Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  I was surprised at what could be considered capitalist propaganda. Obviously anything criticising the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China fell into that category, but any item that was congratulatory about the British army’s performance during the Second World War inevitably brought shouts of ‘Don’t forget Stalingrad!’ or ‘What about the second front?’

  ‘Don’t forget Stalingrad!’ was a reference to the notion my parents had that the whole turning point of the war was the Battle for Stalingrad in which the Soviet armies under Zhukov defeated Paulus’s 6th Army, sending the German invaders fleeing west. As far as they were concerned, such supposedly pivotal moments as the Battle of Britain, El Alamein or the sinking of the Bismarck had been completely insignificant and pointless little skirmishes. I don’t know if my parents ever mentioned these feelings to our neighbours, people who had fought in or lost relatives during several of these encounters. I expect Molly did, but the Regentone certainly got to hear about them.

  ‘What about the second front?’ harked back to the behaviour of Communists before the war and in its early years. Throughout the 1930s the party had been a beacon of resistance to Nazism both at home and abroad, when many others had ignored or tried to accommodate the growing threat. CP members had confronted the British Union of Fascists in street battles up and down the country More importantly, while all the major powers had been intent on appeasing German and Italian fascism the CP had consistently campaigned against it, going so far as to forego their instincts and join in a broad front with other leftwing parties. In 1939, with war imminent, any party member such as Joe could console themselves with the thought that they had done all they could to warn of the dangers of fascism. Then in August of that year the Soviet Union suddenly signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany The order came down from party headquarters that the conflict was now an ‘Imperialist War’, and for nearly two years the Communist Party of Great Britain actually tried to sabotage the war effort by encouraging strikes and denouncing the government for its pursuit of the conflict. In the Soviet Union, along with many other measures the anti-German film Alexander Nevsky was banned. After Germany invaded the USSR in 1941 the party flipped again and its members spent the next two years being rabidly pro-war and demanding ‘Open the second front now!’ By this they meant that the Allies should invade continental Europe right away, without any preparation or planning, simply to take the heat off the Russians in the East.

  Another phrase that would often be shouted at our TV when there was any mention of espionage or a court case was ‘Remember the Rosenbergs!’ Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were Jewish American Communists who were vindictively executed in 1953 after having been found guilty of passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. My mother frequently got terribly upset about the execution of the Rosenbergs, with tears rolling down her cheeks at the very mention of their names, so that I thought for a long time they were people we knew Once I understood they had lived in the United States rather than Anfield the idea grew in me that the authorities in America were likely to whip you off the streets and send you to the electric chair for no reason at all, and that likelihood increased more or less to a certainty if you were black, Jewish or Communist. This gave me a funny attitude towards the United States. I was already aware that there were many amazing things that came from this country — animated films, brightly coloured clothes, comic books — but obviously if you went to the place there was clearly a good chance that you would be electrocuted.

  There was, however, a surprisingly long list of programmes, by no means all of them on the BBC (higher-toned than its new rival, ITV), that we felt an obligation to watch. Molly and Joe were both involved with the Unity Theatre. Afterwards Molly joined too and made costumes for some of their productions. Though it was essentially an amateur group Unity pioneered a lot of the techniques which would become standard in fringe theatre, and introduced a number of writers who were subsequently staples of the professional theatre. Even before the war they were improvising agitprop plays from events in that week’s newspapers, and the London branch put on the first production of a Brecht play in Britain as well as promoting the work of Clifford Odets, Sean O’Casey, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maxim Gorky.

  Over the years many successful actors had graduated from Unity, so when they appeared on the TV we felt it was our socialist duty to watch them. In this way I got to see some of the early work of Lionel Bart, David Kossoff and Warren Mitchell. Alfie Bass, another Unity graduate, was in a hit ITV comedy all about mismatched conscripts called The Army Game, and since he was left-wing and Jewish and had been in Unity I was able to enjoy this sitcom of army life with my parents laughing at it rather than them shouting ‘Remember Stalingrad!’ or ‘Open the second front now!’ every five minutes. We were also very keen to watch what might have been regarded as populist trash on ITV — historical adventure shows such as Robin Hood and Ivanhoe. My parents had the idea (partly true) that these shows were written almost entirely by American refugees from Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist purges, and thought they might contain subliminal or subtle messages of an anti-capitalist nature (also partly true).

  We also felt it was our duty to watch the Harlem Globetrotters whenever they were on. This was partly because they were black, so we were identifying with and supporting their struggle for equal rights, and partly because we read some sort of anti-establishment message into a man using a stepladder in a comedy basketball game.

  On our first-ever day of school our mothers walked us to Anfield Road Primary Though it was built in a firmly rationalist, red-brick style Anfield Road School possessed a big ventilation spire, mostly for show. It was a striking landmark that, oddly, bore a very strong resemblance to the Soyuz rockets that the year before had blasted the Soviet Sputnik satellite into space, stunning the West and causing much celebration in our house.

