Stalin Ate My Homework (23 page)

During our last trip to
Czechoslovakia, with the unfortunate Peter Pemberton, our delegation had
attended a comedy football match. The referee made outrageous decisions and at
one point two men in white coats and curly blonde wigs came on with a stretcher
to take away a man who was playing really well and pretended he didn’t want to
be taken off. I was unsettled by this blurring of genres — was it a football
game or a comedy performance? On the other side of the field a man was painting
a house and Alf said, ‘That bloke looks familiar.’ Later a party was held in
our honour at the local community centre and the same man was there. Alf
approached him, found he spoke good English, and after they had both racked
their memories and drunk a lot of plum brandy they suddenly recalled that
during the war they had shared a ham sandwich in Glasgow during an air raid.

That
same night at the community centre we were entertained by a folk dance troupe
wearing traditional dress. Several of the dancers were very pretty blonde girls
who entranced me with their twirling, spinning and complicated hand movements.
Joe and Molly, too, were very taken with this group and decided to try to bring
them to Britain to show the human face of Communism. Once we returned to the UK
they began planning a tour for the dance troupe, yet no matter how much hard
work they put in it seemed to take ages for anything to happen. My early
teenage years were overshadowed by the constant possibility that these girls
might be coming, until finally the possibility turned into reality with the
news that they would be arriving in a few months and appearances had been
scheduled at Hope Hall in Liverpool and various other venues around the
North-west.

As the
date for their arrival came closer I thought more and more about these dancers.
In my imaginings I was the sophisticated host showing them around my home city
In fact it was only the pretty blonde female ones who were in my daydreams —
the boys had mysteriously vanished. Unfortunately, that was the limit of my
powers. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get the girls of my
imagination out of their folk costumes and into something more attractive.
Whatever I did they remained in their woven skirts, puffy white blouses and
oddly shaped headdresses. After a while I formed a composite image of a single
attractive girl dancer in my mind, and whatever I was doing or wherever I was I
would show it to her. She was constantly in my head, a silent observer but
somehow always fascinated by my amazing life. ‘This is what we call a steak and
kidney pie,’ I would say to my lovely flaxen-haired dancer. ‘We eat it with
chips.’ And her eyes would widen in astonishment. Or ‘That’s Mr Abrahams. He
hates me.’ Or ‘Those two men are called Morecambe and Wise. Though they share a
bed they are not homosexual lovers.’

It was
only a few weeks before the tour was due to begin that we got a message from
the authorities in Prague saying that the dance troupe would not after all be
coming, though they offered no explanation. Perhaps it was an early sign of the
internal upheavals within Czech society that they weren’t being allowed out —
it’s impossible to say But though she never arrived in person I continued to
carry this idealised blonde dancer in my mind and in my imagination I
continually showed off to her — until, that is, I got to an age when I began
doing stuff that I was too ashamed to let her see.

I
sometimes wonder why it is that I remember what it is that I remember. Did the
things that stayed with me form who I became? Or was I already fixed by then,
as the kind of child for whom all the endless visits to galleries, castles and
historic monuments blurred into a few vague impressions while what really stuck
in my mind was two men’s memory of eating a ham sandwich and a folk dancer who
never existed? I would have really liked to retain hundreds of clear and
precise images of all the baroque ceilings and Renaissance architraves I stood
in front of during our travels, but I had no matrix, no philosophical
framework with which to retain them. So they became like pretty pictures hung
on a wall with flimsy string that soon snapped.

During 1964, in my second
year at Alsop, class 2B moved into the Rectory where we had our form room on
the second floor. Some of the kids developed a fad for jumping out of the
window, landing in the grassy land at the back and then running back into
class. I didn’t join in.

I loved
the Gothic feel of the Rectory, the worn elegance of the stairs and doors, the
creepy, High Church romanticism of the mullioned windows and sandstone arches
being forbidden fruit to the son of Communists. The civic centre of Liverpool,
clustered around St George’s Hall and the Walker Art Gallery, favoured the
classical style, supposedly radiating rationality and science, as if ancient
Rome had somehow acquired double-decker buses and a railway station.

On the
floor above 2B was a wood-panelled form room for the upper sixth Classics. In
common with a lot of provincial grammars, Alsop attempted to ape British public
schools. It did this, though, in an unconvincing fashion, like somebody who has
learned a foreign language from a book. And fortunately, for whatever reason,
it decided it could get along without the vicious bullying and the Byzantine
cruelty of those supposedly superior establishments. The boys above us on the
second floor attempted to give the impression, mainly to themselves, that they
were at Winchester, Harrow or Eton. Through studying Latin and Greek A-Level
they were hoping to go to Oxford or Cambridge where, if they got in, they
planned to lie about where they came from. When they weren’t in class these
boys would sit about in leather armchairs conjugating Virgil or editing the
school magazine, while in the winter they actually went so far in their fake
Billy Bunterism as to toast crumpets over an open fire.

That
year we had a maths teacher called Mr Cornes who earned my respect by
disdaining to teach us any maths at all, scuppering my already weak chances of
ever understanding geometry For the entire lesson Mr Cornes would just stare
out of the window. On one occasion the only thing he said to us was, ‘I’ve been
watching those workmen out there for forty minutes and in all that time they’ve
done nothing.’ He dressed smartly in tweed suits with a flamboyant handkerchief
in the top pocket and looked a little like a young Alfred Hitchcock. The most
interesting thing to me about Mr Cornes was that he would come to school every
day in a different smart car which he would park outside the Rectory, alongside
the other teachers’ much more shabby vehicles. One day it would be an MGB
coupé, another day his transport might be an Aston Martin DB4 or a 4.2-litre
Mark II Jaguar with wire wheels.

