Stalin Ate My Homework (3 page)

Unconventionally for
working-class people at that time, and very unusually for left-wingers, once
they were married my parents bought their own house. Just before I was born
they acquired
5
Valley Road, Anfield, Liverpool 4 for the price of one
thousand pounds. Molly borrowed two hundred pounds from bedridden Uncle Willy
to make up the deposit — a sum which she never paid back. The terraced house in
Anfield was not, however, the home she wanted. There had been another in the
more sylvan setting of West Derby Village, but at the last minute she and Joe
had been gazumped. So Valley Road was Molly’s second choice, and there
persisted a sense that she regarded our little house with a degree of
disappointment.

There
was also something of a problem with the next-door neighbours at number 7, a
family by the name of Blundell. According to Molly these quiet and
self-effacing people had wanted our house for their own daughter to live in,
but for some reason, perhaps due to the buying power of Uncle Willy’s two
hundred pounds, we got it. Molly always felt that because of this they bitterly
resented us. This might not have mattered if the two houses hadn’t shared a
water pipe, so that the Blundells were able, if they so wished, to interfere
with the flow to our home. My mother was convinced that they would turn off our
supply from time to time — in fact she was certain that they somehow knew when
she was preparing a bottle of baby formula and would choose that exact moment
to strike. One of my first memories is of my mother at the kitchen window
screaming over the back yard wall at the neighbours that her child was dying of
hunger because they had cut off our water supply.

We lived two miles from
the docks in one of the world’s greatest ports, ‘Liverpool that terrible city
whose main street is the ocean’, as the novelist Malcolm Lowry described it. A
sense of the sea and of infinite horizons was pervasive, though I don’t
remember anybody actually remarking on it — no one ever said, ‘Don’t you find a
sense of the sea and of infinite horizons is always pervasive?’ There always
seemed to be a parrot or a terrified monkey which had escaped from some
seafarer’s house that needed to be chased up and down the back entries by a
gaggle of over-excited kids, and sometimes you might see a Cunard Yank’, a
seaman who worked on the North Atlantic run, operating the great liners that
ploughed the grey seas between Liverpool and the United States. He would be
easy to spot, dressed as he was in the bright blue, yellow or red beebop, zoot
suit with hand-painted tie that he had bought in a clothes shop in Harlem,
Galveston or one of the Mexican barrios of Los Angeles.

Oakfield
Road was the main shopping thoroughfare of our neighbourhood and Valley Road,
the street we lived on, ran off it at a right-angle. While you could go from
one day to the next without a motor vehicle going down our street my parents,
particularly my mother, were convinced that Oakfield Road was a continuous
stream of thundering traffic that would mow a delicate child like me down as
soon as he stepped off the pavement, so I was forbidden to cross it on my own.
There was certainly some traffic. Highly polished steam lorries in the blue and
gold livery of the Tate and Lyle company chuffed up and down, travelling from
the refinery near the docks to the toffee factory where Uncle Joe’s Mintballs
were made, white clouds of smoke streaming from their chimneys. There were
freighters in the dark green of British Road Services pulled by their own
strange three-wheeled Scammell tractor units. Buses too, of course: the numbers
26 and 27 in smart green and cream Corporation livery, their destination boards
both showing ‘Sheil Road Circular’, ran in a loop in and out of the town
centre. Apart from that, though, you could set up a fruit stall in the middle
of Oakfield Road and only have to move it a couple of times an hour. This was
another reason why I had wanted to go and see
Bambi
with a gang of kids
from the street — it would have been the first time I had crossed over to the
other side of Oakfield Road without my mum or dad.

Over
Oakfield Road, everything seemed better and more enticing. There was a toy shop
called Fleming’s with all kinds of colourful stuff stacked up to the ceiling —
footballs, puppets, dolls, toy guns and teddy bears. There was a delicatessen
run by two men both of whom appeared to be called Dickie, equipped with a giant
chromed meat slicer whose spinning, razor-sharp wheel reduced stocky salamis
and burly hams to tame, paper-thin slices. Further along the parade there was a
cave-like general store which seemed like it had been transported from the
American Wild West and sold paraffin, sacks of seeds and slabs of pet food in
jelly that you purchased wrapped in newspaper that became damp and
evil-smelling by the time you got it home. A large branch of the Co-operative
store, three storeys high, dominated the smaller shops. Inside there were
separate meat and dairy counters, and people’s change went zinging around in
brass cylinders suspended on wires above the shoppers’ heads as if their money
was travelling about by cable car at a ski resort. And next to the Co-op stood
my objective, the Art Deco Gaumont cinema, part Egyptian, part Aztec, part
brick blockhouse, the current film displayed on a neon-lit awning above the
doors, coming attractions advertised by lurid posters along the face of the
building and the crowds managed by a uniformed commissionaire dressed like he
was a soldier in a very neat war.

