by Alexei Sayle
For a while I tried to get into Airfix kits. With the occasional and sporadic help of my dad, at the table in the living room, I put together, very badly, a model of the battle cruiser Warspite and a Fairey Barracuda dive-bomber, painted them, put on the appropriate insignia and sat back with the usual sense of dissatisfaction. Then I had an idea: the next time I got my pocket money I hurried down to the toy shop and bought not one but two kits. One was for a Lancaster bomber and the other was of an SRN1 hovercraft. I then sat at the dining table and proceeded to combine them, so what I ended up with was a gluey lump which was basically a hovercraft with four Merlin engines, large wings and a number of swivelling turrets equipped with machine guns. I thought to myself, ‘This is more like it.’ Rather than just accruing things, arranging them and exulting in my possession of them I was making a new and original thing — a Bombercraft or a Hovercaster. I played with my Hovercaster for a while, then tired of it and set it alight in the back yard. Due to the massive amounts of glue employed in its construction the mongrel model caught fire very quickly and burned with great intensity.
We spent a week in Budapest, then travelled sixty miles to Lake Balaton which we were proudly told was the largest body of water in central Europe, as if the slow accumulation of rainwater in a hole over thousands of years was in itself an achievement of socialism. We were to spend the second half of our holiday in a union-owned motel on the shores of the lake. The area round about had in the late 1950s become a sort of Malibu for revolutionaries. Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Leonid Brezhnev and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin all had villas on the south-east shore, furnished in the latest 1950s’/1960s’ modernist style.
The place where we were staying was a white, modern, single-storey building with rooms clustered around a central courtyard and its own private beach. After the troubles of the 1950s Hungary had been given a degree of freedom not allowed in other states of the Soviet Empire, so food at our motel was plentiful, colourful and sumptuous. Back in Anfield we had thought with a certain amount of pride that on Sundays we had been eating salad, but really all we had been eating was lettuce and tomatoes in a bowl, sometimes with a hard-boiled egg on the top and no dressing except perhaps the industrial solvent known as ‘salad cream’. Now I saw what a salad really could be under socialism. There were red, green and yellow peppers, corn on the cob, huge tomatoes stuffed with Russian salad, artichokes, celery, lentils, okra and fresh herbs, all of them covered in rich oils or mayonnaise.
Until our holiday in Hungary all my summers had been spent in Northern countries, and this was the first time I had encountered the true sensuous heat of the South. My skin was toasted brown by the hot sun and occasionally my parents let me sip the warm red Hungarian wine known as Bull’s Blood. Meals were always accompanied by gypsies playing violins whether you wanted them to or not. In Lake Balaton I learned to swim. It seemed that Communism could do amazing things for a person, just as it could for salad. I had spent hours in the swimming baths at junior school splashily drowning, but the waters of the lake were so buoyant that I could float with only a finger holding me up and from there I simply lifted my arm and drifted free. This gave me a great sense of achievement. I had started to worry that I wasn’t the sort of kid who could swim, that I was teetering on the edge of being some sort of pallid, inactive mummy’s boy who stayed in the house and collected things and possibly played with dolls — but here I was swimming. I would dive down beneath the surface and cruise just above the sandy bottom of the lake, holding my breath for what seemed like minutes on end. Then I would kick upwards to emerge like an arrow into the bright sunlight, wondering if Mao Tse-tung wasn’t watching me from the shore with frank admiration.
Behind our motel in the pine woods there was a campsite, with tents scattered under the trees on the spongy ground. The people who stayed in these tents were only allowed access to a scrubby bit of public sand and were forbidden from using our stretch of perfect beach. Our family’s only experience of campsites had been those unfortunate first days in Czechoslovakia, so we didn’t consider it a practice that anybody would actually choose to indulge in. But one day while walking through the woods I came upon a brand-new, dark red Vauxhall Victor, bearing British number plates, parked next to a large tent. A Western automobile was a very rare sight on the roads of a Communist country, where even Soviet Bloc cars such as Skodas and Trabants were extremely scarce. As I passed there was a small crowd of young Hungarian men trying to see into the interior of the car.
A little while later my parents met the people who owned this Vauxhall — they were a family from London, husband, wife and their two sons who were about the same age as me. I knew right away that these people were what I had heard my parents frequently refer to as ‘progressives’ . Calling them ‘progressives’ meant that, while definitely not Communists, they were people who were generally sympathetic to ideas of social progress and liberalism. In the world of my parents there was a whole taxonomy, with ‘party member’ at its centre and radiating outwards, classifying the political allegiance of people you met or saw on the television. Closest to party member was ‘fellow traveller’, indicating people who, without being party members, had distinct Communist sympathies — they came to big meetings, read the Daily Worker, and you could trust them to mind the shop while you were out. Next came ‘fellow revolutionaries’ — all manner of anarchists, nationalists and socialists who you might make a temporary alliance with and then when they ceased to be useful you would try to kill them and they would try to kill you. After fellow revolutionaries came ‘reformists’, which in Britain meant members of the Labour Party, people who thought you could round off the corners of capitalism without doing away with it. Then came ‘progressives’. Lenin was said to have another term for those progressives of a liberal bent who came and wrote admiringly about the Soviet Union: he called them ‘useful idiots’. Then there was a list of people and organisations who were completely unacceptable to us. These included fascists, Trotskyists, Conservatives, the Blundells at number 7 and the British Transport Police.
