Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  After a few days in Paris I was running short of money I had only brought thirteen pounds’ worth of travellers’ cheques, which really was a tiny amount — but then I had no idea how much holidays cost. On previous trips my parents or the Czech government had paid for everything. Travellers’ cheques were what Molly and Joe had carried with them when they journeyed abroad, and back in Liverpool I had been very excited to be buying my own. Emptying my post office account I went to the Thomas Cook office in the centre of Liverpool. ‘How would you like your cheques?’ the girl behind the counter asked. Being aware that travellers’ cheques came in denominations that were sometimes different from conventional currency and trying to act like the world-weary globetrotter I said to her, ‘Oh, I dunno … just give me two threes and a seven.’

  I was down to my last few Francs but I’d hatched a plan to get by Though I was constantly finding myself in confusing situations through my own stupidity I also possessed an eccentric survival instinct. In times of distress, just as Joe would go look for communists when there was a problem, I would turn to politics, politics and drawing, for my salvation.

  Though the May uprising had not reformed society or even made sex with lonely boys compulsory, there had been a significant improvement in the quality of political graffiti. Up until that point activists has simply scrawled straightforward slogans on walls: ‘Smash the state’, ‘End the war in Vietnam’ — that sort of thing. In London I had a particular favourite on a wall at Hyde Park Corner which I passed regularly on the way to shout at the US embassy It read, ‘Free all political pris~~~~~’, the words trailing off in a long jagged line of red paint. Obviously whoever had been writing it had been grabbed by the police before they had the chance to finish.

  The reason the graffiti in Paris was so much better than anywhere else was because it had been strongly influenced by the thinking of one particular group known as the Situationists. The Situationists were inspired by both Marxism and Surrealism, and the most obvious results of their theories were the puzzling and thought-provoking slogans which remained on the walls of the Sorbonne and surrounding area after the riots had ended. ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible,’ read one. ‘If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him,’ read another, and ‘Live without dead time.’ The most famous of all was ‘Under the paving stones, the beach.’

  Eager to try and make some money I bought a box of chalks from an art shop and, securing a little strip of pavement on the Boulevard St Michel where there were many incompetent buskers, I began sketching. I drew the likeness of a revolutionary hero such as Che or Mao with a speech bubble emerging from their mouth saying something I thought was Situationist and cryptic like ‘The revolution is for fish’ or ‘Underneath the pavement, more pavement’. This might not sound like much but the standard of street art in those days, before the invention of the silver robot statue was terribly low. So, in a couple of days passing tourists were throwing a decent amount of money into my toy cap, certainly enough to pay for bread and rough red wine. Though I still didn’t really have anybody to talk to, I was at least drunk in the evenings.

  Towards the end of the week I was in a park, a little triangular patch of trees and grass just off the Boulevard Montparnasse where I was thinking of sleeping that night, when somebody got in a dispute with a park official (I think it might have been me) . The man blew a whistle and immediately the park was full of riot police who scooped up all the backpackers and took us to a police station near the Sorbonne, where we were locked in a cage for a few hours while gendarmes glared at us in a threatening fashion. Luckily they didn’t search me or my bedroll, but they did get my parents’ phone number out of me with a minimum of threats. A sergeant tried to call Valley Road, but of course the phone just rang and rang because while I was in this French police station Molly and Joe were halfway up the Kiel Canal.

  In the early morning the gendarmes let us out of the cage and herded us down a corridor and into the back of a van. Not knowing what was going to happen next, the whole smelly group were taken to the outskirts of the city where the police let us out on to the side of a busy ring road. They informed us that we were all barred from Paris — we had an hour to leave town and never return. Then the van drove off.

  All the other hippies walked to the slip road of the motorway to begin hitching, but I said, ‘Oh, I’m, em … going to another good hitching spot that I know.’ Then I took the Métro back into Paris to the Gare du Nord and, ducking round a corner every time I saw a policeman, got on the first train to the coast and was back in London by the afternoon.

