by Alexei Sayle
All those who were regular subscribers to the paper also knew that these threats contained a large element of pretence, since we were certain that the Morning Star would always, in the end, be rescued by the Soviet Union. Everyone was convinced that the paper was massively supported by Moscow in that the authorities there took bulk orders for which they had no conceivable use. I imagined that somewhere in the vast expanse of the Ukraine there was a house which in my mind’s eye had a front door just like ours, and that every week twenty-four copies of the Morning Star would flop on to their doormat and every week the mother would pick them up and stick them straight into the pocket of a nearby overcoat.
Being old-school Communist Party Cliff Cocker really disliked Ian Williams and my new Maoist mates, but for me the more places I had to go, the more people I knew, the better. I found that if I had time to myself, especially in the evenings, if I wasn’t drinking with Sid and my classmates or at a meeting or seeing Cliff a terrible chasm of panic opened up in my mind and I had to run around town until I found somebody to talk to, somebody to distract me. Fortunately via the Marxist-Leninists I had finally got to know the world of Liverpool’s radical pubs.
All the bohemians, the artists, the poets and the left-wingers drank in three or four boozers on the edge of the town centre. At night, the town itself was the province of people who didn’t know who Friedrich Engels was and had never heard of the Foreign Minister of China, Chou En-lai — clerks, Mods, rich Jewish kids, businessmen, secretaries, nurses. After the pubs closed at 10.30 these people went on to clubs such as the Mardi Gras where Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding performed before they were stars — the Blue Angel, the Odd Spot and the Cavern. But the people I mixed with stayed out of town at night. We drank in the Philharmonic Hotel, a monument of Victorian exuberance with dark wood-panelled walls, copper reliefs, Art Deco lights, a mosaic-covered floor and a bar with a huge golden eagle watching over the drinkers. Alternatively we met up in the Crack, which was the pub favoured by the art students and consisted of lots of little rooms each with weird paintings on the walls.
O’Connor’s was the druggiest pub. A former chapel with doors at each end, it allowed the dealers to run out of one door when the police came through the other. And finally there was the one favoured by the Marxist-Leninists, named the Grapes but called Kavanagh’s by everyone. Wally, Dave, Ian and the rest drank in what was effectively a corridor, though there were two snugs, with old murals on the walls and unusual round tables supposedly taken from a sister ship of the Titanic and fireplaces which blazed with warmth in the winter. I would get the bus into town and then walk up Renshaw Street to O’Connor’s. If there was nobody I knew in O’Connor’s I would go to the Crack and then to the Philharmonic until I found somebody I knew, and perhaps somebody who might buy me a drink if my pocket money had run out.
All these pubs, especially Kavanagh’s, were full of ‘characters’ — men with strange quirks of behaviour which a lot of people found enchanting and bohemian but whose manner I thought was contrived or self-conscious or just plain stupid. There was one Irish guy who hung around with us. In Ireland this man had been a member of a Communist/Nationalist group called Saor Eire and he was now on the run after being involved in several fund-raising bank raids. He was trying to keep his identity secret but everybody called him Irish John or alternatively ‘Irish John Who’s Been Involved in All Those Bank Raids in Ireland’. He tried to pay for his drinks with hundred-pound Irish banknotes, then was quickly arrested and shipped back to Dublin. His real name was Simon.
Even more exciting than the pubs, but more intimidating too, were the shebeens, the after-hours clubs that everybody decamped to at 10.30. All these clubs were run by Liverpool’s various immigrant communities. We had among others the Chinese Nationalist Seamen’s Club, the Niger Club, the Ghanaian Club and our favourite, the Somali Club in Upper Parliament Street, which had a restaurant upstairs that served a yellow curry that you could never get out of your clothes if you spilt it. The club was downstairs in the basement; they played reggae music at a time when it was unknown outside the ghetto and sold bottled beer from a rickety bar.
Oddly, if you were white you had no trouble getting into any of these shebeens, but if you came from one of the other immigrant communities it was impossible. If you were from Jamaica you couldn’t get into the Yoruba, if you were Somali they wouldn’t let you into the Niger, and vice versa. And they weren’t that keen on letting me into anywhere. It wasn’t that I was under-age — nobody ever commented on that — but there was just something about me, some aura which emanated from my personality that got on the nerves of door people. However, early one evening I had a spot of luck. I had managed to get into the Somali because it was almost empty, when suddenly the phone behind the bar rang. The owner came out to announce that the call had been from the police, informing them that there was going to be a raid in ten minutes. Some people left right away, but for those of us who remained they dragged out a box covered in dust and proceeded to give everybody membership cards which looked like they had been printed in the nineteenth century and which we all signed.
The next time I went to the Somali the man on the door stopped me, so I said, ‘But you have to let me in. I’m a member.’
‘What do you mean you’re a member?’ he asked incredulously.
I pulled out my membership card and showed it to him. ‘I’ve never seen one of those before,’ he said, and waved me in with a pained expression on his face.
