Brains in the Family John Strachey, whom I never met,
always man- aged to come across to me as a good man with a good brain, and I choose to regard his recorded mistakes as evidence of pragmatic energy; per- haps because I feel I liked him, as 1 gather most people did. Anyway, I shared his infatuation with the Soviet experiment at the time, and in the end I'm fairly sure we'll all agree it amounted to something (pace the Grand Duke Vladimir). The Mosley thing seems foolish now, but Mos- ley at the time was regarded by all kinds of people as a flaming spear of democratic Socialism, because for a while he was. It's easiest of all to apologise for that ground-nuts business. Certainly it was mistaken and expensive; but it was launched with the most impeccable motive —to feed the hungry. And at a mere twelve million pounds, it surely looks good beside, say, Blue Streak or Suez or Cyprus, where the motives were hardly so clear or pure. Strachey's last contact with this office was a few months ago, when he was moving house and asked the Spectator to house his father's papers. He was still a shareholder in the Spectator at the time of his death. His father, John St. Loe Strachey, in- cidentally, had an odd influence on my life. In 1918 he wrote a little technical book on building houses with pise. de terre, a process in which you build some wooden shuttering and simply trample earth into it till it goes rock-hard. For years after finding this book in the Thirties, I was a pise de terre bore, and some day I'm going to try it.
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