Stalin Ate My Homework (21 page)

Nearly
all the work was done by children, who bore a serious, pompous, self-important
look as if the chess club at school had been given their own railway to run.
The junior guards and adolescent signal operators were dressed in the normal
Young Pioneer costumes of white shirt, shorts and red neckerchief but with the
addition of a peaked cap, while for the more senior staff, such as the child
stationmaster or juvenile ticket collector, there was a special dark blue
uniform, a small-scale replica of what grown-up Hungarian railwaymen and
railwaywomen wore. Clearly there were only a few of these uniforms to go round
and they tended to be on the large side — the sleeves would dangle way beyond
the boy or girl’s hands and their caps covered most of their heads. Their
ill-fitting suits gave you the feeling that your ticket was being punched by
one of the chimps that advertised tea on the television.

At the start of our second
week, on the way to Lake Balaton in our coach, beside a field of maize we came
upon an ambulance blocking the road and a crowd of people gathered around the
body of a teenager who had been knocked off his motorbike and killed. It was
the first dead body I had ever seen. I thought things like that didn’t happen
in a socialist state — that young men got knocked off their motorbikes in the
corrupt West but not here on this road in the workers’ paradise.

The most enduring thing
that came from our second trip to Hungary, apart from a nascent sense of unease
about the Communist experiment, was the nickname applied to me throughout my
early years at Alsop. During the first week we had a double games period and
not showering wasn’t an option, so I had to get changed in front of the other
boys in my class. I had always bronzed easily and, because of our week on the sandy
beaches of Lake Balaton under the hot Hungarian sun, apart from a white strip
where my swimming trunks had been my skin was deeply tanned. Some other boy,
noticing my dark complexion, decided to give me the nickname Sambo. And that was
what I was called for the first couple of years — Sambo Sayle.

My
nickname clearly wasn’t meant kindly but I don’t honestly remember being
bothered by being known as Sambo, and in a time when you could still buy nigger
brown paint in the hardware store such a racist epithet didn’t quite have the
force it would have today But the truth was that I was such an oddly
wired-together child that, while the most innocuous events could send me
sideways, things that were intended to annoy, bother or intimidate me simply
didn’t. Plus as a last resort, like a sort of superpower, I had inherited a
version of Molly’s rage, so if a situation started to look like it was going
bad I was able to turn from dreamy good humour to snarling, unhinged fury in a
split second — which was enough to put most people off messing or indeed in
some cases eating their lunch with me.

Anyway,
after a couple of years my nickname was contracted to Sam.

At the age of eleven, when
I had begun attending Alsop Grammar School, I was still quite a small boy Once
I was into my early teens, however, my body quickly began to grow, until by the
third year I was above average height for my age, with thick black hair
sprouting almost everywhere and short but extremely strong legs. The only parts
of my body that weren’t covered in hair and hadn’t grown explosively were my
arms, which remained as thin and slender as a consumptive girl’s in a Victorian
novel. This was probably a blessing. If my arms had matched my stocky legs in
strength I might have been sorely tempted to become a proper bully, because I
would have been able to hit people very hard. As it was, I possessed the look
of somebody who, as long as they didn’t take their shirt off, could handle
themselves, without actually having the ability to do so. As a result of my
appearance, and since I couldn’t be provoked, was funny and in an emergency
could go completely nuts, I was able to be on good enough terms with the real
hard cases, which meant that I didn’t get bullied but on the other hand I was
not tempted to be a hard case myself.

After
attending Alsop for a couple of years the people I did end up bullying were the
staff. Because he had never liked me I never missed a chance to annoy the
Jewish Communist Mr Abrahams. I messed about in all science classes, seeing
myself as more of an artistic type, and refused to pay any attention at all
during religious education lessons, which in those days meant the Old and New
Testaments, thus depriving myself of any understanding of the foundation of
nearly all Western art and literature. However, it was a highly strung English
teacher called Mr Johnson who I picked on the most. When discussing any work of
literature I would argue with him vehemently for hours on end, using up entire
lessons, taking as my viewpoint an unwavering but mostly misunderstood Marxism
combined with an all-purpose half-baked radicalism. Just as academics were
doing in all the new universities springing up across the country —
cutting-edge institutions with concrete campuses, artificial lakes, meandering
paths and clumps of vegetation ideal for lurking sex offenders to hide
themselves in. Still, such behaviour was unusual in a thirteen-year-old
schoolboy and a lot of the teachers didn’t know how to deal with it. I wasn’t
being disruptive in a conventional sense, but on the other hand they could see
I wasn’t trying to help either.

In some
ways I was the prototype of a new-type school student who would be arriving in
larger numbers in later years — vain, argumentative and nebulously anti-authoritarian.
And if I was a new type of pupil, Molly was definitely a model of parent they
had never encountered before. At junior school she had occasionally interfered,
getting me moved up a class because she felt my academic abilities weren’t
being recognised, but at Alsop my mother adopted the practice of coming down to
the school unannounced if she felt I was being persecuted or my education was
being adversely affected in some way There was also an incident at a
parent-teacher meeting, round about my third year. The usual drill at these
things was that parents moved from teacher to teacher, sitting at a desk in the
hall. The teacher told the parents their child was either stupid and would most
likely become a fireman or clever and should consider carpet retailing as a
career, and the parents gratefully accepted this information. Not Molly One of
the first teachers she approached told her they weren’t going to let me do
physics and chemistry any more because I was so incompetent. Rather I would be
taking some lame hybrid, supposedly so I could spend more time studying 0-Level
art. This prompted my mother to stand and make a speech to the entire hall
about how no false divisions should be made between the arts and the sciences,
invoking the spirit of the Russian composer Shostakovich who she mistakenly
thought had a science degree.

