Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  So the capital of the People’s Republic of Saylovia, Sayleville, came to possess a Palace of Congress built in the modernist style of Brasilia, with a bicameral legislature located in upper and lower houses. In truth, however, it remained, like Brazil and many of the newer states of Africa and the Middle East, a dictatorship, dominated by a capricious and vain despot who was capable of destroying whole neighbourhoods with a sweep of his biro.

  Saylovia kept me going for years until in my early teens the drawings began to change. As a parting gift following the first delegation of comrades to Czechoslovakia, Ladislav had given me personally a lavishly illustrated book all about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, complete with a series of schematic drawings which showed from above, employing arrows and broken lines, how the shooting had unfolded. Here was the tram stop, here was the Mercedes limousine, here were Gucik and Kubis with their guns and bombs. In my drawings, in biro, I endlessly repeated these events, seen from a high vantage point so that the figures were tiny The tram stop, the open car, the little men running and firing and falling down dead. Sometimes I would draw a parallel street where people were going about their normal business unaware that an assassination was taking place only metres away.

  Every Friday when he came home from work Joe would bring Molly a bunch of flowers, carnations or tulips wrapped in coloured paper. He did this every week of his working life and beyond. At the same time he would hand over his wages and from it Molly would manage to pay the mortgage, buy food and put a little money into a post office account for when I went to Oxford or the Sorbonne. Perhaps Joe would have liked to stay home but, after working such long hours as a guard, he would then go off to do union work. In order to spend time with him, me and Molly would often go along to union functions too.

  In the early 1960s he became Liverpool and North Wales District Secretary of the NUR, which required a huge amount of time but paid very little money At the weekend my father would often go for meetings at the edge of his empire, getting up early and leaving before I was awake. Later in the day my mother and I would travel to distant places such as Chester to meet him. We got the bus to James Street Station, then took an electric train under the River Mersey to Rock Ferry where we changed to one of the new diesels that carried us onward to Chester.

  In some ways the rural landscape that surrounded Liverpool and the rolling farmland on the Wirral seemed more exotic and foreign to me than Karlovy Vary, Montmartre or Brussels. At least to get to those foreign places it took a lot of effort, days of travel and the constant handing over of your passport to men in strange uniforms — and when you got there everybody talked a different language and dressed differently and smoked cigarettes that smelt like an abattoir on fire.

  Sometimes if the train driver at Rock Ferry knew my dad he would let me sit in the cab of the diesel with him, and so I was able to watch as neat farms with cows in the fields, woods and little villages made of sandstone came rattling towards us. I wondered how many of the people in those farms and villages were Communists or Jews. Was it like Liverpool, where it seemed that about one in ten of the population was a Communist or a Jew or both, or were an even higher proportion of these farmers on the Wirral members of the party?

  As a District Secretary, Joe would often be a delegate to the union’s annual general meeting which would be held at a different seaside resort every year. Other men might have seen it as an opportunity to get away from their families, but me and Molly always went with my father. After all, everything was paid for by the union, and it was a chance for us to get a little something back for all the time he was away.

  The epicentre of the AGM would be the biggest ballroom in town. For seven days the grand Wurlitzer organ would cower in its oubliette beneath the stage while above it, in the dustmote-spangled air, fat men dressed universally in scratchy grey droned on about ‘resolutions back to congress’, ‘incremental payscale differentials’ and ‘clause nine arbitration agreements’. In its own way it was exciting. To be at the congress of a large trade union in the 1960s was a little like attending a rock festival where the stars up on the stage were balding alcoholics in ill-fitting suits talking gibberish. Trade union men like Vic Feather, Sid Weighell and Len Murray were constantly in the newspapers, on the TV and the radio during that era, in their ponderous, evasive and oxygen-sapping English uttering phrases like ‘at this moment in time’ and ‘in the interests of the working man’ and ‘I’ll have to refer that question back to my executive committee’. This language they had invented to hide their intentions and to repel the uninitiated.

