by Alexei Sayle
To Molly.
The rumour went round the kids in the neighbourhood like a forest fire: Bambi would be coming to the Gaumont cinema in Oakfield Road. It was a brilliant piece of marketing. Every ten years or so the Disney organisation would relaunch their major cartoon movies so that a whole new generation of children became hysterical with anticipation. Whenever a group of us six-year-olds came together, in the playground at break-time or running around the streets after school, we imagined what the film would be like, conjecturing deliriously and inaccurately on the possible storyline. More than anything else there was some collective sense, some morphic resonance that told us all that seeing Bambi was going to be a defining moment in our young lives.
Usually I was at the centre of any wild speculation that was going on, dreaming up mad theories about the half-understood world — the year before, I had successfully convinced all the other kids that peas were a form of small insect. But on this occasion there was something lacking in the quality of my guesswork, a hesitation, an uncertainty which the others sensed, because for me, getting in to see Bambi was going to be a huge challenge. The lives of other children, when they were away from their families seemed to be entirely free from adult interference —there was a range of activities such as purchasing comics, seeing films, games of hide-and-seek and tag, buying and playing with toys, that were regarded by both sides as ‘kids’ things’. For my friends, going to see Bambi would simply mean their mum or dad buying them a ticket and then crossing over Oakfield Road to the cinema in a big, noisy gang. My life wasn’t like that. It was subject to all kinds of restrictions, caveats and provisos, both physical and ideological. I was never entirely sure what was going to be forbidden and what was going to be encouraged in our house, but I suspected that something as incredible as Bambi was certain to be on the prohibited list and I knew that if I was going to see this film it would be a complex affair requiring a great deal of subtle negotiation, possibly with a side order of screaming and crying.
It wasn’t just seeing the film, fantastic as that was likely to be, that obsessed me — it was that the whole event represented a dream not exactly of freedom but of equality. I had begun to suspect that we weren’t like other families. There were things we believed, things we did, that nobody else in the street did, things that inevitably marked me out as different. What I really longed for and what I thought going to the pictures to see Bambi would give me was a chance, for once, to be just one of the crowd. I was convinced that, by taking part in such a powerful cultural event as the first showing for a decade of this animation masterpiece, everything that was confusing about other people’s behaviour would become clear and all that was strange about my own would somehow magically vanish. I would be exactly like everyone else.
My parents needed to understand that they had to allow me to see Bambi! But they didn’t. Whatever pleas I made, whatever tantrums I threw, they steadfastly refused to let me go. They had two reasons. My parents disapproved of most of the products of Hollywood but they had a particular dislike for anything made by the Walt Disney company ‘Uncle Walt’ had been an enthusiastic supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-Communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s, so they hated him for that. But even if he hadn’t been a semi-fascist they would still have had an aversion to his gaudy cartoons and sentimental wildlife films. More significantly in this case, my mother had the idea that I was a sensitive, delicate, artistic boy and she was worried that I would be distressed by the famously child-traumatising scene in which Bambi’s mother is killed by hunters in the forest.
Yet they didn’t wish to be cruel. They understood that I was missing out on seeing an important and culturally significant film, so as a consolation the three of us took the 26 bus into town to attend a screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre. In Alexander Nevsky there are several scenes of ritualistic child sacrifice and a famous thirty-minute-long sequence set on a frozen lake beside the city of Novgorod in which Teutonic knights in rippling white robes, mounted on huge snorting metal-clad stallions, only their cruel eyes visible through the cross-shaped slits in their sinister helmets, charge the defending Russian soldiers across the icebound water. When they are halfway over, the weight of their armour causes the ice to crack and the knights tumble one by one into the freezing blackness. Desperately the men and their terrified, eye-rolling horses are dragged beneath the deadly water, leaving not a trace behind them.
