Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  I wasn’t able to articulate what it was that I felt about the pen and its box and why it was so important that he understood what I meant, even though I didn’t really know what I meant either. And that would make me really angry with him.

  And then we went to the mountains and my behaviour got much worse. We had been playing table tennis in the hotel’s recreation room and suddenly I found I was attacking him with my bat. I was hitting him and hitting him and he didn’t seem to be feeling the blows, and that made me even more angry with him so I hit him some more.

  Then for a while I would calm down and we would be friends again, but my insane behaviour would inevitably reappear. I can’t imagine what it was like for the poor boy, being trapped thousands of miles from home behind the Iron Curtain with a crazy person who kept attacking him. Maybe that’s why he never seemed to react.

  At the end of two unhappy weeks our homeward-bound train stopped on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria.

  We were forced to get down and hang about for an hour or so, wandering about on the low concrete platform. There was generally a long delay at the frontier when you were leaving a Communist country People’s papers had to be checked more assiduously than on the inbound journey, since while there weren’t many people trying to get into the Soviet Bloc there were a lot trying to get out.

  The border station was little more than a halt, really Nobody ever got on here or got off unless they were being chased into the woods by the guards, but unlike most other railway stations in the world this one was equipped with a line of wooden machine gun towers, row after row of barbed wire, an actual minefield and a shop. The shop was the other reason why they held you at the border for over an hour. When you left Czechoslovakia or any other Communist country you weren’t allowed to take any of their currency with you. The rulers didn’t want to have to convert their money, which was worthless outside the Warsaw Pact countries, back to pounds, francs or dollars, losing some of their precious Western cash which they could use to buy luxury goods for themselves. So on the border there would always be a shop stocked with peculiar products offered at ludicrously high prices and staffed by the extremely unhelpful family members of the frontier guards. Here you were forced to spend any krona or zloty that you hadn’t managed to get rid of while in their country.

  These border railway stations, with their armed guards and barking dogs and sinister secret policemen watching everybody with cruel eyes, were always disturbing places, but the shops themselves possessed an even more depressing atmosphere. They were like badly attended museums of failed products, their dusty shelves lined with crudely made folk items, kitchen implements of no conceivable use, jars of peas in vinegar and boxes of pre-war liqueur chocolates, filled with a cherry brandy that had long ago evaporated leaving nothing but a toxic sludge behind. It always took a long time to buy anything in these places, since your main thought was to try and figure out what would be the least inconvenient thing to carry right across Europe. But on that particular day I was in the shop till the train whistle blew for the final time, desperately searching the shelves, thinking I might find something to buy for Peter Pemberton, some wonderful product that would make up for the way I had treated him. But of course there was nothing.

  At the age of eleven I began attending Alsop Grammar School for Boys, and being born in August I was one of the youngest in my class. I had taken and passed the eleven-plus exam the previous spring. As soon as the results were announced — who was going to grammar school, who had failed the exam and was going to secondary modern or technical schools — a kind of poison spread through the street. There was a boy from the other end of Valley Road who I had been friendly with and who had failed the exam, and from that moment he never walked past our house but would circle round and go down the next street rather than risk bumping into me. At least that’s what Molly told me — though maybe he just didn’t like me and she was putting a socio-political gloss on it.

  It was a scary thought going to big school, but the anxiety was made easier to bear in my case because of the fact that, as Communists usually did, we had made sure that we already had a man on the inside. In fact we had two men on the inside. One was on the staff, a maths teacher called Bill Abrahams who had been in the party for many years and was a long-time friend of Joe’s. The other was a pupil, a boy a couple of years older than myself called Cliff Cocker whose parents, Maeve and Len, were also long-standing members of the CP from the southern end of the city.

  On the first day, in my new school uniform of blazer, short trousers, cap, shirt, and black and green striped tie, I walked with a couple of other kids who were going to Alsop to the bus stop on Priory Road. There we caught the number 68 bus to ride the two miles or so to our new school.

  Compared with the friendly and familiar scale of our neighbourhood junior school Alsop seemed huge and threatening. At the rear there was a long sandstone wall which backed on to Walton Village, an early Victorian hamlet of narrow terraced streets with a row of small shops and a church. Those of us who caught the 68 entered via the rear gate in the wall and the first building we saw, standing in front of a patch of dark and overgrown woodland, was a three-storey house built in the Gothic Revival style and known as the Rectory To a troop of small boys already in a state of heightened emotion it appeared spooky and lowering, built as it was from blocks of blood-red, carved sandstone with an open porch of three broad pointed arches, a huge black painted wooden front door with studs in it and arched mullioned windows. I would have thought it was the sort of house a vampire lived in if I hadn’t been aware that vampire stories were superstitious legends designed to subjugate the enslaved rural classes into unquestioning obedience of feudal autocracy.

  In a tight little group we approached the main building, a stock school of the 1920s which faced on to Queen’s Drive, Liverpool’s inner ring road. After the Second World War further structures had been added in a haphazard fashion, each of them built in the dullest example of the architectural style of their period — a dining annexe, an assembly hall, a library and an art room, then later a new block with laboratories, a gym and the metalwork shop. All of it formed a rough square of buildings enclosing a sports field of springy green grass with a running track and a cricket field marked out in fresh white paint.

