Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  Now in his early twenties, Glen had been at Liverpool Art School studying graphic design at the same time as John Lennon and in many ways bore a strong resemblance to the pop star. Glen had the same wiry looks, fervent opinions, quick surreal wit and ironic manner. He was also short-sighted like Lennon, though Glen’s glasses always seemed to be held together with sticky tape. Unfortunately Glen couldn’t sing or write songs.

  There was also an autocratic granny who lived in the same neighbourhood with her other son, Uncle Billy Cocker. Though Len and Maeve were both in the Communist Party they owned their own business: they and Uncle Billy were printers. Operating a press in those days was a true craft that required a great deal of skill and a degree of artistry The local printer was a vital part of the life of a community, and invoices, posters for church events, business cards and stationery all flowed from their shops.

  The Cockers lived in a two-storey flat above their shop in Granby Street right in the heart of Liverpool 8, Toxteth. Though Liverpool had the reputation of being a racially mixed city the African and Afro-Caribbean population were in fact very much confined to the Toxteth neighbourhood in the south end of the city, known as ‘The 8’ or Tokky. Black Liverpudlians were often not even welcome in pubs and clubs in the centre of town. Granby was a wide street of two- and three-storey brick buildings, shops with flats above. A number of the shops were run by Pakistanis, Somalis or Arabs. They stocked strange fruit and vegetables unknown in Anfield (which pretty much meant anything apart from potatoes) and peppers, aubergines, mangoes and melons tumbled on to the pavement. These shops also stayed open well past five o’clock in the evening, the time when all other shops gleefully closed whether anyone wanted to buy something or not. Along Granby and down the side streets old Jamaican men sat in open doorways noisily playing dominos.

  The BBC had a television drama strand called ‘The Wednesday Play’, featuring innovative and challenging dramas that people had to watch because there was nothing else on. One of these plays was a priapic fantasy about a Liverpool postman who won a thousand pounds on the Premium Bonds and moved into a bedsit in Cliff’s neighbourhood, Liverpool 8, where he had all kinds of bohemian adventures with free-spirited girls, became an artist and hung out with black people (referred to by him as ‘spades’, which they didn’t seem to mind at all in the play). I would like to have been like that postman, but found all this vibrancy in real life a bit intimidating and overwhelming. It was all right when it was Communists abroad doing it and I was one of the privileged few who saw it, but all this vigour seemed too free-form and out of control and it was happening just a bus ride away from our house. So I would hurry past all the colourfulness to get to the Cockers’ flat.

  There was another Wednesday Play written by a man who I’m sure was called Barry Blancmange, shown, I think, in 1967 or 1968. It had only one set, a smart room in which a group of people sat at a fashionable dinner party making polite chatter, while in a corner, unwatched, a television played footage of the Vietnam War. From time to time the camera would cut away from the guests to the TV, and when it came back to the dinner party one of the diners would have burst into flames and was now reduced to a smouldering, black stump. It went on like this for an hour of prime-time broadcasting until there was nobody left at the dinner party and probably nobody watching either who wasn’t a blackened stump themselves.

  Though they lived in this cosmopolitan quarter there was something quite austere about Maeve and Len’s Communism. They, and Cliff too, were very staunch and uncritical members of the party and completely unquestioning of the actions of the Soviet Union. Though they attended to all the other rituals such as paying party dues, going to see the Red Army Ensemble and shouting at the television, by this time Molly and Joe had both stopped attending actual party meetings. I suspect that Len and Maeve found something a little untrustworthy in my parents’ politics, which was fine by me.