  Then in the evening a transformation would take place —the folding chairs were cleared away and there would be music and dancing. On the stage there appeared a dance band wearing matching outfits, their weary enthusiasm switching on as they stood to play The most surprising delegates would reveal themselves to be proficient at the jitter-bug and the waltz, straight-faced, spinning and kicking their heels with their wives or women who they said were their wives, while others conspired against them in alcoves.

  I remember at the age of five or six being forced to take a nap in a boarding house in the seaside town of Exmouth — I was supposed to get some sleep in the afternoon so that I could stay up late and attend the union’s annual dinner dance. A window was open and the lace curtain fluttered in the breeze and in the distance a train whistle blew and I couldn’t sleep because I was too excited. Though there were other dances throughout the week the main social event, this annual dinner dance, was held on the Friday night after all work at the congress had been completed, wrapped up in resolutions and plans for strikes, and it was the climax of a week-long parade of functions. Before then, on the Monday after we were settled into our boarding houses and caravans, the mayor would host a reception at the town hall to welcome us to his seaside resort and there would be speeches of greeting and pork pies cut into four under an ornate crystal chandelier.

  At the annual dinner dance the menu never varied — it would probably have taken a resolution back to congress to alter it. So there was brown Windsor soup, roast chicken, roast potatoes and peas, followed by ice cream. The only hint of exoticism would be supplied by fraternal delegates from foreign unions, men of the Deutsche Bundesbahn and the Italian Railways and French railway workers from the SNCF staring in horror at their brown Windsor soup and wondering if it wasn’t in fact made out of the brown bits of Windsor.

  While the men sat in sub-committees and steering groups ignoring the summer sun that streamed through the windows, the women and children had to be entertained. So during the day there were coach trips, visits to stately homes and castles and activities for the kids, especially sports days during which they had their hopes raised and then shattered. By and large me and Molly turned our noses up at these trips. We didn’t like organised fun with people we didn’t know and particularly didn’t wish to marvel at stately homes and castles, which we viewed as the oppression of our class rendered in stone and plaster. Why would we want to look at a Vanbrugh façade, a ceiling by Rubens or a Palladian portico when we knew that what had paid for it was slavery, exploitation and genocide? When we looked at this beauty my family saw only ideology.

  Me and Molly preferred exploring the resorts on our own, ill-informed and pure in our class hatred, and in this we were aided by a wonderful device. The AGMs of the big unions lasted for weeks each summer and there was great competition amongst resorts to be the host for hundreds of big-spending trade unionists, their mistresses and their families. As a token of gratitude the town council of whatever seaside town had been chosen gave each family this magical piece of cardboard — a pass. As the relative of a delegate, having a pass meant that for a week you were entitled to enjoy all council facilities either free or at half price. Bus rides, swimming pools, palm houses, model villages — we flashed that pass and were ushered around like royalty There was a little narrow-gauge train that ran along the front at Scarborough and me, Molly and Bruno our dog would, since it was free t
o us, ride it up and down rather than walking. It was a terrible trauma to come to the end of the week and to realise that your pass didn’t work any more, that you were cast back down with the ordinary passless people. In Scarborough one of the events we got into at half price was a re-enactment of the Second World War sinking of the pocket battleship Graf Spee, held three times a week on the boating lake of Peasholin Park, which for the afternoon became the Rio Plato. On our trips to Czechoslovakia and the rest of eastern Europe we were constantly being shown round the sites of concentration camps or the exact spots where hundreds of partisans had been machine-gunned by German storm troopers, and this was the British equivalent: model Spitfires on wires coming in over the laurel bushes, machine guns blazing, and quite small explosions going off in the water.

  In the summer of 1961, rather than return to Czechoslovakia we had decided on the previous Boxing Day to go to Hungary We would not take a delegation, but while we were there it was arranged that we would meet senior members of the Communist Party and the trade unions with a view to bringing a group of railwaymen over the following year.