  At the school gate, my mother gave me a Corgi model of a Le Mans D-Type Jaguar. This is my first clear and unclouded memory — getting that car with its single seat for the driver and huge stabilising fin in British racing green. This might have been the moment when I became obsessed with cars. Most days the only vehicle going up and down Valley Road was the little red pedal car I owned. So the automobiles I saw seemed miraculous, rare and beautiful. It also occurred to me at an early age that they were not all different, but were in fact classifiable. There were models from one company and models from another company, there were new models and old models that they didn’t make any more but were still driving around, so it became for me a way to impose a form of order on the world by tabulating them all.

  I was certain there was absolutely no chance that we were ever going to own one. Both my parents were pretty unmechanical, and I had also heard that cars cost a huge amount of money —hundreds of pounds, other children told me — and in any case the free rail travel we got made the prospect of owning a motor vehicle economically pointless. From this the idea grew in me that driving was probably about as complicated as making a steam engine go along, that it would require constant attention to all kinds of gauges and dials, the endless manipulation of levers and pedals and probably a large amount of coal. Perhaps my parents ‘dislike of cars was ideological, too. After all, in the Soviet Bloc the authorities weren’t at all keen on their citizens having their own vehicles, going about and seeing things they weren’t supposed to see.

  My mother needn’t have worried about me not liking school, I thought it was great. There were a sandpit and a wigwam, and as an only child it was a pleasant novelty for me to be spending so much more time with kids my own age. It also meant I was able to bring my ideas to a larger audience. At break-time in the first week our teacher, Miss Wilson, said to the assembled class, ‘All right, class, now let’s bow our heads in prayer and thank God for this milk we’re drinking.’ At which point I stood up and said, ‘No, Miss Wilson, I think you’ll find that the milk comes to us via the Milk Marketing Board, a public body set up in 1933 to control
the production, pricing and distribution of milk and other dairy products within the UK. It has nothing to do with the intervention of some questionable divine entity’ I think Miss Wilson must have had a word with the rest of the class about me, telling them I was ‘special’ or something, because I don’t remember ever getting picked on. Which you could see as a religious miracle, really.

  After they were married, had a child and bought a home Joe and Molly had not, as many couples might have done, stopped their travelling. In this post-war period there was one very powerful incentive for anybody, no matter what their political views were, to take part in foreign travel. The Labour government that had been elected in 1945 in a landslide of post-war utopian longing possessed a certain puritanical instinct. The austerity of the life they imposed on 1940s’ and 1950s’ Britain was to some extent forced on the country by the United States maliciously calling in all their war loans the moment the fighting ceased, but there still seemed to be something dreary, life-denying and over-zealous about food, drink and clothes being so severely rationed up to a decade after the conflict ended.

  By contrast, countries such as France and Italy that had been over-run, looted and pillaged by the Nazis were quickly awash with cheap food and wine, rabbits, chickens, fish and wonderful fresh vegetables which overflowed from shops and street markets. And because the Republic of Ireland, just across the Irish Sea from Liverpool, had remained neutral throughout the war it had never experienced any shortage of bacon, butter, cheese or eggs. So while the people back home were being forced to eat omelettes made out of powdered eggs and pies of turnip tops and whale blubber my parents, at least for a few weeks a year, were dining on schiacciata alla fiorentina and langoustine au cognac avec sauce beurre blanc washed down with a decent Pouilly Fuissé or just having a nice chicken sandwich.

  By the age of five I must have been the most travelled child in Anfield. I had been to Normandy twice, Paris, Holland, Belgium, Ireland and the Swiss Alps as well as on numerous trips to London, the Lake District, Devon and Cornwall. Because of all our foreign travel, our exotic backgrounds and our internationalist outlook my parents were convinced that the three of us were really fluent in foreign languages. Joe was thought to have an excellent command of French and something called Esperanto, a language invented by a man called L.L. Zamenhof in the 1920s which was intended to foster peace and international understanding by everybody being able to talk to each other in the same tongue. At home Molly had conversed in Yiddish with her family, so she insisted that she spoke German like a native, and I was supposed to have inherited Joe’s fluency in French. Molly certainly did speak some German. I remember my mother screaming, ‘Mein Kinder! Mein Kinder!’ at a man on a train just outside Stuttgart who had tried to open the window of our compartment on a hot summer night and in so doing was threatening the health of her child by creating a bit of a draught.

  Before the age of five my memories of overseas travel are fragmentary, a collage of alien smells and images and the sound of somebody yelling, possibly a red-haired woman, but in the summer of 1958 we caught the ferry from Folkestone not to Boulogne but the longer passage to Ostend in Belgium, an often rough four-hour crossing. Once we were out of the harbour the waves were endless rows of scallop shells, grey and flecked with foam, and the boat, though it was bigger than the French ferries, still pitched and rolled in the swell.

  Customs and passport control at any Channel port was a lengthy process. After reading from a card you had to answer convoluted questions asked by a man in a strange uniform, there was the use of elaborate seals and stamps, and sometimes you had to remove items of clothing. Going abroad was nearly as complicated as joining the Freemasons. At Ostend we had the usual interrogation, got our passports stamped and our luggage searched. We hated having to open our baggage, not because we had anything to hide but because the Sayles were early experimenters with the concept of wheeled luggage. Each of us had an L-shaped metal contraption with big rubber wheels secured by numerous straps to a corner of our suitcase — straps that had to be undone before the case could be opened. The idea behind this was that you could wheel your luggage along using a handle attached to the other end of the strap. In practice, no matter how tightly you secured them, the case always seemed to work its way free from the straps and would fall off its wheels generally while you were running for a train, either tripping you up and sending you sprawling or, at the very least, stabbing you in the ankle and drawing blood.