One other place was the Gladray Club, which charged a shilling whenever there was a stripper on. It was always full of uniforms, postmen in uniform, busmen in uniform, policemen in uniform and sixth-formers from the Liverpool Institute in uniform — but they would never let me in, even for a shilling.
Apart from introducing me to pubs and African shebeens the other great thing about the Marxist-Leninist Group was the theory study classes which were held once or twice a week. Unlike the policy of the old CP, members of the MMLG were encouraged to study the sacred texts themselves rather than have them interpreted by a crotchety Anglo-Indian and the gnomic statements of a French cartoon dog. Though, under the influence of the Red Guards, the rest of the Chinese economy was collapsing into chaos the country was still managing to produce huge numbers of the Marxist classics which they then sold around the world at a subsidised price. These books were rather elegant in a utilitarian way: a uniform edition with a cream-coloured, thick paper cover and a slightly blurry old-fashioned typeface. It was Ian who led these discussions, and they followed a pattern of study which had existed since the first editions of Marx had appeared and working people all over the industrialised world had seized them and tried to prise open their meaning in rooms above pubs, front parlours and Mechanics’ Institutes. The group ploughed through The Communist Manifesto, Wages, Prices and Profits and Stalin’s History of the CPSU at the speed of the slowest and dimmest-witted member of the group, which was usually me.
For a bit of light relief we would sometimes perform ‘The Great Money Trick’ from Robert Tressell’s novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. This book, first published in 1914, is widely regarded as a classic of British working-class literature. It is based on Tressell’s experiences of the building trade in which he worked and the poverty, exploitation and terror of the workhouse he found there. Tressell died the year before the book was published and was buried in Walton churchyard next to our school.
In the chapter entitled ‘The Great Money Trick’ the hero, Frank Owen, organises a mock-up of capitalism with his work-mates, using slices of bread as raw materials and knives as machinery Owen ‘employs’ his workmates to cut up the bread to illustrate that the employer — who does not work — generates personal wealth while the workers effectively remain no better off than when they began, forever swapping coins back and forth for food and wages. This is Tressell’s practical way of illustrating the Marxist theory of surplus value, which in the capitalist system is generated by labour. We would endle
ssly cut up bits of bread and then pretend that we understood the theory of surplus value, though really it was no clearer now than it had been before. But it did make a change from Marx’s argumentative, dense and grumpy writing.
After attending those study groups for something like a year a remarkable thing happened. The way in which we were taught history at school presented the past in one of two ways. Either it was rendered as an endless list of anglocentric facts about seed drills, Bessemer converters, steam-driven lathes and the Treaty of Potsdam, or we were fed the idea that the world changed, moved from stage to stage simply because various powerful or visionary personalities such as Abraham Lincoln, Henry VIII or Julius Caesar decided to do things and everybody went along with it because they made really convincing speeches. That and the notion that groups of people fought each other simply because they didn’t get on. So the English Civil War was just an argument between two groups of people with different opinions about whether frilly shirts looked good, and the industrial revolution happened first in Britain because we were cleverer than everybody else and had a lot of coal. I had always struggled with this interpretation that the past was random and incoherent, that after Britain enthusiastically pursued slavery for a couple of hundred years Wilberforce came along and pointed out that it wasn’t nice and everybody went, ‘Oh, blimey you’re right!’ and stopped it except in the Southern States of the USA where they were confused because the sun was hot and they talked funny.
To me history as taught at school was like all those memories of galleries, castles and historic monuments that I didn’t have. There was the same sense that if there was only some matrix, some philosophical framework to which I could attach all these facts then they would all make sense and they would all stay with me. And then halfway through Marx’s Wages, Prices and Profits I suddenly thought to myself, ‘Fuck me! This shit is actually true.’
Nobody was more surprised than me at this unexpected turn of events. Up until those study groups I had been like some Ulster Protestant born and brought up on the Shankhill Road whose faith is a matter of geography and tribalism. Then one day God appears to him and tells him that actually, yes, as it happens the Pope is the Anti-christ, Glasgow Rangers are the greatest football team in the world and the best way to worship Him, God, is to march about the streets wearing a bowler hat, holding a rolled-up umbrella and riding a white horse up and down the front at Southport on 12 July.
Though I hadn’t seen it clearly until that moment, the truth was that like the Orangeman or the Sunni Muslim or the Southern Baptist I had been born into my faith. I had been brought up knowing nothing else, and the people I responded to broadly believed the same things that I did. The only difference was that what I believed, what my parents believed, appeared to be demonstrably correct. Once you understood Marx all the apparent chaos of human existence resolved itself into a coherent and comprehensive pattern. People fought not because they differed about how to wear a shirt but because they represented economic classes whose interests conflicted. The Cavaliers were landed aristocrats and their allies who wanted to hang on to a way of life being superseded by Cromwell’s merchant class. Slavery was abolished not out of some idea of ‘niceness’ in the Northern states but because the industrial factory owners of Chicago and Detroit wanted the blacks to work in their factories, to be ‘wage slaves’ rather than actual slaves, though often the improvement in their physical conditions was marginal. The British Empire wasn’t some project designed to bring enlightenment to ignorant savages, but rather a brutal and rapacious exploitation of peoples who were often more humane than us.
