"Out in the Cold"

Or an Obituary Imminent

Our cell is seriously worried. How did the Americans know? Was the type with the hat pulled down over his ears like a Hollywood reporter really a spy of the F.B.I. or did Comrade Bokkinger just speak too loudly ?

I mean to say, it's hard enough even to hold cell, meetings with square dancing going on in the upper gym, and the exec, getting convivial down below and the slabs becoming colder and colder, but when the Voice of America makes our plans public and the Press Association then splurges them everywhere, and The Dominion gives their message the most prominent position on the cable page, It's a bit thick.

Now I come to think of it, it was just as Mike said, "And the next item on the agenda is the Peace Treaty with Japan," that the type who looked like Alan Ladd, except that he had a bottle of beer in his hip pocket instead of a flask, hove into view and out again.

We were even whispering very softly because we knew that as soon as some cop or reporter heard of our plans for the Spring Offensive Scotland Yard and the F.B.I. would be on to it like a shot. It's too undermining for words to hear your own ideas quoted back at you and worse, twisted in the nasty way that these secular newspapers have.

So it is only in our own interest that you should know that we're not going to advise any vocal opposition to the Treaty; and we may add to the uninitiated, and in all modesty, that when members of the University branch of the Party gave their last trilogy of talks there was considerable public interest, even in the biased dailies.

Certainly not; we intend to tell the probes that they should all, without exception, boost the treaty like mad in public and in private. Every respectable capitalist will then begin to suspect that we've got some ulterior motive and he'll look at the treaty again, and think that someone else will do better out of it than he and before they know where they are, the whole decadent lot will be fighting among themselves. At this stage we'll suggest, ex officio, of course, that there should be only one Allied signatory for the treaty, preferably American. Subtle methods, you see such as the 1936 Constitution advised.

And there were worse inaccuracies in the report, such as the capitalist Press in its death throes always lets slip—look at what Salient, for example, product of an essentially bourgeois university, is saying about Peace Movements. What I actually set out to say in the preceding sentence was that it wasn't Peking where Party delegates from New Zealand, Australia and other parts of Oceania will meet; it was Picton, which is not only nearer, but much cheaper to get to.

So you sec that once again we have been misunderstood; although, as Comrade Bokkinger will insist on saying, that comprises a large part of our justification for existing. And if this little article of mine, which I have sent in all uncensored, should make any of you interested in our branch, you will be very, very welcome at any of our meetings. But do bring a rug because the concrete and the marble slabs are so cold at that time of night.