  Glen was less political than Cliff, who shared his parents ‘beliefs, and a less restrained character. I was very honoured to be invited to a small party in their flat to celebrate Maeve and Len’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary Apart from me there were only family members present, except their oldest son who was nowhere to be seen. Then, just after 10.30 when the pubs closed, Glen turned up drunk with three or four straggly-haired, whey-faced hippies. There were three pubs in Liverpool where everybody drank, O’Connors, the Crack and the Philharmonic Hotel, and when the barman started shouting last orders there at 10.15 somebody would always say, ‘Hey, man, does anyone know where there’s a party, man?’ To which on that night Glen had replied, ‘Yes, man, I know where there’s a party, man.’ The hippies brushed past Cliff’s granny and headed straight for the drink and the cocktail sausages. In a very quiet voice Cliff said to his brother, ‘Glen, could I have a word with you out on the landing?’

  ‘Sure, man,’ said Glen.

  He followed Cliff out of the room, and the next sound we heard was the smack of somebody being punched very hard followed by the sound of them falling down a long flight of stairs. After a second Cliff came back into the room and said to the grazing hippies, ‘Right, you lot, fuck off out of it!’ Which they did, moaning to themselves about people being ‘downers, man’. Then the party carried on as if nothing had happened, and after a while Glen came back into the room rubbing his head.

  During the long period of recovery following Joe’s botched surgery, when he had been convalescing, then working part-time on light duties, Molly had herself gone back to work part-time. She spent three days a week at the Vernon’s Pools company, with thousands of other women, combing through the coupons each week for a winner. And when Joe returned to work as a foreman he was still not making the money he would have made doing shifts as a guard, so she continued to go to work. She enjoyed getting out of the house and valued the comradeship she found at Vernon’s. Indeed, Molly enjoyed herself so much that in all the time she was at the pools firm she never organised a strike.

  Up until that point the only employment my mother had had during her marriage was doing what we called ‘the surveys’. Our family’s connection with opinion polling had begun in the 1930s when Joe had carried out some research for the left-wing newspaper the News Chronicle, performing surveys which involved asking people in the street questions on political choices, shopping patterns and reading habits. In time he began to do the same thing on a part-time basis for the Gallup organisation, and after they were married Molly took over this work. When I was young Molly and I once went to the Isle of Man in very stormy seas to spend a couple of nights in budget boarding houses. During the day we would stop people on the rain-lashed promenade to ask them what they wanted out of a holiday on the Isle of Man, which was mostly for the rain to stop.

  When Molly went to work for Vernon’s, she suggested I might want to earn a little money during the long summer holiday doing the surveys myself. This was the second time it had been suggested that I needed to find employment. I had briefly, via a friend from school, done a little part-time work sweeping up in the Grafton Bingo Hall in West Derby Road, but they had had to ask me to go and hide in a back room after complaints that my bizarre manner and unusual appearance were frightening the old lady customers.

  I imagine that, as well as getting a bit of pocket money, my parents thought that doing the opinion polling would teach me the virtues of meticulousness, responsibility and reliability, but it didn’t turn out that way One of the requirements of doing surveys was that you were supposed to ask your questions of people in every one of the socio-economic groups. Socio-economic grouping, a system commonly used in market research, ran from A to E and classified a household according to the job of its main wage-earner. A was a professional person or somebody at director level; B was senior management; C1 was junior management or clerical; C2 was skilled working class; D was unskilled working class, manual labourers and so on; and E was those reliant on the state such as pensioners or the unemployed. This was a problem. It was easy enough for me t
o find C2s since that was everybody’s parents, and there were also plenty of Ds and a few Es around our way But I’m not sure an A had ever been in Anfield, and even if they had they had never hung around long enough for me to go up to them and ask them for their views on detergents, soup or skiing holidays.

  I’m sure that somebody more suited to this type of work would have found a legitimate way to locate members of every socio-economic group, but as soon as I set out to do the surveys I discovered that I had several failings which militated against me doing the job effectively At the outset there was my inability to be systematic. My very first job was a survey on chemical fertiliser. A more organised person might have contacted the farmers’ union, got a list of members, phoned ahead and made appointments, then travelled to their farms and conducted the survey.

