by Alexei Sayle
It was possible to join these long-distance overnight trains at many places — Calais, Boulogne, Ostend or the Hook of Holland after crossing by ferry, or somewhere on the continent, Paris or Vienna, and if you wished they would take you as far as Budapest, Sofia, Moscow, Istanbul or Tehran in great discomfort. Over the years we took night trains from all these departure points — to amuse my classmates I could say ‘Do not lean out of the window’ in* three foreign languages with appropriate accents: ‘Ne pas se pencher dehors!’ I would shout. ‘Nicht hinauslehnen!’ and ‘Pericoloso sporgersi!’
To me there was always something unsettling about travelling by couchette. Superficially you were tucked up safe in your bed, but what was outside the bedroom window kept changing as if one were sleeping in a haunted house. You would drift off amongst fields and farms and wake in the middle of the night, lift the blinds of the condensation-streaked windows and, clearing a gap with your hand, see snow-covered mountains looming towards you at great speed — or you might fall asleep in a marshalling yard and wake hours later still in the same marshalling yard. Foreign railway coaches seemed foreign and unfriendly — they were much more streamlined, all steel and hard plastic, than the Edwardian club-on-wheels of British Railways. The windows on a British train were tiny, fussy little glass panels with complicated catches that you could just about get your hand through, whereas continental ones dropped in two so you could stick half your body out of the carriage, if you wanted, in a way that required warning notices in four different languages. And instead of heraldic imagery — the British Railways emblem was a lion rampant on a wheel — they just had letters for their emblems, like SNCF or DBB.
In the morning the attendant brought you coffee and a continental breakfast. In western Europe this official would also take charge of passengers’ tickets and passports at the start of the journey, returning them before arrival at the destination, to ensure that we were not disturbed by ticket and passport inspections. In the Eastern Bloc countries this was not done, and it was a part of night travel in the East to be woken before and after every border by each country’s frontier police and rail inspectors.
Unlike in sleeping cars, couchette compartments were not segregated by sex, so you slept in your grubby clothes and often found yourself sharing your sleep with strangers. It was a lottery who was going to be in your compartment at nightfall. I would find myself frantically wishing, ‘Please make the fat man with the breath that smells of garlic get off the train at Frankfurt during the evening.’ For some, fellow travellers who shared your compartment for a few hours were a source of mystery and adventure, conversation and fleeting intimacy, but for me strangers were just somebody who was likely to wake you in the middle of the night with their screaming.
We arrived at Prague Central Station late at night two days after leaving Liverpool, but still Ladislav and a whole fleet of Tatras were waiting for us, their engines clattering into life, their triple headlights flaring as we emerged tired and grimy dragging our suitcases on to the cobbled forecourt. Ordinary Czechs must have wondered who these foreign guests were —perhaps relations of the president of some foreign country that the Eastern Bloc was courting for its minerals. I think we must all have been excited to reach our destination, but some were elated even before we got to Prague. A little while after crossing the border from Germany the train had stopped at a station and I was dozing when Prendergast came into the compartment. He raised the blind and, pointing out of the window, said in a reverential, trembling voice, ‘Look … look. That’s where the beer comes from!’ I blearily roused myself and, looking through the smeared glass, saw that the station sign read ‘Pilsen’ .
I don’t know what we thought would happen on this trip but Ladislav, Prukha and presumably the Communist Party authorities at the highest level had decided that what the first delegation of British railwaymen to Czechoslovakia would like to see more than anything else were sights, locations and exhibits connected with the wartime assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague. The next morning the fleet of Tatras was waiting for us outside our hotel, and after we had climbed aboard it proceeded in a long line to the quiet suburb of Kobylisy There the cars parked and we clambered out, looking around us and not knowing what to expect. We found that we were standing on a bend in a wide road, across from us there was a tram track that curved around and out of sight, and in the centre of the road was a tram stop with a little wooden shelter. Beyond the shelter there was a long brick wall behind which tall, green-leaved trees nodded and rustled in the breeze.
