The Family File

THE FAMILY FILE

MARK AARONS

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane

Melbourne Victoria 3000 Australia

email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com

http://www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright © Mark Aarons 2010

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Aarons, Mark.

The family file / Mark Aarons.

ISBN: 9781863954815 (pbk.)

Includes bibliographical references.

Aarons family. Communists--Australia.

335.40994

The ASIO file on the cover is from Laurie Aarons’s 85-volume intelligence dossier. Cover photo (above): Laurie Aarons (left) and Victorian ALP leader, Bill Hartley. Cover photo (below): Mark Aarons (left) and Pierre Vicary. Both photos were taken by ASIO surveillance photographers as part of Operation Shiver on 11 June 1971 outside CPA national headquarters, 168 Day Street, Sydney.

Book design by Thomas Deverall

Typeset by Duncan Blachford

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

ASIO’s Aarons Family Tree

Introduction

THE FAMILY FILE

Acknowledgements

Sources

ABBREVIATIONS

ASIO’s Aarons family tree, developed in the 1960s to sort out the spy-catchers’ confusions about the family’s genealogy. Note the handwritten annotations indicating the ASIO file number of each family member.

INTRODUCTION

The Aarons family was active in revolutionary socialist politics for most of the twentieth century. Four generations eventually were involved, many in senior positions. From the early 1900s my great-grandparents, grandfather and great-aunt were members of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). They belonged to the revolutionary tendency and opposed the ‘reformists’ who wanted to introduce socialism gradually through parliamentary elections.

The first generation, Louis and Jane Aarons, became disillusioned with the ALP during the First World War and joined the Victorian Socialist Party and then the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) at its inception in 1920–21. They were followed by their children, Sam, Millie and Miriam; grandchildren, Laurie, Eric, June and Gerald; and finally, their great-grandchildren, Brian, John and me.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the family’s inspiration. After decades of debate about how to create and build a ‘workers’ state’, finally there was a model to follow. Soviet Russia inspired the international revolutionary socialist movement as a concrete alternative to capitalism, with its ‘boom–bust’ cycles and periodic wars that manipulated nationalism to convince workers to kill each other. The futile killing machine of the First World War was the immediate catalyst to the Bolsheviks’ victory. But that was only one of several revolutionary upheavals at this time.

In the aftermath of these bloody events, the international communist movement was created, which paid dutiful respect to the only party that had succeeded in overthrowing capitalism. In reality, Russia’s communists dominated. This was logical to Western communists, as the Great Depression seemingly confirmed capitalism’s instability and inherent evil, while the Soviet Union was seen as a beacon of progress. The growth of fascism, especially in Hitler’s Germany, also reinforced their conviction that only revolutionary socialism offered a viable alternative to poverty, war and repression. The slaughter of the Second World War, especially the Nazis’ mass killings, underlined this. Communists, however, remained oblivious to the brutal crimes committed in the name of the cause that inspired their idealism.

For five decades the Aarons family was one of the principal targets of successive security and intelligence agencies because we proudly espoused the cause of revolutionary change to replace Australia’s political, social and economic system with one based on the communist ideal. From the late 1920s to the late 1970s and beyond, several intelligence agencies pursued the family’s subversive activities. The Commonwealth Investigation Branch; the Security Service; the Commonwealth Investigation Service; and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) were supported in this effort by state police Special Branches.

Conservative and Labor federal governments directed these organisations to counter subversion and protect the country from espionage. For over four decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1980s, the principal foe was Soviet intelligence, which is referred to here by its commonly used acronym, the KGB, although it had different names at different times.

My family was a major focus of numerous intelligence operations, including penetrating the CPA with agents in order to purloin documents and overhear conversations, tapping our telephones, and physically following, photographing and filming us. According to a former ASIO deputy director-general, by the 1960s there was at least one agent in every CPA branch. Many larger branches contained several and the largest, the Sydney Maritime branch, had at least twelve. On this basis, between 10 and 20 per cent of the membership were in reality secret ASIO plants. This is supported by the declassified files, but the agents’ identities are protected through extensive censorship. Often they were in trusted positions, enabling them to gather extraordinarily accurate intelligence.