You can imagine, armed with this philosophy, how full of myself I now became. Even when I hadn’t had the secret of human history in my grasp I had been a mouthy little bastard in class. Now I was unstoppable.
When Joe was issued with his new British Rail, white-heat-of-technology-style uniform he put it on at home for us to see. Gone were the serviceable, dark blue serge trousers, peaked cap of timeless design, waistcoat and jacket with brass buttons. In their place he was now going to be forced to wear a short bumfreezer jacket made of some sort of polyester that was more commonly used to line the engine compartments of sports cars, with red piping down the sides and a chunky orange zipper up the front. On his head was perched a cylindrical cap with a short peak and ear flaps, also edged in red piping, that could be folded down in cold weather, and for his sixty-one-year-old legs they had given him bell-bottomed trousers. He looked like a very sad and tired Thunderbird puppet.
Since Joe had also been provided with a short cape to replace his long black BR overcoat with shiny brass buttons down the front I took the coat and began wearing it when I went out. It had the look of an old RAF overcoat, which was almost a uniform for hippies, but I gave it my own twist by tying the waist with string. I got a lot of admiring glances from the other hippies in O’Connor’s for that coat. At work Joe continued to make mistakes, to confuse or forget things, but the men at Bids ton always managed to cover these mistakes up or blame somebody else. In fact, if you didn’t know, you couldn’t spot that there was anything wrong with my father. Those who did know, me and Molly, were in a permanent state of manic watchfulness and inclined to see examples of memory loss and confusion where there was only normal hesitation and then become hysterical. Fearing a return of that terrifying thing, emotion, I’d go running out of the house looking for any kind of distraction, while my mother’s response was to become a thorn in the side of US imperialism.
The Vietnam War, a war we weren’t actually fighting in, was to us in the hermetically sealed world of the British left the defining cause of the period, prompting the first large-scale riots on the British mainland since the war and inspiring the plays of Barry Blancmange. Everybody considered it a more or less black and white example of a mighty imperial power (the United States) attempting to crush with brutal military force the aspirations of a small nation (Vietnam) . Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister, had managed despite enormous pressure from the United States to keep Britain out of the conflict but that didn’t earn him many points from the left.
In 1966 Molly had gone down to London to attend a Women’s Day ‘Peace’ conference. While there she became interested in the Vietnamese struggle for independence and on her return joined a group called Merseyside Peace in Vietnam. That ‘Peace’ word is there again because the Communist Party line at the time was to call for peace, rather than victory for the insurgent Vietcong and the North Vietnamese which is what everybody else wanted. Eventually Molly became secretary of Merseyside Medical Aid for Vietnam, a group that wasn’t closely tied to the party One of the first big campaigns Molly and her group organised, and which I reluctantly helped out with, was a giant petition-signing campaign. With a crowd of others I went from door to door in Huyton, collecting signatures from Harold Wilson’s Liverpool constituents urging him to do a lot more to bring the Vietnam War to an end.
It was the first time I had been anywhere like Huyton, one of the new towns where the working classes of inner city Liverpool were meant to find fulfilment under the flat, sarcastic Lancashire skies. The rows and rows of raw new tenement buildings reminded me of the hen sheds at the Ovaltine Farm outside Abbot’s Langley that I used to see from the window of the London train. They were buildings that represented an idea, a false dream, an illusion, rather than something that anybody or anything was truly supposed to live in.
In nearby Kirkby, another 1960s’ new town, the Labour council had built at great cost an artificial ski slope. This would have been a dubious asset for the community even if it had been done right, but somebody blundered and they built it the wrong way round so that the slope ended right at the edge of the brand-new M62 motorway If any of the community had ever used the slope they would have hurtled straight into six lanes of speeding traffic.
A young teacher gave me a lift home from Huyton. She was part of the campaign and had a Renault 4 with the broom-handle gear change. Very excited to be mixing on equ
al terms with a teacher, I was expounding confidently on my career plans. ‘Obviously,’ I said, ‘I’ll get eight or nine 0-Levels, then I’ll go on to do three A-Levels, then study philosophy at a major Oxford college before a career as the editor of a leading news magazine such as Time, Newsweek or Paris Match — or I might be a car designer.’
He said, ‘Well, it’s nice to see somebody who’s got their career all planned out.’ And then he laughed at me! Nobody had ever laughed at me before — not that I could remember, anyway I didn’t like it. It was a taste of what I did to others like Mr Johnson, and it turned out that it felt surprisingly unpleasant. I resolved never to let anybody do it to me again. We finished the journey in frosty silence.
The Catholic Bishop of Liverpool was sympathetic to the cause of peace in Vietnam, and at the urging of Molly’s committee helped organise a mass to protest against the war. During the service Molly was unsure what was going on, so when everybody got up and approached the front she went with them. Which was how this atheist, Communist Jew ended up taking holy communion in one of Britain’s major Catholic cathedrals. Once the priest’s back was turned she spat out the wafer, the literal body of Christ, into her hankie.
