Record of a Friendship

351

Summerhill School

Leiston, Suffolk

My dear Reich,

[ 1952 ]

February 16, 1952

Too often do we get at cross purposes. I simply read The
Troubled Air, by Irwin Shaw, of whom I had never heard. The novel
read as if founded on facts, and in my innocence and ignorance I said
to myself: "Even if it is only partly true, Reich has so many enemies
among doctors, scientists, etc. that friendship with a suspect like myself
just MIGHT happen to harm him." Dammit, man, it was quite an
altruistic motive. You call me a liberal: true. Right, but these days
liberalism is classed with communism, and not only today. In 1920
before I had ever thought about communism I became sponsor for a
German girl who wanted to be naturalised. Months delay till she got it;
the police inspector said: "The delay was because you got that Bolshy
man Neill to sponsor you. " In 192o! Simply because in one line, educa­
tion, I was a rebel I was on the Home Office records as a Bolshy.
Maybe geography makes a difference between us about events. S'hill
is surrounded by U. S.A. bomber bases, and U. S. planes manoeuvre over
our heads daily. We know that if the necessary rearmament is to be the
only factor we shall all have a most dreadful death. And I have never
known how you stand to all this. I don't know if you think that the
West can stop communism in Asia by war instead of by making people
happy and free and well fed so that communism won't have any
attractions.
You say I fear red Fascism in England. I don't now; the people are
almost unanimously against communism of any kind. What I fear is a
war that will probably end in chaos, a good breeding ground for the
worst type of communism. I fear the death of free liberalism in the
name of safety of the State. But the position of a pink person like me
is a poor one, for I don't want red fascism or communism, and I don't
want to see any other fascism grow up to counteract the red kind.
But all this dispute between us never gets anywhere. It just tires us
and saddens us. It isn't our line ...
Yes, it saddens, the more so because I sometimes fear we shall never
meet again. I am not going to try again for a visa, and I see no signs
that things will quieten down in my life time. I get so depressed to think
that all my work for children will be lost for ever in a changed hateful
world. But one sort of consolation at being banned from U.S.A. is that