Over these years the Aarons family files grew into the largest single collection of intelligence dossiers in Australian history. In researching this book I had the files of thirteen family members declassified using the Archives Act. Introduced by Bob Hawke’s government in 1983, this is an essential part of our democratic right to know how government functions, mandating the public release of Commonwealth records after thirty years. The most recent security files referred to here were created in 1978, but ASIO collected further intelligence on the family until at least the mid-1980s.

For over five decades, the Aarons family was under intense security surveillance; during this time, at least 209 volumes of files, photographs, films and tapes were created, amounting to more than 32,000 pages. My father, Laurie Aarons, accounted for eighty-five volumes of over 14,000 pages. Among ASIO’s thousands of targets there is Laurie, then daylight when it comes to both the size of his file and the coverage of his activities. There probably will never be another security target to match him, nor another family of such longevity and scope in the annals of Australian intelligence history.

Taken as a whole, the family files are a comprehensive account of our lives. It would have been impossible to keep such an extensive diary, even if we had each spent many hours every day recording where we went, who we met and what we said and did. Much of the information in the files is inconsequential dross. Other matters are lost in the mists of time, especially as communists were well-schooled in the use of codes when speaking on telephones. Many transcripts of such conversations are consequently indecipherable.

Much of the intelligence gathered by ASIO concerned things that, from the perspective of 2010, would be seen as unexceptional political activities, such as opposing racism, fighting for better wages and conditions for union members and campaigning against environmental degradation. These were legitimate activities, but ASIO recorded them because they were carried out by ‘subversives’ committed to the overthrow of the constitutional order.

There is a powerful and basically accurate thread running through the family files. It tells the story not just of one family, but of the Australian left in the twentieth century. The idealism that motivated family members reflected the various reasons that drew tens of thousands to the CPA over its seventy-year history. Often such idealism was misplaced and masked terrible political mistakes, excesses and blindness to the crimes committed in communism’s name.

There were also many lasting achievements and contributions. This book is not, however, a definitive history of either the Aarons family or the CPA. Rather, it is an account of the family’s activities in and influence on the CPA’s evolution, partly based on this unique collection of intelligence files, but also on remarkable oral history interviews recorded with family members over several decades, providing eyewitness accounts stretching back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

There are thousands of fascinating stories in the files. Only a few are told here as part of a historical narrative that cannot traverse many otherwise interesting by-ways. For example, there could be an entire chapter on ASIO’s numerous efforts to break up my youthful friendships and romances. These mostly involved ASIO officers approaching the parents of school and university friends to caution that their sons and daughters were consorting with a dangerous subversive. Such warnings invariably received short shrift.

The outline of Australian communism’s many failures is well known, including its four-decade long embrace of Stalinism, its uncritical acceptance of Mao’s ideology in the 1950s and rationalisation or outright denial of Moscow’s and Beijing’s numerous crimes against humanity from the 1920s to the 1960s. The corruption of a number of its leading figures is also widely understood, including ballot rigging in some union elections. The roots of these failures can be traced to the CPA’s inception.

In order to obtain recognition as part of the international communist movement, each national party had to demonstrate adherence to Bolshevism. In effect, this meant importing the harsh methods and clandestine organising techniques of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, which had been developed in the extraordinarily repressive conditions of Tsarist Russia. These included the creation of underground cells and a steely discipline that demanded that members subjugate themselves to ‘democratic centralism’, under which the central apparatus exercised ultimate power.

The Bolsheviks’ methods became ruthless and brutal after they seized power in 1917. In the first instance this was justified in order to crush the Western-backed counter-revolution, but repression all too soon became the main method of governing.

As it did in other communist parties, Marxism-Leninism became the CPA’s touchstone. It was, however, a fatally flawed ideology. Its basic precept was the creation of a truly democratic and egalitarian socialist society by revolutionary means, instituting the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to crush ‘bourgeois capitalism’. Marx had adopted the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the nineteenth century, when modern democracy was still in its infancy in Western Europe. It was in part a reaction to the brutal use of state force against the workers’ movement, most notoriously the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. The dictatorship of the proletariat was therefore posed as the only viable method of replacing the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’. But the concept was ready-made to justify communism’s worst excesses and crimes.

