Stalin Ate My Homework (15 page)

I
evolved this elaborate theory that Nadia had been trying to recruit Alf as a
spy (since she must have had StB clearance to mix with foreigners) so that she
could pass on to the KGB details of the Sunday timetables on the West Coast
Line or where the waiting rooms were at Runcorn station. When, after years of
theorising, I eventually thought simply to ask Molly what had been occurring it
turned out to be a less complicated story Nadia and Alf had begun an affair
while we had been in Czechoslovakia and she now wanted him to divorce his wife,
marry her and take her out of the country.

Along with being treated
like a little prince, it was odd for somebody my age to spend such long periods
as the only child amongst so many adults. That these extended periods should
take place on transcontinental trains, in foreign cities and in the backs of
futuristic limousines only added to the weirdness. A lot of the time I was
bored and at other times just confused, but the result was that I tended to
spend great stretches of time inside my head telling myself stories or
inventing complex explanations for the bizarre behaviour of grown-ups.

Throughout a large part of
the 1950s I was a David rather than an Alexei. For many years I was
uncomfortable with my first name and in a period spanning primary and junior
school insisted that I should be called David Sayle, employing my middle name.
Many of my junior school reports are for this other kid called Sayle who
appears to be a rather dull child, judging by what the teachers have written
about him. Clearly my parents went along with me being David — they probably
felt that it was good practice for me to have different aliases, just like
Trotsky and Stalin.

I
returned to being Alexei soon after the
Bambi
incident, another part of
the realisation that I was never going to be like everybody else and I might as
well work on being unique. And there was one particular event which made me
aware that having a distinctive name might not always be a disadvantage. There
was a kid in my class named, with a spectacular lack of imagination, Fred
Smith. I saw him one day by the entrance to Stanley Park where he had been
grabbed by the park policeman for some misdemeanour. This huge man in a dark
blue uniform was demanding to know my classmate’s real name and wouldn’t
believe that he was truly called Fred Smith. In fact the more Fred Smith
insisted that he was honestly called Fred Smith the more the policeman became
enraged at having his intelligence insulted in this fashion.

My
nickname at that point amongst my school friends, as a play on Sayle, was ‘Wayley’.
Seeing me, Fred Smith called out in desperation, ‘Wayley! Wayley! Tell him,
tell him my name’s Fred Smith!’ But the policeman wasn’t interested in my intervention.
‘Don’t be calling to Wayley!’ the man said and gave poor Fred a vicious clip
round the ear for a crime he probably didn’t commit and really for the crime of
being called Fred Smith.

When the doorbell rang I
must have been in the hall or on the stairs playing with my cars or drawing,
because otherwise I don’t know why it was me who answered the door. I wasn’t
exactly a door-answering type of child.

As soon
as I saw who was on the step I knew them for what they were. Two gigantic men,
so big that they blocked the light of the winter sun, dressed identically in
belted raincoats and trilby hats. Coppers! Bobbies! Detectives! All of a sudden
I felt weak. My family had talked about this day for so long, and now it was
finally here. We had assumed it was inevitable that eventually they would come
for us, just as they had come for the Rosenbergs or Pastor Niemöller. After
all, we came both first and second in the famous poem:

First they came for the Communists [that was us!] and I didn’t speak
up, because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t
a Jew [That was us too!]

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I
was a Protestant. [Not us.]

Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to
speak up for me. [Obviously not us, because we’re all dead.]

I
racked my brains but couldn’t think what crime we had committed. Then came the
terrifying realisation that of course they didn’t need you to do anything to
arrest you. The authorities were perfectly capable of fabricating evidence
against you or punishing you even if you were innocent, just like they did with
Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss or poor Fred Smith. Then I became conscious of
the fact that, though we had talked about it we hadn’t actually ever made any
plans for what to do when the inevitable day came. There was no secret
hiding-place in the attic, no convincing cover story to tell, no Sten gun
tucked away under the couch to shoot our way out of trouble.

‘Hello,
son, Bedfordshire CID,’ the bigger of the two men said, flashing an unnecessary
warrant card. ‘Is your dad in?’

Not
knowing what else to do, I showed them into the front room — just, as I
imagined, many victims of tyranny had done in the past, politely letting the
Gestapo, the FBI or the KGB into the best room to sit on the couch — for want
of any other plan. Then I went to fetch my parents.

The
adults closed the door on me, and I was left in the hall to try and listen
while we waited to discover our fate.

Up until that point our
relationship with the police had actually been a rather good one. Molly said
they were a tool of repression for the capitalist state, but we seemed to call
them in more or less whenever we felt like it. If I ever went missing when we
were on the beach at New Brighton, Molly would jump up screaming, ‘Lexi! Lexi!
Where’s our Lexi?’ Then she would run off to find a policeman, even though I
was only sitting three feet away.

When I
was six we had accidentally acquired a dog. It happened one day when Molly and
I were out shopping on Oakfield Road and we saw a small brown puppy running up
and down the pavement in a distressed state, clearly lost or abandoned. We took
it home and named it Bruno, which may or may not have been another
nom de
guerre
of Maxim Gorky’s. Bruno grew up into a very self-contained dog,
which was probably the best way to survive in our house but it didn’t make him
particularly lovable. He had a sly sense of humour a lot like mine, and maybe
that was why we never got on that well.

