Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  I returned to being Alexei soon after the Bambi incident, another part of the realisation that I was never going to be like everybody else and I might as well work on being unique. And there was one particular event which made me aware that having a distinctive name might not always be a disadvantage. There was a kid in my class named, with a spectacular lack of imagination, Fred Smith. I saw him one day by the entrance to Stanley Park where he had been grabbed by the park policeman for some misdemeanour. This huge man in a dark blue uniform was demanding to know my classmate’s real name and wouldn’t believe that he was truly called Fred Smith. In fact the more Fred Smith insisted that he was honestly called Fred Smith the more the policeman became enraged at having his intelligence insulted in this fashion.

  My nickname at that point amongst my school friends, as a play on Sayle, was ‘Wayley’. Seeing me, Fred Smith called out in desperation, ‘Wayley! Wayley! Tell him, tell him my name’s Fred Smith!’ But the policeman wasn’t interested in my intervention. ‘Don’t be calling to Wayley!’ the man said and gave poor Fred a vicious clip round the ear for a crime he probably didn’t commit and really for the crime of being called Fred Smith.

  When the doorbell rang I must have been in the hall or on the stairs playing with my cars or drawing, because otherwise I don’t know why it was me who answered the door. I wasn’t exactly a door-answering type of child.

  As soon as I saw who was on the step I knew them for what they were. Two gigantic men, so big that they blocked the light of the winter sun, dressed identically in belted raincoats and trilby hats. Coppers! Bobbies! Detectives! All of a sudden I felt weak. My family had talked about this day for so long, and now it was finally here. We had assumed it was inevitable that eventually they would come for us, just as they had come for the Rosenbergs or Pastor Niemöller. After all, we came both first and second in the famous poem:

  First they came for the Communists [that was us!] and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.

  Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew [That was us too!]

  Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. [Not us.]

  Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me. [Obviously not us, because we’re all dead.]

  I racked my brains but couldn’t think what crime we had committed. Then came the terrifying realisation that of course they didn’t need you to do anything to arrest you. The authorities were perfectly capable of fabricating evidence against you or punishing you even if you were innocent, just like they did with Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss or poor Fred Smith. Then I became conscious of the fact that, though we had talked about it we hadn’t actually ever made any plans for what to do when the inevitable day came. There was no secret hiding-place in the attic, no convincing cover story to tell, no Sten gun tucked away under the couch to shoot our way out of trouble.

  ‘Hello, son, Bedfordshire CID,’ the bigger of the two men said, flashing an unnecessary warrant card. ‘Is your dad in?’

  Not knowing what else to do, I showed them into the front room — just, as I imagined, many victims of tyranny had done in the past, politely letting the Gestapo, the FBI or the KGB into the best room to sit on the couch — for want of any other plan. Then I went to fetch my parents.

  The adults closed the door on me, and I was left in the hall to try and listen while we waited to discover our fate.

  Up until that point our relationship with the police had actually been a rather good one. Molly said they were a tool of repression for the capitalist state, but we seemed to call them in more or less whenever we felt like it. If I ever went missing when we were on the beach at New Brighton, Molly would jump up screaming, ‘Lexi! Lexi! Where’s our Lexi?’ Then she would run off to find a policeman, even though I was only sitting three feet away.

  When I was six we had accidentally acquired a dog. It happened one day when Molly and I were out shopping on Oakfield Road and we saw a small brown puppy running up and down the pavement in a distressed state, clearly lost or abandoned. We took it home and named it Bruno, which may or may not have been another nom de guerre of Maxim Gorky’s. Bruno grew up into a very self-contained dog, which was probably the best way to survive in our house but it didn’t make him particularly lovable. He had a sly sense of humour a lot like mine, and maybe that was why we never got on that well.

  On a Sunday morning the only chore that was ever asked of me was to take Bruno for his walk in Stanley Park. At a newsagent’s near the park I would buy two comics with my pocket money, the Eagle and a thing called a Commando Comic, which was solely concerned with the adventures of British soldiers during the Second World War, trained killers such as I would have liked my father to be. This comic came in a distinctive pocket-sized format and, despite the unsophisticated stories and simple sketched black and white artwork, once through the gates of the park I would let Bruno off the lead and become absorbed in tales of the war, in which nobody ever indulged in a debate about whether it was an imperative to open a second front or if the conflict wasn’t merely a squabble between competing capitalist ideologies.

  By the time I looked up again Bruno would have vanished. Usually he would just run around for a bit and then make his way home by himself, and he would often be waiting for me when I returned to Valley Road. But occasionally he would go missing for a few hours which meant Molly would be straight down to the police station in Anfield Road demanding an all-out search be mounted immediately We would stand in front of the desk sergeant as he pretended to take down the dog’s details and my eyes would wander in embarrassment to the poster display pinned to the wall behind him. For years the only Wanted posters displayed in police stations were to do with the Colorado beetle, a small red insect which was at the time considered a big threat to the UK potato crop. If you saw one you were supposed to put it in a matchbox and take it to the police station. After a few years the Colorado beetle poster was replaced with one showing the ejector seat of a Harrier Jump Jet, as if even the beetle threat had disappeared and there was now absolutely no crime occurring in Britain anywhere.

