Stalin Ate My Homework (29 page)

There
was a different group of boys from my class that I started hanging about with.
One of them, Sid, was on probation for committing some minor crime. He said he
got to talk to his probation officer about whatever he wanted for an hour a
week. I thought having somebody who had to listen to you for a whole hour
sounded brilliant. And he said he was given a transistor radio by the probation
service as a Christmas present.

We were
doing
Henry V
for 0-Level and as there was a production at the old Hope
Hall, now renamed the Everyman Theatre, the school gave us the afternoon off so
we could go as a group to see the play in the evening. Sid spent the afternoon
drinking, and when the Prologue came on at the beginning of the play and said, ‘Oh
for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention …’ Sid
jumped up and shouted, ‘Ah, fuck off….’ To his credit Roger Sloman, the actor
playing the Prologue, paused, looked directly at Sid and said, ‘Right, I’ll
come on and do that again then’, which got a big laugh and took the heat out of
the situation — a lesson in comedy I made a note of. The play progressed with
ushers chasing Sid all over the theatre, which only added to the Elizabethan
atmosphere of the event.

I had had my first drink
on a Vietnam demonstration. When I was not quite fifteen I had persuaded
another boy from school called John Burrell, who was a Mod, to come down to
London with me to go on a demo. The final destination must have been St Paul’s
Cathedral, because we ended up in a pub at Ludgate Circus where I think I asked
the barman for ‘A half of a beer’. At first I couldn’t understand what anybody
saw in this odd stuff, but I forced myself. As Communist literature constantly
pointed out, sacrifices had to be made if you wished for freedom.

A gang
of us started going out drinking together at the weekends and sometimes even
early on a week-night. Neither Molly nor Joe drank much — strange bottles of
plum brandy given to us by the Hungarian Minister for Railways would lie for
years in the Secatrol untouched, and my parents never ever went to the pub, ‘Dreadful
smoky places,’ Molly said they were. So I figured that would be a good place to
hide from them.

There
was no moral panic back then over young people drinking and there was never a
problem concerning our age — if you wore a suit and tie and didn’t misbehave
you could drink in a pub from about the age of six. We frequented pubs in
Anfield and Everton and drank pints of dark brown mild ale mixed with a bottle
of pale ale, a drink which was called a Brown Mixed. I loved those pubs. Each
was divided into several bars, a snug, a public and a saloon bar being usually
the minimum and often there could be more, all of them equipped with
copper-topped tables and seating covered in a sort of red linoleum — and my
parents weren’t in any of them. There were many local breweries — Higson’s,
Walker’s Warrington Ales, Threlfall’s — and one called Bent’s whose pubs were
tiled like lavatories and sold their own brand of wine they called Bentox.

At the
weekends, if the gang weren’t available, rather than stay about at home I would
go into the centre of town and just walk about. I didn’t walk about with any
purpose — just walked. I didn’t even stop for coffee or a sandwich or anything,
being unsure how you bought such things. When I was with a group of people I
knew how to act; I had a sense of what my purpose was within the pack, which
was basically to clown around, carry on and make trouble. And if you were in an
unfamiliar place there would always be somebody else in the group who
understood the rules of the place — or if you got thrown out you got thrown out
together. When I was on my own a paralysing uncertainty took hold of me. I
would think to myself, ‘Do you go up to the counter and order your sandwiches,
or do you wait to be served?’ So in the end I didn’t have a sandwich.

I also
began to develop a paranoid dread that I would be thrown out of places because
of the way I looked, which was a reasonable fear. Along with my long hair I was
now experimenting with hippy clothes. I often wore a denim jacket that Molly
had lined with rabbit fur bought at a
Daily Worker
bazaar, beads round
my neck and of course my toy hat. With my clothes I was ineptly attempting to
emulate the bands I saw performing on
Top of the Pops
or whose pictures
I saw in the music papers I sometimes bought. The boys I hung out with wisely
stuck to suits and ties when they weren’t in their school uniforms. People
might wear fur coats and beads on the King’s Road, Chelsea, but in Liverpool
the wrong kind of shoelace could still get your head kicked in.

So I
mostly hung about in places like the Walker Art Gallery where they had to let
you in and where it was unlikely, though in Liverpool not guaranteed, that you
would get into a fight. There was a Rembrandt self-portrait that I used to
spend hours standing in front of, and a Lucian Freud painting of a man in a mac
standing by a door in a bedsit in Paddington that particularly attracted my
attention. ‘That’s what I want to do when I’m older,’ I thought to myself. ‘Be
painted standing by a door in a room in a seedy part of London.’ I also enjoyed
many of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings that the Walker owned, paintings which I
imagined would echo the trippy colours of a hippy lightshow if I ever got to
see one.

I also
spent a huge amount of time in Liverpool’s two cathedrals, not attending
services or anything but just sort of standing there. One thing that had really
stuck with me and which I never questioned was my parents’ violent atheism.
Whenever we were told Bible stories at school my mind had shut down like a shop
on a Sunday So with places of worship there was not a whisper of religious awe
in the way I regarded them — to me they were just big, complicated buildings.
The Neo-Gothic Anglican cathedral at one end of Hope Street, designed by the
twenty-two-year-old Giles Gilbert Scott, seemed like the most gigantic and
elaborate Victorian pub in the world — the same stained glass, the same highly
polished brass and stone-flagged floor, even the side chapels were like the
subsidiary bars you found in an alehouse (the ladies’ bar, the snug and the
saloon). Its foundation stone had been laid in 1904, but it was still
unfinished in the 1960s. There was also a magnificently spooky and overgrown
graveyard that I liked to lurk in. The cathedral was surrounded by little
streets of terraced housing, which provided a counterpoint to its bombastic
bulk.