On a
Sunday morning the only chore that was ever asked of me was to take Bruno for
his walk in Stanley Park. At a newsagent’s near the park I would buy two comics
with my pocket money, the
Eagle
and a thing called a
Commando Comic,
which
was solely concerned with the adventures of British soldiers during the Second
World War, trained killers such as I would have liked my father to be. This
comic came in a distinctive pocket-sized format and, despite the unsophisticated
stories and simple sketched black and white artwork, once through the gates of
the park I would let Bruno off the lead and become absorbed in tales of the
war, in which nobody ever indulged in a debate about whether it was an
imperative to open a second front or if the conflict wasn’t merely a squabble
between competing capitalist ideologies.

By the
time I looked up again Bruno would have vanished. Usually he would just run
around for a bit and then make his way home by himself, and he would often be
waiting for me when I returned to Valley Road. But occasionally he would go
missing for a few hours which meant Molly would be straight down to the police
station in Anfield Road demanding an all-out search be mounted immediately We
would stand in front of the desk sergeant as he pretended to take down the dog’s
details and my eyes would wander in embarrassment to the poster display pinned
to the wall behind him. For years the only Wanted posters displayed in police
stations were to do with the Colorado beetle, a small red insect which was at
the time considered a big threat to the UK potato crop. If you saw one you were
supposed to put it in a matchbox and take it to the police station. After a few
years the Colorado beetle poster was replaced with one showing the ejector seat
of a Harrier Jump Jet, as if even the beetle threat had disappeared and there
was now absolutely no crime occurring in Britain anywhere.

In our
use of the police we were out of step with many others, since Liverpool was not
a city in which the force were held in universally high regard. In 1919 the
National Union of Police and Prison Officers had called for a nationwide strike
over pay and conditions which typically, of all the authorities in the country,
only achieved full support amongst officers on Merseyside, where the entire
force abruptly abandoned their posts. In Liverpool even the coppers were
militant. This sudden vacuum, a complete absence of law and order, resulted in
what Liverpool people came to call ‘The Loot’. In poor districts such as
Scotland Road and Bootle people ran riot, shops were smashed open and their
contents plundered. The government’s response was to put Liverpool under
military occupation with orders for peace to be brutally restored. During the
police strike tanks patrolled the streets of our city and three thousand
soldiers, less than a year after they had left the stinking trenches of the
Somme, were used to seize key buildings. Then, once control was re-established,
these soldiers and a few scab policemen were sent to roam through impoverished
neighbour-hoods, smashing down doors and seizing back looted furniture and
goods, a lot of which had been paid for and wasn’t stolen in the first place.
Many working-class people were badly beaten, and at least one was shot dead.

In the
Boys’ Pen at Goodison Park when I went to Everton matches all the bigger boys
would sing,

Who’s that twat in the big black hat?

Copp-er! Copp-er!

Who’s that twat in the big black hat?

Copper is his name!

The Bedfordshire CID had
come to our house to interview my father about the murder of Michael Gregsten
at Deadman’s Hill on the A6 in Bedfordshire, on 22 August 1961, along with the
rape and shooting of his lover, Valerie Storie. James Hanratty, a professional
car thief, had been charged with the crimes. Hanratty’s alibi was that at the
time of the murder he had been in the Welsh seaside town of Rhyl, staying in a
boarding house named Ingledene run by a woman called Mrs Jones, in the attic
room, which had a green bath.

The
police had discovered that Joe had stayed at Ingledene between 21 and 24
August, in the small front room on the first floor. He was there on behalf of
the NUR, taking part in a recruitment drive. In his book
Who Killed
Hanratty?
Paul Foot describes Joe as ‘the most important witness from the
prosecution point of view’. He says that Joe saw no sign of Hanratty, although
he admits ‘he was out on union business from dawn to dusk’. Which sounds
typical enough.

Hanratty’s
trial began at Bedfordshire Assizes on 22 January 1962. On 17 February he was
convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Hanratty’s appeal was dismissed on
9 March, and despite a petition signed by more than ninety thousand people he
was hanged at Bedford on 4 April 1962, still protesting his innocence.

Joe was away for a week
attending the trial in Bedford. One night Molly spoke to him on the phone, and
when I asked how he was she replied that he had told her he was frightened. I
asked her what my father was frightened of, and she said he was worried that
Hanratty might have criminal friends who could harm him in some way.

When he
returned from the trial Joe told us that what had upset him the most was that
he had been the final witness called in the trial. He realised that the last
person Hanratty had heard testifying against him, the last person he had seen
on the stand, the final person confirming his fate, was Joe Sayle. After that
he was taken down, sentenced and hanged two months later. The last witness to
testify against the last person executed in Britain was my father. Though he
never talked about it, since he was such a good-natured man that must have been
a heavy burden for him to bear.

Over
the next few years the case did not go away: prosecution witnesses attempted
or committed suicide and several books were written about the case, including
one by Lord Russell of Liverpool. There were newspaper articles, radio and TV
programmes, all of them contesting the soundness of Hanratty’s conviction and
reminding Joe that he might have taken part in the execution of an innocent
man. When one of those programmes came on we did not shout at the TV as we
usually did but simply changed the channel and said nothing. In 2002, the
murder conviction of James Hanratty was upheld by the Court of Appeal which
ruled that new DNA evidence established his guilt ‘beyond doubt’. So the
coppers got it right.