Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  Unique amongst provincial British cities, Liverpool possessed a United States consulate. It was in fact the world’s first US consulate, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, had once been consul here. In the 1960s it made an excellent destination for demonstrators who didn’t want to travel all the way to London to throw stones at a piece of US government property Soon there were enormous anti-war demonstrations taking place in Liverpool most weekends, and Molly was frequently in the poor consul’s office shouting at him. Often there were thousands at the Pier Head but, as with all open-air events, timing was crucial. When the Merseyside Peace in Vietnam organised one march for what turned out to be a rainy weekday afternoon, so few people turned up that my mother and the other organisers had a debate about whether to march or not. In the end it was decided that the twelve or fifteen of us who were there would walk in the gutter down to the Pier Head, escorted by a phalanx of scornful policemen, not quite demonstrating but not quite walking either. I found this a particularly excruciating experience. I had grown up going on demonstrations, and as far back as I could remember they had mostly felt ridiculous and stupid. The chanting, the folksinging, the empty, sloganising speeches all made me squirm inside, and I was certain that girls were not impressed by a boy walking in the gutter with a placard on a stick.

  In 1968 the Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group gave their support to the secessionist Biafran movement in Nigeria. I remember on a hot summer day walking down Princes Road in Liverpool 8, a shabby but once elegant tree-lined street. Feeling like frauds, we were the only white people amongst several hundred Africans, all of us chanting, ‘We are Biafrans … (clearly not true in our case)’… fighting for our freedom. With Ojukwo leading, we will con-quer.’ (No, they didn’t.) I think we then changed sides and gave our support to the Nigerian government.

  I was on a Vietnam demonstration in ‘68 or ‘69 when I noticed the rainbow flag of the Woodcraft Folk flying above the throng. The Woodcraft Folk had embodied so much of the ramblin’, folk singin’, knitted jumper-wearin’ kind of social-isin, but on going closer I saw that many of those marching under their banner were wearing leather gimp masks, fluorescent leotards or rubber ballerina outfits and were dancing about in a very sensuous way blowing whistles and shaking maracas. Perhaps here was a sign that the socialist left was finally getting more in touch with the spirit of the age. It seemed that the Woodcraft Folk had loosened up quite a lot since my time and I regretted letting my membership lapse until I realised what had happened. The gay movement had stolen the Woodcraft Folk’s flag, the rainbow banner, and were now claiming it as their own.

  This demonstration at the Pier Head ended with the traditional occupying of the US consulate. Nigel Morley Preston Jones came up to me and said, ‘Man … you should come with us on this Vietnam demo in London in May. We’ve got like paint bombs and I’ve got marbles to roll under the police horses and there’s going to be all kinds of trouble.’ Unfortunately Molly was standing next to me when he told me this and she wouldn’t let me go despite all my pleading, and so I missed out on the biggest riot in post-war Britain — the famous Grosvenor Square demo of ‘68. Nigel told me afterwards that it had been brilliant, though he hadn’t used his marbles because he found he didn’t want to hurt the horses.

  Molly did finally let me go on the one in October 1968, which was very tame. Tariq Ali, a student radical and former President of the Oxford Union, was accused by many on the left of betraying the cause because he had agreed with the authorities to avoid Grosvenor Square this time. So there wasn’t much violence but I did manage to get caught up in a brief outbreak of fighting when I attached myself to a breakaway group of anarchists who were attempting to storm the square, throwing themselves against the police lines. Breathless, I found myself exhilarated by the violence. The charging, then the running away, the shouting and the drama, the thrill of seeing people being taken away in ambulances, their heads dripping with blood, the self-righteousness you felt, were all fantastic. Up until that point I hadn’t understood the Mod kids at school who got caught up in football riots, but now I could totally see what they were getting out of it. And you could tell that the police were having as good a time as we were — after all, they were young men too and they wanted to have a fight as much as we did.

  For many people 1968 was a year of upheavals, highs and lows, tremendous excitement and catastrophic disillusionment. For me one of the most shocking things was to find out that I had only passed four O-Levels: a low Grade Three in English lit and art and a lousy Grade Four in history and English language. More than anything else, I was astounded to get only a Grade Eight, a calamitous fail, in French.

