Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  ‘I bet he was shot!’ I said, ‘Or he was blown up by a hand grenade from a British commando and his guts went everywhere…. Or he was knifed in the back by the resistance and as he fell he tore off the….’ Later on Molly gave me a little talk, telling me that the Dutch had been through a lot during the war and they might not feel the same way as me about my find. I thought it was just plain rude of them not to be impressed by my discovery.

  Molly wanted me to get rid of the horrible thing, but I put the Nazi buckle in my pocket, brought it back to England and kept it in a shoebox under my bed. During the autumn term I took it into school one day to show our teacher and the class, but when my prized possession was passed around nobody showed any sign of being particularly taken with it. I had been looking forward to a big reaction, but there was only polite interest. I couldn’t figure it out — the belt buckle had made people edgy and uncomfortable in Holland and here it was doing no business at all. This seemed very odd. Molly had told me that that little square of pitted metal was imbued with evil, yet none of my classmates were able to see it. It appeared that the power of things wasn’t fixed: a belt buckle could only make you feel unwell if you had been fighting the Nazis for years, and if you hadn’t it was just a piece of tin.

  In the second week of our holiday, we took another train from the Belgian coast — this time to the capital, Brussels. We were to become just three of the forty-two million people who visited the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, otherwise known as Expo ‘58. The central landmark of the Expo site was called the Atomium, a gigantic depiction of a cell of iron crystal magnified 165 billion times. Rising high above the exhibition site were nine shiny spheres, each representing an atom and each connected to the next by silvery tubes with escalators in them, escalators that you could travel up or down, from one sphere to the next. Eight of the spheres contained displays of the wonders of the modern world and the ninth, the topmost, provided a view over Brussels and the surrounding countryside.

  The atom, and particularly the destructive power of the atomic bomb, was permanently at the back of everybody’s mind in 1958, so it probably made sense to put a giant one in the middle of the first World’s Fair to be held since the Second World War.

  From the top of the Atomium I could see the distant domes of the city, the green of Heysel Park and, beneath us, hundreds of national pavilions. It was impossible to visit all the exhibits, so we had to make a choice. Obviously we steered well clear of the British and US pavilions, but, oddly, we avoided the Soviet exhibition too. Maybe we thought all the wonders contained within it would be too much to absorb in only a few hours, but from the second our family entered the Czechoslovak pavilion I could see that Joe sensed he was in the presence of something truly special. Others obviously felt the same way, since it had won the best pavilion award and many other prizes for individual displays. Rather than the weapons, heavy engineering, rockets, wheatfields and big science that dominated the USSR’s presentation, at the heart of the Czech display there was something that was still Communist but softer and more human. Apart from the anticipated exhibitions connected with history and geography, the ancient cities of Prague and Brno, the verdant forests and the wild Tatra mountains, there were so many surprising things — friendly colourful films featuring hilarious marionettes from the Puppet Theatre of Prague and case after case of glass, china and textiles designed in a remarkably modern avant-garde style, almost Italian but retaining a subtle socialist sensibility There was much use of pastel colours, geometrical forms and modern materials — plastic, metal, glass and concrete. At the heart of the pavilion was an entire living room complete with the finest in Czech design, angular but comfy-looking chairs, swirly-spouted coffee pots, bulbous coloured drinking glasses, a coffee table and a sofa.

  And there was one more marvel we had to see. After queueing for half an hour or so we shuffled into a small purpose-built theatre, within the exhibition hall, for one of the first performances of the Laterna Magika or Magic Lantern Theatre. If we had been awestruck by the coffee pots and the globular flower vases, then the Magic Lantern Theatre was the final proof that Czechoslovakia was a country like no other, one that seemed able to combine the humane rationalism of the Soviet system with a lyrical, magical spirit all its own.

  There was little language used in the show, but most of it required no words as it was a combination of film projection, dance, sound effects, modern music, light and pantomime. In that dark room people from every land sat amazed, bemused and astonished. We had come in footsore and tired, many of us bombarded with images of nationalistic bluster, massive displays of jet engines and drilling machines, but we were now united by an enchantment that was both more ancient and more contemporary than anything at that vast, sprawling exposition. A man in a crazy wig played jazz with filmed projections of himself while clowns battled spiteful, inanimate objects —kettles, chairs and plates flew through the air as if they were alive — and at the high point of the show a man, on film, walked down a street in Prague towards the camera and then nonchalantly stepped over the edge of the screen and suddenly he was there in front of us, in person, on the stage in Brussels! Joe resolved right there that he wanted to visit this incredible place where the Communist way of life could be presented in such a colourful and friendly manner.

  Years later I learned that at the core of the Laterna Magika was something called ‘black-light theatre’, a technique of illusion that takes advantage of an imperfection of the human eye which means it cannot distinguish black on black. It was actors dressed in suits of black moving against a black background who had made the objects appear to fly through the air. The audience had the impression that they possessed free will, but in reality they were being manipulated by unseen hands.

  We also didn’t know it then, but most of the items in the Czech pavilion, such as the shoes and the furniture and the coffee pots, were only prototypes that were never actually produced.

