Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  Barry and Ingrid, the couple from Yorkshire, were the main members who left us to join a completely different organisation called the Communist Federation of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) . The CFB (ML) soon became our deadliest enemies. The difference between the party and the Federation was that according to Marxist ideology you were only supposed to form a party once the revolution was imminent and the capitalist system on the verge of collapse. This did present our party, the CPB (ML), with a problem in that we had to see the embers of insurrection and the seeds of destruction in every minor glitch of the economic or social order. Any late train or the sacking of a woman from a cake shop was pointed to as a sign that we would all be at the barricades by the end of the week.

  In those days everything in Britain seemed to be grey apart from the cars. Tiny, simple things coloured bright red, yellow, green and blue like children’s building blocks they tick-tocked around the streets running people over with great jollity Chris Walker had bought a pea soup-coloured Minivan with bare metal all round and toggles on a string to open the doors. In it, in a time before the Ml and the M6 were joined up, we would travel down to London for introductory meetings at party headquarters.

  Those journeys were like a joke about how many Marxist-Leninists you could fit into a Mini. Chris and Ian sat in the front while there would be another four of us folded up in the back, in a space no bigger than a bathtub. Bouncing around in the fetid dark, we would only be allowed to emerge into the light, feeling like hostages in Beirut, once the Minivan was parked outside the CPB (ML)’s base of operations. The Bellman Bookshop was a dark and forbidding former bank on Fortess Road in Tufnell Park, north-west London, a depressive Irish neighbourhood of gloomy pubs, grey rooming houses and cash butchers. There were at least two other Maoist bookshops in the area owned by competing sects — one, in Camden High Street, was nearly as big as a Woolworth’s. These other places had proper Marxist-Leninist names such as the London Workers’ Bookshop, but bizarrely the Bellman was named after a character in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ who says, ‘What I tell you three times must be true’ and possesses a map of the ocean which is a blank piece of paper. What sort of message was that sending?

  I thought to myself that this huge, undulating city was the place that I would soon be living and the London members would, before too long, be my new comrades, except they all seemed crazy.

  The party bookshop was overseen by Reg’s wife, Dorothy The daughter of a vicar who looked like the daughter of a vicar in a play, she smoked constantly and would tap the ash from her fag into the pocket of the long grey cardigan she inevitably wore. Occasionally she would begin smouldering, wisps of grey smoke curling from her hips. Comrades were frequently too frightened of Dorothy to tell her she was on fire. Mrs Birch was always spectacularly rude to anybody who ever came into the shop — partly it was because of her abrasive character, but also perhaps she knew the stock to be so dreary that anybody browsing must be a member of the Special Branch or a rival group.

  Around the corner from the Bellman Bookshop was the only colourful spot in the entire district, a London-Italian café called the Spaghetti House. If they weren’t in the pub this was where all the members would go in the few breaks allowed in the day-long meetings. The Spaghetti House was the first eating place of its type I had encountered as there wasn’t anything like it in Liverpool — an ebullient collision of Italian and British cooking mixing bacon sandwiches, spaghetti bolognese and jam roly-poly with custard. Though the party hierarchy were obsessed with security and were continually excommunicating innocent people for being suspected police spies, the staff in the Spaghetti House always seemed to know a lot more about the affairs of the CPB (ML) than the actual members. They would say as they served you, ‘Hokay, here’s your mixed grill, extra toast no tomatoes and I hear that the executive committee is planning to discipline the Brighton Branch for incorrect thought on Comrade Birch’s Crumbs of Imperialism Theory.’