Before leaving the hotel we had been introduced to our new translator, a pretty blonde woman in her twenties named Nadia. Now that we were an official delegation Ladislav couldn’t be with us all the time because he had to attend to his other duties as a senior ministry translator, but he assured Joe that he would join us as often as possible and in the meantime Nadia would look after our party So there we were, standing at the side of the road in a tranquil suburb, when our pretty little translator began her tale of awful murder and terrible retribution.
Pointing to the bend where the tram track disappeared, she told us that on 27 May 1942 at 10.30 a.m. Heydrich, the Nazi Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, set off on his daily journey in an open-topped Mercedes from his home to Prague Castle. Heydrich was such a monster that even other leading Nazis like Himmler were afraid of him, and Hitler admired his cruelty to such an extent that he was considering Heydrich as a possible successor. Two Czechs, Gabcik and Kubis, who had been trained and flown in from Britain, were waiting at the very tram stop we were staring at. As Heydrich’s car approached, Gabcik stepped in front of the vehicle and tried to open fire, but his Sten gun jammed.
I thought of speaking up at this point, since I was pretty certain that I knew what had caused this particular problem. My parents’ hope that I would grow up to be this kind, sensitive pacifist, possibly one who wore sandals over grey socks, backfired badly Due to the ownership limits they’d placed on pretend guns, I’d developed an obsession with real firearms, military aircraft and armoured fighting vehicles of all kinds. If there was a war film on the TV I was more fascinated by the weapons than by the plot or storyline. There was a Graham Greene-scripted film that had recently been shown on TV called Went the Day Well?, in which at one point a British sailor opens up on the Nazi paratroopers trying to take over his village. His weapon is a .45 calibre Thompson equipped with the fifty-round drum magazine that I was particularly fond of. And when sometimes there was an exploded drawing of the internal workings of a rifle or machine gun in one of my comics I devoured every detail, noting the differences in ammunition, feed mechanism and recoil characteristics. This was how I knew that, though it was a serviceable and inexpensive sub-machine gun, there was a drawback with the magazine of the Sten in that it had two columns of 9mm cartridges arranged side-by-side in an alternating pattern, merging at the top to form a single column. As a consequence, any dirt in this taper area was liable to cause feed malfunctions. Rough handling could also result in deformation of the magazine lips, which required a precise eight-degree angle to operate. But I decided not to interrupt the story at such a tense moment by sharing this information with my fellow delegates.
The other Czech commando, Kubis, threw a modified antitank grenade at the vehicle and its fragments ripped through the car, embedding shrapnel and fibres from the upholstery in Heydrich’s body The assassins were initially convinced that the attack had failed, but Heydrich died eight days later from blood poisoning caused either by shrapnel from the bomb or by fragments of upholstery which had entered his spleen.
Next, feeling slightly sick, we got back into our fleet of black limousines and moved to the church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in the centre of Prague. This was where Heydrich’s killers had been trapped and put to death after they were betrayed by a fellow partisan. As our guide talked I looked around and saw that the inside of the church was still riddled with bullet holes from the firefight. She told us t
hat the Nazi retribution for the killing of Heydrich was savage. Ultimately more than thirteen thousand people were arrested, including Kubis’s girlfriend who died in the Mauthausen concentration camp. In an attempt to minimise the reprisals among his flock, the bishop to whose diocese the church belonged took the blame for the actions in the church on himself, even writing letters to the Nazi authorities. He was arrested and tortured. On 4 September 1942 he, the church priests and senior lay leaders were executed by firing squad. Then we had lunch, and afterwards went to a museum to look at Heydrich’s damaged car.
