For a whole year, when I was twelve, I tramped every Friday night down the road and over the railway line to the home of a Mr and Mrs Criddle (he was a director of the sugar firm, Tate and Lyle), where I listened to numerous bearded visitors singing the praises of the USSR and discussing the historical figures who had shaped the great October Revolution. 

At Mr Criddle’s I learnt about Stalin (little Zozo), who had suffered a satisfactorily Dickensian childhood, his mother being a half-wit, his father a drunken brute, but things trailed off after that. Apart from Trotsky and the ice-pick, I never really warmed to Lenin or Kalinin or Dzerzhinksy.

I might even