Stalin Ate My Homework (22 page)

She
sighed, but after a few seconds went into the hall and came back with about
twenty-five brand-new, black and silver enamel CND badges, which she poured
into my outstretched hands.

‘These
aren’t toys, you know,’ she said to me.

‘Oh, I
know, Pat,’ I replied. ‘The struggle for nuclear disarmament is a serious
business. The younger generation such as myself are only too painfully aware
that we’re only ever a few minutes away from nuclear extinction.’

The
next day I took the badges into school and a crowd gathered round me wanting to
see them. Several kids asked if they could have one. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but maybe
you should make a little donation to … you know … the cause.’ So each of my
schoolmates gave me a few shillings for a badge. At first I had thought I was
taking a chance asking them for money, but to my amazement it was them who were
grateful to me for having found this hard-to-get fashion item and they were
also impressed that I had had the contacts to locate them. My fellow pupils
started to see me in a new light — after all, none of them were mates with
ex-jailbird lesbians.

The
cash they gave me for the badges never found its way to CND, I don’t know
whether I ever intended that it should, but my feeling was that I considered
the money as a small stipend, a trifling amount of compensation for all the
travelling, all the trade union meetings my father went to, all the work I had
put into the struggle for peace and justice, and all the effort involved in
being the only child of Communist Party members Joe and Molly Sayle.

It was only slowly that I
became aware of the power of swear words. It was a gradual thing, a creeping
realisation that blossomed into full comprehension round about my second or third
year at grammar school. I heard bigger boys or ones from rough homes using
these special, explosive, forbidden expressions, and once the realisation of
their power dawned I knew that swearing was a thing I wanted to be intimately
involved in.

Once I
had got the most powerful obscenities straight in my head I came home from
school determined to try out their effect on my mother. Full of excitement, I
sat at the dining table in the living room. Molly put my evening meal in front
of me, but instead of eating it I said, ‘I … I … I don’t want that. It’s …
it’s … it’s fucking shit!’ Then I sat back, waiting to hear what kind of
explosion it would prompt. After all, I conjectured, if the bathroom sponge
going missing for a few seconds could prompt a screaming fit from my mother, a
paroxysm of grief that might involve weeping and howling and crying out to the
gods of justice, then me saying ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ was bound to provoke a
tremendous reaction that would be heard at the back of the Spion Kop.

For a
short while nothing happened as Molly considered what I had said in a calm and
reflective manner. Then finally she said, ‘I don’t care if you eat it or not …
but it’s not fucking shit and if you don’t fucking eat it I’m not going to
fucking make you anything fucking else so you can fucking go and get your own
fucking food in some other shit-fucking place you fucking little bastard shit
fuck.’

After
that day Molly rarely spoke a sentence without an obscenity in it, and I was
often too embarrassed to bring school friends home because I was worried about
them being offended by my mother’s foul language.

It was late in the
afternoon. Joe must have been working nights and so had been upstairs sleeping.
Suddenly I heard him calling out in a frightened voice, full of pain. ‘Molly!’
he called. ‘Molly, call an ambulance! Molly! Molly! Call an ambulance! It
hurts, it hurts.’ An ambulance came quickly and took Joe to the big hospital in
Stanley Road. Molly accompanied him while a neighbour looked after me.

There was
a period of a few hours when there was no news from the hospital and in that
time I experienced an enormous level of anxiety I desperately wanted someone
to tell me what was going on. My always active imagination was spinning endless
scenarios of catastrophe. While I looked like I was watching telly, internally
I was overwhelmed by fear.

By the
time Molly returned from hospital where it turned out, after some confusion,
that Joe had gallstones, the removal of which would require him to have an
operation, I concluded that emotions were so painful that it might be a good
idea, in the future, not to feel them.