Towards the weekend, again in our fleet of government limousines, we went to the village of Lidice. As a punishment for the assassination of Heydrich, the Nazis, who suspected there may have been a connection between the perpetrators and a family who lived in Lidice, killed all the men of this village and deported the women and children to concentration camps. The buildings were burned to the ground and the stream that ran through it was diverted to another course. Grain was then planted over the site of the village in an attempt to eradicate any sign that the place had ever existed. What we were being shown here was the oddest thing, an absence, not something that was there but something that had been taken away All the way back from Lidice in the lead car I sang ‘One Man Went to Mow’ at the top of my voice, while everybody else sat in hollow-eyed silence. Our holidays had never been conventional, but this one was in another league of strangeness. In the second week, between the visits to locomotive works and folk concerts we were given a private screening at the Ministry of Information of the 1943 film Hangmen Also Die!, a dramatic re-enactment of the events leading up to the assassination of Heydrich and the shoot-out in the church of Saints Cyril and Methodius; made in Hollywood by refugees from the Nazis, it was directed by Fritz Lang, scripted by Bertolt Brecht amongst others with music by Hans Eisler.
I don’t know what the Czechs were trying to show us, if anything. In Britain there were many memorials to the Second World War, big stone things, unmoving and civic and dedicated almost entirely to the armed forces. My parents never paid any of them the slightest bit of attention, but as soon as we were on the continent their attitude changed. They would be constantly pointing out the plaques and the bundles of wilted flowers tied with red, white and blue ribbons that commemorated the spots where hostages had been executed for acts of resistance, and endlessly drawing my attention to the walls of the many buildings which bore a tracery of craters — the trail of machine gun and rifle fire. ‘Look!’ my parents would gleefully say, pointing at some inscription, ‘It says here, Lexi, that twenty hostage nuns were massacred on this very spot,’ or ‘Over there, Lexi, that was where they hanged the entire football team.’
Lacking religion as we did, perhaps these were our places of worship. Communists believed in partisans in the same way that more ethereally inclined families believed in fairies; they were both mythical woodland creatures possessed of wisdom and nobility who ran around the forest making mischief. The spiritual families would seek out spooky caves or magical trees or the places where miracles happened, and for Communists the sights of Nazi reprisals were our Wooky Hollow.
Though it never seemed to be of concern to my parents, mention of the war sometimes caused in me a scintilla of unease because of the fact that my father had not fought. Railway guard had been what was known as a ‘reserved occupation’, a job considered so necessary to the war effort that even if he had wanted to volunteer Joe would not have been allowed to join up. Still, it bothered me just a tiny bit, even though Joe’s was actually an extremely dangerous job because freight trains and marshalling yards were often the target of German bombers. Most of the others boys’ fathers had been in the army, navy or air force but mine hadn’t — and he hadn’t volunteered to fight in Spain either. There was something in me that would have liked him to have been some kind of soldier or military hero, something spikier than just being a very nice man.
On another evening we went as a party to a performance at the Magic Lantern Theatre. The rest of the group were seeing it for the first time and were astounded by the show, but I was surprised to find myself a little bored by it all. I supposed there was a limit to how many times you could be impressed by teapots flying through the air.
As a bit of light relief from visits to locomotive factories and the horrors of the Second World War, one evening we were taken to the Good Soldier Schweik pub in the old town of Prague — the first pub I had ever been in. When I got back to Britain my parents bought me a Penguin edition of The Good Soldier Schweik, a hefty paperback with a grey cover. I do think they often forgot I was only eight years old. I didn’t read the book for many years but I liked looking at the illustrations at the head of each chapter — a tubby, unshaven man in a shabby uniform, cavorting with dancing girls or mysteriously stuffing dogs down his tunic. When I did finally get around to reading the book, at twelve or thirteen, my holiday souvenir turned out to contain a message that seemed very much at odds with the socialistic seriousness we were usually presented with. It was as if a stick of Blackpool rock you had bought as a memento of a day out contained an offensive message running right through the middle of it.