Under Lenin the concept evolved into the dictatorship of one party and under his successor, Josef Stalin, into the dictatorship of one man. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU, the renamed Bolsheviks) substituted itself for the proletariat and, in communist jargon, became ‘the leading force’. From the beginning of Bolshevik power ruthless methods of repression were used, implemented by an unprecedented secret police apparatus that was utilised not only against ‘class enemies’ but also against other strands of the socialist movement.

After Stalin seized control, a process began to ‘Stalinise’ first the CPSU and then all communist parties. This removed the ‘democratic’ from ‘democratic centralism’ and put all power in Stalin’s hands (or those of the general secretary in other parties). Stalinism was accompanied by even more ruthless methods, resulting in brutal purges of Stalin’s opponents, real and imagined, including many devoted communists. The consequence was the Great Terror, in which millions of innocent people were murdered or sent to the gulags to die of starvation, disease and maltreatment. All of this was perpetrated in the name of ‘defending’ socialism, which was supposed to serve the interests of the people.

Like all loyal members of the international communist movement, the CPA became a Stalinist party. This meant adopting Stalin’s concepts, especially the idea of ‘the party line’, which once promulgated by the all-powerful central committee had to be followed by all party members. Suppression of differences of opinion, often by ruthless methods, was the inevitable consequence. Stalin’s ‘infallibility’ was an article of faith for Australian communists until Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of the ‘cult of the personality’ and its criminal consequences.

This was not, however, the entire story of Australian communism. In the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the socialist project, many positive contributions have been obscured. As Laurie Aarons told Caroline Jones in 1987, these included leading bitter industrial struggles to achieve advances in working conditions, such as the forty-hour week and safety on the job, and successful campaigns to improve social services and expand childcare facilities for working families.

For much of its history the CPA was a decisive presence in the trade union movement, exercising influence well beyond its size. Communists helped to revive many moribund unions during the Great Depression and led important struggles to restore living standards. Over the following fifty years communist unionists played important roles in creating an enduring ethos of workplace fairness and redressing the imbalance of power between employers and workers, although some also abused their positions in typically Stalinist fashion.

Communist-influenced unions supported anti-colonial national liberation movements and workers’ struggles around the world. Such campaigns included aiding the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War; opposing Japanese militarism in the late 1930s; assisting Indonesian independence during and after the Second World War and then the East Timorese after Indonesia’s 1975 invasion; actions in solidarity with the Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s; and support for Chilean unionists in the 1970s and 1980s, to mention just a few examples.

Many things that are taken for granted in modern Australia were not widely accepted in the recent past. Communists played prominent roles in supporting the Aboriginal movement for land rights and self-determination and in combating racism against Indigenous communities. Similarly, they campaigned against South Africa’s apartheid regime, at a time when many excused or even espoused it. Many conservatives branded Nelson Mandela as a ‘terrorist’, while communists supported him from the early 1960s.

Revolutionaries were mostly anti-war activists, from the First World War to Vietnam. Sometimes their stance was patently incorrect, for example, when the CPA followed Stalin’s dictate in declaring the Second World War an ‘imperialist conflict’ in 1939. On the other hand, the broad campaign against the unjust war in Vietnam was a high point for communist organising, initially defying the mood of the times. The anti-war position was subsequently endorsed by a majority of Australians, including many who initially supported the war but who were persuaded by persistent arguments over several years. The CPA at times uncritically embraced Vietnam’s communists, who had sometimes used ruthless methods in imposing their rule and then followed the Soviet and Chinese socialist models after their 1975 victory.

Of most significance is the CPA’s decisive break with Stalinism after the mid-1960s. Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ at the CPSU’s twentieth congress in 1956 began the process for a new generation of CPA leaders, including Laurie and Eric Aarons. It was a long and often tortuous journey that ultimately led to the rejection of the Soviet and Chinese Stalinist models and the development of a democratic Australian alternative. These advances were made only through bitter internal struggles that fractured the party’s previously monolithic structure.

In the early 1960s the CPA belatedly sided with Khrushchev against Mao’s attempt to reimpose Stalinist methods on the international communist movement. The majority of Australian communists then took an independent course, in August 1968 condemning Moscow’s crushing of Alexander Dubèek’s Prague Spring. Czechoslovakia was perhaps the last hope for a democratic socialist model that might have posed an attractive alternative to capitalism. The suppression of the Czech reforms was a major setback for the CPA’s emerging democratic model.