  Back home in Liverpool I began to get the sense that there was something up with our doctor, a neatly dressed man with black hair and a moustache by the name of Cyril Taylor. On the one hand we would make these huge trips right across town, from Anfield in the north end of the city to Sefton Park in the south, to see him when there were plenty of perfectly competent doctors on our side of Liverpool. But as soon as we got to his surgery there seemed to be some indefinable tension in the air. Travelling this far to see somebody usually meant that they were in the party, yet once we were seated in his consulting room he always behaved as if there was something funny about us, as if me and Molly were a pair of droll characters in a play And from the way Molly talked about him on the bus home I got the clear impression that there was some sort of black mark against our doctor’s character, some quality in him that didn’t quite measure up.

  As I grew a little older it became clearer what was going on. Up until the age of five or six I had thought there were only two specific types of people in the world, those who were ‘in the party’ and those who weren’t. But I now learned that there was a third category Cyril Taylor was one of those people who my parents dismissively referred to as having ‘left in ‘56’. These were members of the British Communist Party who had resigned after the Soviet Union had violently crushed an uprising of workers and students in Hungary in 1956. Even though Stalin was dead, the Russians showed themselves to be intolerant of any opposition within their empire — during the invasion nearly three thousand Hungarians were killed and two hundred thousand fled as refugees. Mass arrests, executions and denunciations continued for months afterwards. Disillusioned, many like our doctor quit the party.

  But others, such as my parents, took the events in Hungary in their stride — indeed, in some ways they welcomed them. Marxism-Leninism was, after all, a theory of compulsion. What Communists longed for was equality, a society in which all people would be the same, but they didn’t have any faith that equality would just come about gradually by itself. Rather, they believed that people had to be forced t
o be equal. For every proletarian who understood right away the benefits of the worker state there were fifty who had to be cajoled or even compelled to see what was being done for them. Then there were all the class enemies, factory owners and policemen and the self-employed who couldn’t be allowed to spread their poisonous opinions unchallenged. My parents welcomed Hungary as a test of their faith: it allowed them to show that they would stand steadfast with the party while others like Cyril Taylor, who didn’t understand that the march towards liberty, peace and freedom couldn’t be held up by a load of people demanding liberty, peace and freedom, joined the Labour Party and became well-known city councillors.

  One thing that my parents didn’t seem to understand was that, though they were sending a clear message to the world with their stance on Hungary, they were giving confusing messages to their son by entrusting his precious health to a class traitor. If those who left in ‘56 were renegades and weak-minded back-stabbers, how could one of them look after me? How could somebody who was a traitor be a good doctor? Surely a person who was an evil revanchist would be useless at their job? Something here didn’t add up.

  Fortunately my teeth, unlike the rest of me, weren’t considered important enough to become an ideological battleground in the class war. Our dentist, a man called Savitz who had a surgery nearby in an old house next door to the Astoria cinema in Walton Breck Road, wasn’t in the party or anything so he didn’t cause me any confusion while painfully hacking my gums about.

  There was, however, a war of ideas which affected me on a more basic level than my parents’ attitude to healthcare, and that was their peculiar stance on certain toys. Although Molly and Joe were Communists dedicated to the dictatorship of the industrial proletariat, my mother in particular held opinions on daily life that were closer to those of the more avant-garde elements of the upper classes than to those of our neighbours in Valley Road. My parents had to work for a living, didn’t have any servants and didn’t know any archbishops or ambassadors, but a lot of the ideas they harboured concerning food, travel and child-rearing would have been familiar to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan or Lady Ottoline Morrell. One of the ways in which Molly differed from the majority of parents in our street, though Bertrand Russell would have heartily approved, was in her attitude to toy guns.

  There was a theory, prevalent in liberal circles, that giving children war-like toys could awaken in them aggressive, antisocial and overtly male tendencies which were unsuited to the modern world. My parents subscribed to this idea, despite the fact that, as Marxist-Leninists, they believed in the violent armed overthrow of capitalism. If they had been consistent they would have purchased a .22 rifle or a shotgun and booked me shooting lessons. Instead, they refused to purchase any kind of replica firearm.

  At first this wasn’t too much of a problem — during games of war or cowboys and indians, all the boys in the street just ran around pointing their fingers at each other and shouting, ‘Ack, ack, ack!’ or ‘Kerpow!’ But soon their parents began buying them plastic or metal toy guns which usually fired a paper roll of percussion caps, and this left me pretty badly outgunned with just my fingers. Yet no matter how much I pleaded with her, Molly refused to buy me a toy gun. In the end, out of desperation, tired of spending every evening lying dead on the pavement, I started making my own imitation weapons out of bread. I would chew an L-shape into a slice of Hovis, then smuggle it out of the house so I could run around the streets shooting other kids with my wholemeal pistol. I brought such conviction to my play-acting that the other kids were persuaded that my bread gun possessed a degree of firepower, and as long as it didn’t rain I was fine.

