Alleyn's until his retirement in 1961. In 1931 he began attending meetings of a branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain in Bethnal Green, and canvassed for Joe Vaughan, the CPGB candidate for Bethnal Green South West in that year's general election. In 1932 he joined the party on a probationary basis, which was partly self-imposed, and travelled to the Soviet Union as part of a delegation that also included Barbara Wootton. He also visited Isherwood and Spender in Berlin. He became a full member of the party in 1934. In 1936 he married Hilda Percival (1909–1995), a fellow teacher and CPGB member, with whom he had a son and a daughter (their son, Christopher Upward, became a linguist). During the Second World War the family was evacuated with Upward's school to Cleveleys in Lancashire, where Alleyn's temporarily merged with the nearby Rossall School. Starting in 1942 Upward and his wife began to be investigated by MI5 in relation to their communist activities. Upward remained committed to internationalism and socialism for the rest of his life, although he and Hilda left the CPGB in 1948, believing that it was no longer revolutionary and that its leadership was trying to appease the Labour government. Upward's first novel, Journey to the Border, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1938. It describes in poetic prose the rebellion of a private tutor against his employer and the menacing world of the 1930s, inducing a nightmarish state, and concluding with the recognition that he must join the workers' movement. After this, Upward found it increasingly difficult to write anything, and so in 1952–53 he took a sabbatical year from teaching in order to focus more intently on his writing, but this backfired and resulted in a nervous breakdown. During this time he destroyed most of his Mortmere stories from his Cambridge days, having concluded that such grotesque and fantastical fiction was inappropriate in a post-Holocaust world. In 1954 Upward began to overcome his creative block and started work on an autobiographical trilogy titled The Spiral Ascent, dealing with the struggle of a poet, Alan Sebrill, to combine his creative endeavours with political commitment to the CPGB. The trilogy was published in the years following Upward's early retirement in 1961 to the house where his parents used to live in Sandown, Isle of Wight. In the Thirties (1962), the first volume, describes Sebrill's early