The
shops on our side of Oakfield Road, shops that I was free to visit on my own,
seemed dull and tawdry by comparison. There were only two that I was even
mildly interested in: the newsagent’s where I went to get my comics and the
women’s clothing shop on the corner of our street. Behind the dusty plate glass
of this emporium there were arranged the strange items of underwear women wore
beneath their dresses — flesh-coloured foundation garments adorned with hooks,
clasps and straps like the uniforms of some sort of bizarre paratrooper
regiment. These items of intimate apparel were displayed on female torsos made
of pink plaster, torsos that had truncated stumps where their arms, legs and
heads should have been, as if they had been modelled on the victims of a
pre-war railway trunk murder. When I got a bit older this window provoked some
very complicated feelings in me.

In Valley Road, even a kid
like me with an overly anxious mother was free to run semi-wild. All the
children played out in the street during daylight hours, swinging from the
gaslamps that stood like watchtowers every twenty yards along the pavement.
The children of the street — the Noakeses, the Haggarty girls — came to our
house to play with toys and I went to theirs, even if we were having a feud
with their family We ran in and out of the identical yellow brick terraced
houses, jumped on and off the low front walls and played the same street games
that children had played for hundreds of years.

One of
the differences between me and the other kids, which I was highly appreciative
of, was that as an indulged only child I was not required to do much around the
house. I heard horror stories from my friends about being asked to wash the
dishes, tidy up their bedroom or polish their own shoes. Sometimes even I would
be sent to the dairy at the opposite end of Valley Road to ‘get the messages’.
Resentfully I had to walk right to the other end of the street, a journey of over
three hundred yards, then hand over money and a note and return with milk or
butter from the white-tiled shop. Occupying an awkward triangular site the
dairy, unlike the terraced houses, was built of red brick and through its
frosted glass windows you could dimly see the hindquarters of the cows shifting
uneasily, lined up facing away from you as if they were watching a football
match.

We got a telephone quite
early on. I can still remember the number: ANF (for Anfield) 7874. But
unfortunately, due to a shortage of lines we were at first forced to accept
something called a party line, which meant you were essentially sharing with
another subscriber. There were several disadvantages to this arrangement: true,
the joint subscribers were charged less for the line rental, but if the other ‘party’
was using the phone then you couldn’t make a call, and while it meant you could
listen in to their conversations they could also listen to yours. You would
lift up the telephone only to find your neighbour was already on it talking at
great length about their hernia operation, and then you would have to wait and
keep lifting the phone until it was free. Of course, in our case the other
party were the long-suffering people at number 7. We weren’t that bothered about
them listening in to our conversations since we believed as a matter of course
that our phone was tapped by the security services. I was taught from an early
age to maintain rigorous telephone security, never to use real names or give
specific times, locations or details of meetings. This sometimes meant that me,
Molly and Joe went to places where we thought we had arranged to meet people,
only to find that they weren’t there.

But
just as with the shared water supply, Molly was convinced that the neighbours
somehow knew when we wanted to make a call and would choose that exact moment
to ring their aunty in Shrewsbury This time, however, she didn’t have to shout
over the back yard wall to make her feelings clear — she could do it right in
next door’s ear, at high volume. So we were supplied with our own private line
remarkably quickly, at a time when you could often wait years for one.

It
still wasn’t easy to make a call, though, because in our house vital phone
numbers were stored in an arbitrary number of locations. At the same time as
the phone arrived we had bought a device, an arrangement of alphabeticised
pages inside a spring-loaded plastic box, where by sliding a toggle to, say,
the letter C you would get all the people you knew whose name began with the
letter C. Provided, of course, that you had written their name and phone
number down on that page in the first place. Unfortunately, if they were in
there at all most numbers were written on pages that bore no relation to the
surname of the person they were attached to, so the Smiths would be under N and
the Noakeses under XYZ. More than that, though, Molly tended to store the
majority of vital numbers in any location other than our spring-loaded phone
book. The most popular places, apart from random scraps of paper that blew around
the living room, were the pages of defunct NUR diaries. If you urgently wanted
to find the number of Anfield Road Junior School, Auntie Dorothy or the doctor,
for instance, you had to know to look under 27 April 1954 (Anzac Day Holiday,
Australia).

Apart from the odd
overheard phone call we had no clear idea what the neighbours thought, but this
didn’t stop us making a number of assumptions. One area where we were convinced
our life was superior to anybody else’s in the street was in the food we ate.
The tastebuds of most British people had been destroyed by six years of war and
another eight years of rationing, so to the neighbours food had become fuel,
plain and simple, to be shovelled down the gullet without ever being tasted.

In our
house we basked in the fact that we enjoyed our meals — our dinners were
healthy and delicious, not the boiled stodge that everybody else ate. Molly
cooked chicken soup and matzo balls, gefilte fish, salmon cutlets and roast
lamb. One year we had a goose for Christmas, though it wasn’t really a success.
At lunchtime on a hot summer Sunday in Anfield Molly would say proudly, ‘Look!
Everybody else in the street’s eating roast beef, roast potatoes and horrible
gravy But We’re Having a Salad.’