  I decided I didn’t want to go back to Liverpool as that would have been admitting defeat — the importance of holidays was so great that they couldn’t under any circumstances be abandoned but had to be endured at all costs. Maybe I was hoping that if I held on long enough Ladislav would come and rescue me with a fleet of Tatra limousines. Some English hippy I had spoken to while in the cells had said, ‘There’s a cool scene in Brighton, man.’ So, taking the word of a drug-addled idiot, I caught a train down to the south coast of England.

  On the beach front at Brighton things seemed to be improving. Amongst the druggies hanging around the deck chairs and ice cream vans I was delighted to see a guy who I vaguely knew from O’Connor’s pub in Liverpool. I went up to him and said, ‘Hi, Eric!’

  Eric, however, didn’t seem so pleased to see me. ‘Hey,’ he replied in an unfriendly manner, looking around to see if anybody else had heard our exchange. Then, dropping his voice to a whisper, he said, ‘They call me Moose down here, man.

  By this time I was so desperate for company that I chose to endure hanging out with a guy named Moose rather than be on my own. He told me he knew an empty house where we could crash for the night, so me and Moose walked a little way out of town until we came to a suburban villa with boarded up windows. By now darkness had fallen, so our actions were hidden from the street as we prised back the rough wooden shutters and climbed in through one of the windows. Breathing heavily from our exertions, we stood in the derelict room for a few moments, the only illumination filtering in from the sodium lamps outside. Then suddenly our eyes were dazzled by half a dozen powerful torches shining in our faces. The police had been waiting in the house, expecting a teenage runaway to turn up, but they took me and Moose to the police station anyway I had now been arrested twice in two countries within twenty-four hours and this time I was searched. The desk sergeant took my Opinel number 8 with the 8.5cm blade out of my back pocket and said, ‘I’m not happy with this.’

  ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘if you’re not happy with that, you’re definitely not going to like what’s in my bedroll.’

  He looked at the commando dagger where it lay on the padded sleeping bag. ‘I’m going to have to take this off you,’ he finally said.

  I wasn’t going to argue, but they did give me a receipt written on the back of an envelope. These police too tried to ring Molly and Joe, but by then they would have been docking at the port of Rostock and so once more there was no answer. This time I was kept in a cell until about 6 a.m., after which me and Moose were given the now familiar speech about leaving town and never returning. Amazingly, a very young constable offered to take us back into town in his own car. The desk sergeant gave him a wry and weary look as he did so, and once we were on the move it became apparent why With ridiculous faux casualness the young policeman turned to us and asked, ‘Er, I hear, like, that there are … like people selling drugs in Brighton.’

  ‘Are there?’ me and Moose asked with apparent shock.

  ‘Yes. You don’t know who they are, do you?’

  ‘No, we don’t, officer, honest. We never knew such things went on, but we’d certainly tell you if we did.’

  Pulling up on a road, still a fair way out of town, the ambitious young constable said, ‘You two can fucking get out here.’

  Me and Moose-slash-Eric stood on the grassy verge as he drove away in his little red Ford Escort. Below us across the Do
wns the English Channel sparkled in the early morning light and I experienced for the first time something liberating and empowering, a sensation I would feel many times over the coming years — the wonderful release of giving up. Completely and utterly I gave in to the reality that my hitch-hiking holiday was a disaster and, feeling lighter in spirits than I had for weeks, I headed home.

