Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  I played with my Hornby Dublo happily enough but never expanded it much from the basic layout. I never felt the need. To me the world outside our front door, the world of 1950s’ Liverpool, embodied all those qualities that others found in train sets — a sense of order, a sense of perfection, the feeling that things would remain as they were for ever. In the mornings most of the men went off to work. Joe worked shifts, so sometimes he would be sleeping or coming home when the others were going out, but there were plenty like him and that only added to the general sense of bustle and ordered endeavour. The fathers in our street worked in the building trades, clerked in insurance offices or stood behind the counter in banks, while others attended to the production lines of the modern factories springing up on the edges of the city Buses and trams and electric trains took them from our street to the workplace, or else they walked or rode black bicycles with rod brakes and creaking leather saddles, and a very few got rides in cars. After they had seen the men go off to work the mothers did the housework and then took their children to the verdant parks dotted with freshly painted shelters, palm houses, floral clocks, boating lakes and open air theatres where there were concerts and Punch and Judy shows in the summer. The city’s streets were lined with shops right into the city centre where they were replaced by massive mercantile buildings. All along the river the docks teemed with shipping — cargo boats and giant liners bound for the USA and South America, West Africa and the Isle of Man, while green and cream ferries bobbed back and forth across the river, and green and cream electric trains ran in tunnels beneath it and sometimes me and Joe would lay out my small circle of track in the front room and solemnly watch the train go round and round, a faint, acrid smell of lightning coming from the transformer which brought power from the mains. The front or ‘sitting rooms’ of most of the houses in the street were reserved for sombre occasions such as this and therefore most of the front rooms in the street went unused for the majority of the year, kept only ‘for best’ — ‘best’ being a euphemism for a visit from somebody unpleasant such as the vicar, the police, the doctor or relatives that you didn’t like much.

  Ours got more traffic, because apart from the phone and the Secatrol this was where Joe’s books were kept. My father seemed to have given up buying books once he had a family, as if this was something only bachelors did, because the hundred or so volumes housed in two wooden bookcases in the front room all dated from before the war and provided a vivid picture of the life of a working-class radical of the 1930s. Though Joe never got to speak much about what he felt even in the brief silences when Molly wasn’t shouting at the neighbours, these books were like geological rock strata that revealed the evolving layers of his personality There was a burning curiosity about the future, represented by the collected works of H.G. Wells in a uniform edition. There was an interest in the mind:

  An Outline to Psychology and the works of Emile Coué, the French psychologist and pharmacist who believed you could cure yourself of illness and depression by saying every morning and evening, ‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.’ There were hints of another life in that many of the books seemed to be gifts from women, with inscriptions like ‘Merry Christmas for 1946 from Betty’. And there was the closest thing we had to a religious object, the book that had made Joe a Communist — Jack London’s The Iron Heel.

  When he was still a teenager, Joe had taken part in the General Strike called by the Trades Union Congress on 3 May 1926 ‘in defence of miners’ wages and hours’. But though the railwaymen and the dockers brought the country to a total halt, elements in their unions, the TUC and the Labour Party were always fearful of revolution and so, nine days after it began, the TUC General Council visited 10 Downing Street to announce their decision to call off the strike. The miners fought on alone for many months before going back to work on worse terms than before. For just over a week it must have seemed like a revolution was indeed possible. In Joe’s part of the world warships hovered in the Mersey, their guns trained on the city, troops camped in the gardens outside St George’s Hall, while a Council of Action, a sort of primitive People’s Soviet, controlled the day-to-day activities of the strike. Over the other side of the river in Birkenhead, a group of strikers attacked the trams and brought them to a halt. Despite the odd fight with the police, by and large throughout those nine days the strike remained solid on Merseyside. Then suddenly it was all over and things went back to the way they were, only now poisoned by a brief glimpse of what might have been.

  I don’t think I ever heard the story of Joe’s conversion to Communism from him but rather it came from Molly, who would relate formative incidents from my father’s life, when he wasn’t there, as if she was his official biographer. So Joe might have remained simply a left-wing-inclined trade unionist if he hadn’t, at the height of his anger and shame over the collapse of the General Strike, encountered a book written twenty years before which seemed to predict exactly how the dispute would collapse and the terrible fate which awaited the working-class when it did.

  Jack London was an extremely popular writer known for his action-packed tales of the wilderness, gold prospecting, wild animals and the high seas — novels such as The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Sea Wolf. But the futuristic Iron Heel was something entirely different, and at first Joe was stunned simply by the form it took. The book is supposedly written by an academic, Anthony Meredith, in the year 419 BOM (Brotherhood of Man), which is around AD 2600 in our time. Professor Meredith’s book is a commentary on the ‘Everhard Manuscript’, ‘ancient’ documents written by a woman called Avis Everhard and hidden by her in the year 1933 only to be discovered centuries later. Avis is the leader of a resistance movement fighting a giant capitalist oligarchy — the eponymous Iron Heel which rules huge parts of the planet. The manuscript itself covers the years from 1912 to 1932 and details the rise of the Iron Heel, the failed First Revolt against it and preparations for the Second Revolt. The manuscript ends with Avis certain that the revolution will succeed but with the reader being aware that, from the historical perspective of the professor in 419 BOM, it was in fact betrayed. In the Second Revolt the revolutionaries are crushed and the capitalist tyranny endures for centuries more.

