Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  When the guys turned up at Eric’s house they acted all Southern, arrogant and snotty in their leather jackets and stubble. Then they both got drunk on cheap red wine and I think they slept with both Fizzy and Sheila, which I would like to have done, but worst of all I saw them casting covetous glances at my brand-new second-hand Raleigh Equipe racing bike with five Campagnolo Grand Sport gears and Brookes leather racing saddle. The last I heard of these two men and their truck full of bicycles was that, after careering all over the UK causing chaos and sleeping with members’ girlfriends, they had crashed into a ditch outside Boulogne and abandoned the van. It didn’t seem a very effective way to fight the forces of US imperialism.

  Despite being a noisy show-off, up until my fifteenth year I had never been in any disciplinary trouble at school. But all that quickly began to change. Apart from anything else I felt free to challenge the staff and their rules because I was certain that I wasn’t going to get punished in any significant way Another child might have resented his mother turning up at the school complaining or fighting his battles for him, but early on I had realised there was no way I could deflect Molly from interfering in my life and so I might as well use it to my advantage. One of the favourite stories from my childhood that Molly would tell about herself concerned a kid from another street who had been pushing me around outside our house. Hearing the commotion, Molly and our dog Bruno had come roaring out of the front door and chased the kid away, pursuing him to the corner. The next time I saw the bully, he was full of admiration. ‘Your mum should be in the Olympics,’ he said. Molly loved that story.

  So fear of Molly was probably why, despite all the things I did, I was not once caned. Corporal punishment wasn’t that common at our school but it was used on occasion and though, particularly later on, I committed several offences that would have earned another boy six strokes on the hand I never got them.

  I started to argue more fiercely with the teachers in class and I began to take liberties with the school uniform. Rather than the regulation striped tie, I wore a thin black knitted one. I wore high cuban-heeled boots rather than the official sensible brogues, and after my plastic mac caught fire I bought another one, bronze-coloured, which drove the staff into paroxysms of anger with its gaudy iridescence.

  They tried to discipline me. I got a lot of lines, I had to write out various scientific laws hundreds of times so that I could recite them without knowing what they meant, and I was given tons of detentions. From time to time I was also required to do my homework while sitting outside the headmaster’s office. But I never got the cane. And the fact that the other kids saw me getting away with stuff that they were getting beaten for only served to increase the idea that there was something special and mysterious about me — at least that’s what I thought. ‘Why didn’t Sambo get the cane?’ kids would say in aggrieved tones, rubbing their stinging palms. ‘He was there when it caught fire. In fact it was his idea to set it alight.’ But Sambo said nothing. He let the impression grow that he was the headmaster’s illegitimate son or that his Communism gave him magical powers. He certainly wasn’t going to let on that he only got away with stuff because the staff were frightened of his mum.

  After the betraying of Peter Pemberton it had taken me quite a long time before I made another best friend my own age, but after a while I became close to another boy at Alsop. His name was Leo Scher and one or both of his parents were Swiss. For a couple of years we were very good friends. He lived in the Wavertree district of the city where I would visit him on a Saturday We would go to the swimming baths or take his dog for a walk in the park; then I would be home by five-thirty or six and I’d be in from then on. Then one day, I think it was a Saturday, it was as if I thought to myself, ‘Sod this!’ I never spent another night in, and I didn’t spend any more time with Leo Scher.

  There was a different group of boys from my class that I started hanging about with. One of them, Sid, was on probation for committing some minor crime. He said he got to talk to his probation officer about whatever he wanted for an hour a week. I thought having somebody who had to listen to you for a whole hour sounded brilliant. And he said he was given a transistor radio by the probation service as a Christmas present.