There didn’t seem anything the least bit odd to me in classifying people according to their usefulness, sometimes just from their footwear. ‘Ah, yes,’ you’d say to yourself. ‘Desert boots. This person is clearly a progressive with pacifist tendencies.’
The Vauxhall Victors were, with their brand-new car and nice accents, clearly a lot better off than us but also they appeared to be a lot more naive. Our enthusiasm for the East, for Communism, was the zeal of the professional whereas they just seemed to be terribly enthusiastic, in a middle-class kind of a way, about everything they had seen in Hungary What I couldn’t understand was why they were staying in a tent and swimming from the public beach. Didn’t they know anybody in the party?
That autumn, on a cold and misty November day we went to visit the Vauxhall Victors. They lived in a suburb of south-east London called Forest Hill. Because of the freedom of travel conferred by our passes me, Molly and Joe would sometimes decide to drop in on people who lived hundreds of miles away Occasionally I suspected that these people were a little discomfited that we had come so far to see them at such short notice. On this trip I became conscious for the first time of the terrible vastness of London. As our local train stopped at yet another station, passed through yet another neighbourhood, ran alongside another park, overtook another town hall I thought what a daunting city it must be to live in and I imagined you would have to be a very confident person just to go down to the shops.
Mr Vauxhall Victor picked us up in the car from the nearest Southern Region station, then we drove past even more parades of shops and down more streets of suburban villas and large semis until finally, after about a week, we came to their enormous double-fronted Victorian house. This was the first middle-class property I had ever been in and it was a very different place from the austere homes of Valley Road. We were shown into a large living room with French windows leading to a garden that seemed as unending as the suburbs in the gathe
ring twilight. There were paintings on the walls, books stuffed higgledy-piggledy on the shelves and brass music stands with sheet music on them in the middle of the floor.
My parents were chatting inconsequentially to the couple when I, who never thought that my interventions might be unwelcome, remarked on what a lot of coloured people we had passed on the way to their house. Immediately a look of panic passed over the faces of the couple. I reckon they knew as few of the proletariat as we did of the petit-bourgeois and they secretly suspected, as a lot of the liberal middle classes did, that all working-class people harboured racist views. Now, right here in their home, one of them was openly expressing these opinions. I took their silence to mean that they hadn’t understood what I was saying, so I attempted to make it clearer. ‘You know,’ I said. ‘Blacks, negroes, you’ve got loads of them round here.’
Then they gave us tea, and afterwards the two sons played classical music for us. I think one of them played the flute rocking backwards and forwards, eyes closed, lost to the world. It was late evening when the father gave us a lift back to the local station. As we waited on the foggy platform, without needing to say it out loud me, Molly and Joe agreed never to do that again.
The reason I had noticed how many black people there were in south-east London, wasn’t racism but rather extreme envy. My parents had gone to a lot of trouble to tell me about racial prejudice and what a bad thing it was, and so over the years I had become desperate to express my tolerance and solidarity to a black person at the earliest opportunity. Unfortunately Anfield was more or less a hundred per cent white, so there were no minorities for me to show my lack of racial prejudice to.
Then one happy day a black man started walking down Valley Road in the mornings — presumably on his way to work, or perhaps he was a student at the university I took to sitting in the bay window of the sitting room waiting for him; then, when he appeared, I would rush out and stand in front of him so he had to stop. I would be wearing a big smile on my face, a smile that I thought radiated a beatific sense of liberality Then I would say, ‘Hello!’ to him in as unprejudiced way as I could, so he would understand that here was one British person who didn’t think he was inferior in any way In fact this small British person thought he was probably superior, since his suffering had given him all kinds of insights which white people couldn’t guess at and he was almost certainly good at dancing too. After a while he stopped walking down our street, presumably taking another route to work.
Towards the end of 1962 I came to test everybody’s tolerance for me, when throughout that autumn the entire world was thrown into an enormous panic by the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few months nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States seemed not just a possibility but almost a certainty In October of that year reconnaissance photographs taken by an American U-2 spy plane revealed missile bases being built in Cuba, prompting a US blockade and an armed confrontation between the superpowers. Unlike the rest of the country number 5 Valley Road remained an oasis of calm. We knew the truth of the matter, and it wasn’t what everybody else believed.