  What I did was catch a ferry to Wallasey I was certain they had farms on the Wirral because I was pretty sure they had countryside out there somewhere — I had seen it from the train on the way to Chester. Then from the Wallasey landing stage I walked up the ramp to the bus station and went from unfamiliar bus to unfamiliar bus asking the conductors, ‘Do you go anywhere in the country where they have farms?’ Finally I found one who said that they did go to the country and that was where they kept the farms, so I caught his bus and got off where he told me to, which was certainly in the middle of the countryside.

  I stood in a lane with cowslips dotting the hedgerows and watched the bus disappear into the distance. Then silence descended, nothing moving in the warmth of a spring day After a few moments of indecision I decided to carry on trudging up the lane in the direction the bus had vanished in, until eventually I came to a rough track that seemed like it might lead to a farmhouse. Following ten minutes of walking I was attacked by a dog and had to run away I found a path, stumbled through a wood and found another farmhouse, but the farmer’s wife was extremely annoyed at being disturbed in her chores by a long-haired youth mumbling about her preference in nitrates. Then I said to her, ‘Oh, before I start I need to know, would you describe yourself as a C1? Or would you say you were a B? You’re not a C2, are you?’ At which point I had to run away again. As far as I could tell the most common animals in the countryside weren’t sheep or chickens but angry dogs. Finally a farmer did speak to me. He pointed out that I was in an area devoted entirely to dairy farming and they had no use for chemical fertiliser.

  I was astonished at how bad all this made me feel — I hated how out of my depth I was, how alien and confusing those country lanes seemed and how much of a failure I felt. There was a raging compulsion in me to succeed, to gain mastery over the situation, and yet I couldn’t seem to go about it in the way that anybody sensible would. And I didn’t like talking to people I didn’t know, either. It was like being on the date with the girl on the boat. What did they want? What did they think of me? Why weren’t they saying anything? Would they like it if I sang ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup’?

  I got back to Anfield late in the evening, hot and dusty Giving vague replies to my parents’ enquiries as to how it had gone, I went up to my bedroom and sat at the little desk where I sometimes did my homework. After a few minutes of staring at the questionnaire forms I began to write. I invented addresses, made up names and of course faked entirely the answers to questions about chemical fertiliser — just like Volunteer Marek in The Good Soldier Schweik writing articles about imaginary animals for the natural history magazine he worked for. I sent my survey off and in a few weeks received a cheque and another assignment, this one about chocolate bars.

  In the autumn, because they were so pleased with my work I was getting sent many more opinion polls to carry out and beginning to feel overwhelmed. When I returned to school after half-term I got my fellow pupils involved. At first I just asked them to pretend to be their parents and give the answers they thought their parents might give, but after a while I simply handed out the forms and left them to it. They in turn now started to get carried away and began inventing identities, claiming to be a Dutch pilot who owned a string of racehorses or, more worryingly, a female ballet dancer with a great liking for rugby players. In many ways it was more creative than the English lessons we sat through. During the lunch break the whole class would be quietly working away, compiling false information which I sent off to headquarters and which was then used to formulate government transport and housing policy, predict shopping trends and analyse how the public felt about the politics of the day for articles in newspapers and magazines.

  At the age of fourteen going on fifteen my dance card was as full as that of a debutante doing the London season. I had good pals my own age at school; I had Cliff and his mates, all older boys; I spent a great deal of time with Cliff’s family as well as my own; and I had begun to get involved in organised revolutionary politics. In 1966 I joined the youth wing of the Communist Party — the Young Communist League, generally referred to as the YCL. There was no pressure from my parents to do so, it was just a natural and timely thing as if I was seamlessly moving into the family business. I always thought that if we had had a van it would have written on the side in big letters: ‘Joseph Henry Sayle and Son — Revolutionaries. Estimates given. No Kalashnikovs left in this van overnight.’