  Suddenly over the summer, after being expelled from school, I was thrown into a scramble of applying for college places long after everybody else had put in their bid. It turned out that the London School of Economics wasn’t impressed by four poor 0-Level results, but many nursing schools and teacher training colleges also didn’t want me. A few months earlier I thought I had a dazzling number of options, but now my future had narrowed to a tiny dot. My exam results told me university wasn’t a choice open to me, despite my previous delusions I wasn’t a genius at languages, and I knew I didn’t have what it took to go to drama school. I was still convinced that I was a brilliant performer, but all the same couldn’t imagine myself attending classes in fencing, ballet dancing and mime. In order to brighten the empty summer months, while rejection letters fluttered daily on to the doormat, I decided to repeat the wildly unsuccessful hitch-hiking holiday experiment of the year before — except this time I planned to go to the Netherlands since I was still technically banned from France.

  My aim was to go and stay with Cliff’s brother Glen, who had moved to London to work in an advertising agency, then after a few days take a ferry to Ostend and from there travel to Amsterdam. While I was in London my intention was also to pay a visit to Julie, the cute girl from Ealing I had met in Bulgaria, I thought it might be a good idea to have a girlfriend in London for when I went to college there.

  I thought I’d really got my look together. Apart from the lesbians in Touch of Evil I had also been very impressed by the Buñuel film Belle de Jour, in which Catherine Deneuve plays a woman named Séverine who decides to spend her days as a prostitute while her husband is at work. Séverine becomes involved with a young gangster, Marcel, who ends up shooting her husband before being shot himself. Throughout the film Marcel is dressed totally in black, wearing a long leather overcoat that I thought looked totally ace and carrying a stick that had a knife in it, which also was totally cool. While a whole generation of pretentious teenage boys became obsessed with Catherine Deneuve, that’s what I took from the film.

  My other influence was a guy called Zbigniew Cybulski, sometimes referred to as the Polish James Dean. He had starred in Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 film Ashes and Diamonds, completing the trilogy A Generation and Kanal, all three of which I had seen either on the TV or at Unity Theatre. Cybulski wore these really stylish tinted sunglasses all the time. I had read somewhere that they were his own — he had to wear them because he had fought in the Warsaw Uprising, the three-month-long insurrection against the Nazis, when the resistance used the sewers to move about in (the subject of Kanal) so he couldn’t now take bright light. Which, even if it wasn’t true, was a brilliant excuse to wear shades after dark. In Ashes and Diamonds Cybulski not only wore cool sunglasses but also got to carry a German 9mm MP 38 sub-machine gun around all the time.

  So this was me on my way to London. Long black hair parted in the middle, beard with the middle shaved out of it to make it look a bit different, dark glasses, black leather biker’s jacket with lots of zips that my mum had bought me in a shop in Southport, black leather gloves and black trousers. By tucking them into my trousers I was able to disguise the different lengths of the legs and the weird pouchy bits around the thighs tucked into sheepskin-lined black motorcycle boots. It was a very hot summer, 1969.

  When Julie opened the door of their large semi-detached house she was more beautiful than I remembered, with the air of being a proper grown-up rather than the pretend one that I was. That she should look so lovely was not a good start to the evening, because unfortunately not only did I dress like a man who had spent three months in the Warsaw sewers but I had begun to act like one too. Julie and her mother treated me with great kindness and had even invited over some other young people to provide entertainment, but throughout dinner and afterwards I remained silent for long periods, staring at the floor, then uttered a single harsh laugh or said something weird like ‘Clown time is over, man.’ The truth was that I was nervous and feeling terribly out of my depth. I wanted
Julie to be my girlfriend but she seemed in a such a different league — not just glamorous but metropolitan too. For the whole night I behaved abominably I imagine that those nice young teenagers cannot have had a more excruciating evening in all their young lives.

  As I lay in my bed in their spare room I heard Julie and her mum talking about me on the landing outside. ‘He’s awful,’ her mum said. ‘He’s got a chip on his shoulder about something.’ I shrivelled like a punctured balloon, ashamed at hearing the pain and confusion in their voices and realising the chaos I had caused. Then I inflated with pride for exactly the same reason.

  The next morning I slunk away and, collecting my bedroll from Glen’s flat, caught the train down to Folkestone and from there took the four-hour ferry trip to Ostend.

