Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  Molly and Joe were completely relaxed about flying, but I was more anxious. The interior of the IL 18 was fitted out with rows of seats that had frilly antimacassars on the headrests, net curtains hung from a plastic-covered wire at the porthole windows, there were open luggage racks above the passengers’ heads, and a line of round Art Deco-style light fittings set in the ceiling ran the length of the passenger compartment. If I was going to travel through the air at thirty thousand feet I wanted to be in something that looked like a futuristic spaceship rather than an Edwardian saloon bar or a railway station buffet.

  Our refreshment room came in fast and low over a cornfield before bumping down on to the tarmac, engines screaming in reverse as we hit the runway On arrival at the tiny terminal building it felt odd that we weren’t met by a delegation from the Bulgarian Communist Party but had to get on a coach with all the other tourists. On the other hand, at least we didn’t have to visit any locomotive factories or the sites of Nazi massacres.

  Golden Sands had been constructed as a resort solely for the use of foreign tourists. The only way you could eat in the restaurants or drink in the bars was by using Western currency to buy coupons, which you then exchanged for food and drink. In effect it was a town built along the lines of the crappy shops at the border between the Soviet Bloc and the West. Despite this, Golden Sands provided a reasonable holiday for the Western visitor, if not for the Bulgarians. Local people were free to come into the town and watch Westerners enjoying themselves but couldn’t legally buy a single thing in this segregated part of their own country.

  The hotels we stayed in were all low two-storey buildings, linked by paths lined with highly manicured flower beds. These flower beds were sprayed every night with insecticide to keep the mosquitos down. At night, once the insecticide trucks had gone, in these patches of vegetation there lurked men who would hiss at you, offering local currency in exchange for pounds, marks or francs at much higher rates than were provided by the government. They didn’t get many takers because there was nothing to buy, no matter how many zloty you had.

  The local teenagers who came into the town didn’t want money. What they longed for was information about one thing — pop music. A group of boys sat next to me on a bench asking if I had any Beatles music. I don’t know why they thought I would be carrying records around, but before I could answer a policeman walked past and they became very nervous, pretending they had nothing to do with me. I realised that, in all the time we had spent in the East, up until then we had only ever mixed with people who were part of the system, who were loyal to the party and its allied organisations. This was the first time I had encountered kids my own age who weren’t running their own railway Clearly there were tensions, but you didn’t get to be a Communist without learning to ignore what was in front of your face. I put the youths’ willingness to risk being seen talking to a Westerner down to the unstoppable power of the Beatles. In that year of 1966 it was impossible to overstate how big they were, and on their backs how big Liverpool had become.

  During the day I hung around a wooden jetty that stretched out from the hot, silky sands into the Black Sea. This was where the teenagers congregated, away from the adults. These young people had come to Bulgaria from all over Europe, and there were even a few from the United States. Sun-tanned girls in bikinis floating in the cobalt water would ask me, ‘So are you, like, really from Liverpool?’

  ‘Yes,’ I would reply.

  Then, wide-eyed and excited and looking at me in a way I didn’t quite understand, they would say, ‘Wow! So do you know the Beatles, then?’

  ‘No,’ I would reply.

  There was one girl, a couple of years older than me, called Julie who was on holiday with her mother. She was from Ealing in London and she seemed absolutely lovely, droplets of water glistening on her skin, the sun reflecting off her white bikini. The closest I got to expressing my adoration was to suggest I swim along the bottom of the sea, then come up between her legs so she would be sitting on my shoulders, and then we would topple sideways as I had seen others do. But she declined, perhaps fearing dreadful injury apart from anything else. I would try and sit next to Julie in the evenings when we ate, looking devotedly at her.