The Schweik pub was ‘themed’ around the Good Soldier. There were beer mats with his face on, pictures of the author, Jaroslav Hasek, and there was even a shop where my parents bought me a little cloth figure of the tubby soldier. When I read the book I wondered if the Czech authorities knew what they were doing promoting with Schweik, letting a pub be opened in his name and selling cuddly toys in his likeness, since the message of the book, while it might have been anti-authoritarian, is certainly not one supportive of the ideals of socialist conformity The worrying notion niggled away for years at the back of my mind that the governments of Communist states might not always know what they were doing.
The Good Soldier Schweik is set at the time of the First World War and tells the story of a petty thief who makes his living stealing dogs. Schweik seems determined to volunteer to fight for the Austrian Emperor, but nobody is sure whether he is an idiot or an incredibly crafty anarchist intent on undermining the war effort. Though I was fascinated by the book, I sometimes found the character of Schweik unsettling. I was still enough of an ideologue to find his total rejection of doctrine, his selfishness, his lustfulness and his dishonesty disturbing, but also worryingly appealing. The figure I found more congenial, as well as a wonderful comic creation, was Volunteer Marek. In civilian life Marek had been a writer, one who got fired from his job at a natural history magazine after writing articles about imaginary animals because he couldn’t be bothered learning about real ones and found them too dull anyway. Marek is appointed to the post of historian for Schweik’s battalion and in that role he begins writing, in advance, descriptions of heroic and poignant deaths for his fellow soldiers.
I supposed that Czech officialdom assumed that the book only mocked the authorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire because that was when it was set, whereas in fact it was a satire on the corruption and stupidity of all officialdom. In retrospect maybe The Good Soldier Schweik also opened a window into the sly and sardonic nature of the people who had been our hosts and went some way to explaining a few of the odd confusing things that had gone on.
After two weeks’ holiday culminating in one final huge dinner, with speeches and the presentation of much globular Bohemian glassware, we set out on the return journey to Britain, with Nadia our translator travelling with us as far as the border. It was night and we were approaching West Germany when, realising that I hadn’t seen Alf for some time, I went looking for him. I searched all over the train until finally I came to a compartment with the blinds drawn. Sliding open the door, I saw in the darkness the shape of two figures springing apart, Nadia and Alf, their clothes in disarray ‘It’s dark in here,’ I said, switching on the reading lights. In the sudden brightness Nadia looked like she had been crying. This didn’t stop me sitting down next to them and beginning to chat happily about whatever was on my
mind. Oddly, they didn’t seem to want me around. I couldn’t understand it: people, particularly Alf, usually acted as if they found my company delightful, but these two definitely wanted me gone. So after a while I got up and left and spent the next few years wondering what had been going on.
I evolved this elaborate theory that Nadia had been trying to recruit Alf as a spy (since she must have had StB clearance to mix with foreigners) so that she could pass on to the KGB details of the Sunday timetables on the West Coast Line or where the waiting rooms were at Runcorn station. When, after years of theorising, I eventually thought simply to ask Molly what had been occurring it turned out to be a less complicated story Nadia and Alf had begun an affair while we had been in Czechoslovakia and she now wanted him to divorce his wife, marry her and take her out of the country.
Along with being treated like a little prince, it was odd for somebody my age to spend such long periods as the only child amongst so many adults. That these extended periods should take place on transcontinental trains, in foreign cities and in the backs of futuristic limousines only added to the weirdness. A lot of the time I was bored and at other times just confused, but the result was that I tended to spend great stretches of time inside my head telling myself stories or inventing complex explanations for the bizarre behaviour of grown-ups.
Throughout a large part of the 1950s I was a David rather than an Alexei. For many years I was uncomfortable with my first name and in a period spanning primary and junior school insisted that I should be called David Sayle, employing my middle name. Many of my junior school reports are for this other kid called Sayle who appears to be a rather dull child, judging by what the teachers have written about him. Clearly my parents went along with me being David — they probably felt that it was good practice for me to have different aliases, just like Trotsky and Stalin.