  We were doing Henry V for 0-Level and as there was a production at the old Hope Hall, now renamed the Everyman Theatre, the school gave us the afternoon off so we could go as a group to see the play in the evening. Sid spent the afternoon drinking, and when the Prologue came on at the beginning of the play and said, ‘Oh for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention …’ Sid jumped up and shouted, ‘Ah, fuck off….’ To his credit Roger Sloman, the actor playing the Prologue, paused, looked directly at Sid and said, ‘Right, I’ll come on and do that again then’, which got a big laugh and took the heat out of the situation — a lesson in comedy I made a note of. The play progressed with ushers chasing Sid all over the theatre, which only added to the Elizabethan atmosphere of the event.

  I had had my first drink on a Vietnam demonstration. When I was not quite fifteen I had persuaded another boy from school called John Burrell, who was a Mod, to come down to London with me to go on a demo. The final destination must have been St Paul’s Cathedral, because we ended up in a pub at Ludgate Circus where I think I asked the barman for ‘A half of a beer’. At first I couldn’t understand what anybody saw in this odd stuff, but I forced myself. As Communist literature constantly pointed out, sacrifices had to be made if you wished for freedom.

  A gang of us started going out drinking together at the weekends and sometimes even early on a week-night. Neither Molly nor Joe drank much — strange bottles of plum brandy given to us by the Hungarian Minister for Railways would lie for years in the Secatrol untouched, and my parents never ever went to the pub, ‘Dreadful smoky places,’ Molly said they were. So I figured that would be a good place to hide from them.

  There was no moral panic back then over young people drinking and there was never a problem concerning our age — if you wore a suit and tie and didn’t misbehave you could drink in a pub from about the age of six. We frequented pubs in Anfield and Everton and drank pints of dark brown mild ale mixed with a bottle of pale ale, a drink which was called a Brown Mixed. I loved those pubs. Each was divided into several bars, a snug, a public and a saloon bar being usually the minimum and often there could be more, all of them equipped with copper-topped tables and seating covered in a sort of red linoleum — and my parents weren’t in any of them. There were many local breweries — Higson’s, Walker’s Warrington Ales, Threlfall’s — and one called Bent’s whose pubs were tiled like lavatories and sold their own brand of wine they called Bentox.

  At the weekends, if the gang weren’t available, rather than stay about at home I would go into the centre of town and just walk about. I didn’t walk about with any purpose — just walked. I didn’t even stop for coffee or a sandwich or anything, being unsure how you bought such things. When I was with a group of people I knew how to act; I had a sense of what my purpose was within the pack, which was basically to clown around, carry on and make trouble. And if you were in an unfamiliar place there would always be somebody else in the group who understood the rules of the place — or if you got thrown out you got thrown out together. When I was on my own a paralysing uncertainty took hold of me. I would think to myself, ‘Do you go up to the counter and order your sandwiches, or do you wait to be served?’ So in the end I didn’t have a sandwich.

  I also began to develop a paranoid dread that I would be thrown out of places because of the way I looked, which was a reasonable fear. Along with my long hair I was now experimenting with hippy clothes. I often wore a denim jacket that Molly had lined with rabbit fur bought at a Daily Worker bazaar, beads round my neck and of course my toy hat. With my clothes I was ineptly attempting to emulate the bands I saw performing on Top of the Pops or whose pictures I saw in the music papers I sometimes bought. The boys I hung out with wisely stuck to suits and ties when they
weren’t in their school uniforms. People might wear fur coats and beads on the King’s Road, Chelsea, but in Liverpool the wrong kind of shoelace could still get your head kicked in.

  So I mostly hung about in places like the Walker Art Gallery where they had to let you in and where it was unlikely, though in Liverpool not guaranteed, that you would get into a fight. There was a Rembrandt self-portrait that I used to spend hours standing in front of, and a Lucian Freud painting of a man in a mac standing by a door in a bedsit in Paddington that particularly attracted my attention. ‘That’s what I want to do when I’m older,’ I thought to myself. ‘Be painted standing by a door in a room in a seedy part of London.’ I also enjoyed many of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings that the Walker owned, paintings which I imagined would echo the trippy colours of a hippy lightshow if I ever got to see one.