  It had always been a core belief in our family that the Sayles were really good at foreign languages. So confident was I in my natural linguistic ability that for five years I had paid hardly any attention in French classes — I refused to hand in any homework and as the exam grew nearer did no revision, instead relying on my genetic inheritance to see me through. It was only when I was met with complete incomprehension during the oral part of the exam that I began to suspect that things were not going to go well. ‘Quoi?’ the examiners kept asking me with puzzled expressions on their faces and ‘Je ne comprends pas.’ I, on the other hand, thought I was eloquently and fluently conveying complex ideas of political philosophy in perfect, slightly Marseilles-accented French.

  When the results came through the door they confirmed that this idea of our polyglotism had been a collective delusion. After that shock, when I thought back to our overseas holidays there arose several uncomfortable and long-suppressed memories of foreigners staring in stunned bafflement at one or both of my parents as they talked at them. Now those incidents began to make sense. The more I reflected on it the more memories surfaced of perplexing incidents that had happened abroad which were now understandable — why, for example, we were served boiled cod in Stuttgart when we thought we were getting an ice cream. I began to suspect that Joe, rather than being fluent in any foreign language, got others to understand him and do what he wanted simply out of sheer niceness, while people did what my mother wished because they were frightened of her.

  It was during the 1967 NUR AGM which was held in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands that I resolved never to go on holiday with my parents ever again. Me, Molly, Joe and Bruno had been due to stay in a caravan in the surrounding hills for two weeks. After about five days I had demanded to be allowed to go home. The caravan was like our boat except that at least on a canal cruise the landscape changed, whereas outside the steamed-up window of the caravan there remained day after day the same glowering, alien and unsettling pine forest. The city of Inverness was on a broad flat river and surrounded by a huge amount of more wooded nothingness. It was disconcerting to be in a place that was musty, cold and wet but where you still were continually bitten by insects. We were given the usual privilege passes for entry to all council-run facilities, but as far as I can remember there was nothing that I wanted in Inverness even at half price. One memory I have is that up in the wooded secret hills we visited some people who were painting hundreds of plaster figures of Mickey Mouse by hand in a long shed. That was it for me, I said, ‘I can’t take any more of this.’

  The journey from the Highlands took the whole evening and night and it was just before dawn the next day when we crawled into Lime Street Station. The buses hadn’t yet begun running, so I walked all the way from town to Anfield through early morning streets slick with rain.

  To have a whole house to myself brought a tremendous sense of liberation. For seven days I lived on small tins of chicken in jelly, Fray Bentos pies where you cut the top off the tin and then cooked it in the oven so the crust rose and packets of Vesta Chop Suey where you fried a curly little crispy thing to put on top of your meal. In my mind I watched myself doing these things and thought I saw a sophisticated and independent young man.

  One night some friends of mine and Cliff’s from the sixth form came back to m
y empty house with some girls. While they were upstairs I found myself sitting in the living room frustrated that I didn’t have a girlfriend. Turning on the TV, I came in about a third of the way through the most extraordinary film I had ever seen. The movie was shot in jagged black and white, and in the first scene I saw there were girls in black leather biker jackets who had boys’ haircuts and they were menacing a more feminine woman who was tied up to a bed in a motel and the biker women were smoking marijuana, in the fifties! The tale was of a big fat corrupt sweaty policeman in a neon-lit city that looked like Venice but without any canals. Dennis Weaver from the cowboy series Gunsmoke kept running into the seedy motel where the boyish girls were tormenting the woman and smoking the joints, shouting, ‘It stinks in hayah!’ Charlton Heston was pretending to be a Mexican and Marlene Dietrich played a fortune teller. Even when it finished I didn’t know what it was I had seen, and it was years before I realised that I had watched two-thirds of Orson Welles’ A Touch of Evil. All I knew right there and then was that I wanted a leather jacket like those bad girls and I wanted to smoke marijuana.