  In our use of the police we were out of step with many others, since Liverpool was not a city in which the force were held in universally high regard. In 1919 the National Union of Police and Prison Officers had called for a nationwide strike over pay and conditions which typically, of all the authorities in the country, only achieved full support amongst officers on Merseyside, where the entire force abruptly abandoned their posts. In Liverpool even the coppers were militant. This sudden vacuum, a complete absence of law and order, resulted in what Liverpool people came to call ‘The Loot’. In poor districts such as Scotland Road and Bootle people ran riot, shops were smashed open and their contents plundered. The government’s response was to put Liverpool under military occupation with orders for peace to be brutally restored. During the police strike tanks patrolled the streets of our city and three thousand soldiers, less than a year after they had left the stinking trenches of the Somme, were used to seize key buildings. Then, once control was re-established, these soldiers and a few scab policemen were sent to roam through impoverished neighbour-hoods, smashing down doors and seizing back looted furniture and goods, a lot of which had been paid for and wasn’t stolen in the first place. Many working-class people were badly beaten, and at least one was shot dead.

  In the Boys’ Pen at Goodison Park when I went to Everton matches all the bigger boys would sing,

  Who’s that twat in the big black hat?

  Copp-er! Copp-er!

  Who’s that twat in the big black hat?

  Copper is his name!

  The Bedfordshire CID had come to our house to interview my father about the murder of Michael Gregsten at Deadman’s Hill on the A6 in Bedfordshire, on 22 August 1961, along with the rape and shooting of his lover, Valerie Storie. James Hanratty, a professional car thief, had been charged with the crimes. Hanratty
’s alibi was that at the time of the murder he had been in the Welsh seaside town of Rhyl, staying in a boarding house named Ingledene run by a woman called Mrs Jones, in the attic room, which had a green bath.

  The police had discovered that Joe had stayed at Ingledene between 21 and 24 August, in the small front room on the first floor. He was there on behalf of the NUR, taking part in a recruitment drive. In his book Who Killed Hanratty? Paul Foot describes Joe as ‘the most important witness from the prosecution point of view’. He says that Joe saw no sign of Hanratty, although he admits ‘he was out on union business from dawn to dusk’. Which sounds typical enough.

  Hanratty’s trial began at Bedfordshire Assizes on 22 January 1962. On 17 February he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Hanratty’s appeal was dismissed on 9 March, and despite a petition signed by more than ninety thousand people he was hanged at Bedford on 4 April 1962, still protesting his innocence.

  Joe was away for a week attending the trial in Bedford. One night Molly spoke to him on the phone, and when I asked how he was she replied that he had told her he was frightened. I asked her what my father was frightened of, and she said he was worried that Hanratty might have criminal friends who could harm him in some way.

  When he returned from the trial Joe told us that what had upset him the most was that he had been the final witness called in the trial. He realised that the last person Hanratty had heard testifying against him, the last person he had seen on the stand, the final person confirming his fate, was Joe Sayle. After that he was taken down, sentenced and hanged two months later. The last witness to testify against the last person executed in Britain was my father. Though he never talked about it, since he was such a good-natured man that must have been a heavy burden for him to bear.

  Over the next few years the case did not go away: prosecution witnesses attempted or committed suicide and several books were written about the case, including one by Lord Russell of Liverpool. There were newspaper articles, radio and TV programmes, all of them contesting the soundness of Hanratty’s conviction and reminding Joe that he might have taken part in the execution of an innocent man. When one of those programmes came on we did not shout at the TV as we usually did but simply changed the channel and said nothing. In 2002, the murder conviction of James Hanratty was upheld by the Court of Appeal which ruled that new DNA evidence established his guilt ‘beyond doubt’. So the coppers got it right.

  Considering we were two-thirds Jewish atheist Communists, Christmas was a surprisingly important occasion in our house. Molly would say that for her, as a child in an Orthodox house, Christmas had been strictly forbidden, but her mother would still secretly slip the children oranges and simple stuff so they wouldn’t feel left out amongst the Christian kids. On British television, during the 1950s and 1960s, the holiday period was also a time when presentations from the Soviet Union were prominently featured. It was as if there was considered to be something seasonal about performances originating from a godless, authoritarian dictatorship. The Moscow State Circus, with its spectacularly unfunny clowns, disturbingly dangerous high-wire acts and animal cruelty, would be transmitted live and at interminable length from a tent in Manchester. ‘Best horsemen in the world,’ Molly would say with a tremble of pride in her voice, referring to the Cossack horsemen who leapt on and off the backs of their stocky ponies as they hurtled round and round the circus ring. Presumably these men were the direct descendants of those Cossacks who had set fire to her grandmother’s village. The Bolshoi Ballet, too, was a regular fixture of the holiday period, and I can vividly recall sitting on the couch jammed in between Molly and Joe. They fell asleep the moment the programme began, leaving me to watch three hours of Swan Lake to the accompaniment of stentorian snoring.