By
contrast, the building of the Catholic cathedral at the other end of Hope
Street began in October 1962 and was completed in May 1967. I spent a lot of
time there too. In those days there was a chain of restaurants called the Golden
Egg which employed a very similar design aesthetic to Liverpool’s Catholic
cathedral. They both made liberal use of handmade ceramics and modern materials
such as coloured plastics and back-lit fibreglass panels. One day while
wandering around the Catholic cathedral I came upon the most peculiar thing.
Beneath the plinth on which the space capsule-shaped modern building rested,
there was an older building. I didn’t know it then, and there were no
explanatory signs, but this was the crypt of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ massive
classical/Byzantine cathedral which was begun in 1933 and then abandoned — a
building which, if it had been completed, would have become the second-largest
church in the world with the world’s largest dome. As it was, it looked as if
the modern cathedral had stolen an older one and was then sitting on it.

Staying out till all hours
meant I was frequently late for school. One day, long after assembly had begun,
I was trying to sneak on to the premises unnoticed when I saw another dark-haired
boy the same age as myself strolling through the gates, hands in pockets,
whistling happily to himself. I followed this boy to a classroom where he
joined a number of other boys who were sitting about in a relaxed fashion,
reading magazines and comics or chatting happily together.

A
prefect walked past and I said to him, ‘Hey, who are those kids in that room?’

‘Those
are the Jews,’ he replied.

‘The
Jews?’

‘Yeah,
they’re Jews. Morning assembly involves a lot of Christian hymn singing, so
because of their religion they don’t have to attend. They can more or less come
in when they want as long as they get here by the beginning of classes. Unlike
you, Sayle. You’re on detention … again.’

When I
got home that evening I angrily asked Molly why she hadn’t got me excluded from
religious assembly because I was Jewish.

‘I didn’t
want you to be left out,’ she replied.

‘So let
me get this right,’ I said. ‘You called me Alexei when everybody else was
called Sidney, you took me to see
Alexander Nevsky
and
Ivan the Terrible
rather than
Bambi
and
Pinocchio,
you made me wear peculiar
trousers …. My trousers were a big area of contention between me and Molly at
the time. Since I had been a child Molly had always made my trousers on her
sewing machine. This had been fine when I was young and unselfconscious and in
shorts, but once I moved up to proper trousers at the age of eleven or so it
slowly began to occur to me that there might be something a bit off about my
pants. By the time I got to fourteen I was certain that the trousers I was
wearing possessed all kinds of strange bulges, weird pouchy bits in the seat
and twisted seams that ran all over the place, and one leg always seemed to be
at least six inches shorter than the other. Molly, on the other hand, was convinced
that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her handiwork. I remember standing
on a stool with her sticking pins in me and me screaming at her, ‘I bet you
were a lousy tailor.’ And she replied, ‘Yes, I was,’ and she laughed, which
made me absolutely crazy The weird thing was that neither of us ever thought of
going to a shop and just buying some proper factory-made trousers.

I
continued with my diatribe: ‘You forced me to see the Red Army Choir rather
than the Beatles! You told me Lenin came down the chimney at Christmas with my
presents! And yet, and yet, the one time when me being a bit different could
have got me another half an hour in bed, you didn’t want me to feel left out!’

‘Oh,
fuck off, Lexi,’ she said.

Spending
five years at forced Christian worship did at least make me one of the few
atheist Communist Jews who knew all the words to ‘All Things Bright and
Beautiful’ and the Lord’s Prayer. I consoled myself with the thought that if
the National Front or some other Nazi organisation ever gained power in Britain
and their version of the Gestapo came for me I might be able to pass myself off
as a Christian by enthusiastically singing every verse of ‘Oh God Our Help in
Ages Past’.

Having managed to put a
bit of physical distance between me and my parents the time now seemed right to
try and put a degree of ideological space between us too. Most teenagers rebel
against their parents, try and become different from their mother and father,
preferably adopting some way of life that really annoys them. But for me
breaking away was more problematic because I really liked being left-wing and
I really liked left-wingers. Being a Communist amongst Communists was what
defined me — it was my thing. So in the end the form my teen rebellion took was
that I didn’t do the obvious thing and become self-interested and reactionary
and a little Tory, or, even worse, become self-interested and reactionary and
join the Labour Party I didn’t even stop being a Communist. I just became a
different kind of Communist.

Up until
the late 1950s the two biggest socialist states, the USSR and the People’s
Republic of China, had seemed to be close as close could be. But towards the
end of the decade splits in the relationship began to appear, until in 1961 Mao
and the Chinese Communist Party openly denounced ‘The Revisionist Traitor Group
of Soviet Leadership’.

The
dispute was really about national interest, access to nuclear technology and
people simply not liking each other, but the ostensible reason for the fracture
was disagreement over who was truly the heir of the Soviet Revolution. In 1956,
in his ‘Secret Speech’ to the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev had denounced the
‘cult of personality’ that surrounded Stalin and had revealed some of the
terrible crimes committed during the Great Purges. Over the next couple of
years Khrushchev attempted to reform the Soviet system, placing more emphasis
on the production of consumer goods over traditional heavy industry and
liberalising, a tiny bit, the repressive Soviet attitude towards any form of
dissent. Though slightly assuaged by the crushing of revolts in Hungary and
East Germany, many in the West’s Communist movements were uneasy with this
liberalisation. They didn’t like the idea of a Communist society allowing its
citizens to express their opinions freely or to have a choice of more than one
type of hat. Yet they had nowhere to take their disaffection until the
Sino—Soviet split offered these puritan characters a choice of an extra-dour
kind of socialism more in keeping with their sententious inclinations.