  Once through customs we needed to get further up the Belgian coast, so we hauled our luggage on to a tram that ran through the sand dunes and the trim little towns to the resort where we were staying. Though the voters of Kirkdale hadn’t elected my father in 1938, his dislike of trams seemed to have been widely shared and since the war there had been a steep rundown of the city’s network. The year before our trip to Belgium Joe had taken me to see Liverpool’s last tram outside St James Street Station. Decked out in strings of light bulbs it had seemed lumbering and sad, like a sickly elephant in a down-at-heel circus. By contrast these single-deck trams that raced up the Belgian coast appeared swift and confident. The Liverpool ones had swayed from side to side on metal grooves in the cobbled streets and, with so many different lines cut in the street, often seemed confused as to where they were going. But here there was only the one line going north, and once out in the countryside these Belgian trams ran swift and sure.

  The reason we were staying in this particular small hotel in this particular town was that the woman who owned it advertised in the Daily Worker. She wasn’t a Communist herself — this was simply a smart piece of business. As Communists were so used to being reviled, when somebody was nice to them party members could often be absurdly grateful for even the tiniest bit of attention, and if somebody was prepared to welcome them into their establishment or try to sell them the products they made they could be ridiculously loyal. There were only about three places that regularly advertised in the Daily Worker. One was the hotel we were staying in, another was a shop that sold sub-standard Soviet consumer goods in Shepherds Bush, and the third was a Greek restaurant in Tottenham Court Road confusingly named ‘Au Montmartre’. When we were in London we sometimes ate there. It seemed to be full of veterans of the Spanish Civil War, grizzled men in berets and leather jackets despondently eating their way through kleftiko, sheftalia or moussaka, served with chips, peas, sliced bread and butter and a cup of tea.

  We checked into the hotel, with its long glassed-in sun terrace facing the beach. After dinner we sat in wicker chairs and stared out to sea as the storm that had been brewing during our crossing finally broke. For the first time I saw forks of lightning explode like cracks in a window, spearing downwards in jagged lines to the black water while a man swam towards the storm, seemingly unconcerned in the electric sea, and my parents debated whether he was doing the right thing. Was floating in the sea during a thunderstorm a bad idea or in fact the safest place to be? They thought on balance it was probably the latter, that swimming towards the tempest was a brilliant strategy to avoid injury by lightning bolts.

  The weather was sunny and breezy, we sat on the beach, we ate all kinds of food you couldn’t get in Britain and we rode about in four-seater pedal-karts. Molly and Joe didn’t just stay at the seaside — here was another thing that was different about us and our holidays. When those few working-class British people who did so travelled abroad they stayed at some tourist hotel on the Italian Riviera or the Spanish Costa Brava, and if they socialised they socialised only with other British holidaymakers. But the Sayles were different — the Sayles knew people who lived abroad, real foreign people!

  In 1945, soon after the war ended, Joe had attended a Communist Party conference in Paris at which he had met a couple of Dutch comrades called Ank and Ayli. They were journalists who throughout the war had run an underground newspaper for the resistance. In the aftermath of the conflict there was wide-scale famine in Holland, since the majority of the Allies’ relief effort was, iron
ically, going to feed the defeated Germans. Joe befriended the Dutch couple and, seeing that they were poor and hungry, he helped them out. Now, thirteen years later, they wanted to repay his kindness. We were going to spend the weekend with them in Amsterdam.

  Early one morning the three of us took a tram back to Ostend and from there caught a train that travelled inland from the Belgian coast, crossing the border into Holland and terminating in Amsterdam where the once starving couple met us at the Centraal Station. Perhaps reflecting the way our two countries were diverging, or maybe just how their fortunes had improved, Ank and Ayli now seemed to be doing much better than us. They even had that most extraordinary of things, a car, a black Volkswagen Beetle with the oval rear window, and we spent the day driving with them in the Dutch countryside. We took a long straight road that was only for motor vehicles — I didn’t know it, but this was my first trip on a motorway The needle on the VW’s speedometer touched 90 kilometres an hour and, not knowing there was a difference between kilometres and miles, I thought we were going at an unbelievable speed.

  Later in the day, this being Holland we went for a walk along a canal. As we strolled along this strip of water lined with thin trees I noticed something lying on the ground by the side of the towpath, half buried in the mud and masked by a clump of scrawny grass. I picked it up and brushed the dirt away It was a square of rusted and pitted metal, mostly flat but bent over along the top and bottom edge, and about the size of a big box of Swan matches. The outer metal was the colour of dried blood, but the middle, a raised crest in grey pewter, remained unaffected by corrosion. It was an emblem, oval in shape, a motif of laurel leaves and at the centre an eagle holding in its talons a swastika. I had found the belt buckle of a German soldier.