lasted only ten days the miners held out from April until December. Until the June examinations were over I was chained to my books, but I worked with a darkness around me. What was happening in the coalfield? How were they managing? Once I was free to go home to Lochgelly my spirits rose. When you are in the thick of a fight there is a certain exhilaration that keeps you going.

Stanley Baldwin promised that there would be no victimization when the miners went back to work. That was one more piece of deliberate deception. My father was not reinstated - from four months he trudged from pit to pit, turned away everywhere. Uncle Michael was also victimized, and so sadly he came to the decision that the only thing to do was to go off to America.

Even the poorest parents did everything they possibly could to send their children to school well wrapped up in cold weather and adequately shod, but there were times when at least half a dozen arrived blue with cold and with leaking footwear. Most members of the staff considered themselves a cut above the colliers' children they were teaching and were Conservative in their views, but one thing I did appreciate was the trouble they took to keep a cupboard well stocked with the cast-off clothes and footwear collected from the homes of better-off children.

A young dark girl took the rostrum, a puckish figure with a mop of thick black hair thrown impatiently aside, brown eyes flashing, body and arms moving in rapid gestures, words pouring from her mouth in Scottish accent and vigorous phrases, sometimes with sarcasm which equalled Shinwell's. It was Jennie Lee making her first speech at an ILP conference. And what a speech it was.

Winston Churchill was at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer and I directed my attack mainly against his budget proposals. Later in the day, in the Smoking Room, he came over to me and congratulated me on my speech. He assured me that we both wanted the same thing, only we had different notions of how to get it. The richer the rich became, the more able they would be to help the poor. That was his theme and he said he would send me a book that would explain everything to me. The book duly arrived. It was The American Omen by Garet Garrett, a right-wing economist who was despised by most of us for his extreme views.

One of my infuriating memories of this time, arising from the greatly varying educational and income standards of Labour Members of Parliament, was Beatrice Webb taking it upon herself to teach the wives of the poorer Labour MPs how to dress, how to curtsey, how to behave generally when invited to Buckingham Palace or any other grand social occasion. I was saddened that our poor women should have been so bamboozled by the Webbs. They had their own natural dignity, their own best clothes for special occasions. But these things Mrs. Webb did not understand.

H. G. Wells was one of the bright guiding stars of my youth. I read avidly everything he wrote. That day in Parliament there had been a violent debate about all the issues that meant most to me - the cruelty and indignities of the Means Test, failure to get on with the building of urgently needed houses, schools and hospitals, and all this against a background of hundreds of thousands of unemployed building workers. I arrived at Great College Street brimming over with indignation. H. G. Wells brushed aside anything I tried to say, returning obsessively to the teaching of history in schools. We began glaring at one another with growing hostility. So this was H. G. Wells, this dumpy little man with the squeaky voice, totally indifferent to the problems that concerned the great mass of ordinary people.

She is pretty. She has brains. She follows Maxton, quarrels with the Labour Party, hates MacDonald; loathes Snowden; loves Russia.

Bevan and Jennie Lee stayed with us in Belgrade for a day or two. Plump, with a florid face and light blue "Welsh" eyes, prematurely gray, Bevan expounded his views slowly and patiently. But along with that went an inquiring mind, quick response, and sparkling wit. The qualities I most liked in him were the unconventionality of his sharp intelligence and a faith in socialism that was that of a man of the people, primordial, unshakable.

Between Bevan and me there was a curious affinity in our perception of the crisis into which both variants of socialism, Western and Eastern, were plunging. We both believed in moral boundaries in politics, though politics as such neither can nor need be moral. Those boundaries do not coincide with the striving for truth, but they are not totally distinct from it either. The later conjectures and charges that Bevan influenced me are untrue. Those charges were officially denied in Tito's letter to Bevan after accounts with me had been settled.

To the end, Bevan and Jennie Lee stubbornly protested against the pressures brought to bear on me, and he turned for help to the Socialist International. His death in 1960, while I was in prison, hit me like the loss of a very close friend. Other friends had long since abandoned me, and I had been anathematized by many. With me, affinities in viewpoint always blend with personal affection. When I first left prison, I dedicated my book Conversations with Stalin to Bevan, repaying as best I could the debt I owed this faithful and constant fighter.

Jennie Lee differed from her husband, not so much in the principles she stood for as in her way of interpreting them. More reserved, not as rhetorical, she was sharper and harder than her husband, who in his early youth had been a miner, whereas she had had a university education. For her, principles were the main thing; for him, testing them was equally important.

Jennie Lee came twice to Belgrade on my account, first when I was arrested in 1956 and again when I was released in 1961. The 1956 trip was without question a solace to Stefica and our small circle of sympathizers, but its impact on officials was probably limited to their meting out a "gentler" penalty. Her second trip reinforced our friendship and brought sad memories of Aneurin. We have continued corresponding - infrequently but warmly - to this day. When Stefica and I visited London in 1969, we were in effect guests of hers and under her constant care.

Aneurin and I were at the cottage that Sunday in September when war was declared. We tuned into the one o'clock news for official confirmation that the fight had really begun. We had discussed all this so often and so much. Now at last it had come. Our enemy Hitler had become the national enemy. All those who hated fascism would have their chance to fight back. No more one-sided massing of all the wealth, influence and arms of international reaction against the workers of first one country then another. I thought of Spain. I had a guilty feeling about Spain. I said something to Aneurin that must have indicated the drift of my thoughts. He had been pacing up and down our long, low, white-washed cottage room, for once too excited for words. He stopped walking up and down to rummage in a corner among a disorderly pile of gramophone records. He found what he was looking for. He found records we had not dared to play for more than a year: the marching songs of the Spanish Republican armies.