  Many of the restaurants in Sunny Beach were open-air —tables arranged around a dance floor, with a band in dinner jackets playing on a small stage and a bar under a canopy strung with coloured lights. The night was scented by the nearby pine forests and the lush flower beds, cicadas chirped in the grass and insects fluttered on the warm breeze until the insecticide lorry came along and killed them all. One night we were sitting with a group of other British tourists when Joe offered to go to the bar to buy a round of drinks. He collected everybody’s coupons and headed off into the crowd of dancers. He didn’t return for nearly an hour, and when he did, smiling to himself, he didn’t have any drinks with him. On his way to the bar Joe had got chatting with the band leader and had ended up giving the musicians everybody’s coupons in exchange for them playing the Gerry and the Pacemakers’ song and Liverpool FC anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. The other tourists were very annoyed that they didn’t have any drinks but their anger just seemed to confuse Joe, who couldn’t really offer any proper explanation as to why he had given everybody’s vouchers away After that, wherever we went in the resort any nearby band would strike up Rodgers and Hammerstein’s show tune, so that it followed us around for the rest of our holiday as if we were trapped in some two-week-long, Balkan-tinged production of Carousel.

  It’s hard to say now what exactly was wrong with Joe. His problems with memory loss and personality change were more gradual and spread over a much longer period than is common with Alzheimer’s. Another explanation might be a series of small but undetectable strokes. Whatever the cause, the fact that he was ill was never discussed in our house. I know there were concerned visits to Cyril Taylor, our doctor, but the reason for them and the diagnosis, if any, were never revealed, at least not to me. I suppose there was no answer in any of the places we would normally look. The party couldn’t offer a solution. If you looked in the Daily Worker there wouldn’t be an answer. The National Executive of the NUR didn’t have any helpful ideas. So as a family we took an unspoken decision to look the other way, which worked for a while — but it’s when you’re looking the other way that you get hit by a bus.

  I was just left with a fragmentary sense of something wrong and some unsettling memories. One Sunday evening, soon after our return from Bulgaria, we were having egg and tomato sandwiches for our tea and then planning to watch the TV show Perry Mason. Before the programme began we would play board games, and on this particular evening me and Joe were having a game of draughts. Until then he had always won, but this time it was as if my father had forgotten the rules of the game because the moves he made on the board made very little sense. As the contest went on I found Joe’s behaviour increasingly disconcerting, so somehow, by making stupid moves of my own, I contrived to let him win. Afterwards I could tell that Joe knew I had let him beat me. It was an uneasy sensation, to feel pity for a parent when you’re fourteen years old.

  After he had been on light duties as a ticket collector for a few months, Joe was finally considered fit enough to go back to work full-time. But the injury to his foot meant he couldn’t perform the duties of a guard any more, so instead he was promoted and appointed senior foreman at a railway goods yard at Bids ton over on the Wirral. At least as he was no longer a guard Joe didn’t have to work shifts, but he would still come home exhausted. And when he did he would often tell us stories of a train that had been sent down the wrong route or an important shipment that had somehow been mislaid. But between them the men at the depot always seemed to save the situation, or at least conceal the identity of who was responsible. I went to visit him there one weekend and found it an eerily remote sort of place. The depot had been built on marshland and tall, slender grasses grew between the tracks, nodding slowly in the salty breeze that blew in from Li
verpool Bay This depot at Bids ton was slowly being run down: grey rail lines unused for many years curled this way and that like whip marks across the soil, while on the oxidising tracks rested row after row of battered, old-fashioned, wooden coal wagons that would never move again.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I heard one of the junior railwaymen, a longhaired youth who had been throwing stones at an old window frame and shattering the glass, ask one of the others, referring to me.

  ‘That’s the boss’s son,’ he replied.

  It felt weird that Joe was somebody’s boss.

