Stalin Ate My Homework (20 page)

At the age of eleven I
began attending Alsop Grammar School for Boys, and being born in August I was
one of the youngest in my class. I had taken and passed the eleven-plus exam
the previous spring. As soon as the results were announced — who was going to
grammar school, who had failed the exam and was going to secondary modern or
technical schools — a kind of poison spread through the street. There was a boy
from the other end of Valley Road who I had been friendly with and who had
failed the exam, and from that moment he never walked past our house but would
circle round and go down the next street rather than risk bumping into me. At
least that’s what Molly told me — though maybe he just didn’t like me and she
was putting a socio-political gloss on it.

It was
a scary thought going to big school, but the anxiety was made easier to bear in
my case because of the fact that, as Communists usually did, we had made sure
that we already had a man on the inside. In fact we had two men on the inside.
One was on the staff, a maths teacher called Bill Abrahams who had been in the
party for many years and was a long-time friend of Joe’s. The other was a
pupil, a boy a couple of years older than myself called Cliff Cocker whose
parents, Maeve and Len, were also long-standing members of the CP from the
southern end of the city.

On the
first day, in my new school uniform of blazer, short trousers, cap, shirt, and
black and green striped tie, I walked with a couple of other kids who were
going to Alsop to the bus stop on Priory Road. There we caught the number 68
bus to ride the two miles or so to our new school.

Compared
with the friendly and familiar scale of our neighbourhood junior school Alsop
seemed huge and threatening. At the rear there was a long sandstone wall which
backed on to Walton Village, an early Victorian hamlet of narrow terraced
streets with a row of small shops and a church. Those of us who caught the 68
entered via the rear gate in the wall and the first building we saw, standing
in front of a patch of dark and overgrown woodland, was a three-storey house
built in the Gothic Revival style and known as the Rectory To a troop of small
boys already in a state of heightened emotion it appeared spooky and lowering,
built as it was from blocks of blood-red, carved sandstone with an open porch
of three broad pointed arches, a huge black painted wooden front door with
studs in it and arched mullioned windows. I would have thought it was the sort
of house a vampire lived in if I hadn’t been aware that vampire stories were
superstitious legends designed to subjugate the enslaved rural classes into
unquestioning obedience of feudal autocracy.

In a
tight little group we approached the main building, a stock school of the 1920s
which faced on to Queen’s Drive, Liverpool’s inner ring road. After the Second
World War further structures had been added in a haphazard fashion, each of
them built in the dullest example of the architectural style of their period —
a dining annexe, an assembly hall, a library and an art room, then later a new
block with laboratories, a gym and the metalwork shop. All of it formed a rough
square of buildings enclosing a sports field of springy green grass with a
running track and a cricket field marked out in fresh white paint.

Somehow we were marshalled
into the school’s assembly hall where we were addressed by the headmaster, Mr
L.W. Warren, who was known as Les or the Bazz. He had a thin moustache,
Brylcreemed hair and, like most of the teachers, he always wore a flapping
black gown. Mr Warren gave us his speech of welcome before we were sent off to
find our classes. Right away I encountered a problem familiar to all those
involved in espionage. My control, Molly, had given me inadequate information
for identifying my fellow Communist agent amongst the schoolboy cadre. The only
thing my mother had told me about Cliff Cocker was that he was a boy with black
hair and glasses. The first morning at grammar school was unsettling. First we
were given an incomprehensible chart telling us where all our lessons were — it
came as a shock to me that you had to move around, rather than your teachers.
The only thing that allowed me to remain calm was the thought that as soon as I
located Cliff Cocker he would explain everything and assuage all my confusion.

My plan
was that lunchtime would be the best time for me to hook up with my fellow
comrade, to begin the vital work of bringing Marxist-Leninist thought to our
school, or at least for him to let me know me where the dining hall was. So
when the lunchtime bell rang and we were ejected into the playground I went up
to the first bigger boy I saw with black hair and glasses and stood in front of
him, smiling in much the same way as I had done with the black man who used to
walk down Valley Road. ‘Hello, Cliff!’ I said. ‘Long live Lenin! Long live the
proletariat!’ To his credit I don’t think this bigger boy, whoever he was,
actually hit me, but he made it very clear that he wasn’t at all pleased at
being addressed by some new kid and he told me very forcefully to get lost.

All
morning, because I had been hanging on to the thought of Cliff Cocker as my
saviour I hadn’t bothered trying to get to know any of the other kids in my
class, nor had I paid any attention to what was being said to me about school
rules or where anything was. After losing that first vital morning it took me
months to catch up, if I ever did, and it was several years before I got to
know Cliff Cocker. I did meet Mr Abrahams on that first day — indeed it was
impossible to avoid him since he was teaching my class first-year maths. Mr
Abrahams took an instant dislike to me. The Abe, as everybody called him, was
a Jewish Communist who was mad about cricket, maths and Everton football club.
I was useless at the first two and didn’t much care about the third. He may
also have found me annoying because he was a strict disciplinarian, while I
might have got the idea from somewhere that since we were comrades in the
proletarian struggle it was perfectly fine for me to address him as Bill in
class. Which he didn’t like at all.