  With the usual panic we had got to the Gare du Nord and were racing down the platform. Maybe because me, Molly and Joe were travelling further east than we had done before I was experiencing a particularly heightened sense of awareness. I remember dragging my suitcase along when on an adjoining track I caught sight of a train that presented such an image of glamour and speed that it scarcely seemed real. It was scarlet and silver with a cockpit for the driver like a bomber plane’s, high above its long, aerodynamic nose and porthole windows down the flanks. In slanted metal letters along the side of the locomotive were written these magical words: ‘TEE — Trans Europe Express’. This was the train I wished we were going to be riding on, racing swiftly across Europe in air-conditioned luxury, rather than the train that we were taking. I was afraid of the train we were taking.

  The three of us were running to the Gare de l’Est, right next door, to ride the Orient Express from Paris to Vienna. This was as far as the famous express ran at that time, and from there we would be taking another train onward to Budapest. One of the films Unity Theatre endlessly showed was The Red Balloon, a 1956 short in which a young boy chases a red balloon, which seems as if it has a life of its own, all over Paris. I felt sometimes that boy was our family, though we were continually chasing trains rather than red balloons that symbolised an idealistic notion of hope.

  When we got to the Orient Express we were reluctant to board. The passengers seemed very seedy and frightening, hanging out of the windows or snogging girls on the steps and refusing to move. Once aboard it was hard to get to our seats because the aisles were blocked by gypsies and their luggage — luggage which seemed to consist of large hessian sacks that appeared to be moving. Molly had been going on for months about how dangerous the Orient Express had become, hence my nervousness. Finally we settled into the ancient, dirty carriage, and a few minutes later the train jerked into life and slowly ground through the same Paris suburbs that we had come through a few hours before. However, somewhere between Strasbourg and Munich, in keeping with the train’s reputation for mystery and intrigue, I did find ten Swiss francs in the toilet. The dining car of the Orient Express still hung on to a little of the glamour of the pre-war years. Lacy curtains fluttered in the breeze from the open windows and the staff’s uniforms, stained with half a century of soup, even now evoked the bygone glory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with their gold epaulettes and ornate silver buttons. They served these little tins of orange juice as a sort of hors d’oeuvre, and I will still occasionally taste orange juice from a can and be projected back like a time traveller to some foreign dining car, sunshine streaming through the window with consommé slopping from a bowl as the train rocks gently from side to side.

  At least if we were in the dining car we were safe and moving in the right direction, but Joe had developed this terrifying new practice of making us all get off the train with him to eat in the station buffet, leaving all our belongings behind. He would force us to leave the security of the carriage, walk along the platform to a tiled, echoing underpass and cross under the tracks to emerge on the busy station concourse. It was an extraordinary sensation, terrifying but in its way also thrilling. We would traverse the marble floor of some German terminus, garish neon signs in blues, reds and yellows advertising hotel rooms by the hour and Teutonic singing reverberating from the station beer hall, with Joe insisting we had plenty of time because the train would leave from one platform in a few minutes but it would certainly return half an hour later to another. All the same, it took a great deal of confidence to sit still and eat a bratwurst while watching everything you owned clanking off up the line.

  It was late evening when we got to Vienna, where we would spend the night in a small hotel near the station. The place where the three of us were staying didn’t have a restaurant, so we went out into the streets to find a café. Eventually we located a large restaurant unlike anywhere I had been before. It had warped ancient wooden floorboards and in the centre of the room a huge ornate black iron stove with a fat pipe reaching up to the ceiling — waiters in long aprons pirouetted around this stove with massive trays of food held high above their shoulders. I ordered a Wiener Schnitzel, which came with a fried egg on top. It seemed such a brilliant idea to be eating something named after a city in the city it was named after.