As I sat in that smoky, beer-smelling room, stunned and disturbed by the flickering black and white images on the screen, it began to dawn on me that all my efforts to be one of the crowd, to be just like the other kids in the street, were doomed to failure. That no matter how hard I tried, I was always going to be the boy who saw Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky instead of Walt Disney’s Bambi.
My maternal grandfather, Alexander Mendelson, the shamas — a combination of caretaker and secretary — of the Crown Street Synagogue, died not knowing that his daughter was married to a non-Jew, was expecting a child, had joined the Communist Party and was living in a terraced house in Anfield at the opposite end of Liverpool. My mother experienced a great deal of conflict over not telling her father about her new life and her baby, but if a girl married out of the Jewish faith the common practice amongst devout families was to ‘sit shiva’ for them, to mount the week-long period of grief and mourning held for a dead relative and then to treat the errant daughter as if she was in fact dead. She may have wished to be open with her family, to tell them all about her new circle of friends, this new faith she had found and her new husband, but she convinced herself that it was safer to lie. My mother informed her parents that she was leaving the family home, also in Crown Street, and moving across to the other side of the city to, as she told them, ‘live in a flat’. Once the patriarch was dead she felt able to tell her mother, brother and sisters her true situation. It is a testament to their good nature, and perhaps a little to their fear of my mother’s furious temper, that they didn’t then cut her off.
My parents met in 1947 at a discussion group called the Liverpool Socialist Club which assembled for talks, debates and lectures of a left-wing nature at the Stork Hotel in Queen’s Square. Notions of social justice, equality and the communal ownership of the means of production were so fashionable that the owner of this smart city centre venue let them have the room for free, even though they were planning, at some point in the future, to take his hotel off him.
At the time of their marriage my father, Joe Sayle, was forty-three years old and my mother, Malka (also known as Molly) Mendelson, was thirty-two. Molly was the oldest child in a family of nine who lived in the heart of Liverpool’s poor Jewish quarter. Her mother had been born in the city, but her father was an immigrant who had fled Latvia, then under Russian jurisdiction, as a teenager fearing conscription into the tsarist army During the nineteenth century the Russian authorities would sweep up any Jewish male, some as young as twelve, and not release them from military service for twenty-five years, when they would be dumped, worn out and confused and often thousands of miles away from their home.
According to Molly her father looked like a lot of the inhabitants of the Crown Street ghetto — men and women who had brought their way of life intact from the old country His face was covered by a flowing black beard, and winter or summer he dressed in a long dusty coat and big black hat. Not one of my mother’s many sisters or her brother ever deviated the tiniest bit from the path laid down for them — they remained throughout their lives devout Jews, staying within the faith, unquestioning and placid. That life was never for Molly. Until she was eleven her father treated her, his first-born, like an equal, encouraging her to learn and to read, c
hatting to her about his activities during the day, Jewish law and life back in Russia. Once her brother was born, however, all the attention suddenly stopped: now he had a son, her father was only interested in talking to him. But by then her curiosity had been awakened.
Before the Second World War Molly had worked as a seamstress in the tailoring trade, then during the war she had been employed sewing flags for the armed forces — Union Jacks and Red Ensigns. But she left not long after VE Day following her involvement in an industrial dispute. When she met my father Molly was working at the Littlewood’s Pools company along with thousands of other women, combing through the weekly football coupons looking for people who had suddenly become rich. Molly was short-sighted and always wore glasses, had a head of luxuriant, bright red hair and, in one of her few acts of conventionality, a temper to go with it. She was capable of going from serene equanimity to incandescent rage in a split second.