  In ‘68 Molly and Joe had booked themselves a cruise on a Russian ship named after Lenin’s wife, the Krupskaya. The Soviet Union possessed a whole fleet of these boats, enormous white vessels that cruised the Baltic and the Black Sea calling in at various ports of the Eastern Bloc, from where Western tourists would be shown the wonders of the Soviet world. Then they were whisked back to their ship for running buffets that always featured a huge glazed salmon as their centrepiece and displays of folk dancing in the evening. While I, on the eve of my sixteenth birthday, planned to travel to a city that only three months before had been rocked by some of the most violent riots in its history during which several people had been killed, where there had been massive factory occupations, the seizure of universities by students and an unofficial general strike involving eleven million workers which had succeeded in bringing down the government. You could never tell with my parents what they would object to — especially Molly Though Molly wouldn’t let me go on the May Vietnam demo she did, without any argument, allow me to travel to Paris, abroad alone for the first time in my life. She didn’t even express mild concern about me travelling to a city where the riot police were still attacking people months after the main event, whereas a few weeks before when she found out I had been eating chips from the chip shop up the road from school rather than a nutritious lunch she started screaming that I was going to give myself stomach cancer and tearfully begged me to stop.

  My parents may have felt reassured because I had told them I was going to take the train to Paris — and why wouldn’t I seeing as it was fast and in my case completely free? But I had told them a lie. Actually my plan was to hitch-hike. There was an almost mystical significance to hitch-hiking. It was free, so that appealed to hippy stinginess, and according to the mythology you were guaranteed to meet all kinds of really ‘cool’ people and enjoy all kinds of freaky adventures. As soon as Molly and Joe were on the train to Harwich to join their cruise ship I took the bus to a roundabout at the beginning of the East Lancashire Road, which I vaguely thought led to London. I stood on the edge of the road and stuck out my thumb … and I waited on that roundabout for the rest of the day and right throughout the whole of the following night. The next morning I got the same bus back into town and took the train to London and onward to Paris. As I ate a meal in the dining car on the train from the French coast the ticket collector, seeing my free pass, saluted me, proletarian to proletarian.

  In all the time over the next couple of years that I spent trying to hitch-hike I think I only ever got about five lifts. Two of those drivers were drunk and one thought he was Jesus. It was my appearance that was mostly to blame — my clothes, my hair and the tortured expression of doubt and embarrassment that I wore permanently on my face. The front cover of the album Highway 61 Revisited showed Bob Dylan dressed in a white T-shirt with a drawing of a Triumph Bonneville motorcycle printed on it. The Triumph logo was placed above the picture of the motorbike and the word ‘Motorcycles’ ran below. I desperately wanted a T-shirt like that but, having no idea where to buy one, I produced my own version drawn with a felt-tip pen on an old and yellowing scoop-necked T-shirt from the Co-op. When attempting to create my own drawing I hadn’t really been able to stretch the T-shirt flat on the living room table and so the image came out all crazy-looking, as did the lettering. Rather than saying ‘Triumph’ it looked more like ‘TrUmP’ and ‘Motorcycles’ had come out as ‘momoMymycles’. As I stood on the roundabout at the beginning of the East Lancs Road I looked like a wild man who had been writing mad incoherent words on his shirt, or possibly somebody who had tried to commit suicide by repeatedly stabbing himself with a magic marker. And I was still wearing my toy hat.

  And I wasn’t intending to stay in small hotels or youth hostels as I had told my parents — I was planning to sleep rough. After hitch-hiking, sleeping rough was another experience that was supposed to give you all kinds of insights into the human condition. I had bought myself an olive green sleeping bag from the Army and Navy stores in Lime Street and I travelled with this rolled up, tied with straps and supported by another strap that went over my shoulder. All the clothes I had with me were inside the bedroll, and it was very inconvenient to get anything because you had to undo all the straps. Typically, I was far more interested in looking like Woody Guthrie than in having anything practical to carry my luggage in.