  On the way back from the café, in the window of an electrical shop I saw a radio in bright red plastic with four silvery antennae shaped like the Sputnik satellite. Here was another amazing thing. In Britain radios were shaped like radios and were dull and sober wooden boxes. It seemed like an act of extraordinary genius to conceive of manufacturing one that looked like something else, and in such vibrant materials. It seemed somehow very German, too. In the years to come, as German cars, machine tools and consumer products drove British goods from the shops I thought of that radio and wasn’t surprised.

  On the way back to the hotel we came across something else very German or Austrian — a group of young men on the other side of the road pushing people off the pavement, punching them and slapping them in the face. They passed us by, but it was an unsettling incident.

  The next morning as the Hungarian Railways train headed east from Austria the weather gradually became hotter and the landscape outside the windows slowly changed. I noticed grain that was stacked in unfamiliar ways, I saw fields of sunflowers and peppers for the first time, whitewashed houses with reed roofs and storks nesting in the chimney pots, horse-drawn carts on dirt tracks. At the border between Austria and Hungary we spotted a group of British miners who were so overcome to be leaving Hungary that they were in tears.

  Once in Budapest we were put up in a grand baroque hotel, reserved solely for the use of foreigners, on the banks of the Danube. The imposing public rooms swarmed with citizens from all across the Soviet Empire mixed with people like us, Westerners who had come to marvel at a real-life workers’ state. Though I was a child I was good on atmospheres: having no older brother or sister to ask what they thought might be going on meant I quickly became attuned to changes in the psychic weather in a room. I suppose I got a lot of practice, since having Molly for a mother was like living in the emotional equivalent of Darwin in northern Australia where there are fifteen lightning storms a day So in that big hotel by the Danube with its sweeping staircase I began to notice that there was one group of comrades who, though they went un-noticed by the Westerners, seemed to send an uneasy frisson through the hotel’s staff and some of the other guests from the East. These people were the Russians.

  There must have been Russians around during our two trips to Czechoslovakia, but this was the first time I had been amongst them as a distinct group and it was only the slight apprehensiveness that followed them which drew my attention. In a bar at the top of the stairs there was one Russian who seemed especially fond of me. As my parents looked on, smiling, he sat me on his knee, and as the smell of v
odka and onions cascaded over his metal teeth he pressed gift after gift on me. This Russian must have been in the Soviet air force, some sort of ‘adviser’ perhaps, because amongst the things he gave me were a pilot’s wings, first class, and a huge golden cap badge with laurel leaves, a red star and a hammer and sickle at the centre.

  After three trips to the East I now had a lot of stuff like this — stuff that I didn’t really know what to do with. I did briefly wonder whether having pilot’s wings might entitle me to take the controls of a Mig 17 fighter jet with no further training. I told the kids at school that it did, but never put it to the test.

  It was hard to stop people in Communist countries giving you things. They were particularly keen on badges, the usual images of Marx and Lenin but also little metal sputniks and national flags. My parents already possessed Liverpool’s largest collection of Bohemian glass, oddly shaped bowls in red glass shot through with little air bubbles and decanters and wine glasses tinted in shades of blue and yellow. What I seemed to have ended up with mostly were pennants. The walls of my bedroom were already covered with these triangular pieces of shiny silk celebrating youth conferences in East Germany that I hadn’t attended and Brazilian football clubs I had previously been unaware of. Every day I was in Hungary I acquired more souvenirs that I didn’t know what to do with. When I got home I put my pennants on the wall and then thought, ‘Now what?’

  By the age of ten or eleven I had, either with other boys or on my own, taken part in train-spotting, car-spotting, birdwatching and egg-gathering. In a rudimentary fashion I had tried to collect comics, rocks, toy cars and butterflies. But each time at some point I had been plagued with the twin thoughts ‘Now what?’ and ‘Is that it?’ At which point I always abandoned my latest hobby I kept trying and trying, but perhaps I just didn’t have that collector’s impulse or maybe it was simply that my hobby and my family’s hobby was the elimination of private property via the violent expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, organisation of labour on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and centralisation of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank and the suppression of all private banks and bankers. So writing down numbers in a book was likely to have a hard time competing with that.