As a small child, dressed in flannel shorts, socks, sandals and my best knitted tank-top, my glossy black hair slicked down with water, I would visit the house in Crown Street with my mother. I felt as if I too had been swept up by the tsarist authorities and dumped a thousand miles from home, because though it was only a bus ride away from our house, it seemed as if we had skipped backwards in time by a century or two. The Mendelson family home was a big, black building of three floors and a basement, up the road from the synagogue and next to a yard where my grandfather had operated as a coal merchant. The house appeared very bare, with large stretches of worn linoleum in the hall; everybody seemed as pale as a ghost, and there was always the smell of poor people’s soup. The only things that shone brightly were the oddly shaped religious artefacts on the sideboard, their polished brass flanks decorated with strange foreign writing that looked like it had come off the side of a flying saucer. During these calls it felt like we were visiting the embassy of a very poor and distant country — Molly and her five sisters always seemed to treat each other with remarkable brusqueness, as if my mother was applying for some sort of mining permit.
Like Molly/Malka, each of the sisters had both a Hebrew and an anglicised name, so I was always confused about exactly how many sisters there were and what they were called. Who was Rosie? Who was Ester? Was Celia the same woman as Kranie? She certainly looked the same, with identical waxy skin and a skittish manner, but then why did she have a different name? At least the only brother was simply called Uncle Monty.
During the day Monty worked in the kosher section of the big slaughterhouse in Smithdown Road, but in the evenings he was a cantor at the Fairfield Orthodox Synagogue where cruel children in the congregation would laugh at him behind his back because he gave his sermons, not in the normal MittelEuropean of the old-world rabbi, but in the same flat, nasal Scouse/Jewish accent that all the Mendelsons had. It was an accent that was at its best when expressing distress, anger, anxiety or confusion. One dark autumn evening in Crown Street I wandered out into the back yard to find Uncle Monty sitting in a rough, temporary shed with a roof made out of palm leaves, eating two fried eggs with his hat on. I thought my uncle had decided to live like a castaway on a desert island, like you saw in cartoons — but in his own back yard, which seemed like a brilliant idea to me. Disappointingly, Molly told me on the bus home he was celebrating the feast of Sukkot, where just after Passover, extremely devout Jews recreate the open-air shelters they’d built while wandering in the desert.
Perhaps that house on the edge of the city centre possessed an odd atmosphere not simply due to the Mendelsons’ religious exoticism but also because it sat at the direct epicentre of a network of bizarre, complex and mysterious underground tunnels. These subterranean passages form a labyrinth radiating out from Crown Street, covering a vast area and built during the early part of the nineteenth century under the direction of an eccentric businessman named Joseph Williamson.
Brick-arched, they burrow beneath the entire neighbourhood with no clear plan, like the meanderings of a gigantic, deranged worm. The passages vary in size as frequently as they change direction, from the vast ‘banqueting hall’, about twenty-one metres long, eight metres wide and six metres high, to the ‘ordinary’ tunnels which are only just big enough for a man to walk upright in. Nobody knows for certain quite why Joseph Williamson built them. Some held that he was a member of a religious sect, and that the tunnels were built to provide refuge for himself and his fellows when the world ended. But the most likely explanation is that it was an unhinged scheme to give unemployed men something to do — an early attempt to alleviate the terrible suffering of the labouring masses. And so, in a way, it was. The inhabitants of Crown Street, such as the Mendelsons, would dig a hole in their back yard and tip all their rubbish in, rather than going to the trouble of putting it in the bin — as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have a network of secret passages underneath your house.
Sometimes I would be taken up to the attic where under the eaves lay a strange, wraith-like figure whose connection to the Mendelsons was unclear. This man with his long grey beard, thin bony arms and reedy voice was known as Uncle Willy, and he never left the big brass bed that he rested in. Monty told me, when I asked him what was wrong with Uncle Willy, that he had been attacked by a tiger in India — but even at the time I didn’t think that seemed likely Still, I thought Uncle Willy must be really important to be allowed to stay in bed all day.
My father never came with us on these trips, and when we returned to Anfield our neighbourhood seemed extremely normal and dull. The most exotic thing about Anfield was us.