  After a while, though, my parents could see that I was being made to look a little bit too eccentric shooting children with my edible pistol. So, in an echo of the UN Disarmament Commission, which was formed under the Security Council and which met intermittently from 1954 to 1957, we held our own arms limitation talks. After furious bargaining the final outcome, which was agreed by all parties, was this: I would be allowed toy firearms but they would be limited to non-automatic weapons, a restriction which basically meant I could only own revolvers with a Wild West flavour. No automatic pistols, rifles or sub-machine guns would be allowed, though after a while I did get something called a Range Rifle which was essentially a Colt .45 revolver with a stock and long barrel.

  Though I now possessed toy guns, an unbridgeable arms gap had opened up between me and the other kids in our street. For instance, there was a gadget that several of the local boys owned called a Johnny 7. This was less of a gun and more of an integrated weapons system, combining multiple grenade tubes, an automatic rifle and a rocket launcher, and my small stock of revolvers was never able to compete with that. I consoled myself with the thought that in the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos the lightly armed Communist Vietcong were at the same time taking on and beating the United States army, Range Rifles versus Johnny 7s, but on a larger and more lethal scale.

  I also faced a weapons gap in terms of toy soldiers, but the reasons for that are less clear — as far as I can recall, my parents had no policy on little plastic men in uniform. The way toy soldiers worked in our street was that you took all your soldiers round to another boy’s house in a box or they came round to yours with their soldiers in a box. Then you fought a battle, and if you lost the other kid technically owned whatever room the battle was being fought in. This was a male-only thing, of course. Boys had soldiers, girls had dolls, so the girls would take their dolls round to each other’s houses and maybe they fought each other with them — I don’t know For some reason my toy army seemed to have a large number of non-combatants in its ranks — soldiers carrying minesweeping equipment, endless columns of stretcher-bearers, bandsmen armed only with trombones and a complete plastic ENSA troupe — while the other kid’s army usually comprised a massive phalanx of machine gun crews, bazooka teams and infantry, equipped with rifles and sub-machine guns all supported by aircraft, artillery and armoured formations.

  I think the pacific make-up of my army might have had something to do with unarmed soldiers, for some reason, being cheaper to buy in the local shop, so I had purchased them without giving a thought to whether they would be useful in battle or not. I also seemed to have in my army a whole mixed regiment of Red Indians with bows and arrows and knights in armour who had become detached from their horses. The outcome of all these childhood battles was that theoretically other boys owned most of our house, though this was never tested under international law.

  Over the years my family had evolved a number of rituals which took place every summer, on the morning that we went on our holidays. Firstly there was the getting up far too early, stumbling about in the darkness and bumping into the furniture. This was followed by the ritual cooking of and then failure to eat six boiled eggs. It’s unclear why it was felt that on days of travel we didn’t require a full breakfast, when you would have thought it was then that we needed it most. But for some reason every summer holiday began with six eggs being boiled, two each for me, Joe and Molly These eggs would never be consumed because eating them would inevitably be interrupted by the second ritual, which was the running backwards and forwards to the taxi office.

  The old black Austin taxi that was going to take us to Lime Street Station had been ordered weeks before from a family firm with an office a couple of streets away, but perhaps because my parents were Communists and the taxi firm were representatives of the petit bourgeoisie — that class which in Marxist terms ‘owned their own means of production’ and whose political allegiance could therefore switch between the ruling and the working-class depending on self-interest — we didn’t trust them to turn up. Lord Harmsworth, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Cole Porter or the Duke of Edinburgh might ring the taxi firm asking for a cab to take them to the dog track, a cocktail bar or a grouse shoot, and they would inevitably bend to the will of the aristocrat or the celebrity rather than an ordinary working-class family such as ours. So I
would be sent at ten-minute intervals to remind them that a taxi had been ordered to take me and my family to Lime Street Station, and in between my visits Molly would telephone them with a slightly different version of the same message. From the other room I could hear her begging them to swear that a taxi would be coming and reminding them that our money was as good as the Duke of Edinburgh’s, alternating her entreaties with screaming at me, ‘Eat your eggs, Lexi! For the love of God, eat your boiled eggs!’ Then, as like as not, we would run across the road and get a bus.

  In August 1959 there was a particular hysteria attached to our preparations because this year was extra-special. Molly, Joe and Alexei were going to Czechoslovakia — we were travelling eastwards beyond the Iron Curtain. Like the man in the magic lantern show but in reverse, we were going to step into the movie screen and the narrow streets of Prague.

  The beginning stages of the journey to the continent were by now familiar to me. First of all you had to get to London — things didn’t really begin until you reached the capital. The three of us would tumble through the ticket gates at Lime Street, dishevelled, some of our clothes on backwards because we’d dressed in the dark, dragging our suitcases on their unsteady and unreliable wheels behind us. Sometimes we would get there before our train was even at the platform, but generally the Red Rose Express with its red and cream carriages stretching away up the platform would be waiting for us. At the head of the train, wreathed in a cloud of steam and quietly hissing to itself, would be a dark green Royal Scot-class locomotive, its smoke deflectors and chimneystack picked out in black.