The Blue Field by John Moore

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Our MP
    â€˜Simple folk,’ Mr Chorlton once remarked, ‘often become Socialists because they are poor and others are rich; more complicated people sometimes do so because they cannot bear to be rich while others are poor.’ Our Member of Parliament was one of the latter sort; and we knew quite a lot about him because it had turned out that he was the same M. R. Halliday (Halliday minor) to whom Mr Chorlton had taught the appreciation of Virgil’s hexameters about the year 1919. Old schoolmasters delight to indulge in a complicated sort of detective-game when the names of their ex-pupils get into the papers; and Mr Chorlton, who had an enormous acquaintance among gossipy old dons atOxford, succeeded in piecing together what was probably a fairly accurate history of Mr Halliday’s career.
    It seemed that he was one of those people who are driven into scholarship almost against their will; for he suffered from a slight deformity of his foot, which at school and at Oxford had prevented him from playing the usual games. ‘I’ve had half a dozen boys like that,’ said Mr Chorlton, ‘they slog away at their books with a sort of melancholy fanaticism while all the time they’re eating their hearts out to do the absurd things which footballers do after matches -to run riot in the streets and climb lamp-posts and make away with the helmets of policemen. And when they get Double Firsts and become Presidents of the Union and Senior Wranglers and whatnot it’s an empty triumph because they’d much rather have had a rugger Blue or rowed in the boat-race!’
    Maurice Halliday went down from Oxford with a brilliant reputation, plenty of money, and good prospects in any profession he cared to choose. But he chose to become a Socialist and to bury himself in the office of a Left-wing publisher who clung precariously to the brink of bankruptcy until he finally toppled over the edge in the summer of 1939. Meanwhile Halliday, the unwilling bookworm, had made himself an authority on the social history of England during the Industrial Revolution and had published a fat book on the subject which hardly anybody had read (‘except me,’ said Mr Chorlton. ‘I used to read everything. It’s rather good’). He had also married his employer’s daughter.
    Then the war came, and being debarred by his twisted foot from joining the Forces he spent the next five years in the Ministry of Information: ‘just like his student-days,’ said Mr Chorlton, ‘tied willy-nilly to his desk, with the war like another envied rugger-rag going on outside his study window.’
    In 1945 he had won the Elmbury Division for Labour, by eleven votes after two recounts, and he had already begun to make a reputation as a promising backbencher and in particular as an indefatigable asker of Questions about almost every conceivable subject.
    â€˜So there you are,’ ended Mr Chorlton, ‘we know all about him. But old schoolmasters like me are very foolish really to pursue these inquiries. It is only once in a blue moon that we have the pleasure of teaching a boy who is not a dolt or a blockhead or a rugger hearty or a simple cretin; and almost invariably, when we follow his subsequent career, we discover that he either writes immoral novels or unintelligible poetry or preaches a political doctrine which is highly repugnant to us. These are Time’s revenges upon my miserable profession!’
Mrs Halliday
    We had come across Halliday’s wife through her activities in connexion with the crèche and because she had been searching, in vain so far, for a house in the neighbourhood. She was a brisk, businesslike and self-possessed young woman with a new-laundered smell who looked as if she ought to be a gym-mistress but turned out to be a bluestocking; her extremely attractive head was crammed chock-full of all the latest dogma, she had no doubts about anything under the