Stalin Ate My Homework (19 page)

The reason I had noticed
how many black people there were in south-east London, wasn’t racism but rather
extreme envy. My parents had gone to a lot of trouble to tell me about racial
prejudice and what a bad thing it was, and so over the years I had become
desperate to express my tolerance and solidarity to a black person at the
earliest opportunity. Unfortunately Anfield was more or less a hundred per cent
white, so there were no minorities for me to show my lack of racial prejudice
to.

Then
one happy day a black man started walking down Valley Road in the mornings —
presumably on his way to work, or perhaps he was a student at the university I
took to sitting in the bay window of the sitting room waiting for him; then,
when he appeared, I would rush out and stand in front of him so he had to stop.
I would be wearing a big smile on my face, a smile that I thought radiated a
beatific sense of liberality Then I would say, ‘Hello!’ to him in as
unprejudiced way as I could, so he would understand that here was one British
person who didn’t think he was inferior in any way In fact this small British
person thought he was probably superior, since his suffering had given him all
kinds of insights which white people couldn’t guess at and he was almost
certainly good at dancing too. After a while he stopped walking down our
street, presumably taking another route to work.

Towards the end of 1962 I
came to test everybody’s tolerance for me, when throughout that autumn the
entire world was thrown into an enormous panic by the Cuban Missile Crisis. For
a few months nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States seemed
not just a possibility but almost a certainty In October of that year
reconnaissance photographs taken by an American U-2 spy plane revealed missile
bases being built in Cuba, prompting a US blockade and an armed confrontation
between the superpowers. Unlike the rest of the country number 5 Valley Road
remained an oasis of calm. We knew the truth of the matter, and it wasn’t what
everybody else believed.

Me,
Molly and Joe believed that the whole crisis was simply a pretext, part of a
shrewd plan conceived by the Communist Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Rather than
being caught out trying to militarise the Caribbean, the Soviet Union had deliberately
created the emergency It was in fact a brilliant strategy designed to force the
USA into agreeing to never again invade Cuba (something they had tried the
previous year at the Bay of Pigs) and to remove the nuclear missiles which they
had recently installed in eastern Turkey along the Russian border. All this
would be achieved in exchange for the Russians simply dismantling some rockets
which they hadn’t really wanted to put into Cuba in the first place.

Unfortunately,
apart from members of the British Communist Party such as us nobody else in the
UK was in on the ruse. So while I remained eerily calm all the other kids at
school, their parents and the teachers were experiencing a great deal of
stress. As far as they knew, the world was in very real danger of imminent
extinction. During those two frantic weeks there were reports on the TV and
radio and in the newspapers of demonstrations, candle-lit vigils, suicides and
people building nuclear bunkers in their back gardens — everywhere you went
there was a tense atmosphere. In the midst of this febrile mood I would sit in
class with a knowing smile on my face giving everyone the thumbs-up sign, or I
would walk along Oakfield Road whistling, grinning and saying to passers-by who
I thought looked especially worried, ‘No need to fret — it’s all going exactly
to plan. Mr Khrushchev’s got it in hand. They don’t want them missiles there
anyway’ This made people feel even more disturbed and upset, since they now
believed the situation had become so intense that an olive-skinned child in a
knitted tank-top had been driven mad by world events.

In 1962 we took our third
trip to Czechoslovakia. Again Joe had put together a delegation of railwaymen
including Prendergast, Alf and his friend. But this time I too would be taking
a companion, a boy from school who was my best friend. By the age of ten a
clear distinction was already emerging in the way children behaved with each
other. Some kids at school or in the street were popular types who had a big
circle of mates, while others were loners who kept to themselves. And then
there was me, who occupied some odd middle ground. I was a serial best-friender.
I would become close to one other boy and spend all my time with him. I would
invest all my emotions in him and visit his house constantly, dropping in at
all times of the day and night whether I was invited or not. Eventually there
would come a point where my best friend would let me down in some way — lie to
me about where he was going, or leave me waiting for him at some agreed spot
and never turn up. After that I would refuse ever to speak to him again and
would have to embark on the whole tedious business of finding a replacement.
So far I had had three best friends: a boy called Colin Noakes, another named ‘Tubby’
Dowling, and now I was on to my third, a boy from junior school named Peter
Pemberton.

Peter
lived in a big Victorian house off Breck Road, a busy shopping street about a
quarter of a mile away from Valley Road. Naturally I spent a great deal of time
at his house, which had a long, overgrown garden leading to a group of
ramshackle workshops in a mews behind. We used to climb on to the roof of these
sheds and pull off bits of lead which we tried unsuccessfully to fashion into
coins for use in slot machines.

In
terms of friendships I was very much self-taught, the Communist Party was no
use in this department, since it viewed all human relationships as no more than
tools for bringing about the proletarian revolution. My parents were both very
popular in their own ways but I wanted to make friendships in my own
distinctive fashion, radically different from theirs. So what I ended up with
were relationships that were wonkity things very much like the model Airfix
kits I made — badly constructed, eccentric in appearance and liable to burst
into flames.