  Along with a few pairs of baggy underpants and some T-shirts with mad drawings on them was an enormous, double-edged commando dagger in my bedroll. I don’t quite know when the thing with me and knives started. Travelling through France when I was quite young, I had seen in shop windows some wooden-handled penknives called Opinel which had entranced me. These simply made objects exuded a powerful kind of utilitarian beauty: they embodied the idea of peasants hacking off a chunk of rough saucisson sec for their lunch or a philosopher sharpening his pencils prior to composing a stinging diatribe against some other philosopher. By contrast British penknives, with their clumps of pathetic, tiny blades, were fussy things you associated with boy scouts. So on one early trip through France I bought myself an Opinel, and then on a subsequent holiday I bought myself a bigger one, then I bought one with a locking ring so that it could be held open and wouldn’t close if you stuck it in something, at which point I couldn’t deny to myself that, though I did like the idea of cutting up sausage and sharpening pencils, I also very much liked the idea of having a weapon tucked in my back pocket. Then somebody gave me the commando dagger and I thought I might as well take that on my holidays too.

  As I walked from the Gare du Nord to the Left Bank, there were riot police everywhere — the notorious and feared CRS. The city was hot and humid under the afternoon sun. The buildings, like huge storage heaters, gusted wet air into the cobbled streets. I felt lonely Down a side street carpeted with vegetable peelings I came upon a row of Citroen vans full of men in padded suits, helmets on and visors down. They looked at me with my long hair and my bedroll as a hawk might look at a fieldmouse.

  From its high point in May the street protests and occupations had declined, partly due to the connivance of the Communist Party and their trade union federation, the CGT, with the right-wing government. The students, intellectuals and anarchists who had rioted had been as opposed to the French CP and the conventional trade unions as they had been to the de Gaulle government, seeing them all as part of the same old-fashioned corrupt system. The Morning Star, taking its line from the British party leadership, came out and condemned the ‘68 protests; and Pif the dog, who after all was at the centre of things, had several strident points to make about the intellectual narcissism of the protest’s leaders.

  On the posters outside the Gaumont cinema that advertised the coming attractions there would always be a strapline designed to express the essence of the film. There was one movie incongruously starring method actor Rod Steiger and blowsy, blonde, Swindon-born bo
mbshell Diana Dors, whose caption read, ‘You’re not afraid of the jungle, so why are you afraid of me?’ Beneath the title of the movie of our family’s life, which might be called ‘Von Sayle’s Express’, the legend would read, ‘Holidays were overly important to them.’ Consequently when I tried to devise my first independent holiday I over-reached myself catastrophically.

  I had the idea that Paris ‘68 would be my Aldermaston march, that like Glen Cocker I would encounter a girl who was so aroused by the political upheaval, so excited by the throwing off of all bourgeois morality, that she would have sex with me, even if she didn’t want to, as part of her revolutionary duty.

  Going to Paris alone was a huge mistake. I should have known that if the prospect of spending an evening in Liverpool by myself brought on feelings of existential dread so severe I had to go running around town until I met somebody to talk to, then travelling to an alien city where I knew no-one and where the streets were full of out-of-control riot police was likely to open up a pit of desolation in me so terrible that each second was an agony that seemed to go on for hours. Especially since I was truly awful at striking up the superficial friendships you needed if you were going to go on a holiday like this. I would hear other hitchers say to each other, ‘Man, I got talking to this guy outside Athens, man, and he just like invited me to his sister’s wedding on this Greek island and I ended up playing the bouzouki all night for all these chicks, man, and then….’ Whereas my story would go, ‘This bloke started talking to me in Victoria Station but he seemed to be saying how sealions were tapping his phone, so I ran away’ I would have liked to ask somebody to come with me but, fearing rejection, I lacked the confidence to do so.

  As I lay in my sleeping bag under the Pont Neuf, whimpering with loneliness and occasionally, as I turned over, getting stabbed in the back by my commando dagger, all around me pretty girls were humping groovy, handsome-looking guys who played Beatles songs on the guitar. Thus I learned the lesson that, even after the revolution, cool, handsome and confident is always going to beat weird-looking and needy.