  The house was cold and on the doormat under a stack of letters were my extremely poor 0-level results, but I remained happy to be home. That night I caught the bus into town. It took a while for me to find anyone to have a drink with, but when I did something else remarkable occurred. Naturally I related what I had been up to over the last few weeks, and in the telling my catastrophic hitch-hiking holiday gained a coherence and a vitality it hadn’t had while it was actually happening. In previous years I had recounted various incidents from my holidays to the kids at school, but this was the first time I had been able to fashion a complete saga that was entirely centred on my mishaps and adventures — everything and everyone were merely a backdrop to the doings of me. People listened fascinated as I told it in the Philharmonic, and then I went to O’Connor’s and told it there, and then I went to the Crack and told it there, and then I went back to the Phil and told it again to some different people, each time adding detail, dropping bits, altering the sequence of events and mostly making myself appear much less of a dick, until by the time I got to Kavanagh’s I was a modern-day Scouse Odysseus. Up to that point I had thought that when things happened it was the end of them, but it turned out that if you could tell a story that was only the beginning of their life. In the right hands events could be chopped and shaped and filleted until they came out exactly as you wanted them to come out, just like election results in the Soviet Union.

  I had a whole new audience for my story when I returned to school a week later as a member of the sixth form, studying for three A-Levels: Art, History and English. Then everybody in the political world came back from their summer holidays and I told it to them too. One night I was at a meeting in Liverpool University and afterwards, sitting around, I was relating the story of my summer holiday, which was by now almost as long as the holiday itself, to a group who hadn’t heard it before. One particular girl with long auburn hair and a round pretty face seemed to be regarding me with rapt attention. I thought to myself, ‘Why is that girl looking at me like that?’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, yeah!’

  She was a couple of years older than me, a student at a teacher training college on the edge of Liverpool. I went back with her to her hall of residence that night and stayed until the early hours, when I had to climb out of the window to avoid the prowling authorities. It was a misty morning as I waited for the first bus back into town, giddy with the thought that finally I had found somebody who liked me enough to let me do that to them.

  But it might have been that I hadn’t got it quite right, because as the bus moved off I began to feel this tremendous pain in my groin. Then a few seconds later the bus hit somebody with a thump. We had to wait for about a quarter of an hour before an ambulance arrived and I did think of asking them to take me to the hospital, but then we moved off. I got home about an hour later and spent the rest of the day in bed like some Victorian lady who had been violated for the first time, while Molly kept bursting into my bedroom shouting, ‘Lexi! Lexi! What’s wrong? Are you all right? Oh God! Oh Christ, are you ill? Shall I phone Cyril Taylor? What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong!’ 1 didn’t mind — in the end my disastrous holiday had got me a girlfriend.

  Molly and Joe brought me a balalaika, a three-stringed folk instrument with a triangular body, as a souvenir of their cruise. While my parents had been on the high seas the Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia, bringing to an end Dubcek’s Prague Spring. The first Molly and Joe knew of it was when a group of Italians on the Krupskaya, having heard the news on the BBC World Service, demanded that they be landed at the nearest port and allowed to go home right away.

  Ladislav never mentioned the upheaval in his letters, but a little while later he wrote to say that Prukha, the Minister for Trade Union Affairs who had hosted many dinners for us and had come to our home several times, was dead, apparently murdered during a street robbery Which always seemed a bit unlikely in such a rigorously policed country.

  One evening the local BBC TV news programme, Look North, ran a feature on a Japanese performance artist who was appearing at the Bluecoat Gallery, one of Liverpool’s oldest buildings, situated behind Woolworth’s in the town centre. This extremely odd-looking woman wrapped herself in toilet paper and conducted her side of the interview, composed of various cryptic pronouncements, in a high, squeaky voice. The presenters in turn treated her as if they were talking to someone in the novelty slot usually reserved for harmonica-playing livestock or batty, hundred-year-old men who had fought in the Boer War. They said the woman’s name was Yoko Ono. ‘That’s the last we’ve seen of her,’ I said to my dad.

  To live in Liverpool in those days it might have seemed as if you were a citizen of some magical city. Every day was a pulsating stew of music, art, poetry and theatre. Twenty-four hours a day you might see avant-garde performers from outside town, such as Yoko or Bob Dylan. At a hundred venues you could witness home-grown talent, poets, painters and musicians of enormous ability I had very little to do with any of it.

