1956–1957

Government ministers are talking of communist plots to poison the water supplies and overthrow the government. We are expecting new arrests, but they have cried ‘wolf’ too often and there is no panic in the movement. The Congress movement is quietly adopting the Freedom Charter as the definitive statement of aims of the whole liberation struggle.

It could be the best of times except for the regular police raids on homes and offices, with the seizure of books, documents and typewriters. Everything seems tranquil, though the seizures go on without any explanation or discernible purpose.

At the end of 1955 the police arrive at our house again in the early morning. We have been raided and searched several times before, but nothing like this. Plain-clothes police study every book on our shelves. They seem unsure about what they are doing and ask each other questions like: ‘Do we want books by Karl Marx?’ They study every piece of paper they can find in files and drawers and pile up suspect items for confiscation. Amid the political matter on the pile there is a children's tale of a horse, Black Beauty, and A Post-War Plan for the City of London.

They are slow readers and slow to decide. As the morning passes I no longer find it funny and grow angry and hostile. At midday they are still working doggedly through the desk and shelves in our livingroom, with the rest of the house to come.

There are books in every room. It is going to be a long siege. If we do not starve them out they will never finish. The family take their meals and afternoon tea in the kitchen. I take mine on my lap, ostentatiously, watching them at work in the livingroom and offering them nothing. By late afternoon they begin to wilt, with two bedrooms, a garage-junk room and outbuildings still unsearched.

They get ready to pack up and go, but I am not ready. I insist on an itemised receipt for everything in the removal pile. It is dark before they have painstakingly written a receipt for over three hundred books, papers, letters, documents and two typewriters and carried it all away.