Normal respectable people have almost no idea of the parallel world in which much of the British Left actually live, or certainly used to live. It came as something of a surprise to me after I joined the International Socialists in the late 1960s and was slowly drawn into this strange zone.

Much of this came back to me at the weekend when I read the (to me) hilarious accounts of Jeremy Corbyn’s dinners of cold baked beans, and his austere, serious-minded holidays, spent chugging about on Warsaw Pact motorbikes. The man’s an obvious Roundhead, left over from the New Model Army, with all the unenviable virtues - and even more unenviable disadvantages - of those ferocious and magnificent old soldiers for righteousness.

I know nothing more about the Corbyns than has been published, and have never been invited round for cold beans or hot ones. But the glimpse of his life summoned from my memory a whole world . Its boundaries were marked by great mounds of unsold left-wing papers under the bed, posters for forgotten demonstrations flopping off the walls, reefs and mountain-ranges of undistributed leaflets, surmounted with unfinished, rather horrible meals; more often than not, a neglected lawn and a feeling of perpetual hurry, to a meeting, to a demonstration, to one of the hundreds of gatherings and episodes which the Left-wing faith demands of its scrawny, ill-dressed devotees. You might meet people who had lived in East Berlin or still had friends there, or who had couriered gold and messages for the Comintern. Sometimes in the midst of this there might also be quite a bit of unconventional sex going on (by the standards of the 1960s, though rather restrained now) . In some cases there might also be quite a bit of drink taken, though abstention wouldn’t be frowned on, and in the more exotic, studenty outfits, drugs as well.

I realise that most normal people would be genuinely amazed by this way of life, this milieu in which people don't believe what everyone believes or behave as everyone behaves.

I cannot tell from how deep into this world Mr Corbyn comes. Some sort of clue has been given by various profiles, which have mentioned Mr Corbyn's even more nonconformist brother, the weather forecaster and defiantly anti-warmist Piers, who is sensibly unconvinced by the view that climate change is man-made, an unusual position on the Left. ( I had always assumed they were related, but had never known whom to ask. They definitely are).

Simon Hattenstone, in the Guardian, was one of several reporters who showed that he wasn’t very versed in the language of the Left when he recounted that ‘Corbyn grew up in a politicised family in Shropshire. "Mum and Dad met campaigning on the Spanish civil war. Both were active peace campaigners."'

Um. This is mildly puzzling on the face of it. Though the Corbyn parents are (and what a shame this is) no longer with us and cannot be asked, I don’t think anybody much campaigned for ‘peace’ in the Spanish Civil War. In fact a lot of previously left-wing pacifists (George Orwell among them) abandoned their pacifism about that time. The English left, to a man and woman, were for the Republic and against Franco, and wanted the Republic to win. This couldn't be done through peace. Many went there and proved it with their lives. Others returned wounded and in some cases crippled for life. Such people could still be found in Left-wing London in the 1960s and 1970s, still vigorous and clear-minded.

What about ‘peace campaigning’? Well, sometimes the term is misleading. In the post-1945 world, it generally meant campaigning against *Western* nuclear weapons, not Eastern ones.

This was not least because those who campaigned against Soviet nuclear weapons, in the only places where it mattered, did not usually stay at liberty for very long. Their ideas were greeted with scorn as well as hostility, especially by those Communist governments who were delighted by 'peace' campaigns in NATO countries. Indeed, some of the best pro-deterrence propaganda I have ever seen was posted up in East Berlin department stores in the winter of, I think, 1983 – a cartoon hedgehog wisely refusing a Fox’s smiling suggestion that he abandon his prickles, until the Fox has agreed to have his teeth removed. The same message, less elegantly expressed, was to be found as late as 1991 on banners on the main street of the secret city of Kurchatovsk in Kazakhstan, built by Beria as the headquarters of the USSR’s H-Bomb project.

This ‘peace campaigning’ in Britain took place mainly in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, founded in 1957. I note that what I used to know as ‘the CND symbol’ (brilliantly invented by the English artist Gerald Holtom from the combined semaphore signs for ‘N’ and ‘D’ ) is now known as the ‘peace symbol’. This is a rather broader claim, which might be made for a number of other organisations and movements. If CND had succeeded in its aims, I am not by any means sure that peace would have been the outcome.