Me and
Peter were such good friends that I decided it would be perfect if he came to
Czechoslovakia with us. Despite already having had several friendships founder,
I remained relentlessly optimistic that this one would be fine. I thought it
would only make things better if we took Peter on holiday with us. Then I
wouldn’t be with my parents all the time and would have a best friend of my own
age to play with. That’s what I told myself, but I think the real reason I
wanted Peter Pemberton with us was that I would have somebody to show off to.
Given what went wrong, I think that what I was after was a passive and admiring
audience, for him to sit in awe while I explained the wonders of eastern Europe,
told him how incredible they were and how incredible I was for being so
familiar with them.

Peter’s
parents can’t have been rich and it must have been an effort for them to get
the money together to pay for such a trip, yet as far as I can remember they
did it willingly I was convinced we were going to have the best time anybody
had ever had ever. In fact, of course, I was far too worked up and expecting
far too much from a holiday, so that once we got to Czechoslovakia and things
weren’t perfect in every respect I turned into an absolute monster.

The delegation spent the
first week in Prague and the second in the countryside, on this occasion at a
resort in the High Tatra mountains. Everywhere we went I tried to point things
out to Peter. ‘Look,’ I would say when we were in the department store opposite
our hotel. ‘Isn’t it fantastic? They’ve only got one kind of pen for sale here
and on the box it just says “Pen” in Czech.’ I was showing him this because I
had become fascinated by the products on the shelves in the shops in
Czechoslovakia and Hungary, their graphics and their packaging. Unlike a department
store in Britain there was only one of everything — one style of pen, one brand
of toothpaste, a single type of soap, and all very simply packaged. I found
something attractive in this utilitarianism, the bold use of colour, the blocky
shapes and the simple lettering.

Peter
had no idea what I was going on about. ‘What’s so good about there being only
one kind of pen?’ he would ask. ‘I’ve got two pens back home and they’re both
different.’

I wasn’t
able to articulate what it was that I felt about the pen and its box and why it
was so important that he understood what I meant, even though I didn’t really
know what I meant either. And that would make me really angry with him.

And then we went to the
mountains and my behaviour got much worse. We had been playing table tennis in
the hotel’s recreation room and suddenly I found I was attacking him with my
bat. I was hitting him and hitting him and he didn’t seem to be feeling the
blows, and that made me even more angry with him so I hit him some more.

Then
for a while I would calm down and we would be friends again, but my insane
behaviour would inevitably reappear. I can’t imagine what it was like for the poor
boy, being trapped thousands of miles from home behind the Iron Curtain with a
crazy person who kept attacking him. Maybe that’s why he never seemed to react.

At the
end of two unhappy weeks our homeward-bound train stopped on the border between
Czechoslovakia and Austria.

We were
forced to get down and hang about for an hour or so, wandering about on the low
concrete platform. There was generally a long delay at the frontier when you
were leaving a Communist country People’s papers had to be checked more
assiduously than on the inbound journey, since while there weren’t many people
trying to get into the Soviet Bloc there were a lot trying to get out.

The
border station was little more than a halt, really Nobody ever got on here or
got off unless they were being chased into the woods by the guards, but unlike
most other railway stations in the world this one was equipped with a line of
wooden machine gun towers, row after row of barbed wire, an actual minefield
and a shop. The shop was the other reason why they held you at the border for
over an hour. When you left Czechoslovakia or any other Communist country you
weren’t allowed to take any of their currency with you. The rulers didn’t want
to have to convert their money, which was worthless outside the Warsaw Pact
countries, back to pounds, francs or dollars, losing some of their precious
Western cash which they could use to buy luxury goods for themselves. So on the
border there would always be a shop stocked with peculiar products offered at
ludicrously high prices and staffed by the extremely unhelpful family members
of the frontier guards. Here you were forced to spend any krona or zloty that
you hadn’t managed to get rid of while in their country.

These
border railway stations, with their armed guards and barking dogs and sinister
secret policemen watching everybody with cruel eyes, were always disturbing
places, but the shops themselves possessed an even more depressing atmosphere. They
were like badly attended museums of failed products, their dusty shelves lined
with crudely made folk items, kitchen implements of no conceivable use, jars of
peas in vinegar and boxes of pre-war liqueur chocolates, filled with a cherry
brandy that had long ago evaporated leaving nothing but a toxic sludge behind. It
always took a long time to buy anything in these places, since your main
thought was to try and figure out what would be the least inconvenient thing to
carry right across Europe. But on that particular day I was in the shop till
the train whistle blew for the final time, desperately searching the shelves,
thinking I might find something to buy for Peter Pemberton, some wonderful
product that would make up for the way I had treated him. But of course there
was nothing.