Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  Everybody was in a state of high excitement when the United States landed a man on the surface of the moon. The next day I told my class-mates that though they might have stayed up all night to watch the TV coverage I’d gone to bed early I said that everyone I knew agreed with Gil Scott Heron of the Last Poets. As far as heroin-addicted black men from the ghetto like me and Gil were concerned, the lunar landings were just ‘Whitey on the Moon’. Today the staff would have had a big case conference about me and afterwards I would have been booked twice weekly sessions with the school psychologist and proscribed heavy doses of some stultifying drug but then they conspired against me, which only served to increase the messianic sense of my own significance. Of all the pupils in the sixth form I was the only one who wasn’t made a school prefect. Then a few weeks after the beginning of term the headmaster announced at assembly that the school was going to have a student council with a representative drawn from each year. Clearly this institution would have as much power as the North Korean parliament, but still my classmates chose me as their representative. There was a pause of a day or two while the votes were counted; then the word came back that our class had to hold the election again. Again they voted and again they picked me. When their choice was rejected once more my classmates got the idea and elected somebody else. I think if the school had only reached out to me at that crucial point, then like a trade union firebrand given a life peerage or a troublesome journalist awarded a well-paid seat on the board of an arts organisation they might have been able to buy me off and make me their most enthusiastic advocate out of gratitude. Instead they drove me further into the arms of rebellion.

  Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the persecution by the school I considered this a very happy time. Me and my mates would play football every lunchtime in Walton Hall Park over the road from school, and sometimes we would go to one of the pubs on Rice Lane in Walton and get mildly sozzled. I would spend all my lunch money on drink, then go to the cloakroom where the little kids ate their packed lunches and extort them into giving me one of their sandwiches. There seemed no greater taste in the world than somebody else’s sandwich when slightly drunk.

  In spite of getting a lot of detentions I loved being in the sixth form. We sat not at desks like schoolchildren but in chairs with little swivel tables like students probably had.

  The subject I was particularly drawn to was English. This was because, like a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks that the TV newsreaders are addressing him directly, the syllabus seemed to have been devised by the Oxford and Cambridge examination board with the sole purpose of highlighting crucial aspects of my life. The Dickens novel we were studying was Hard Times, set in a fictionalised version of nearby Preston, it concerned the terrible working conditions of industrial towns — conditions that had given rise to the theories of Marx and Engels. The Shakespeare play was Coriolanus, at the heart of which is the relationship between an overpowering mother and her son, allied to a debate over whether ‘the plebeians’, have the right to govern themselves or if they can only be ruled by a stern and cruel leader.

  But it was Animal Farm that affected me the most. I felt like I had a personal relationship with George Orwell; over the years he had been condemned in our house with great bitterness, as if he was some errant relative who had stolen the family silver and run off to Australia. Now I was being forced to read one of his books, and this book really, truly was all about me and my family and the thing that we believed in.

  While my classmates struggled, I was aware of exactly who all the characters represented. The pig Napoleon represents Stalin, and Snowball, Napoleon’s rival and original leader after the farmer is thrown out, was clearly Trotsky The horses Boxer and Clover are the honest proletariat. The vicious puppies are the KGB. Moses the raven, with his tales of a place in the sky called Sugarcandy Mountain, symbolises the Russian Orthodox Church and so on. I half expected a delegation of trade union mice to come trooping through at some point with a little mouse translator, to be given presents and made honorary pigs at lavish banquets.

  Still, it was terribly hard to take in this fairytale allegory of the corruption and cruelty that descended on Russia in the two decades after the Bolshevik revolution.

  If it had been written as a conventional novel I might have been able to dismiss it, but written like this it seemed undeniably true. It was both disturbing and moving. I thrilled to the revolution when the animals overthrow the cruel farmer, and I was upset as I had never been before when towards the end the brave horse Boxer tries at the last minute to break out of the van taking him to the knacker’s yard.

  Animal Farm had such an effect on me that I had to construct a way of coping. I scoured the book to find a character I could identify with, a figure who would represent some kind of personal salvation for me, the animal I would be in that situation — and I found it in the cat. The cat represents what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat, by which he meant, generally speaking, the criminal classes. The criminal classes broadly share with the working-class their social attitudes, their accents and of course their neighbourhoods, but they differ in their motivation. While the worker slaves to earn an honest living, the Lumpenproletariat merely cares about itself. It is only at the last minute that the cat joins in the revolution, sinking her claws into Mr Jones the farmer. Later on she is seen telling the birds that they are all comrades now and it’s perfectly safe for them to land on her paw. I understood that in Animal Farm she personifies those who insincerely adhere to ideology for personal gain, but I hoped that perhaps I could be a slightly better version of the cat. I was telling myself that whatever happened I would make sure I looked after me first, that I would always hold some secret part of myself back from politics.

