Stalin Ate My Homework

by Alexei Sayle

  On the other hand, at least he was getting on with things. What was I going to do with my life? The only offer I had got, even of an interview, was at Southport College of Art for a place on a two-year foundation course. If I impressed at the interview and got on the course, then passed A-Level art, it would mean I could eventually apply for a place at a London art school. It had come down to this — only my skill at drawing was likely to save me.

  Unfortunately, when the letter came informing me of the date of my interview it coincided with my planned journey to Holland. So sacrosanct were holidays that nobody contemplated for a second the idea that I should delay or cancel my intended trip. Instead, we decided that Molly would attend the most important interview of my life for me. On 11 September 1969, while I was still coming down from the dope I had smoked the night before, my mother took the portfolio of work I had done at school with her on the train to Southport. Fearing she might be late for my interview she took a taxi from the station to the art school, which was maybe four hundred yards away.

  Molly must have done well in the interview, because a few days after my return from Amsterdam they offered me a place. I had the feeling when I turned up for classes on my first day that they were expecting a Jewish lady with red hair and glasses.

  What might have swung Molly’s interview was that she’d actually once been in the same room as Picasso and had watched him create a work of art. On a cold and blowy Monday in November 1950 fleets of coaches departed from every major city and town in Britain heading to Yorkshire for ‘the Sheffield World Peace Congress’. My parents, recently married, were on one of the many coaches that left from Liverpool. They were in the massive crowd who cheered and cheered as Pablo Picasso, speaking from a stage decorated with yellow banners proclaiming ‘Ban All War Propaganda’ in big red letters, related how he and his father used to paint doves together and how he was allowed to paint the legs. Then he declared. ‘I stand for life against death. I stand for peace against war!’ Picasso sat down to thunderous applause.

  Oddly enough my mother was as excited at hearing Hewlett Johnson, a Christian Marxist, the so-called ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury Cathedral speak, as she was at seeing the world’s greatest living artist in the flesh. Perhaps that is why my parents failed to make a bid for a sketch of a dove that they watched Picasso draw, a sketch which he then signed and later in the evening was auctioned to raise funds. Instead it was bought by an American businessman for twenty guineas.

  The term at Southport Art College began a week later than that at Alsop, so one lunchtime I decided to go back to see my old school mates, who I knew would be playing football over the road in Walton Hall Park, just as we had done the year before. Somehow I hadn’t managed to see any of them during the summer holidays. After spending all morning choosing my outfit, in the end the only change I made was that in place of the ragged denim jacket lined with rabbit fur I was wearing when I met Sid I put on my black leather biker jacket. I suppose when you have a look that works you should stick with it, though when I wore my black leather boots on the bus, sarcastic people kept asking me where my motorbike or occasionally where my horse was.

  One of the television programmes that the entire Sayle family was happy to watch together was The Saint, starring Roger Moore and broadcast on Granada TV Molly felt it was ideologically safe because a lot of the writers and cast were Unity Theatre alumni and therefore socialists. Alfie Bass and David Kossoff regularly turned up in supporting roles, as did Warren Mitchell who would always be cast as the swarthy Moroccan.

  What I liked most about The Saint was that when the hero, Simon Templar, visited somewhere impossibly exotic on a case (distant locations such as Marseilles, Salzburg or Tangier, faraway places whose streets, even to a teenager, looked suspiciously like the back end of Elstree Studios) whatever he needed for his mission — guns, plans of the main post office, a hot air balloon — was always available via some old pal who lived there. All kinds of helpful and exotic folk in towns and cities all over the world — jittery safe-crackers, sexy dancing girls and world-weary police inspectors — were happy to help Simon out without giving it a second’s thought. In the world of the Saint, friendship was a fixed and simple thing that lasted for ever. None of these people ever told Simon that they didn’t want to help him solve a murder, rob a bank or let him play a game of football with them.

  The day was hot and cloudy as I walked across Stanley Park, then on through Anfield Cemetery past rows of collapsing tombs and tilting angels. It suddenly struck me that this was the last time I would do this familiar walk — I wasn’t a schoolboy any more. Arriving at the park opposite Alsop just after the lunch break had begun, I saw my former classmates in their school uniforms kicking a ball about across the grass. Crossing the worn turf towards them I thought they looked like children, shouting, swinging at the ball and rushing around. As I got closer they stopped one by one, turned and looked at me, as if they didn’t know what I was doing there. And I for my part, sensing their hostile attitude, may then have laid it on a bit thick about where I would be going next week — telling them that at art school you could come in at any time of the day that you wanted and there would be sexy girls and drugs and you called the lecturers by their first names and went to parties at their flats and they gave you lifts home in their sports cars and they treated you as an equal. Unlike at school where they were.

  Nobody invited me to stay and have a kick-about with them, so I turned and strode away like I had somewhere else to be. It seemed to me that they would have liked to be different and I would have liked to be different but there was a script that we were following, a script that we didn’t have the wit to rewrite. Or maybe I was just being a git.