  Joe was spellbound by the sheer cleverness of it: to write a book that worked on so many different levels, to comment on the real world of the present by writing about an imaginary future, to evoke the poignancy of Avis’s hopes for the revolution through the reader knowing things that she could not, such as that the uprising fails and she is killed, all seemed astonishing to him. Joe was particularly responsive to the way in which Jack London, a self-educated working-class man like himself, mocked overly intellectual scholars such as Professor Meredith by having the academic get details of life in the early twentieth century completely wrong.

  In the world of The Iron Heel workers in certain essential industries such as steel and the railways are bought off, allowed a sort of favoured status which brings with it decent wages, adequate housing and reasonable education for their children while the rest of the working masses are left to face centuries of grinding poverty and exploitation simply because in a crisis the treacherous and corrupt union leaders side with the authorities.

  As soon as the General Strike collapsed Joe, who was already a member of the British Labour Party, secretly joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

  Joe’s ‘dual membership’, remaining in the Labour Party while keeping the fact that he was now a Communist secret, was a policy that came to Liverpool all the way from the Kremlin. In the 1920s the Comintern, the department of the Polituro of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union tasked with controlling foreign Communist parties, had despaired of fomenting revolution in western Europe in the short term. So they changed their plans and ordered Communists in the West to join or maintain membership of other more powerful left-wing parties. In this way they hoped to gain influence in the world of politics while at the same time, if they could,
sabotaging their rivals.

  Members of the Labour Party were supposedly not allowed to be active in any other political group, but the rule was never enforced. Indeed the higher-ups in the organisation were happy to make use of the energy and commitment of those, like Joe, who came to be called ‘Entryists’. At the same time they made sure that these Communists didn’t rise too high in the Labour Party without first clearly renouncing their revolutionary beliefs. The same was true in the trade unions. Members of the Communist Party were expected to work their way up in their particular union, to fight their employer at every opportunity for higher wages and better working conditions. But, oddly enough, the party also demanded that they be exemplary employees, the logic behind this diktat being that the rank and file wouldn’t respect somebody who didn’t pull their weight on the job. This meant that Communists were often in the contradictory position of being the best and most profitable employees of firms they were sworn to destroy.

  The rank and file too were delighted, up to a point, to have a Communist representing them — they knew that he would fight harder and longer than some less ideologically motivated shop steward. On the other hand, as soon as the Communist tried to politicise any struggle — to take the fight beyond trying to earn a few more pence a week or knock a few minutes off the working day and instead attempted to point out the larger iniquities of the capitalist system — the workers rapidly lost interest and became mulishly resistant to any entreaties. According to Molly, Joe’s refusal to dilute his political beliefs cost him dear. Less able men in the union were appointed over him to lucrative and powerful full-time posts, while others in the Labour Party were elected as city councillors and went on to become chairs of powerful committees or even Lord Mayor.

  My mother told me this with indignation in her voice but what I saw for myself was that, where another person might have become bitter or disillusioned, Joe seemed to become cheerier and cheerier over the years. Bustling about, a little man with his trilby hat permanently on his head, he always seemed to be laughing. Though everybody understood that here was a man who was dedicated to introducing a one-party state in which government terror was a central tool for ensuring the dictatorship of the proletariat I would hear people say, ‘You couldn’t meet a nicer bloke than Joe Sayle.’

  Various examples of Joe’s election literature were stored in the Secatrol. In 1938 he had stood in the municipal elections as Labour candidate for the Kirkdale ward, promising’… the demolition of slums and every insanitary house, large-scale replanning of built-up areas with provision of open spaces, children’s playgrounds and school development’. He also seemed to have developed a great resentment of trains. Under a section headed ‘Transport’ my father promised’… the gradual substitution of Motor or Trolley Buses on all routes, no further expenditure on new tram cars or new tracks.’ Joe stood for the council twice but neither time was he elected. When Molly informed me of this I dwelt on it for a long time, turning this rejection over and over in my mind. It made me wonder what was wrong with the people of Liverpool. What was up with them? Why didn’t they vote for my dad?

  When he was home in the evening Joe would come to my bedroom, sit on the bed which caused stuff to fall off the shelf, and tell me stories that he’d make up on the spot, inventing characters like Freddie the Frog. Too often though, he was out, either working or at a union meeting. And sometimes, even though he was home, I would have to compete with the Communist Party for his attention. Meetings were not held frequently at our house but there were times when from my position on the floor of the front room I would look up, the air around me wreathed in smoke, staring into a forest of political men’s trouser legs.