While
waiting for a consultation with the surgeon Joe got into conversation with a
woman, the wife of another patient, who mentioned that she had had her varicose
veins removed at the same time as she had been in for other surgery and what a
relief it had been. Joe too suffered from varicose veins, so he asked the
doctors if he could have them removed at the same time as he was anaesthetised
for the gallstones operation.

It was
on Guy Fawkes night, with rockets scrawling into the sky, bangers exploding in
the street and a bonfire burning at the top of the road, when the hospital
called to say something had gone wrong with the operation on Joe’s leg. Instead
of cutting a vein the surgeon had inadvertently severed a nerve in my father’s
right foot. The prognosis was that he would have no feeling in that foot and
might have difficulty walking on it in the future.

When we
went to see him for the first time Joe lay in a large ward of shrivelled men in
new pyjamas whose steel-framed beds seemed to go on and on to the horizon, as
surgeons in white coats stood over him trying to evade responsibility Tall
men, kindly and infinitely superior in their attitude, spent a few minutes
trying to patronise Molly before they realised that they couldn’t get away with
it and, after a little bit of stalling, early in 1965 we were awarded the
almost unheard of sum of one thousand pounds by the hospital in compensation.

Joe was
in Stanley Road for quite some time recuperating, so Molly bought him a little
transistor radio to listen to in bed on a single earpiece. Transistor radios
were quite a new thing at that time — it seemed amazing that you didn’t need to
listen to the BBC via a set the size of a gas oven that employed giant valves.
The radio, made by Pye, was in blue and white plastic with a carrying handle
that slid out in an arc from a recess in the top. After he got back from
Stanley Road I took that radio for myself.

From
then on Joe had to have a bar put in all his shoes which gave some support to
the arch of his dead foot, but for the rest of his life he would walk with a
limp. Soon after he got out of hospital we were at the top of the street and
Joe tried to race with me like we had done so many times in the past, but all
he could manage was an unsteady stumble as I easily outdistanced him.

Still,
we were in possession of one thousand pounds which was a great deal of money It
could have bought us all kinds of things: a luxury car, a cottage in North
Wales, a small business importing dried fruit. Instead we bought a boat.

What a
family of spectacularly unmechanical, two-thirds Jewish Communists thought they
were doing buying a cabin cruiser moored on a canal bank just outside Chester
is anybody’s guess. Molly always blamed me for this unwise purchase. The guy
who sold it to us was some kind of super-second-hand-car-salesman. Joe was
keen but Molly equivocated and so the salesman turned his oily charm on me,
saying, ‘What do you think of it, son? Isn’t she a lovely craft? A beautiful
craft. All the girls love a boy with a craft such as this.’ I was so unused to
having my opinion solicited that I responded with enthusiasm, saying, ‘Yes, a
boat. Let’s get a boat. This boat. I want this boat.’ My parents folded and
purchased a second-hand cabin cruiser for far too much money No matter how much
I pointed out, later on, that I was twelve and what were they doing anyway
letting themselves be influenced by a child in such a crucial decision, Molly
was implacable that what followed was all my fault.

Once
again our distrust of the spiv, the self-employed, the smooth-talking, fur
coat-wearing petit-bourgeois had been vindicated. This was a familiar story I
knew from listening in to the tales my parents’ political comrades told that
all of them were constantly being taken advantage of by plumbers, builders,
hoteliers, driving instructors and every other kind of sole trader. There was
some naïve quality in Communists which meant that they simply couldn’t
understand the mind of the self-employed, could never haggle for a bargain, do
a deal or ensure their roof was repaired properly Perhaps some of the
motivation for them being Communists was the desire one day to have all the
self-employed who had robbed them over the years either collectivised or shot.