  But there was another lesson I took from the novel and its author. When I mentioned to Molly how I felt it was a great book and I was really grateful we were doing it for ‘A’ Level she just kept shouting ‘Orwell’s a bastard! Orwell’s a bastard!’ which typified not just her opinion but how most on the left regarded any art form. Like fundamentalist Christians who have to believe that every word of the Bible is true and those holy words were written by people who had no human foibles, so it was with Marxists like my mother. They only wanted to listen to messages that confirmed the things they already believed in written by authors who were ideologically pure. From then on I was eager to listen to all the competing voices I could get my hands on, even though such liberality was disapproved of in our house. While I could leave pornography or alcohol lying around my bedroom I was forced to hide my copy of Brideshead Revisited in a secret compartment at the back of the wardrobe.

  This happy year at school began to come crashing down thanks to my nemesis ‘the Abe’, Bill Abrahams, the Jewish, cricket-loving, Everton-supporting, Communist maths teacher. He had not taken us for maths since the first year, but he continued to dislike me and took every opportunity to put me in detention if I was caught misbehaving. I quite liked having a nemesis: it played into my sense of me being an especially dangerous person whose ideas, style of dress and manner were more than the straight world could take.

  Then it all went a bit too far. At Alsop, in another imitation of a public school, we had a ‘tuck shop’ — a little cupboard-sized place where pupils could buy chocolate, drinks and biscuits at break-time. I was in the queue one day when the Abe came in and started yelling, accusing me of being rowdy I was particularly agitated by this because for once he was wrong and I was just standing there quietly So we argued, and at some point he shoved me, so I punched him and we ended up having a bit of a tussle — nothing too much, but as soon as I got away from him I legged it home without waiting to be sent and told my parents what had happened. It was Joe who went down to Alsop that same day to talk to Bill Abrahams, seeing as they’d known each other since the 1930s. I was worried that he wouldn’t be up to it but between them a perfectly sensible deal was worked out, indeed considering I’d hit a teacher what Joe achieved was pretty remarkable
. The only condition was that I wasn’t allowed back until I’d written a letter of apology to Mr Abrahams. I did it grudgingly but I never accepted that I’d done anything wrong and I never really appreciated how much my dad had done for me and how much the negotiation had taken out of him.

  I got into more and more trouble with the teachers and at the end of the school year the headmaster called me into his office which always smelled of furniture polish and sitting behind his desk in the dusty gown that made him look like a third rate wizard, he told me not to bother coming back in September. I couldn’t believe it, I’d got away with so much for so long but now my smart arse ways had got me expelled from school! I realised with a thumping heart that without some kind of academic qualifications I couldn’t get to college and if I didn’t get to college I could imagine myself at the age of sixty, still living with Molly and staying in on a Saturday night to do her hair.

  Then my girlfriend left me for an anarchist. I didn’t really blame her — I was a useless boyfriend. In theory the idea of me having a girlfriend held tremendous appeal — someone who by law had to keep me company whenever loneliness and panic crept over me. After that, though, I was pretty much out of ideas.

  My problems over what you were actually supposed do (did you always give flowers after sex?) were merely a much more complicated version of the difficulties I had had over the years with best friends such as Tubby Dowling and Peter Pemberton. At least in Mao’s China young people were too busy destroying factories, stopping the traffic and beating their teachers to death to concern themselves with the bewildering complexity of human sexual relations.

  My efforts to find another girlfriend were hampered by Molly and Joe, having begun drinking in the same pubs as me, they now started to go to the same parties. I would climb the fetid stairs to some student flat in Liverpool 8 trying to act all cool and hard when, looking across the room, I would see Molly telling a group of pretty anarchist girls some anecdote about my potty training or how as a child I used to think that I might be kidnapped by bananas. ‘That’s him over there in the leather jacket,’ Molly would say, pointing in my direction, and the pretty anarchists would look at me with an expression you never want to see on the face of a good-looking girl.

  I decided I didn’t just need to go to college, that college needed to be in London. It wasn’t an original idea — when I went round the pubs, especially the Crack, I would often come across guys sitting at a table who had spent some time in the capital. They would relate their experiences to a horrified crowd as if they were telling tales of the Somme in 1916. ‘It’s terrible down there,’ they would say, staring with faraway eyes at an un-nameable horror. ‘I paid three shillings for a pint of bitter in a pub in Clapham’, or ‘You don’t get rice with your sweet and sour pork’, or ‘You’re completely anonymous down there.’ Which seemed as good a reason as any to emigrate right away.

  But even if you weren’t somebody who was known to many only as ‘Molly Sayle’s son’, there were other reasons to leave. On the surface Liverpool was booming. The pubs and clubs were packed and, though the Beatles had moved to London, there was still a vital music scene. The Mersey Sound poetry anthology had recently been published by Penguin, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, Adrian Henry, Roger McGough and Brian Patten reigned like pashas over Liverpool 8 and the two football teams were winning everything in sight — yet if you sniffed the wind you could smell a storm coming.

  Towards the mouth of the river at Seaforth work was almost completed on a massive container terminal. When it opened, the numbers working in the docks would drop from tens of thousands to a few hundred. A Marxist historian would say that industries grew up and remained in an area because there was a plentiful supply of a certain necessary item. The existence of coal and steel in the Midlands led to the engineering industry being based there, a humid climate meant cotton was woven in Lancashire, and finance was located in the City of London because of a plentiful supply of hard-hearted and cruel individuals. But all the new factories on the outskirts of Liverpool were founded with massive government grants. Ford and Triumph at Halewood, English Electric and Otis Elevator on the East Lancashire Road, were hundreds of miles from where they should have been. When the orders dried up they were the first to close.