  My parents were always remarkably keen to take me to see Santa in his grotto at Lewis’s department store — I suppose they felt that Santa was a lot like Stalin. Their names were sort of similar and they were both kindly-looking, rotund gentlemen with facial hair and red uniforms whose headquarters were located in the northern snowy wastes and were based upon a system of slave labour. At first we would shop for my presents at something called ‘the Daily Worker Bazaar’ which was held at the Communist Party bookshop. On long trestle tables would be arrayed sickly pot plants, Marxist literature, Paul Robeson records and crudely carved wooden toys from East Germany and dolls from the Soviet Union, which when you unscrewed them sometimes contained scribbled notes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn begging to be released from the gulag. After a while I refused to put up with this stuff and demanded to be given what everybody else was given. From then on Christmas was a happy event. I would wake up early and dive into what was known as a selection box. Molly very sensibly took an interest in healthy eating long before it was a general concern, so the only time I got my hands on the sugary confectionery that was beginning to swamp working-class areas was at Christmas. Then, after gorging on Smarties and Kit-Kats, I would open my other presents.

  In the afternoon, after shouting at the Queen’s speech on the TV (‘Parasite! Liar! What’s she got on her head? What about the Rosenbergs? Second front now!’) we would have a lovely turkey dinner — just the three of us, just like everybody else. And on Boxing Day we would eat turkey sandwiches and then the table would be cleared and Molly and Joe would spread out their maps and Baedeker guides and continental railway timetables and plan where we would be going next summer.

  One of my favourite Christmas gifts was something called a ‘Give-a-show-projector’. This was a battery-operated slide projector accompanied by a number of strips with simple cartoon stories on them. You could throw these images on to the wall or the ceiling, wherever you wanted. Discovering a flair for entrepreneurship, over the holidays I held a series of shows in my bedroom, charging other kids for the experience. Growing bored with the official storylines that came with the cartoon strips, I started to make up my own.

  This gave me a taste for performance and I began giving little impromptu shows for my parents, dressing up in clothes I had taken from the laundry cupboard. These shows were generally based on stories that were in the news or events taking place in the neighbourhood and were usually performed with a satirical bent, thus predating the satire boom on television by a good few years. If a neighbour or a visiting member of the Communist Party or the doctor was in our house when I suddenly decided to put on a show then they were trapped and would be forced to watch it too. Me and Molly couldn’t see why they wouldn’t want to be present at an improvised performance by a child prodigy such as me.

  Another staple that appeared year in year out in my Christmas stocking along with the confectionery was a box of coloured pencils, some pens and drawing paper. Being an only child was a bit like taking an extraordinarily long train journey: you were always trying to find something to do to pass the time. At first I just told myself tales inside my head, but then I discovered that drawing was a great way to give the stories in my brain an external life. Initially I had employed watercolours and pencils along with the other children, but by the time of the first delegation to Czechoslovakia I was working mainly in the relatively new medium of the biro, illustrating, in a large series of drawings, the daily life of a country known as Saylovia.

  Saylovia was a land where a number of visions of the present and the future came together. Clearly Saylovia was in many ways influenced by the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia. The flag of Saylovia was very similar to the Czech flag and all the cars looked like Tatras, with bold aerodynamic shapes, prominent air scoops and big fins.

  But its primary model was more local in inspiration. At the beginning of the 1960s the reshaping of Britain had begun to gather pace. Those in charge of it, government officials, local councillors, town planners and architects, were determined that the rebuilding of the country would go far beyond a limited and sympathetic restoration of war damage and instead produce an entirely modern country in which inequality and social divisions would be designed out by the
lavish use of ferro-concrete and central heating. The feeling amongst all these visionaries was that here was an opportunity for the wholesale reformation of society Through road traffic management, hygienic plumbing, massive programmes of demolition, flyovers, underpasses and town planning the war-like and aggressive nature of human beings would be tamed. Never again would the ignorant masses want to take up arms against other nations, or indulge in racism or xenophobia, because instead they had a nice flat with a balcony and underfloor heating.

  The public were not to be consulted on whether they wished to have their cities and towns torn down and rebuilt in an entirely original and untested style with no connection to what had gone before. But it was considered helpful if they could be convinced that this giant social experiment was what they had wanted all along. So articles began to appear in newspapers and magazines, accompanied by architects’ drawings showing how fabulous Coventry or Cumbernauld was going to look once all the rotten old stuff had been swept away and the tower blocks, ring roads, tree-lined boulevards and shopping precincts replaced them. There was also a ‘traffic expert’ by the name of Professor Sir Colin Buchanan who proposed driving giant, multi-lane highways through the middle of every one of Britain’s cities. His predictions, too, were accompanied by elaborate drawings. I was very taken with these images of utopia; the streetscape seemed so clean and uncomplicated compared with the cluttered and chaotic Liverpool town centre with its untidy jumble of buildings spanning the centuries. Everything would be so much better when the city was all pedestrian bridges and urban throughways.