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The Society of Malaŵi Journal

friends in 1995, he observed: “Three years after these were written, I spent the summer
in Bosnia when its hills sparkled with the slogan “Bratsvo i Jedintsvo” – “Brotherhood
and Unity.”

A British propaganda leaflet, picked up in Burma by Shepperson, which had
been dropped in quantity over Japanese troops in the Kabaw Valley in 1944
exhorting them (in Japanese on verso) to surrender: “Fifty thousand corpses –
your comrades - are now stripped clean on the rolling hills of Burma…defeat in
battle, retreat, starvation, death – this is what lies ahead of you…when you lie in
heaps of dead just like your comrades who went to their deaths continually
tormented by maggots and white ants, and who were left behind in the jungle.”

Likely the poet with whom, in my view, George related most closely was the
so-called “peasant poet” John Clare (1793-1864) who was born in Helpston, a village
not far from George’s own birthplace in Peterborough. Few could visit George during
his retirement at Orton Wistow without being urged to drive him to visit Clare’s
birthplace to experience a personally conducted tour. It appears George developed a
deep personal empathy with the young poet’s anguish at the enclosure of the common
land surrounding Helpston around the1820s, with the concomitant destruction of
ancient woodlands and boundaries and with access rigorously denied by the new
owners: the ‘landed gentry’. Possibly such deep concerns, in part at least, informed
George’s own early socialist leanings and activism.
One Friday morning, over ten years ago now, George asked me whether I had
ever read the Communist Manifesto. I answered in the negative on the slim grounds
that having attempted Marx’s Das Kapital in my early ‘teens, my curiosity had been
severely dampened. George produced a copy from his shelves and asked me to read it
for discussion at our next meeting. Having subsequently discussed it and received a
most informative peroration from George, he invited me to keep the manifesto. He then
produced some papers from a file lying on a nearby chair which he handed me to read
with the comment “I don’t the least mind what happens after I go, but I would be most
grateful if you didn’t mention this to anyone during my lifetime”. The topmost flimsy
he handed me was a carbon copy of a letter he had typed to the American Ambassador
in London. Dated in the early 1950s, it appeared George had been denied a visa to the
USA on account of his past affiliation with the Communist Party and consequently he
had written this letter in vindication. George detailed his pre-War Party membership
with precision, confirmed his resignation when he was mobilised and later
commissioned into the Northamptonshire Regiment, and of his having later re-joined
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