  I also spent a huge amount of time in Liverpool’s two cathedrals, not attending services or anything but just sort of standing there. One thing that had really stuck with me and which I never questioned was my parents’ violent atheism. Whenever we were told Bible stories at school my mind had shut down like a shop on a Sunday So with places of worship there was not a whisper of religious awe in the way I regarded them — to me they were just big, complicated buildings. The Neo-Gothic Anglican cathedral at one end of Hope Street, designed by the twenty-two-year-old Giles Gilbert Scott, seemed like the most gigantic and elaborate Victorian pub in the world — the same stained glass, the same highly polished brass and stone-flagged floor, even the side chapels were like the subsidiary bars you found in an alehouse (the ladies’ bar, the snug and the saloon). Its foundation stone had been laid in 1904, but it was still unfinished in the 1960s. There was also a magnificently spooky and overgrown graveyard that I liked to lurk in. The cathedral was surrounded by little streets of terraced housing, which provided a counterpoint to its bombastic bulk.

  By contrast, the building of the Catholic cathedral at the other end of Hope Street began in October 1962 and was completed in May 1967. I spent a lot of time there too. In those days there was a chain of restaurants called the Golden Egg which employed a very similar design aesthetic to Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral. They both made liberal use of handmade ceramics and modern materials such as coloured plastics and back-lit fibreglass panels. One day while wandering around the Catholic cathedral I came upon the most peculiar thing. Beneath the plinth on which the space capsule-shaped modern building rested, there was an older building. I didn’t know it then, and there were no explanatory signs, but this was the crypt of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ massive classical/Byzantine cathedral which was begun in 1933 and then abandoned — a building which, if it had been completed, would have become the second-largest church in the world with the world’s largest dome. As it was, it looked as if the modern cathedral had stolen an older one and was then sitting on it.

  Staying out till all hours meant I was frequently late for school. One day, long after assembly had begun, I was trying to sneak on to the premises unnoticed when I saw another dark-haired boy the same age as myself strolling through the gates, hands in pockets, whistling happily to himself. I followed this boy to a classroom where he joined a number of other boys who were sitting about in a relaxed fashion, reading magazines and comics or chatting happily together.

  A prefect walked past and I said to him, ‘Hey, who are those kids in that room?’

  ‘Those are the Jews,’ he replied.

  ‘The Jews?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re Jews. Morning assembly involves a lot of Christian hymn singing, so because of their religion they don’t have to attend. They can more or less come in when they want as long as they get here by the beginning of classes. Unlike you, Sayle. You’re on detention … again.’

  When I got home that evening I angrily asked Molly why she hadn’t got me excluded from religious assembly because I was Jewish.

  ‘I didn’t want you to be left out,’ she replied.

  ‘So let me get this right,’ I said. ‘You called me Alexei when everybody else was called Sidney, you took me to see Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible rather than Bambi and Pinocchio, you made me wear peculiar trousers …. My trousers were a big area of contention between me and Molly at the time. Since I had been a child Molly had always made my trousers on her sewing machine. This had been fine when I was young and unselfconscious and in shorts, but once I moved up to proper trousers at the age of eleven or so it slowly began to occur to me that there might be something a bit off about my pants. By the time I got to fourteen I was certain that the trousers I was wearing possessed all kinds of strange bulges, weird pouchy bits in the seat and twisted seams that ran all over the place, and one leg always seemed to be at least six inches shorter than the other. Molly, on the other hand, was convinced that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her handiwork. I remember standing on a stool with her sticking pins in me and me screaming at her, ‘I bet you were a lousy tailor.’ And she replied, ‘Yes, I was,’ and she laughed, which made me absolutely crazy The weird thing was that neither of us ever thought of going to a shop and just buying some proper factory-made trousers.

  I continued with my diatribe: ‘You forced me to see the Red Army Choir rather than the Beatles! You told me Lenin came down the chimney at Christmas with my presents! And yet, and yet, the one time when me being a bit different could have got me another half an hour in bed, you didn’t want me to feel left out!’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Lexi,’ she said.