A few weeks before I went
to grammar school, in the summer of 1963, Joe led his first delegation of
railwaymen to Hungary I assumed I was really going to enjoy our second trip to
the land of the Magyars. After all, there was no Pemberton to enrage me and this
was a country where on our first visit several important and pleasurable things
had happened — I had learned to swim and had come to understand the true
meaning of salad. But the holiday unfortunately coincided with a change in the
way I saw things. I suppose it was one of those cognitive shifts that everybody
goes through as they grow up, but in me it always seemed to take a violent and
abrupt form — the sudden opening of a trap door rather than something more
gradual and easier to get used to. Up until that point, even if I was confused
by events I sort of accepted them, assuming that somewhere out there was a
single, simple explanation for what was going on. In Hungary I started for the
first time to be aware of the shifting sands of human relations, to see that
there was often no simple explanation for what was happening; rather, there
were a thousand explanations and none at all.

Yet
when we embarked on the journey I was still hoping that somehow I could
rediscover my previous certainty, that I could find the equanimity that had
deserted me. Sadly, if you are beginning to feel unsettled about people’s
motivation then visiting a country from which some six hundred thousand
citizens were deported to Soviet labour camps after the Second World War, where
they spoke a weird Finno-Ugric language completely unrelated to those around
it, where there were great tensions between the various ethnic groupings,
Hungarian, Romanian and gypsy, and where a revolution had been brutally
suppressed only seven years before, probably wasn’t a good idea.

As soon
as we left the main railway station I noticed a distinctive smell in the air
which I hadn’t really noticed on our previous trip. A lot of the buses and
trucks in Hungary used some sort of cheap diesel that had a strong aroma and
formed clouds of black smoke that blew everywhere. And the trucks expelling
these noxious clouds, though they were carrying commercial goods, were military
or ex-military vehicles, with long bonnets and a hatch for a machine gun in the
roof of the cab. And waiting for us outside the station, coughing out its own
cloud of black smoke, wasn’t the fleet of Tatras we were used to but a coach.

We
drove to our hotel, which once more was on the banks of the Danube. From the
window of my room I could see the famous Chain Bridge, the Széchenyi lánchid
that linked Buda and Pest and beyond it the Adam Clark Tunnel which ran under
the hill beneath the Buda Castle. In front of the tunnel was a big traffic
roundabout and on that roundabout the Russians had placed what was supposedly
the first T34 tank to have liberated the city in 1945, its 75mm gun pointing
directly at the window of my hotel room. As we travelled around the country I
noticed that most towns seemed to possess their own T34. Certainly as a memorial
it was a powerful reminder of the Second World War and the sacrifices that the
Soviet Union had made to defeat the Nazis. But there was also a threat there —
after all, it was only a few years ago that the sisters of these tanks had
suppressed the Hungarian uprising, and it was as if the Russians were saying
that it wouldn’t take long for them to return.

In
Budapest there was a trade union leader called Szabo who fulfilled the same
role as Prukha in Czechoslovakia, but he never came to Britain and, though we
spent a lot of time together, there was never quite the same affection between
us; the Czechs were our first love and we wouldn’t allow ourselves to get too
close to anyone else. Our translator, another brittle blonde, became a major
source of confusion for me. For some reason we were visiting a radio station
when somebody in the group rather bravely asked our translator a question about
the ‘56 uprising and the bullet marks all over the city Her reply was that the
revolt had been the work of ‘bandits’ whose only motivation was that they
wanted to kill policemen. My parents and the rest of the delegation seemed to
think this a reasonable explanation. Later, as we were travelling around the
city’s ring road on our bus and passed some bleak concrete apartment blocks,
she made some dismissive remarks about gypsies, saying that the authorities had
tried to house them in nice modern flats but they had used their front doors
for firewood. Nobody else appeared to object to her remarks even though I had
been told that Communism was supposed to have eradicated these types of
attitudes. Yet here they still were.

A few
months after we returned from Hungary our unpleasant translator managed to
come to England. When she reached Liverpool she came to stay with us for a few
days, but cut her visit short because she was appalled by our poverty She had
expected us to have a big house and a car to take her around in, but instead we
found ourselves being pitied for being poor by somebody from a Communist
country!

While we were in Budapest
we also paid a visit to the railway run by my fellow comrades in the Hungarian
Young Pioneers. Not only did they run it, in the early 1950s they had actually
built the twelve kilometres of narrow-gauge line that ran through the Buda
hills. The carriages were painted red and white and seemed to be about half the
size of a standard coach, though with normal seats and luggage racks, so I felt
a bit like I was riding through a forest in one of the passenger cars from my
Hornby train set.