Joe and Molly Sayle had their only child on 7 August 1952, the day that egg rationing finally came to an end. Joe wanted to call his son Joe, but Molly insisted that he was called Alexei — Alexei David Sayle. She named me partly because her father had been called Alexander, and partly because while pregnant she had been reading the works of Maxim Gorky But that didn’t mean she wanted to call her child Maxim. That name was an alias used by the author to hide his true identity from the tsarist secret police. He was really Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, and so that’s what she called her only son — Alexei.
Although eggs might now be freely available, names remained firmly on the ration. In Liverpool in 1952 there were plenty of sturdy and serviceable British Stanleys and Colins and Davids and Freds and Jims and Philips being born, but there was only one Alexei David Sayle. And if being called Alexei didn’t make me feel special, as a back-up David, of course, was King of the Jews.
After going out together for three years my parents had got married in 1950, which came as a surprise to many Nobody had ever expected Joe to marry, and when his family found out that his bride, who would be coming to live with them and taking over one of the downstairs living rooms, was Jewish they asked each other, ‘What will we eat? What will we eat?’
Joe had lived for many years in Tancred Road, Anfield, in a room at the very top of the house, with his stepmother and his niece Sylvia. When she came in from school Sylvia would often hear the sound of Joe tapping away on his typewriter. He had ambitions to be a proper writer, but the work he was doing was more mundane — reports for his trade union, the National Union of Railwaymen, or articles on transport for the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker.
Joe’s father had been, like so many in Liverpool, a seaman. His mother, who came originally from Jersey, died when he was five. He was left with few memories of her — just a ghostly image of an unhappy woman in white gloves who refused to do any housework. Later the father remarried and Joe, along with his two brothers and three half-brothers, lived with their stepmother.
Though they moved a lot, the family mostly stayed within the Anfield area. Several of Joe’s brothers had jobs on the railways, and when he left school at fourteen he too went to work for the Cheshire Lines Company, which served Liverpool, Manchester, Lancashire and Cheshire. To work on the railways in the 1920s and 1930s was to be relatively fortunate. Unlike the docks or the building trade, where men were little
more than slaves taken on from day to day, it was a steady job — as a railwayman you were part of a uniformed workforce with a solid sense of identity and represented by strong unions. At the top of the hierarchy were the engine drivers. I was taught to regard engine drivers with distrust, to see them as temperamental, arrogant men who took too much pride in mastering their snorting steam engines. The drivers’ union, ASLEF, was often in conflict with the NUR, which spoke for the rest of the workforce, the signalmen, porters, cleaners and guards. Joe was a goods guard, in charge of the cars that carried freight. He rode at the end of the train in his own little wooden wagon known as the brake van. When we watched American cowboy films on the TV they referred to this carriage, more excitingly, as the caboose. The brake van looked like a small Swiss chalet on wheels, a creosoted wooden shed made of planking with a narrow verandah at each end and a chimney poking out of the curved roof. A few times I rode with my father to mysterious-sounding destinations such as Stalybridge and Altrincham Junction. Inside his van there was a coke-burning, black pot-bellied stove that warmed the air with such ferocity that I would become sleepy and have to be taken out on to the gently rocking verandah, to be jolted awake by the cold air rushing by.
Joe’s main job was to keep a close eye on the freight wagons, either from his verandah or from a little projecting side window in each wall through which he could see the whole length of the train, and to apply the brakes manually in the event of an imminent disaster. If the train stopped on the line for some reason such as fog the guard had to walk back up the tracks placing explosive detonators on the rails to alert following trains. It seemed heroic work. In our family the guard was clearly the most important member of the train’s crew.
But it was the tools of Joe’s trade that really fascinated me. Each night he would come home and give me his leather satchel, which held a battered and scratched black paraffin lantern with red and green filters that could be placed over the clear glass lens to warn of danger or give the all-clear, a red and a green flag, squares of linen stitched to a thick wooden baton for the same purpose. In his waistcoat he carried a metallic-tasting whistle and a big fob watch like a miniature station clock.