Anyway, in this world, life looked very different from most people’s. Irish nationalism was a sort of ally, with varying degrees of reservations. Israel was wrong and the 'Palestinians' were right. Any strike was good. The armed forces were suspect rather than a source of pride. There was, even among Trotskyists supposedly disenchanted with the USSR, an openness to the Socialist world, especially Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Eastern Europe, ruled by men in suits all too like our own governments and plainly unromantic, tended to be only for the Communists.

Which brings me to a rather good first novel which I have just finished, Jo McMillan’s ‘Motherland’ http://www.amazon.com/Motherland-A-Novel-Jo-McMillan/dp/1473611997, the background to which is explained here http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/aug/01/lenin-mum-and-me-my-communist-childhood

From her girlhood, she lived in this odd backwards-facing world in which every loyalty was a disloyalty, and the other way round.

The book (sometimes very funny, sometimes desperately embarrassing and sad, always absorbing and moving) is full of her ineradicable love for her batty, determined Stalinist mother. That mother is a descendant of other Communists, who counted it a betrayal to abandon her earthly faith just because everyone else was leaving and because the USSR kept invading other people’s countries with tanks. I do have a sort of admiration for this indomitable wrongness, never forgetting my own seduction, a conscious rejection and betrayal of everything I had ever been brought up to believe, and so in some ways worse than a false belief I had been born into and nurtured with.

East Germany, of all places, became the refuge of this intense and loopy two-person family, who spent most of the year failing to sell the Communist ‘Morning Star’ to the hostile and baffled people of Tamworth. In Potsdam and East Berlin they were suddenly normal and welcome for a few sunny weeks. Then they had to slog back to Staffordshire and be jeered at and suspected, outcasts for the rest of the year.

Of course, it was not an exact reflection, one world the mirror-image of the other. There was one vital difference. During my many wanderings round the Communist world from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, I would occasionally fall into a feeling of normality. Look, there was food, there was beer, there were normal-looking people going about normal-looking tasks. And then there would be an idol of Lenin, that merciless murderer, or the urgent need to hush one’s voice while speaking, or a banner proclaiming a naked lie, or a parade of tanks with their barrels pointing West, restrained ultimately by the nuclear weapons that CND and the ‘peace’ movement wanted to abolish.

Or one might glimpse , as one walked round East Berlin, granite-faced detachments of the Feliks Dzerzhinski (I won’t attempt the German spelling) Regiment, named after the bloodthirsty founder of the KGB. They had a marching chant whose chorus went ‘Feliks! Dzerzhinski!...You have taught us how to hate!!!” The final word in German was ‘Hass!!!’ which was enunciated with a prolonged and menacing hiss. These were the palace guard of the ‘Socialist Unity Party’, loyal Marxist-Leninists ready to defend Communism to the end if required . They never were required, though I suspect that if the East German leadership had decided to try the Tiananmen Square route out of trouble in 1989, it would have been the Feliks Dzerzhinski boys who would have machine-gunned the crowds in Leipzig. But those leaders – who lived in Western comfort in a compound at Wandlitz, north of Berlin, which was fenced off from their own country much as their own country was fenced off from the West – correctly decided it was wiser just to give in.

Jo McMillan, not unreasonably, did not observe this sort of thing, or the Stasi secret police ( at least as a named organisation, for those who lived under its gaze were wiser not to name it) , in her childhood and teenage visits. But lurking in her story are brief flashes of the true, horrible and sinister characteristics of the ‘German Democratic Republic’, like some deadly alligator glimpsed for the occasional moment among waterweeds, then invisible again, then a little closer. You will find these for yourself if and when you read it, and I urge you to. I think it is enough to say that her teenage East German friend, an elusive but very credible character in the book, who jeers at the appalling dress sense of Western communists, whose clothes, she says, look as if they have already been worn by at least two other people of entirely different shapes, has a better idea of what is going on this poisoned paradise than the narrator does, let alone her deluded but devoted mother.

Even so, it would be wise not to forget that such a place existed, that real and well-intentioned human beings admired it, that (as I keep pointing out) many of its policies and characteristics (especially concerning secondary education and the family) have since been introduced here. A country, such as ours, which has a Ministry of Justice and a Ministry of Culture, which is increasingly being deserted by its educated professionals, which makes divorce easier than breaking a car-leasing agreement and which is dedicated to separating children from their mothers at the earliest possible opportunity, such a country should be careful about laughing at people who admired such things 40 years ago, but at least knew they were eccentric.