Though
he was unaware of my existence, I really liked Mr Cornes and tried to imitate
his enigmatic manner. I saw that if you say nothing, people find it unsettling
because they don’t know what to make of you. Another of our family hate figures
was the Spanish fascist dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Also a fan of
being inscrutable, Franco once said, ‘You are the slave of what you say and the
master of what you don’t say’ He might have added that that approach isn’t
always guaranteed to work. If you attempt, for example, to be sphinx-like,
mysterious and enigmatic when you get to the front of a long queue at the chip
shop, you do risk being punched quite hard in the back of the head.

Under
the influence of Mr Cornes my artwork began to change. The futurist utopia of
Saylovia, with its high-rise buildings, eight-lane highways and pedestrian walkways
started to be of less interest to me. The new Britain that the architects’
blueprints and the articles in the newpapers had been preparing us for had
begun to appear, and it didn’t look anything like they had told us it would.
The optimistic line drawings in the magazines hadn’t found a way to render the
rain-streaked concrete of the new Kingsway Tunnel that had been built between
Liverpool and Wallasey, destroying huge swathes of Scotland Road, obliterating
thousands of homes and hundreds of small businesses in the process. They had
somehow failed to include the litter that skittered about at waist height in
the new shopping precincts, whipped up by the storm-force winds that were
permanently channelled between the flimsy buildings. The people who had once
occupied these neighbourhoods had been moved out to estates on the edge of the
city, the only real difference between Stalin’s forced migrations and those in
Liverpool being that the Liverpudlians went willingly, believing the lie that
they would have a better life in these purpose-built new towns, the promise of
electric storage heaters and twin sinks taking the place of the bayonet and the
forced march.

Instead
of Saylovia I began to draw an elaborate and ever-changing fantasy in which a
slightly older version of me drove to London in one of Mr Cornes’s cars, an
open-topped MGTF with wire wheels, my luggage strapped to the chromed rack on
the boot lid behind the driver’s seat. I was a bit vague about how you got to
London by road as I had only ever travelled there by train, but I thought it
might be somewhere up the Al and I had an idea that Bedford was on the way So I
would often draw me in my MGTF in Bedford high street with a pretty girl giving
me an admiring look as I stopped for her at a zebra crossing.

As an
artist I was clearly part of no movement. I worked alone, unconnected to the
cultural elite, like a teenage William Blake. Nevertheless the drawings I did,
scribbled down the margins of my school books, filling lined foolscap pads and
scrawled over the backs of envelopes, were expressing the spirit of the age. I
wasn’t aware of it, but Jack Kerouac’s On
the Road
had been published
eight years before and the idea that travel for its own sake could be a
quasi-mystical experience was slowly crossing the Atlantic.

More
influential for me than Kerouac’s beatnik ramblings was a US television series
shown intermittently and at odd hours on the local ITV station, Granada. When
people consider the artistic cauldron of the North-west in the 1960s Granada
TV, based in Manchester but serving the entire region, innovative, liberal and
creative but always populist, pioneering investigative documentaries, US
comedies and ground-breaking dramas, often gets forgotten. But I grew up in an
area that effectively had two BBCs. Though it was true that Granada, with their
eccentric scheduling, could make you work hard for what you wanted to see. I
did sometimes wonder whether I was hallucinating one particular show because
it had so few viewers that when I asked other people they said they had never
heard of it. Also, in form and content it seemed to have been made specifically
for me.

Route
66
was probably the only TV drama series ever to be
filmed entirely on the road with not one scene shot in a studio. It concerned
two enigmatic young men named Tod and Buz who travelled around the USA in one
of the greatest cars of all time — a Chevrolet Corvette convertible powered by
the 327 cubic inch ‘Small Block’ V8, getting involved in existential adventures
and speaking to each other in a hyped-up quasi-hipster English. The show
clearly had a liberal, progressive agenda and dealt sympathetically with
stories about mercy killing, the threat of nuclear annihilation and teenage
runaways. Tod and Buz were also always running into isolated nihilistic loners
living in tumbleweed-infested ghost towns.

Though
I was unaware of it at the time,
Route 66
gave work to emerging
directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Hiller and featured guest stars of
the calibre of Rod Steiger, Martin Sheen, Buster Keaton, Robert Redford and a
young Robert Duvall playing a heroin addict. In the episode with Robert Duvall,
Buz revealed that in the past he had had his own problems with the White
Horse, the Brown Sugar, the old Yam Yam, which seemed like a really cool thing
to me. Not that I ever wanted to take heroin, which frankly looked like it was
a lot of hard work, appeared to be quite uncomfortable and meant you had to
listen to jazz music. Rather, I wondered if it might somehow be possible to just
jump straight to being the sort of world-weary, wise person who had once been a
junkie without ever going to all the trouble and mess of actually being a
junkie. When I drew myself in biro in my MGTF driving to London I was trying
to capture the same restless spirit that informed
Route 66
or On
the
Road.
Me as the loner, the free spirit, a man with a complicated past,
steering his sports car wherever the mood took him, to romantic places such as
Runcorn, Bedford and Dunstable where he would have adventures that ended with
a liberal conclusion.