Without such a decisive break with its past, however, the CPA would be rightly viewed today as just another Stalinist party, like the majority of communist parties which remained subservient and loyal to either Moscow or Beijing.

This does not, however, entirely exculpate Australian communists. The attempt to transplant a foreign revolutionary ideology from a mainly backward peasant society into an advanced Western nation was inevitably doomed to failure. Yet it is also clear that whenever Australian communists pursued their own independent course, analysing local conditions and applying creative solutions to domestic issues, they attracted wider support.

For example, from the late 1960s communists played an important part in the modern environment movement, especially in providing a union link through the use of green bans on harmful development. They were also influential in building the contemporary feminist and gay and lesbian movements. After 1965 the CPA played a significant role in bringing traditional working-class activists together with such newly emerging social movements, helping to popularise ideas that have contributed to the quality of Australian society.

In the end, however, for much of its history communism was rightly seen as an alien import, controlled by a foreign power. The Soviet Union provided substantial funding and directed the CPA’s political strategies for its first forty-five years. Communists owed a higher loyalty to Moscow, proclaimed in the interests of the ‘workers of the world’.

This led some communists to betray Australia by spying for Soviet intelligence. The details of this have been broadly known since the mid-1950s and the release of Western intelligence files in recent decades has expanded our understanding. This is confirmed here by the previously unpublished confession of the Australian spymaster for the Soviets, Wally Clayton, surreptitiously recorded by Laurie Aarons in 1993 in a final effort to establish the truth after many unsuccessful attempts. Clayton confirmed that his espionage was approved by the CPA’s senior leaders.

This is another powerful thread running through many parts of the family files, helping to explain why so much effort and so many resources were devoted to spying on the CPA generally and the Aarons family specifically. Yet ASIO never found any evidence of spying implicating a family member, although my grandfather, Sam Aarons, was found in possession of a classified government document that could have made him a significant figure in the Royal Commission on Espionage in the mid-1950s.

In the end, despite many stupidities, considerable crudeness and frequent lapses of professionalism, ASIO had a legitimate task. All nation-states require security services to protect their citizens and national security. At its worst, however, some people were victimised by ASIO’s activities. Some communists suffered career setbacks because of ASIO’s interventions, including the father of one of my first girlfriends who was doubly punished in his professional life: firstly for having once belonged to the CPA; then because his daughter went out with me, as documented in our ASIO files. My brother John’s file also contains several examples of attempts to thwart his career when ASIO informed universities of his communist affiliations during job selections.

But for the most part ASIO’s work was conducted within a largely democratic framework, although it frequently crossed the line between professional intelligence agency and political participant by permitting and sometimes encouraging the government to misuse its intelligence for narrow party-political purposes. Following the CPA’s break with Stalinism after the mid-1960s, its work consisted almost entirely of legal political activities within a policy framework of introducing socialism through democratic means. Yet ASIO continued its massive counter-subversion operation for another two decades.

That only changed as a result of a 1983 legal case taken by a CPA member who was employed in the Commonwealth public sector, challenging an adverse ASIO security clearance restricting his access to classified documents. ASIO fought bitterly, but unsuccessfully, in the Security Appeals Tribunal to preserve its power to declare that CPA membership was of itself grounds for an adverse security clearance. ASIO had perpetuated an outdated, even prejudiced, policy for far longer than was actually necessary. The Tribunal’s rejection of its position finally saw the CPA, and therefore the Aarons family, recede as a major security target.

But despite its many faults ASIO stands in contrast to intelligence services in communist countries, which established elaborate networks to intimidate their own citizens and compiled dossiers on millions of innocent people. These agencies were principally instruments of repression and often mass murder. More damning, their immense power was exercised in the name of an apparently noble cause that many firmly believed would take humanity to its highest form of social organisation.

For seventy years the Aarons family threw itself into this cause. What follows is the story of how that cause was betrayed and how the family tried to redeem the cause, and in the process, itself.