  Another realisation which slowly dawned on me as I began to go out and about in the world was that there was something odd going on with men’s toilets. If you wanted to use a public lavatory and were walking towards it from a fair distance you wouldn’t see anybody going in or out, yet when you got down the steps the subterranean space would be full of men standing silently at the urinals, with only one gap left for the bona fide customer. I wondered whether when you got to the age of twenty or something, like these men were, it took three-quarters of an hour to have a piss, which I wasn’t looking forward to. What’s more, as you went up the stairs and out into the night you would hear a sudden scuffling back down in the lavatory. What was that all about?

  Also, one evening when I was about fourteen and was walking back from the local library along Walton Breck Road with an armful of Sherlock Holmes novels a man stopped me. He said he was a long-distance lorry driver who had parked up for the night and asked if I knew where the best chip shop in the neighbourhood was. I thought for a second, then told him about several chippies in the area, first noting their opening hours and then listing their various merits and demerits, explaining differing prices and comparing cooking techniques. He, however, appeared distracted and not really listening, until suddenly in the middle of a long discourse about batter he blurted out, ‘Do you want a kiss?’ I told him that no, on balance I didn’t want a kiss, and he went on his way leaving me feeling confused. I didn’t realise that he was homosexual —I just thought he was a lorry driver who was sexually excited by people comparing chip shop prices. Afterwards, when I did figure out what he was, I was sorry I hadn’t known he was gay It annoyed me that I had missed an opportunity to be liberal-minded towards somebody who was still at that point part of a legally persecuted minority If I had known he was homosexual I would have been able to express my cloying tolerance towards him (though I still don’t think I would have given him the kiss he wanted because he wasn’t very good-looking) .

  A few months later, when I was almost fifteen, the lorry driver might not have found me that good-looking either, since within less than six months my appearance had changed radically The olive-skinned, brown-eyed boy had vanished completely, to be replaced by this hulking youth with long hair and a wispy beard which I would occasionally augment with black biro, and spots. My mother suggested that the best treatment for pimples was to put calamine lotion on them, so instead of little red spots my face was adorned with huge pink patches.

  And along with this change in appearance came a much more focused interest in girls — though this interest wasn’t accompanied by any insight into how you might get them to let you do the things you wanted to do with them. I envied the gay lorry drivers of Britain who just seemed to wander the streets asking boys if they wanted a kiss. Somehow that didn’t seem possible with a girl, and as far as I knew girls didn’t hang around in underground urinals either, conveniently letting you fumble with them in the dark.

  Before I was fifteen I had had only a single experience that might have been called a date when I had invited some poor girl, the daughter of an NUR official I had met at a union function, to come and visit our boat with me. Once I had got her there I was completely unsure what to do next — the urge to reproduce is supposed to be irresistible, but in me the urge not to be rejected was even stronger — so I just sat staring at her for an hour and then took her home on the bus. But while I had no idea how to get an individual girl to do what I wanted I discovered that I did have the ability to make a crowd bend to my will.

  One evening on the stage of the NUR social club in Dean Road Joe was presented with a cheque for the union’s Orphan Fund by the Liverpool players Ian St John and Ron Yeats. It was the first time I had been around celebrities, and I liked the way they seemed to drive other people crazy for their attention. Drinkers tore up cigarette packets that they pleaded with these big, noble, polite men to autograph. So I got myself cast in the school play Our nervy English teacher Mr Johnson was directing a production of Nikolai Gogol’s satire of corruption set in late nineteenth-century tsarist Russia, The Government Inspector. There may have been something a little pointed in my being given the one-line part of ‘A Jewish Merchant’, but I didn’t care — it was showbusiness, baby! The corrupt mayor of the town was played by Cliff Cocker and the part of Khlestakov, the foppish civil servant with the wild imagination, by a guy called Russ Stamp from the year above me. There was much excitement because some girls were being imported from our sister school, Queen Mary, to play the female roles, and one of them actually had to kiss Russ Stamp.

  My one scene involved a deputation of Jewish merchants approaching the fake government inspector, complaining about the mayor’s behaviour and attempting to bribe the fraudulent official with gifts handed over on a silver tray My single line was ‘Please accept the tray with it’, a piece of nothing business with which I managed to get a huge laugh on every one of the three nights the play ran by employing instinctive timing, some physical comedy and a huge helping of unacceptable racial stereotyping.