  Largely this was due to my disorganised nature. I knew things were going on from the TV and newspapers and sometimes I would try and attend an event but would either get there on the wrong night or go to a pub that had the same name as the pub where history was being made so I would spend all evening in some grimy bar down by the docks, sipping on a half of bitter in a smeared glass and wondering if the old bloke in the plastic mac talking to his whippet was in fact the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg in disguise.

  It was probably the only time in the history of a northern city you could impress people by saying you were a poet. In imitation of Adrian Henry, Brian Patten and Roger McGough I began composing verse and managed to have one poem published in the school magazine, a coruscating account of my life as the black inhabitant of a Chicago slum, which ended, ‘Rats in the basement … sniper on the rooftops.’ I did a reading at the Library on Walton Road which was run by two librarians who wore matching black polo-necked jumpers and thought of themselves as the Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath of Liverpool but it didn’t lead anywhere. I also began attending the Merseyside Youth Theatre but though we rehearsed for a couple of years we never managed to put on a play.

  Two people however who had managed to insert themselves into the very heart of Liverpool’s pulsating artistic scene were Joe and Molly Sayle. As secretary of Merseyside Medical Aid to Vietnam, Molly organised several blood drives that I failed to contribute to, as well as fund-raising events and petition-writing campaigns. There was a Vietnamese woman called Lin Qui, who was officially a journalist based in Paris but was known by everybody in left-wing circles as the main representative of both the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Communist government in Europe who when I got home from school often seemed to be sitting in our front room, silent and enigmatic in her black tunic staring at the Secatrol.

  Now because Molly was mixing in the same radical circles as I was she and Joe started turning up in the same pubs that I drank in, having got over her revulsion for these ‘noisy smoky places’. I would see my mother coming down Hope Street striding along while Joe, in his trilby hat and belted raincoat, ran to keep up with her. Bearing down on me like a destroyer in the Mediterranean ramming a midget submarine, no matter how I twisted and turned Molly was always there in my periscope. The only other fifty-year-olds the young clientele of these places knew were their mums and dads, their aunts and uncles, quiet and self-effacing souls in cardigans and slippers. Now, here in their midst, was this red-haired woman who was the same age as their parents but was shouting fuck as loudly as she could, arguing endlessly, hitting them when they disagreed with her and expressing deliciously inflammatory opinions
, noisily calling Princess Margaret a prostitute and vehemently defending Stalin’s show trials. Joe they liked for his gentleness and good humour. In the pubs where I knew perhaps eleven people to say hello to all the young drinkers thought Molly was amazing so that often my mother would be surrounded by a fawning crowd of admirers, who would look at me like an interloper if I ever tried to join them.

  One of the artists Molly became friendly with was a sculptor called Arthur Dooley It’s hard to imagine that Arthur could have become a celebrity in any other age than the 1960s. This was an era when churches had forgotten what their purpose was so when new ones were occasionally built they resembled tortured collisions of blockhouse and circus tent or Wimpy Bar and airport control tower. Arthur specialised in figures of Christ, Joseph or Mary that were commissioned to stick on the outside. A pudding-faced, garrulous man with a thick Scouse accent he was a former apprentice at Cammel Lairds shipyard who managed to somehow combine being both a devout Catholic and a committed Communist. Unlike the deformed structures in which his work was displayed Arthur’s sculptures — tortured, skeletal figures rendered in fibreglass, rags and scrap metal — were eloquent and powerful works of art. Bizarrely Arthur was also a fixture on the TV chat show circuit, a regular guest on ‘Parkinson’ and celebrities, most notably the drag artist Danny La Rue, were collectors of his work, though its hard to know what Danny La Rue did with a seven foot high scrap metal Jesus.

  That’s who Molly was mixing with now, members of the Vietcong and people off the telly Arthur Dooley’s studio was in a former pub in the village of Woolton on the edge of Liverpool. Together he and Molly organised an art exhibition in support of Medical Aid for Vietnam. I sold one of my pictures for ten shillings and immediately lost the cheque.