Me, Molly and Joe believed that the whole crisis was simply a pretext, part of a shrewd plan conceived by the Communist Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Rather than being caught out trying to militarise the Caribbean, the Soviet Union had deliberately created the emergency It was in fact a brilliant strategy designed to force the USA into agreeing to never again invade Cuba (something they had tried the previous year at the Bay of Pigs) and to remove the nuclear missiles which they had recently installed in eastern Turkey along the Russian border. All this would be achieved in exchange for the Russians simply dismantling some rockets which they hadn’t really wanted to put into Cuba in the first place.
Unfortunately, apart from members of the British Communist Party such as us nobody else in the UK was in on the ruse. So while I remained eerily calm all the other kids at school, their parents and the teachers were experiencing a great deal of stress. As far as they knew, the world was in very real danger of imminent extinction. During those two frantic weeks there were reports on the TV and radio and in the newspapers of demonstrations, candle-lit vigils, suicides and people building nuclear bunkers in their back gardens — everywhere you went there was a tense atmosphere. In the midst of this febrile mood I would sit in class with a knowing smile on my face giving everyone the thumbs-up sign, or I would walk along Oakfield Road whistling, grinning and saying to passers-by who I thought looked especially worried, ‘No need to fret — it’s all going exactly to plan. Mr Khrushchev’s got it in hand. They don’t want them missiles there anyway’ This made people feel even more disturbed and upset, since they now believed the situation had become so intense that an olive-skinned child in a knitted tank-top had been driven mad by world events.
In 1962 we took our third trip to Czechoslovakia. Again Joe had put together a delegation of railwaymen including Prendergast, Alf and his friend. But this time I too would be taking a companion, a boy from school who was my best friend. By the age of ten a clear distinction was already emerging in the way children behaved with each other. Some kids at school or in the street were popular types who had a big circle of mates, while others were loners who kept to themselves. And then there was me, who occupied some odd middle ground. I was a serial best-friender. I would become close to one other boy and spend all my time with him. I would invest all my emotions in him and visit his house constantly, dropping in at all times of the day and night whether I was invited or not. Eventually there would come a point where my best friend would let me down in some way — lie to me about where he was going, or leave me waiting for him at some agreed spot and never turn up. After that I would refuse ever to speak to him again and would have to embark on the whole tedious business of finding a replacement. So far I had had three best friends: a boy called Colin Noakes, another named ‘Tubby’ Dowling, and now I was on to my third, a boy from junior school named Peter Pemberton.
Peter lived in a big Victorian house off Breck Road, a busy shopping street about a quarter of a mile away from Valley Road. Naturally I spent a great deal of time at his house, which had a long, overgrown garden leading to a group of ramshackle workshops in a mews behind. We used to climb on to the roof of these sheds and pull off bits of lead which we tried unsuccessfully to fashion into coins for use in slot machines.
In terms of friendships I was very much self-taught, the Communist Party was no use in this department, since it viewed all human relationships as no more than tools for bringing about the proletarian revolution. My parents were both very popular in their own ways but I wanted to make friendships in my own distinctive fashion, radically different from theirs. So what I ended up with were relationships that were wonkity things very much like the model Airfix kits I made — badly constructed, eccentric in appearance and liable to burst into flames.
Me and Peter were such good friends that I decided it would be perfect if he came to Czechoslovakia with us. Despite already having had several friendships founder, I remained relentlessly optimistic that this one would be fine. I thought it would only make things better if we took Peter on holiday with us. Then I wouldn’t be with my parents all the time and would have a best friend of my own age to play with. That’s what I told myself, but I think the real reason I wanted Peter Pemberton with us was that I would have somebody to show off to. Given what went wrong, I think that what I was after was a passive and admiring audience, for him to sit in awe while I explained the wonders of eastern Europe, told him how incredible they were and how incredible I was for being so familiar with them.
Peter’s parents can’t have been rich and it must have been an effort for them to get the money together to pay for such a trip, yet as far as I can remember they did it willingly I was convinced we were going to have the best time anybody had ever had ever. In fact, of course, I was far too worked up and expecting far too much from a holiday, so that once we got to Czechoslovakia and things weren’t perfect in every respect I turned
into an absolute monster.
The delegation spent the first week in Prague and the second in the countryside, on this occasion at a resort in the High Tatra mountains. Everywhere we went I tried to point things out to Peter. ‘Look,’ I would say when we were in the department store opposite our hotel. ‘Isn’t it fantastic? They’ve only got one kind of pen for sale here and on the box it just says “Pen” in Czech.’ I was showing him this because I had become fascinated by the products on the shelves in the shops in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, their graphics and their packaging. Unlike a department store in Britain there was only one of everything — one style of pen, one brand of toothpaste, a single type of soap, and all very simply packaged. I found something attractive in this utilitarianism, the bold use of colour, the blocky shapes and the simple lettering.
Peter had no idea what I was going on about. ‘What’s so good about there being only one kind of pen?’ he would ask. ‘I’ve got two pens back home and they’re both different.’
