A Matter of Trust

Once Upon Another Time is Jessica Douglas-Home’s account of the part she herself played in an extraordinary private enterprise which came to be known as ‘the Oxford visitors’. The story began with Julius Tomin, a philosophy teacher who had been ejected from his university position in Czechoslovakia. He continued openly, but unofficially, to teach courses for students expelled from Charles University on political grounds. He and his students were subjected to violence and harassment, and the strict control of access to books imposed by the authorities led to their losing touch entirely with the course of learning in the West. In 1979 Tomin wrote a letter to many Western universities, inviting lecturers to visit and speak at his seminars. Oxford was the only university to respond.

By the time Jessica Douglas-Home got involved there was a regular stream of lecturers going into Czechoslovakia in secret and meeting dissidents, bringing them what comfort they could – carrying books and small sums of money, lecturing to them, taking samizdat work to the West in the hope that it might be published, and relying on the Czech Government’s assertions, for foreign consumption only, that there was freedom of thought and association behind the Iron Curtain. The visitors risked unpleasantness, assault from the police, and deportation. The Czechs risked nearly everything that could be risked – loss of jobs, humiliation, imprisonment, persecution of their families, ostracism and loss of education for their children, even death. Sympathizers sent money when a very high-profile visitor, the Master of Balliol no less, was arrested and deported. A trust was founded, and somehow what amounted to an underground university was established and maintained under the noses of the communist government. Those Westerners who took the risk of going found the most serious and motivated students they had ever encountered, driven by a hunger for learning. Fascinated by this ‘pimpernel’ world, Jessica Douglas-Home offered her own services. Surely philosophy was not the only subject crushed by the system in the Soviet bloc. She was a painter and a theatre designer – she could talk about art, and she could carry books and money as easily as the next visitor. Smuggling books had its amusing side: ultra respectable Westerners crossed the Iron Curtain carrying suitcases with a layer of US dollars on top. Beneath was a layer of pornography. Both these layers could be safely raided by customs officers – the works of Aristotle and St Augustine, and even eventually exam papers to be sat by secret students, were at the bottom. Jessica Douglas-Home’s sombre memoir brings home what it was like to be involved. Each visit required cunning and courage, and reads like the nail-biting opening of a tense and sinister thriller. Those imprisoned in the totalitarian world had no choice other than to take risks or lose what made life meaningful to them. They had decided to refuse to collaborate in the Newspeak pretence that surrounded them, and, in Václav Havel’s resonant phrase, to ‘live in truth’: their Western visitors were struck by the aura of peacefulness and light-heartedness that their choice had brought them. But Western visitors were in no such trap. They were volunteers, walking into danger out of human solidarity with the oppressed, out of a belief in the freedom to study and to read, to paint and to talk, the freedoms they themselves enjoyed. Jessica herself had a busy and fruitful life as a working artist, two young sons, and a husband – Charles Douglas-Home, the editor of The Times – who was ill, and then more ill, and then dying. She could justifiably have judged herself unable to help. Instead she repeatedly crossed the Iron Curtain, and extended her visits to Hungary, and to the even more appalling Romania. The pages of her memoir contain a roll-call of others who did the same, and of the even braver people who received them. The official West was not amused. British ambassadors, with honourable exceptions, were very wary of helping dissidents, and Western cultural organizations had often set up relations with the official culture, the writers’ unions and suchlike of the oppressive governments themselves. It was easy to smear dissidents as parasites when they were denied any employment, and as criminals when thought itself was treated as a crime. It was no accident that 1984 was carried along with philosophy in the visitors’ suitcases. I came across Once Upon Another Time when I was working on a novel, A Desert in Bohemia, which is about moral luck. I was fascinated by a particular question: can one’s moral virtue be influenced by luck? Having the good fortune not to have lived in Eastern Europe I had not been tempted to betray my friends, and was not guilty of doing so. But how might I have behaved given the terrible moral temptations of life east of the Iron Curtain? The complacency of those who have not been put to the test is an ugly thing. Writing a novel is a good way of exploring such a question, but no novel could have the impact of Jessica Douglas-Home’s factual account, no thriller could be more exciting. Is it all over now? The world with an iron curtain across it, which for so long seemed set for eternity, has certainly crumbled. Western visitors with manuscripts folded up small and hidden in their socks played a part in that outcome. But there isn’t a simple happy ending. At the conclusion of her book Jessica Douglas-Home muses on the present:

The world . . . remains as fascinated as ever by the crimes of the Nazis. But it is already forgetting the equally horrific and far more extensive criminality of Communism . . . The forces that have swept across Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall are also sweeping away many of the values for which the dissidents suffered . . .

She asks if the collective memory of the times and places she visited will survive. We can still resist the conspiracy of skewed history. Read this book, and lock it in your memory.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 4 © Jill Paton Walsh 2004