  Liverpool’s most iconic edifice, the Liver Building, had originally been planned as an office block in Chicago and adapted to Liverpool by chopping off the top fifty floors of the design. There was a similar chopped-off Chicago feel to Liverpool civic politics — the same boss culture, the same dynastic corruption, the same insularity The police patrolled in dark blue Land Rovers like an occupying army rather than genial bobbies. As Marxist-Leninists we were constantly predicting that chaos was on the way, but for once, we were right and the city’s rulers were ill suited to cope with it.

  In some ways it was not just a Liverpool phenomenon. There was a notion that had been growing in every section of British society, certainly since the Second World War, that the provinces weren’t worth anything. All the things that had been considered important about towns and cities outside the metropolis — substantial Victorian buildings, homely regional cooking, shipbuilding and making things in factories — were now deemed to be hopelessly naïve and old-fashioned. A comedian could get a big laugh just by saying ‘Leicester’.

  In early 1969, reflecting the consolidation that was taking place in the automobile industry, banking and retailing, the Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group ceased to be independent and became the Liverpool Branch of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) . The CPB (ML) had been founded in 1968 by Reg Birch, an angry, grey-haired little man in a suit, along with other leading members of the engineering union, all of them disillusioned by the Soviet-aligned Communist Party of Great Britain. At the time it had maybe three hundred members, which made it a giant amongst left-wing groups.

  In China Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, a young student whose parents had been accused of being ‘capitalist roaders’ and horribly tortured during the Cultural Revolution, was being taught English at Beijing University The only foreign publication available to the students was a newspaper from a tiny Maoist group in Britain, and even this was kept under lock and key Jung Chang was allowed to look at a single copy of this paper only once, and was disappointed to discover how dull it was and how slavishly and tediously it reproduced the Chinese Communist Party line. As she was staring at it a lecturer walked past and said, ‘That paper is probably read only in China.’ Well, that paper was our paper! It was The Worker, the official journal of the CPB (ML).

  But Jung Chang’s lecturer was wrong. How could he know that, even though Chinese students hungry to read almost anything at all in the English language found it too insipid to bother with, me and a couple of comrades could sell twenty or thirty copies on a Saturday morning outside Central Station to people who had access to the whole of Western literature? Admittedly some of those sales went to elderly lefties who mistook The Worker for the old Daily Worker and bought a copy for the racing tips, but there were a small number of men and women, not members of any group or party but simply out shopping with their wives or on their way to the football or buying clothes at Lewis’s, who would on an impulse purchase a copy of our paper and then read it thoroughly, occasionally coming back the next week to discuss some arcane point of Marxist theory.

  If there was any criticism over the quality of the newspaper, Reg Birch would say that it had fewer mistakes, mis-spellings and typos than the Guardian. What he failed to point out was that the Guardian came out every day and had seventy pages, while The Worker came out once a month and had four pages. There was also a problem of subject matter in the party newspaper due to an imbalance in the organisation’s make-up. The majority of the members of the CPB (ML) were teachers, bank workers and students but the largest single group were in the Engineering Union, while the next largest group, due to a couple who were enthusiastic and persuasive recruiters, worked in a warehouse owned by Peng
uin Books near Wembley. So the stories in The Worker often tended to be about either the manoeuvrings for power in the Engineering Union or the problems of working in a big book warehouse near Wembley.

  In Liverpool the membership had changed. Nigel Morley Preston Jones, the city’s first Maoist, had left the group to join the Anarchists, but he let us keep our bookstall in the Simon Community Hostel. Nigel had never quite seemed to have the right dour spirit for a Marxist-Leninist anyway Once we had been on a demonstration about housing in Birkenhead and, handing me the megaphone, he suggested I chant, ‘Build bombs not houses!’ Without thinking I yelled the slogan into the mouthpiece and then wondered why everybody suddenly turned round and started staring and making angry faces. Once I had realised from Nigel’s sniggering what he had made me do, the thing that really surprised me was that anybody actually listened to these chants. I certainly didn’t, even when I was shouting them into a megaphone. It was a shock to be reminded that most of the people on the left wholeheartedly believed this stuff, that they thought shouting these slogans and going on these demonstrations might actually make a difference to something. Whereas I generally looked on it as, at best, a nice day out with friends with the possibility of a fight at the end of it.

  The Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group voting to become a branch of the CPB (ML) caused the first split in our little band of revolutionaries. You were nobody in left-wing politics until you had been involved in a split, so I felt that the huge and acrimonious argument over joining the larger party in London was some sort of initiation ceremony or rite of passage. There was a Syndicalist group based in Birkenhead, who we would occasionally see at meetings and demos; the creed they followed stated that social justice and equality would only be attained when every worker in the world belonged to a single gigantic trade union. They had four members. This group, who were not wealthy, saved up for ages to go to a Syndicalist conference in London but unfortunately they had a split over some fine point of doctrine on the way there and attended the conference as two separate groups, one with three members and the other with one.