  The first meeting of the YCL that I attended was at a small, early nineteenth-century terraced house on the other side of Oakfield Road, one of the poorest type of workers’ cottage with a front door that opened directly on to the street. The house was owned by a man called Eric Savage who, though he might have been a Communist, certainly wasn’t young. I learned at the meeting that this was quite normal. Though the membership of the YCL consisted of boys and girls between fifteen and twenty years of age, the leadership of the Communist Party didn’t trust them to run their own affairs. So the secretaries of the local groups were generally middle-aged men who had been vetted by the CP hierarchy — though solely for doctrinal obedience. Eric Savage shared the house with two young women who were both in the YCL: one was called Fizzy and the other Sheila. He had been a member of one of the lesser Merseybeat bands in the early 1960s and owned two giant Alsatian dogs who were eating the walls of his home and finally broke through to the house next door.

  My first meeting involved rehearsing in the road for a piece of street theatre that the group were planning to put on at a Vietnam demonstration at the Pier Head. We stood around outside Eric’s house and somebody pretended to be an American soldier stabbing a peasant woman with a bayonet. That was as far as we got, because everybody appeared to run out of energy after that point. It seemed extraordinarily lame.

  Much as another household might hold in high esteem a religious personage, a popular singer or some local sports team, the Soviet double agents Philby, Burgess and Maclean were much-revered figures in our home. We admired the way they had managed to deceive the British security services for so many years while working for the cause of Communism, we valued the damage they had caused to the reputation of Britain and the hundreds of British agents they had effectively killed, and we applauded the way they had evaded punishment, escaping from the West to enjoy what we supposed were full and fulfilling lives in Moscow and going to see the Red Army Ensemble whenever they felt like it. When Philby published his autobiography, My Silent War, I was particularly taken with his description of the moment when he first joined M16. So incompetent and chaotic did those around him seem that he assumed he was working for some sort of sham front organisation designed to deceive the enemy He imagined that at some point, when he had been with them for a while, he would be shown the real, hidden M16, all cool efficiency and sleek modernity Only slowly did it dawn on him that the ramshackle organisation he was working for was all there was. There was no better M16 — this was it.

  I felt the same about the YCL. This was the youth wing of an organisation that occupied hundreds of Special Branch spies in the UK. Internationally, Communism controlled something like a third of the world’s population — the Soviet Union, China, great swathes of South-e
ast Asia, Cuba, all of eastern Europe — and yet these people couldn’t organise the fake stabbing of a peasant woman in the street.

  At Eric’s house I met a tall red-head, a couple of years older than me, Ian Williams. From time to time I would see him on the political scene at mass meetings or demonstrations, as we shopped around deciding who we would give our revolutionary business to. Ian took the idea of revolution so seriously that he invested in his own crash helmet to wear on demonstrations. It was a cylindrical leather-covered thing with long flaps like the ears of a bloodhound that buckled under the chin, and was of a type that was generally worn by human cannonballs at the circus.

  He never came to another meeting of the YCL, and you could see why The thing that finally did for me was when they organised a nationwide campaign called Bicycles for Vietnam, an operation orchestrated by the leadership in London. Two trusted members, who were both rather handsome twenty-five-year-old guys, were to drive an ancient removal van round the country collecting unwanted bicycles which they would then take down to Marseilles for transshipment by Cuban freighter to the North Vietnamese port of Haiphong. When the bicycles arrived in South-east Asia they would be employed in the war against US imperialism. We were already aware that for the Vietnamese the bicycle was a mighty weapon — the Vietcong would reputedly transport up to a ton of munitions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail on a single machine. For me, though, this confirmed that the YCL didn’t know what they were doing. This scheme was just a piece of make-work nonsense, designed solely to distract fractious members like me who were becoming disenchanted with the group and their elderly, rubber mac-wearing leadership. My guess was that the Vietcong had their own bicycles, sturdy Chinese-style machines, and had no need for bikes designed with the European market in mind, models that folded in the middle or pink ladies’ bikes with shopping baskets attached to the front handlebars.