  Somehow we were marshalled into the school’s assembly hall where we were addressed by the headmaster, Mr L.W. Warren, who was known as Les or the Bazz. He had a thin moustache, Brylcreemed hair and, like most of the teachers, he always wore a flapping black gown. Mr Warren gave us his speech of welcome before we were sent off to find our classes. Right away I encountered a problem familiar to all those involved in espionage. My control, Molly, had given me inadequate information for identifying my fellow Communist agent amongst the schoolboy cadre. The only thing my mother had told me about Cliff Cocker was that he was a boy with black hair and glasses. The first morning at grammar school was unsettling. First we were given an incomprehensible chart telling us where all our lessons were — it came as a shock to me that you had to move around, rather than your teachers. The only thing that allowed me to remain calm was the thought that as soon as I located Cliff Cocker he would explain everything and assuage all my confusion.

  My plan was that lunchtime would be the best time for me to hook up with my fellow comrade, to begin the vital work of bringing Marxist-Leninist thought to our school, or at least for him to let me know me where the dining hall was. So when the lunchtime bell rang and we were ejected into the playground I went up to the first bigger boy I saw with black hair and glasses and stood in front of him, smiling in much the same way as I had done with the black man who used to walk down Valley Road. ‘Hello, Cliff!’ I said. ‘Long live Lenin! Long live the proletariat!’ To his credit I don’t think this bigger boy, whoever he was, actually hit me, but he made it very clear that he wasn’t at all pleased at being addressed by some new kid and he told me very forcefully to get lost.

  All morning, because I
had been hanging on to the thought of Cliff Cocker as my saviour I hadn’t bothered trying to get to know any of the other kids in my class, nor had I paid any attention to what was being said to me about school rules or where anything was. After losing that first vital morning it took me months to catch up, if I ever did, and it was several years before I got to know Cliff Cocker. I did meet Mr Abrahams on that first day — indeed it was impossible to avoid him since he was teaching my class first-year maths. Mr Abrahams took an instant dislike to me. The Abe, as everybody called him, was a Jewish Communist who was mad about cricket, maths and Everton football club. I was useless at the first two and didn’t much care about the third. He may also have found me annoying because he was a strict disciplinarian, while I might have got the idea from somewhere that since we were comrades in the proletarian struggle it was perfectly fine for me to address him as Bill in class. Which he didn’t like at all.

  A few weeks before I went to grammar school, in the summer of 1963, Joe led his first delegation of railwaymen to Hungary I assumed I was really going to enjoy our second trip to the land of the Magyars. After all, there was no Pemberton to enrage me and this was a country where on our first visit several important and pleasurable things had happened — I had learned to swim and had come to understand the true meaning of salad. But the holiday unfortunately coincided with a change in the way I saw things. I suppose it was one of those cognitive shifts that everybody goes through as they grow up, but in me it always seemed to take a violent and abrupt form — the sudden opening of a trap door rather than something more gradual and easier to get used to. Up until that point, even if I was confused by events I sort of accepted them, assuming that somewhere out there was a single, simple explanation for what was going on. In Hungary I started for the first time to be aware of the shifting sands of human relations, to see that there was often no simple explanation for what was happening; rather, there were a thousand explanations and none at all.

  Yet when we embarked on the journey I was still hoping that somehow I could rediscover my previous certainty, that I could find the equanimity that had deserted me. Sadly, if you are beginning to feel unsettled about people’s motivation then visiting a country from which some six hundred thousand citizens were deported to Soviet labour camps after the Second World War, where they spoke a weird Finno-Ugric language completely unrelated to those around it, where there were great tensions between the various ethnic groupings, Hungarian, Romanian and gypsy, and where a revolution had been brutally suppressed only seven years before, probably wasn’t a good idea.

  As soon as we left the main railway station I noticed a distinctive smell in the air which I hadn’t really noticed on our previous trip. A lot of the buses and trucks in Hungary used some sort of cheap diesel that had a strong aroma and formed clouds of black smoke that blew everywhere. And the trucks expelling these noxious clouds, though they were carrying commercial goods, were military or ex-military vehicles, with long bonnets and a hatch for a machine gun in the roof of the cab. And waiting for us outside the station, coughing out its own cloud of black smoke, wasn’t the fleet of Tatras we were used to but a coach.

  We drove to our hotel, which once more was on the banks of the Danube. From the window of my room I could see the famous Chain Bridge, the Széchenyi lánchid that linked Buda and Pest and beyond it the Adam Clark Tunnel which ran under the hill beneath the Buda Castle. In front of the tunnel was a big traffic roundabout and on that roundabout the Russians had placed what was supposedly the first T34 tank to have liberated the city in 1945, its 75mm gun pointing directly at the window of my hotel room. As we travelled around the country I noticed that most towns seemed to possess their own T34. Certainly as a memorial it was a powerful reminder of the Second World War and the sacrifices that the Soviet Union had made to defeat the Nazis. But there was also a threat there — after all, it was only a few years ago that the sisters of these tanks had suppressed the Hungarian uprising, and it was as if the Russians were saying that it wouldn’t take long for them to return.