Mark Aarons, May Day 2010

THE FAMILY FILE

ONE

Just 52,082 votes ensured that I was born into a warm, loving family with both a mother and father. In September 1951 my father, Laurie Aarons, was preparing to go underground when the referendum to ban the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was easily carried, as was widely expected in those intensely anti-communist times. That bitterly divided September my mother, Carol, was six months pregnant. Prime Minister Robert Menzies was supremely confident of winning his referendum; the CPA’s leaders had realistically come to the same conclusion. Instead, a late swing gave the ‘No’ case victory by the narrowest of possible margins. The decision of 1 per cent of Australians in three states confirmed our democratic values.

It made a huge difference to me. Victory for the ‘Yes’ case would have meant I would not have known my father, perhaps for many years. Like other senior Australian communists, Laurie believed that the ‘Yes’ case would triumph. As secretary of the Newcastle district, where the party had a considerable base in mining and heavy industry, Laurie rightly believed he was on the lists of communist leaders who would be interned without trial if the government declared a state of emergency. His wife and children would have also been interned in this event. The lists of those selected for internment had been compiled by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic counter-espionage and counter-subversion security service formed in early 1949 after the Venona decrypts established the extent of Soviet espionage in Australia.

Communists believed that Menzies’s referendum was the first step towards an Australian dictatorship under which they would be the initial target in a widespread campaign to crush the militant wing of the labour movement. Careful preparations had been made to send key leaders underground to ensure the CPA survived illegality, for many decades if necessary. From underground the party planned to continue its historic struggle to overthrow capitalism and create a revolutionary socialist state.

At home in the working-class Newcastle suburb of Wallsend on the night of 22 September 1951, Carol listened to the referendum count on ABC radio with my older brothers, Brian and John, aged six and four.

Laurie, however, had taken elaborate steps to ‘disappear’ and did not come home that night, only returning the following day once the unanticipated result was clear. How long he could have remained underground, protected by the CPA’s ‘illegal apparatus’, is now simply a matter for historical speculation. Under Menzies’s law he would have been liable for a lengthy term of imprisonment of up to five years for continuing the CPA’s activities in defiance of the ban.

The man who built the apparatus to keep the CPA functioning under illegality was New Zealand-born Wally Clayton, a veteran of clandestine communist activity, having been handpicked by the CPA leadership for this dangerous work early in the Second World War.

When the party was first banned in June 1940 during Menzies’s first period as prime minister, Clayton’s patient work and attention to detail ensured it continued to function effectively with the help of secret members and anonymous supporters. The leadership operated from safe houses, the party newspaper was regularly produced and underground cells functioned in industry and local communities.

Although numerous party members were arrested and gaoled under Menzies’s wartime provisions, the CPA re-emerged far stronger and more influential when the Curtin government lifted the ban in December 1942. The party leadership had learned much from this experience of illegality. Preparations for an underground existence were more sophisticated in 1951 than in 1940, but so too was ASIO. In its first two-and-a-half years ASIO had already effectively penetrated the CPA, instituting comprehensive surveillance and learning many of its deepest secrets.

The immediate reason for ASIO’s establishment was startling evidence gathered by British and American cryptanalysts. A major Soviet blunder during the Second World War had enabled Western code-breakers to partially break Moscow’s hitherto unintelligible ciphers, used to transmit highly secret intelligence gathered by its extensive espionage networks. The decrypted fragments were codenamed Venona.

By 1948 sufficient Soviet cables had been deciphered to allow Western intelligence to build an alarming picture of Soviet espionage in Western countries, including the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia.

The material from Australia indicated there had been serious leaks of classified information, especially top-secret British documents that had been shared with the Department of External Affairs. The Australian army had also uncovered evidence that top-secret military intelligence had been leaked, jeopardising Allied operations against the Japanese.

Furthermore, the leaks compromised American information that had been shared with London and Canberra, including nuclear and missile technologies.

In 1948 the United States downgraded Australia’s access to top-secret intelligence and insisted that Ben Chifley’s Labor government establish an effective, modern security service along the lines of Britain’s MI5. A super-secret investigation of the leaks was conducted by senior MI5 officers, resulting in ASIO’s establishment in March 1949.

Although intriguing reports were published in 1948 about serious breaches of security, the Venona decrypts remained highly guarded secrets until the mid-1990s, following the USSR’s collapse. The partially decoded documents were publicly released from 1995. The Soviet cables between Canberra and Moscow established that Wally Clayton was the KGB’s Australian spymaster.