  I can remember hanging around at the Belgian seaside in the late summer sunshine, which all seemed so familiar from my childhood holidays. The flags of all the nations of Europe flapped in the breeze, pedal cars filled with laughing families trundled up and down the esplanade and the outside terraces of bars advertising their English beers teemed with holidaymakers. And I thought about how much I hated being by myself and yet I seemed to find myself over and over again in some remote foreign spot feeling awful.

  With this thought in mind I caught the train to Amsterdam — I don’t think I even bothered going through the masquerade of hitching, so despondent did I feel. My parents had dug out the address of their old friends Ank and Ayli, and once in the city I walked to where I thought they lived. Except that I didn’t do anything as sensible as buy a street map or ask anybody if this was the right place and I don’t think we’d actually told them I was coming either. The result was that late at night I found myself, a man with long hair and a beard dressed entirely in black with a bedroll over his shoulder, hammering on a beautifully polished wooden door set with bevelled glass windows in an Amsterdam suburb. Through the glass, inside the house, I could see shapes moving about and heard high-pitched frightened voices whispering to each other as I banged over and over on what was almost certainly the wrong door.

  After a while I gave up and went back into the centre of town. Somehow I found my way to Club Paradiso, a famous hippy counter-culture place inside an old church. Typically for Holland, Paradiso had been opened by the city authorities, was publicly subsidised, and the sale and consumption of dope and acid were allowed. Outside, the building was dark and creepy, and in some ways was even worse inside. The only thing I found more unpleasant than being on my own was being with hippies and listening to their endless talk, yet this too was something which I seemed to find myself doing all the time. The self-pity and sense of entitlement of these people repelled me — all their tales were either about how they had taken advantage of somebody else or how they had been done out of something that they felt was rightfully theirs. In a balcony overlooking the stage area, with three large illuminated church windows behind me, I bought some dope so strong that it left me drooling, shivering and sweating, propped up against a wall throughout the night. In the morning I decided, even quicker than the previous year, to cut my holiday short and go home.

  Just before I left I saw a shop selling flick-knives, which were illegal in the UK, so with the last of my Dutch money I bought one and hid it inside my jacket. I thought it one of the most lovely things I had ever seen. Its handle was inlaid with bone and the blade, chromed stainless steel, sprang out from the side at the click of a button. Suddenly there was a knife in your hand where there had been nothing a split second before. Because of my knife I was very nervous as the ferry approached the south coast of England, so I got chatting with some random guy until we were through customs. I realised right there that I didn’t have the nerve to be a criminal, so there was another career opportunity gone.

  One unique contribution Liverpool had made to the counterculture was a character I never encountered anywhere else, and that was the Hard Hippy The Hard Hippy was somebody who had the same qualities of self-pity and narcissism as the normal hippy but was also capable of kicking your head in. During that long summer I sometimes used to hang around a ramshackle art gallery in the centre of Liverpool where a Hard Hippy used to hold court. He had long blond hair and his muscular torso was only ever covered by faded denim dungarees as worn by US hillbilly farmers, except that in his case he wore them with the legs cut off high up on his bulging hairy thighs. Dotted around the gallery were various house plants that ranged from fairly well through sickly to dead. One day the Hard Hippy was discoursing to a group of us about how he was planning to name the child he was having with his chick Fluoride when a mild-mannered guy in glasses who had been wandering around looking at the terrible art on the walls inadvertently interrupted the Hard Hippy’s monologue.

  ‘Er … does anybody mind if I take a cutting from one of these plants?’

  The whole room fell into a nervous silence as the muscular blond stopped talking and, sensing the change, the mild-mannered guy began to shift nervously from foot to foot realising that he had made a bad mistake.

  After an uncomfortable thirty seconds during which we all fidgeted anxiously the Hard Hippy finally said in a calm but icy voice, ‘I dunno, man. Why don’t you ask the plant?’

