As we left, north towards Oxford Street, I gazed back at the statue of Eros, his attempt to leap over the Wall permanently frozen, caught by the concrete and the wire.

2

In my very soul I believe that there is nothing on this earth as wonderful as the land we have inherited from our forefathers. Tomorrow we will mark seven years since the shining Archangel sailed up the Thames to liberate us from Fascism. In those seven short years we have sown the seeds of peace to realize the promise of our ancestors. Capitalism, you see, sees greed and mutual mistrust as the most desirable of human attributes. Communism answers that claim with a belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity. And we have believed it for a very long time – for what was the cry of the French Revolutionaries? Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité. Now I won’t paint a rosy picture of the future. At times it will be difficult. But some day we will be truly free, and that means living in equality and brotherhood.

Anthony Blunt, interviewed on RGB
Station 1, Monday, 17 November 1952

A few weeks later, I walked the same route north to Oxford Street, part of a mass of people trudging slowly with scarves or cotton masks tied over their mouths to keep out the heavy November smog. The few cars on the road sprayed one by one through the gutter, so that regular waves of oily water swept on to the pavement, leaving pools clouded with dirt. It had been less than a month since that day, but so much had changed.

I stopped to look down Regent Street. With their faces covered, the swaddled bodies seemed like a strange crowd of moving shop mannequins, reeling about on the pavement in patterns only they understood. Someone’s shoulder knocked into mine and a man in a raincoat seemed to mumble an apology through his scarf, but before I could say anything he had melted into the throng, disappearing among countless others shambling in every direction. I took a moment to wipe the grime from my face before I set off again.