  Spending five years at forced Christian worship did at least make me one of the few atheist Communist Jews who knew all the words to ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and the Lord’s Prayer. I consoled myself with the thought that if the National Front or some other Nazi organisation ever gained power in Britain and their version of the Gestapo came for me I might be able to pass myself off as a Christian by enthusiastically singing every verse of ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’.

  Having managed to put a bit of physical distance between me and my parents the time now seemed right to try and put a degree of ideological space between us too. Most teenagers rebel against their parents, try and become different from their mother and father, preferably adopting some way of life that really annoys them. But for me breaking away was more problematic because I really liked being left-wing and I really liked left-wingers. Being a Communist amongst Communists was what defined me — it was my thing. So in the end the form my teen rebellion took was that I didn’t do the obvious thing and become self-interested and reactionary and a little Tory, or, even worse, become self-interested and reactionary and join the Labour Party I didn’t even stop being a Communist. I just became a different kind of Communist.

  Up until the late 1950s the two biggest socialist states, the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, had seemed to be close as close could be. But towards the end of the decade splits in the relationship began to appear, until in 1961 Mao and the Chinese Communist Party openly denounced ‘The Revisionist Traitor Group of Soviet Leadership’.

  The dispute was really about national interest, access to nuclear technology and people simply not liking each other, but the ostensible reason for the fracture was disagreement over who was truly the heir of the Soviet Revolution. In 1956, in his ‘Secret Speech’ to the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev had denounced the ‘cult of personality’ that surrounded Stalin and had revealed some of the terrible crimes committed during the Great Purges. Over the next couple of years Khrushchev attempted to reform the Soviet system, placing more emphasis on the production of consumer goods over traditional heavy industry and liberalising, a tiny bit, the repressive Soviet attitude towards any form of dissent. Though slightly assuaged by the crushing of revolts in Hungary and East Germany, many in the West’s Communist movements were uneasy with this liberalisation. They didn’t like the idea of a Communist society allowing its citizens to express their opinions freely or to have a choice of more than one type of hat. Yet they had nowhere to take their disaffection until t
he Sino—Soviet split offered these puritan characters a choice of an extra-dour kind of socialism more in keeping with their sententious inclinations.

  So I became a Maoist, while my parents remained devoted to the Soviet Union. Soon violent arguments erupted over the breakfast table in 5 Valley Road, Liverpool 4.

  ‘Don’t you dare call your mother a Bureaucratist Capitalist Roader, Alexei!’

  ‘Well, she is, Dad! Anyone disassociating themselves from direct manual labour is bound to set themselves apart from the masses, inevitably leading to Bureaucratism. As the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, has stated, “There must be no ‘sitting in the office’, ‘no moving his mouth but not his hands’.”‘

  ‘What are you talking about, Lexi? You haven’t done a day’s manual labour in your life! And why do the Gallup Poll people keep phoning, saying they need to speak to you urgently?’

  ‘You’re a Red Fascist, Molly! A Commandeerist! A One Voiceist! And is my football kit ready? Because we’ve got double games tomorrow.’

  It was on a Vietnam demonstration early in 1967 when I first became aware of Maoism. There was this extraordinary guy walking along by himself; he had long hair, a straggly beard and a floor-length overcoat. Using both hands, he carried in front of him a large poster of Chairman Mao Tse-tung attached to a tube of grey plastic piping. As we passed a Chinese restaurant on Lime Street, all the waiters and chefs piled out of the restaurant cheering him and making the ‘waving a little red book’ gesture. Which, when I thought about it, seemed a bit odd since most of the Chinese in Liverpool had been in the city for three or four generations, spoke English with thick Scouse accents, were extremely entrepreneurial and held no affection for Communism. Maybe they were just excited to see one of us parading around with a picture of one of them. This man was Nigel Morley Preston Jones and he was Merseyside’s first Maoist.