Just before Christmas 1945, as William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw, awaited execution for treason because of his wartime broadcasts from Germany for Hitler, my father wrote to him. "Our children will grow up", John Beckett told his friend, "to think of you as an honest and courageous martyr in the fight against alien control of our country ... That is how we shall remember you, and what we will tell our people." Joyce replied that he was "deeply touched by what you say of the manner in which your children will be taught to regard me".
It was a promise my father did his best to keep. While he was composing the hardest letter of his life, I was probably sleeping upstairs, as peacefully as a seven-month-old baby can sleep. All Joyce's other fascist friends, including their leader Oswald Mosley and AK Chesterton, who went on to found the National Front, rushed to condemn him. But my father never spoke of Joyce except with affection and respect. Only recently, when the MI5 intercepts on his letters and telephone calls were at last opened, did I discover that this was because he was keeping a promise to an executed comrade.
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