  ‘What?’ said the visitor.

  ‘I said, “Why don’t you like get on your knees and ask the plant if you can take a cutting?” After all, it’s like you’re taking like one of its babies or something, man.’

  ‘Erm … OK, yes,’ said the mild-mannered man, and bending down to the ill-looking spider plant he said to it, ‘Erm … hi. Erm, do you mind if I take a cutting from one of your shoots?’

  Nothing happened.

  ‘What did it say?’ asked the Hard Hippy.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to mind.’

  ‘Well, go ahead, then.’

  With trembling hands the visitor took a tiny sprig of the plant and quickly left.

  ‘Fucking straights, man,’ the Hard Hippy said.

  That summer really did seem to go on for ever. Even Maoism had been suspended for the months of July and August and on into early September, so there weren’t even any dull meetings or screenings of The East Is Red to go to. Either side of my trip to Holland I reverted to what I used to do, which was to wander about aimlessly One day towards evening, just before my trip to Amsterdam, I was standing on Everton Brow, a high ridge running north—south above a slope that curved down to the Mersey a mile and a half away and which in the early nineteenth century had been lined with substantial villas. In the late afternoon between where I stood and the languid water there was virtually nothing but rubble, as if farmers were being paid to cultivate fields and fields of broken bricks between the occasional fifteen-storey slabs of vertical housing. The old neighbourhoods, the narrow cobbled streets of terraced housing, the corner shops, the wide boulevards of stores, the cinemas and pubs had been obliterated as thoroughly as a Czech village that had resisted the Nazis. Here and there the isolated stump of a building remained — a library with Arts and Crafts detailing or a High Victorian pub — but these only served to emphasise the desolation. From my vantage point the city was like somebody with a beautiful smile who had had their teeth kicked in. All the buses had lost their conductors and no longer carried the city’s coat of arms on the sides, but rather an unattractive logo that appeared to have been designed as a class project in a school for troubled children, and were now run by something called ‘Merseytravel’. It was as if an instruction had gone out from some centralised office saying, ‘Make everything ugly’.

  Nearer to home, along Oakfield Road the Gaumont cinema had closed down, Peter Pemberton’s house had been bulldozed, Eric Savage’s house was scheduled to go the same way, the Co-op store had gone, a lot of the little shops were derelict, boarded up or burned out, and the two Dickies had long ago abandoned their delicatessen. On the other side of the city Liverpool University had bought up all of Crown Street and then flattened the entire neighbourhood. This was what Joe had promised in his electio
n literature in 1938: ‘… the demolition of slums and every insanitary house, large-scale replanning of built-up areas with provision of open spaces, children’s playgrounds and school development’. There had certainly been demolition and there were now open spaces, but there was nothing in them except mud.

  Coming towards me, bright against the gloom, was a shock of blond hair. It was Sid, my former drinking buddy — Sid, who had been on probation and got drunk and been chased round and round the Everyman Theatre. He hadn’t gone into the sixth form with the rest of us but had left school the year before at fifteen. I was enormously relieved to see a familiar face in this wasteland and waved the startled young man down with an extravagant smile on my face. He reluctantly stopped and, once he recognised who it was, told me how he was getting on. He was now, he said proudly, an office junior at an insurance company in town. But as we talked Sid kept glancing uneasily about him, and after a few minutes of strained conversation he said a quick goodbye and scuttled off, leaving me standing alone on that long and bleak escarpment.

  I knew that Sid had been nervous in case somebody from his neighbourhood saw us talking together. He lived in one of those bleak tower blocks down the hill whose populations were intolerant of anybody who acted, thought or dressed in even the tiniest way different from the norm. So for him to be seen chatting to a man resembling a Cossack who had become detached from his regiment meant he was at the very least risking having his sexuality questioned and being mercilessly mocked for months about having weirdy friends. Still, I found it sad that somebody who had once been so wild had been that easily tamed by a weekly wage and a shiny suit.