  Though I was only three or four the men who were at those meetings are clear in my mind, not because I recall them directly but because when Molly and I were together in the house or on a visit to Stanley Park, me in my little red pedal car, Molly would provide a judgemental commentary on the meetings and particularly on the members. When she spoke about Joe and his past she employed a valedictory tone, as if making a speech at a meeting, but when she talked about other people in the party I could never tell if Molly was even really speaking to me or to herself. Yet, silent and watchful, I took it all in. In this way I learned that this comrade was a terrible disappointment to his father who was a leading figure in the party, that that comrade was a drunk, that this one spent all his time working for the betterment of the working-class but left his own children and wife cold and hungry, and that I should never let myself be left alone in a room with that one.

  One year one of the members told me he would make me a toy fort for Christmas. I think it was just something said on the spur of the moment, and he might have forgotten all about it if I hadn’t badgered him repeatedly over the next few months. ‘How’s the fort coming along?’ I would ask him. ‘Will it have an electric light bulb?’ and ‘Perhaps a working portcullis?’ and ‘Do you think a proper drawbridge would be a good idea?’ It took a long time to arrive but finally, wearily, right on Christmas Eve he deposited it at our house — and it was magnificent. It had all the things I had specified: a drawbridge you could wind up and a working portcullis and a little light bulb that worked off a battery Then he stopped coming to the meetings and I never saw him again. That was one problem with having a family that wasn’t based on blood ties — people often inexplicably vanished and you weren’t supposed to miss them.

  Joe and Molly had one Communist Party friend who they were particularly close to. His name was George Garrett, and he had been something of an inspiration for Joe. At the age of fourteen Garrett had run away to sea, then jumped ship in Argentina. He travelled north to the United States and became a hobo, riding the rails around the USA. After a while he returned to seafaring and in 1914 his ship, the SS Oswald, was captured by the German navy, but the crew were rescued. In 1918 he married, but remained unemployed for long periods due to his membership of the Communist Party He returned to New York, where he became a member of the Syndicalist trade union, the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as ‘The Wobblies’. On his return to Britain he took part in the first hunger march and the founding of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement. Garrett also became a founder member of the Left Theatre, which in turn became the Unity Theatre. All the time he wrote short stories about the sea, working-class life and the battles that poor families had with the repressive institutions of church and state. He was also a literary critic, and his essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Joseph Conrad’s novel The Nigger of the Narcissus were published in literary journals. These brought him to the attention of George Orwell.

  In 1936 Orwell was in the middle of writing The Road to Wigan Pier and so it was natural that, being in the area, he came to Liverpool to stay with George Garrett. Though he was again unemployed and had a large family to feed, Garrett gave Orwell a place to stay and never asked him for any money The two men would stay up all night drinking and talking about the novels of Dostoevsky, Melville and Jack London, and the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg and Eugene O’Neill. The way I heard the story from my parents, Garrett was happy to entertain his friend for as long as he wished to stay, but they couldn’t understand why he allowed this Old Etonian, this poverty tourist, to keep hanging around. They felt that their George was the real thing, a working-class man who had been forced into his life on the road by a desperate desire to escape a terrible life, not because he thought it would make a good book.

  The Communists’ dislike of Orwell was confirmed when later that year he went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War and on his return, in his book Homage to Catalonia, accused Communist factions of waging internecine war on their left-wing allies instead of fighting the true enemy — Franco’s fascists. Molly also said that Orwell had promised to give George Garrett a big dedication in The Road to Wigan Pier but had gone back on his word. The Daily Worker, the Communist Party’s newspaper, gave The Road to Wigan Pier a really bad review when it was published. Over the years, of all
the many people my parents despised — J. Edgar Hoover, Winston Churchill, Hitler and Walt Disney among others — it was Orwell’s name that came up most frequently and was spoken with the most venom. I thought he must be the most evil man in the world. On the other hand, while my parents wanted the story to show their friend George Garrett in a good and noble light, it actually gave me the impression that he had been a bit of an idiot to allow himself to be taken advantage of in this way.

  Some Communists like George Garrett tried to have as little as possible to do with consumer goods, but around about 1957 we bought the flashiest thing you could possibly purchase — a television set. It was the Co-op’s own brand, which was called a Regentone. It had a brown walnut cabinet with a tiny murky grey screen, and a little metal badge of a knight carrying a pennant mounted on a horse fixed to the cloth covering of the speaker grille. The TV was our second big purchase. Molly had made sure that she got a sewing machine first, a heavy black metal thing bristling with wheels and needles that stabbed rapidly up and down, with a stencil of flowers down its flanks to try and hide its murderous intent. It took years before the sewing machine was paid for. Compared to the sewing machine, our TV was a friendly thing.

  We had always thought that the families who bought televisions were consumerist members of the working-class who had allowed themselves to get caught up in the bourgeois notion of trying to impress the neighbours. But after the Regentone came into the house that idea was quietly dropped and, like everyone else, we soon made the TV the centre of our lives. Though, to be fair, in our house watching the television was more of a two-way process than in other homes. It seemed we had bought a television mostly so we could argue with it, a response which became particularly violent when a news report came on. Right away one or other of my parents would begin shouting, ‘Nonsense!’ ‘Lies!’ or ‘Capitalist propaganda!’ at anything they disagreed with, which tended to be nearly everything that was shown on the news.