There were many things
wrong with our boat. In the best of circumstances a cabin cruiser is just a
pointy caravan that floats and leaks, but ours was much, much less than that.
Apart from anything else, our boat was quite small. There was a tiny cramped
cabin at the front with thin foam seats which could be folded out into a double
bed, while at the rear of the cabin on a cupboard was a little cooker and
opposite it a cabinet the size of a coffin with a chemical toilet inside. At
the stern part, where you steered the boat from, there was an open space with more
seats. This area could be shielded from the weather with a folding canvas cover
a bit like a giant pram’s or a huge sports car’s. At the prow it had a name in
Welsh,
Ty Mawr,
inscribed in gold stick-on letters which we never
bothered to have translated but probably meant ‘Big Mistake’.

But it
was at the very stern of the boat that the source of a lot of our problems
resided. Although in most ways
Ty Mawr
was a quite substandard craft she
had for some reason been fitted with a gigantic outboard motor, an
American-made 75hp Evinrude which would have been more suited to a speedboat
hurtling between the Florida Keys than to a cabin cruiser on the Chester Canal.
Right from our first day of ownership we had great difficulty controlling the
power of this enormous machine, particularly given the very imprecise, and,
once we owned it, badly maintained throttle linkage that ran to the stern from
a lever beside the steering wheel.

It was
a warm summer Sunday when we had our first day out on the boat. Getting there
involved us taking two trains to Chester, then a bus to the mooring on the
outskirts of the city Once we had arrived we stared at this thing we had bought
and wondered what to do with it. Then after a pause we climbed gingerly aboard
and I was given the job of steering. It took ages to start the engine, pumping
a little rubber bladder to get fuel into the system and then pulling violently
on a string to turn it over. Once the Evinrude was ticking smokily to itself we
pushed off from the bank with a lot of screaming and shouting from Molly, ‘Lexi!
Lexi! Lexi! Mind that fucking swan!’

At
first things went well enough as we puttered slowly between canal barges with
their gaily painted sides and flowers planted in enamel pots. With the
propeller turning slowly we passed fishermen sitting contemplatively on the
banks, their lines dangling in the water, children in kayaks laughing and
splashing each other and fellow cabin cruisers meandering gently along, their
brass fittings polished to a high shine and the husband and wife seated in the
cockpit, eating sandwiches and drinking Pimms.

Then I
tried to speed up just the tiniest bit. I shifted the accelerator lever a
millimetre and immediately the throttle jammed open and the peaceful bucolic
scene was shattered. The noise of the Evinrude climbed to a tortured scream and
the bow of
Ty Mawr
rose steeply out of the water like a German motor
torpedo boat reaching the open sea. Now completely out of control, our little
cabin cruiser sped up the canal weaving in and out of the other boats with all
three of us yelling and screaming until we crashed into the bank, driving so
far up the soft grass and mud on this remote stretch of the canal that we
nearly ended up in an adjacent field.

This
was how our days out usually went. There was one particularly shaming
experience when the lines of a large number of fishermen became entangled in
our propeller and I wasn’t able to stop, so I ended up dragging them along the
towpath, their faces red and sweating as they ran swearing and screaming at me
at the top of their voices.

Its uncontrollable nature
wasn’t the only problem with our gigantic outboard motor. Where the cabin
cruiser had been tied up near Chester the boatyard was secure because access
could only be gained via a large metal gate. Unfortunately after a while, maybe
because it was a bit nearer, we decided to move
Ty Mawr
to a mooring
just outside Maghull in Lancashire on a stretch of the Leeds—Liverpool Canal.
This was just an open expanse of towpath and wasn’t at all secure, so we became
afraid that somebody was going to steal the Evinrude and therefore we never
left it on the boat. Since we didn’t own a car, every time we wanted to go for
a sail we had to take the giant outboard motor with us on the bus. It’s hard to
describe how stupid I felt sitting on a bus with a giant Evinrude outboard
motor on the seat next to me. It was very heavy, too, and we had to carry it on
and off two buses, a Ribble from Maghull to Scotland Road and then the number
27 to the stop in Oakfield Road near our house. Between visits to the
Leeds—Liverpool Canal the Evinrude lived in our front sitting room.