  Getting that laugh was confirmation of what I had always suspected: I knew how to make a crowd laugh, and I would do pretty much anything to get that laugh. Though my classmates were more analytical in the way they looked at comedy than they would have been if they had lived in any other part of the country, they still came at it from the direction of well-informed punters, in other words as amateurs. When I looked at the performance of a comedian on the TV or the radio it was as if I could see inside it, know what the comic was attempting, what would be coming next; also I would sometimes hear or see something that got a laugh and yet I would feel that the response was undeserved, on account of it being obtained through some trick or because the audience were too cooperative, too willing to laugh uncritically Not that I loved humour or anything. I didn’t start collecting George Formby records or going to see comics in working men’s clubs, I didn’t even particularly try and watch comedy shows when they came on the TV It was just that I knew with absolute certainty that I was fluent in the language of that country and I might go and live there one day.

  It was odd for me to have such a complex relationship with humour at such an early age, since neither of my parents were at all sophisticated in that department. Joe liked terrible puns and being jolly and everybody getting along, which I didn’t value at all, while Molly’s concept of comedy was wholly Jewish, straight out of the nineteenth-century shtetl; and they both liked awful, sentimental, bloody Charlie Chaplin. In 1963 a famous tour had come to the Empire Theatre in Lime Street, featuring Roy Orbison, the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers. We hadn’t gone to see that or even been aware of its existence, but we had that same year been in the audience for something called the Red Army Ensemble — the official choir of the Russian armed forces. This group of folk dancers, musicians and singers toured the world improving the image of the Soviet Union by having fat men in jodhpurs sing ‘The Volga Boatmen’s Song’, ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Kalinka’. The Empire was completely packed for the show with an audience as excited and expectant as that which had greeted the Beatles, but a lot older and with many more of those Russian-style astrakhan hats. There was a lot of heavy-handed humour in the show, such as when these gimlet-eyed killers sang as an encore a comical version of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. This cracked my parents and the rest of the audience up, except me. The two of them loved these ponderous agitprop jokes that Communists told each
other, whose punch-line was usually something to do with the President of the United States being a bastard. That and people falling over.

  Molly was also particularly poor on the importance of plot development or story structure in fiction. If I left one of the novels I was reading lying around — Catch 22, L’Etranger or The Hound of the Baskervilles — she would pick it up and then start reading it backwards, beginning with the last page. Then she would refuse to let me have it back, spending hours happily engrossed in a story whose outcome she already knew, watching characters’ personalities unevolve.

  Through appearing in the school play I at last became good friends with Cliff Cocker. Well, I say friends, but in some ways Cliff treated me like a wild boy he had found living in the woods. By then he was in the sixth form and intending to become an actor. Cliff’s group had their own form room which as a fourth-year I supposedly wasn’t allowed to enter, but he would sneak me in and encourage me to sing, do impressions of the staff and swear for the other, older boys. I used to sing the Foundations’ ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup’, which for some reason killed every time.

  Cliff was always pointing out how handsome he was, just like his namesake Cliff Richard, and certainly he had been a bit of a heart-throb with the girls from our sister school during the run of The Government Inspector. I came to think of myself as another member of the Cocker family and took to spending a lot of time round at their house. They were an extraordinarily good-looking family, which is why Cliff had to keep saying how handsome he was. Cliff’s father, Len, was a strikingly tall, upright man who had been in the Palestine police throughout the Second World War serving in the British Mandate, where he had developed a great sympathy for the Arab cause. His mother, Maeve, was remarkable too, elegant and dark-haired and unmistakably Irish in her looks. Cliff also had a sister, Penny, and of course there was his older brother Glen, who had lost his virginity on the Aldermaston march.