It was
poor Mr Johnson who reacted most badly to being tag-teamed by the Sayles,
mother and son. He was supposed to take our class for general studies as well
as English, but after a while he refused to deal with two doses of me in a week
and handed the class over to a more phlegmatic teacher, Mr Lucie, because he
was afraid of what Molly would do to him if he taught me the wrong thing.

During my early grammar
school years I hadn’t given up on my ambitions to be an athlete and still
occasionally trained with the Walton Harriers. As soon as I arrived at Alsop I
signed up for the school’s cross-country team. My thinking was that, despite my
early success in the hundred yards dash, the sprint wasn’t my discipline so
maybe a longer distance would suit me better. Alsop’s football and cricket
squads did reasonably well in inter-city championships, but the cross-country
team was not a premium outfit. In fact we were pretty useless, and I was far
and away the worst member of the squad.

We
would have training runs round Walton Hall Park, opposite the school, in the
evenings. The teachers would be desperate to get the run over with so they
could go to the pub, but they couldn’t leave until I came huffing up a good
twenty minutes after all the other boys. Maybe they suspected me of subversion,
but I really wasn’t trying to finish last. It was just that, despite putting
all my effort into it, I would always come in way behind the rest. Even though
I had cut the corners off a couple of fields, rowed across a boating lake and
burrowed through a hedge in order to shorten my route.

The
cross-country team generally competed on a Saturday morning. I would travel to
unfamiliar parts of the city on the bus, then meet up with my team-mates to run
through parks, fields and ancient woodland. What I liked most about being in an
athletics squad was that after the race we often got given a very nice spread
provided by the other boys’ mums, with homemade cakes, sandwiches containing
unusual commercial fillings and unhealthy-looking drinks in a selection of
vivid colours that I wouldn’t be allowed to drink at home.

The
only success we ever achieved, beating another team and me coming in third from
last rather than last, was when we competed against a team from a Catholic
school in the south end of the city who were already, by the age of twelve,
heavy smokers. I was filled with a transcendent sense of triumph as I stumbled,
covered in mud, past one white-faced adolescent after another as they sat
gasping on tree stumps clutching their sides or sprawled vomiting in the claggy
grass.

In November 1957 J.B.
Priestley wrote an article for the
New Statesman
entitled ‘Britain and
the Nuclear Bombs’, which proposed the idea of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
The magazine received a great many letters of support for Priestley’s article
and it led to the founding of CND — the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The
following Easter a march from London to the Atomic Weapons Research
Establishment at Aldermaston was organised by a group called the Direct Action
Committee, supported by CND after some initial reluctance. Thereafter, CND took
over the organising of the annual Easter marches starting at Aldermaston and
ending in London. Sixty thousand people participated in the
1959
march
and a hundred and fifty thousand in the 1961 and 1962 marches.

The
Communist Party had an ambivalent attitude to CND. They thought they should
support it because it was popular and anti-government, and there were
opportunities for recruitment to the party if they sent members on the
marches. What they really wanted was for the West to give up its nuclear weapons
while the USSR hung on to theirs, but they couldn’t really say that — they had
to pretend they were in favour of everybody giving up their bombs.

On the
matter of the Aldermaston marches I took a different attitude from the party’s.
Glen Cocker, Cliff’s older brother, had been on the very first demonstration
and one night, somewhere between Berkshire and London, he had lost his
virginity on the floor of a village hall to a female demonstrator. When I
watched footage of the protests on the TV news, I always got an erotic
frisson
from seeing grainy film of people in duffel coats trudging through spring
rain, accompanied by the music of a trad jazz band.

You couldn’t say that the
British left has produced many timeless classics of graphic design. In fact
there is only one, the badge of the CND, a motif which has gone on to become
the universal symbol of peace and the visual representation of a decade. It
remains a masterpiece. Designed in 1958 by a man called Gerald Holtom, the
badge is based on the semaphore symbols for N and D placed within a circle.
Holtom later said that it also symbolised ‘an individual in despair, with hands
palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before
the firing squad’. The CND badge quickly became a fashion item, particularly
because for young people it was something of a breakthrough. Previously if you
had wanted to advertise your radical credentials you had to invest in a whole
new wardrobe or even actually do something radical, but now you could attain
the same effect simply by wearing a shiny metal badge — except that these badges
quickly became almost completely unavailable, at least in Liverpool. It was an
odd experience — something connected with what we did had become the height of
fashion and I suddenly became the centre of attention, with kids at school
showing a previously undisclosed interest in coming on marches and joining CND.

I knew
that what they really wanted were the rare badges and I sensed an opportunity
Through my network of left-wing activists (Molly and Joe) I discovered that a
woman called Pat Arrowsmith, a famous peace campaigner and founder member of
CND who had once been force-fed while on hunger strike in prison, was living
near us in a little house off Breck Road. One afternoon I walked round there
and knocked on the door. It was answered by a woman with very short hair
wearing a checked shirt of a very mannish cut. ‘Excuse me, Pat,’ I said, ‘I’m a
young schoolboy very interested in the peace movement, planning to start my own
branch of CND, and I was wondering whether you had any badges … you know,
for the kids at school? To get us started, like.’