  In Budapest there was a trade union leader called Szabo who fulfilled the same role as Prukha in Czechoslovakia, but he never came to Britain and, though we spent a lot of time together, there was never quite the same affection between us; the Czechs were our first love and we wouldn’t allow ourselves to get too close to anyone else. Our translator, another brittle blonde, became a major source of confusion for me. For some reason we were visiting a radio station when somebody in the group rather bravely asked our translator a question about the ‘56 uprising and the bullet marks all over the city Her reply was that the revolt had been the work of ‘bandits’ whose only motivation was that they wanted to kill policemen. My parents and the rest of the delegation seemed to think this a reasonable explanation. Later, as we were travelling around the city’s ring road on our bus and passed some bleak concrete apartment blocks, she made some dismissive remarks about gypsies, saying that the authorities had tried to house them in nice modern flats but they had used their front doors for firewood. Nobody else appeared to object to her remarks even though I had been told that Communism was supposed to have eradicated these types of attitudes. Yet here they still were.

  A few months after we returned from Hungary our unpleasant translator managed to come to England. When she reached Liverpool she came to stay with us for a few days, but cut her visit short because she was appalled by our poverty She had expected us to have a big house and a car to take her around in, but instead we found ourselves being pitied for being poor by somebody from a Communist country!

  While we were in Budapest we also paid a visit to the railway run by my fellow comrades in the Hungarian Young Pioneers. Not only did they run it, in the early 1950s they had actually built the twelve kilometres of narrow-gauge line that ran through the Buda hills. The carriages were painted red and white and seemed to be about half the size of a standard coach, though with normal seats and luggage racks, so I felt a bit like I was riding through a forest in one of the passenger cars from my Hornby train set.

  Nearly all the work was done by children, who bore a serious, pompous, self-important look as if the chess club at school had been given their own railway to run. The junior guards and adolescent signal operators were dressed in the normal Young Pioneer costumes of white shirt, shorts and red neckerchief but with the addition of a peaked cap, while for the more senior staff, such as the child stationmaster or juvenile ticket collector, there was a special dark blue uniform, a small-scale replica of what grown-up Hungarian railwaymen and railwaywomen wore. Clearly there were only a few of these uniforms to go round and they tended to be on the large side — the sleeves would dangle way beyond the boy or girl’s hands and their caps covered most of their heads. Their ill-fitting suits gave you the feeling that your ticket was being punched by one of the chimps that advertised tea on the television.

  At the start of our second week, on the way to Lake Balaton in our coach, beside a field of maize we came upon an ambulance blocking the road and a crowd of people gathered around the body of a teenager who had been knocked off his motorbike and killed. It was the first dead body I had ever seen. I thought things like that didn’t happen in a socialist state — that young men got knocked off their motorbikes in the corrupt West but not here on this road in the workers’ paradise.

  The most enduring thing that came from our second trip to Hungary, apart from a nascent sense of unease about the Communist experiment, was the nickname applied to me throughout my early years at Alsop. During the first week we had a double games period and not showering wasn’t an option, so I had to get changed in front of the other boys in my class. I had always bronzed easily and, because of our week on the sandy beaches of Lake Balaton under the hot Hungarian sun, apart from a white strip where my swimming trunks had been my skin was deeply tanned. Some other boy, noticing my dark complexion, decided to give me the nickname Sambo. And that was what I was called for the first couple of years — Sambo Sayle.

&
nbsp; My nickname clearly wasn’t meant kindly but I don’t honestly remember being bothered by being known as Sambo, and in a time when you could still buy nigger brown paint in the hardware store such a racist epithet didn’t quite have the force it would have today But the truth was that I was such an oddly wired-together child that, while the most innocuous events could send me sideways, things that were intended to annoy, bother or intimidate me simply didn’t. Plus as a last resort, like a sort of superpower, I had inherited a version of Molly’s rage, so if a situation started to look like it was going bad I was able to turn from dreamy good humour to snarling, unhinged fury in a split second — which was enough to put most people off messing or indeed in some cases eating their lunch with me.

  Anyway, after a couple of years my nickname was contracted to Sam.

  At the age of eleven, when I had begun attending Alsop Grammar School, I was still quite a small boy Once I was into my early teens, however, my body quickly began to grow, until by the third year I was above average height for my age, with thick black hair sprouting almost everywhere and short but extremely strong legs. The only parts of my body that weren’t covered in hair and hadn’t grown explosively were my arms, which remained as thin and slender as a consumptive girl’s in a Victorian novel. This was probably a blessing. If my arms had matched my stocky legs in strength I might have been sorely tempted to become a proper bully, because I would have been able to hit people very hard. As it was, I possessed the look of somebody who, as long as they didn’t take their shirt off, could handle themselves, without actually having the ability to do so. As a result of my appearance, and since I couldn’t be provoked, was funny and in an emergency could go completely nuts, I was able to be on good enough terms with the real hard cases, which meant that I didn’t get bullied but on the other hand I was not tempted to be a hard case myself.