In September 1951 Laurie knew nothing of Clayton’s work for Soviet intelligence. Less than three years later, however, his political work became inextricably intertwined with Clayton following the defection of the Soviet intelligence officers Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, and the Royal Commission on Espionage. Their relationship persisted until Clayton’s death in 1997. Clayton’s espionage explains much of ASIO’s work over the following decades. The ‘case’, as ASIO codenamed it, dominated the new security service’s operations against the CPA, focused particularly on the illegal apparatus and those who directed its work.

A few months after I was born in the Royal Newcastle Hospital, the CPA brought Laurie back to Sydney after almost six years away from his hometown. At thirty-four he became secretary of the New South Wales branch, the largest and most important party organisation, containing three of its key districts: Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong.

After joining the CPA payroll in 1943, Laurie worked as a party organiser among service personnel, then on the Sydney waterfront, before stints in Adelaide and Newcastle. Returning home in mid-1952 he moved the family into a small asbestosfibro housing commission house at 107 Tangerine Street, Fairfield, where I lived until I was almost seventeen.

In the early 1950s Fairfield was on the cusp of dramatic change. The old world was disappearing, typified by our go-ahead milkman, Col, who ladled our milk from huge churns on his horse-drawn cart into the billycan Carol left on the front porch. I missed Col’s horse when he upgraded to a truck around 1955 and thereafter delivered pasteurised bottled milk. At this time Fairfield became a cauldron of multiculturalism. It was a mainly working-class suburb situated on what was then the city’s far south-western fringe. It was also a major reception area for post-war migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, Italy, Greece, Germany and Holland. When I started at Villawood Public School in 1957 I met kids of many nationalities. I ate my first dill pickles and salami with a Polish boy and played with Russians, Latvians, Croats, Serbs, Italians, Ukrainians and Maltese.

I soon realised there was something different about my family. The brutal crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the bruising brawl between the Soviet and Hungarian water polo teams at the Melbourne Olympics a few weeks later were still fresh in the public mind, although they made little impact on me. But I was quickly buffeted by the hostility of some of my schoolmates, who brought their parents’ fierce anti-communism into the playground. This was especially so for the children of migrants from behind the ‘Iron Curtain’.

Despite my parents’ almost round-the-clock political activities, we lived a mostly ordinary family life. Several things, however, stood us apart from our neighbours, especially Laurie’s frequent overseas absences, notably when he was away for seventeen months from August 1955 until Christmas 1956, attending a clandestine communist training school in Beijing. Otherwise we were basically a normal family, eating a roast dinner most weeks, going on annual family holidays, sleeping out on the beach or beside the Murray River, celebrating birthdays and Christmas like other Aussie families. It was a shock to be exposed to the reality that my loving parents, whom I adored, were not so popular in the wider community, despite the highly respected role Carol played in the school’s Parents and Citizens’ group.

In 1958 Laurie made his first visit to the Soviet Union, returning with a huge pictorial book called Time, Events, People, published on the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. I was inspired by the stories and photographs of the Soviet soldiers depicted in it, and after briefly resisting my entreaties, Laurie made me a wooden rifle.

One day the local Salvation Army band, which regularly played on the corner opposite our house and then canvassed for donations, knocked on our door. I got there with my rifle on my shoulder before Carol and was warmly greeted: ‘Hello sonny, are you an army man?’ I looked up at him and very proudly said: ‘No, I’m a Red Army man.’ At that instant Carol arrived at the door, picked me up by the scruff of the neck and yanked me inside.

Laurie was often a CPA candidate in federal elections and posters featuring his image were prominently pasted on the telegraph poles outside my school. In that visceral way in which children can be cruel,

I recall that some of my schoolmates reacted by singing a ditty based on a popular advertisement for a pest-control service called the Flick Man, which went something like this:

How can you be sure there are no white ants in your floor, borers in your door, silver fish galore? Get a Flick Man, that’s your answer.

Remember one Flick and they’re gone.

This had been reworked to refer instead to: ‘Reds beneath the floor, spies behind the door, communists galore’. They probably had no understanding of the scarring effect it had on me, simply meaning it as a humorous tease. But it reflected the widespread anti-communism they had learned at home.

In spite of such trials I was proud of my parents, even if I did not understand precisely