Stalin Ate My Homework (30 page)

So I
became a Maoist, while my parents remained devoted to the Soviet Union. Soon
violent arguments erupted over the breakfast table in 5
Valley Road,
Liverpool 4.

‘Don’t
you dare call your mother a Bureaucratist Capitalist Roader, Alexei!’

‘Well,
she is, Dad! Anyone disassociating themselves from direct manual labour is
bound to set themselves apart from the masses, inevitably leading to
Bureaucratism. As the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, has stated, “There must be
no ‘sitting in the office’, ‘no moving his mouth but not his hands’.”‘

‘What
are you talking about, Lexi? You haven’t done a day’s manual labour in your
life! And why do the Gallup Poll people keep phoning, saying they need to speak
to you urgently?’

‘You’re
a Red Fascist, Molly! A Commandeerist! A One Voiceist! And is my football kit
ready? Because we’ve got double games tomorrow.’

It was on a Vietnam
demonstration early in 1967 when I first became aware of Maoism. There was this
extraordinary guy walking along by himself; he had long hair, a straggly beard
and a floor-length overcoat. Using both hands, he carried in front of him a
large poster of Chairman Mao Tse-tung attached to a tube of grey plastic
piping. As we passed a Chinese restaurant on Lime Street, all the waiters and
chefs piled out of the restaurant cheering him and making the ‘waving a little
red book’ gesture. Which, when I thought about it, seemed a bit odd since most
of the Chinese in Liverpool had been in the city for three or four generations,
spoke English with thick Scouse accents, were extremely entrepreneurial and
held no affection for Communism. Maybe they were just excited to see one of us
parading around with a picture of one of them. This man was Nigel Morley
Preston Jones and he was Merseyside’s first Maoist.

Mao
Tse-tung had launched the Chinese Cultural Revolution in May of the previous
year, and for the first time there was a revolutionary movement that was
explicitly centred on the youth of a country Right across that vast nation
young people were formed into Red Guard groups and were then encouraged to
beat up their teachers, destroy factories and generally parade around like
little dictators. It seemed such an obvious idea that teenagers should be
allowed to wreck businesses and stop the traffic, many members of my generation
wondered why nobody had thought of it before. After all, young people knew all
there was to know on all subjects; our certainty and our clarity of thought
meant that it was obvious that we should be put in charge of everything right
away.

In left-wing politics
there were a number of code words that instantly signalled the ideology behind
an organisation. If you were in the know you understood that ‘Peace’, as in ‘Peace
in Vietnam’ or ‘Women’s Peace Day’, meant ‘Communist Party Front’, while ‘Solidarity’,
as in ‘Vietnam Solidarity Campaign’, meant Trotskyist-controlled. Similarly,
though all Communists were supposedly Marxist-Leninists, inspired as they were
by the economic and philosophical ideas of Karl Marx allied to VI. Lenin’s
theories on imperialism and the nature of the vanguard party, if you went on
about it, going so far as to include ‘Marxist-Leninist’ in the name of your
group or party, then it meant that you were in fact a Maoist.

The
leader of the Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group was Ian Williams, the young man
I had first encountered at the lame YCL meeting. Now a student at Liverpool
University, he lived with his girlfriend Ruth who worked in an office to
support them both since Ian, because of problems with his father, couldn’t
obtain a student grant. The MMLG was more diverse than a lot of left-wing
groups. Its oldest member was a dock worker from Birkenhead called Wally
Sturrock: high-cheeked and dark haired, part-gypsy, he was in his mid-twenties
and unlike the rest of us was always well dressed in smart tailored suits,
narrow shoes, colourful shirts and stylish slender ties. Another member, Dave,
always reminded me of Pasha Antipov as played by Tom Courtenay in David Lean’s
film of
Doctor Zhivago.
Pasha is the disappointed romantic whose
bitterness turns him into a cold-blooded and callous revolutionary known as
Strelnikov. It was easy to imagine Dave travelling post-revolutionary Britain
in an armoured train, shelling villages and shooting people for ideological
deviationism. There was also the man with the picture of Mao on a stick, Nigel
Morley Preston Jones. He had met Ian in a pub after some demonstration and,
brought together by Nigel’s photo of the Chairman, they had founded their own group.
Nigel was converted to Marxism-Leninism by a guy he met in Glasgow who was a
member of a tiny Scottish Marxist-Leninist party. Like all little parties this
group put a great deal of energy into producing their newspaper, whose headline
one month read ‘Victory for Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Thought in the Gorbals’.
After coming to Liverpool Nigel had found a job and a place to live at the
Simon Community, a shelter for the homeless housed in a crumbling building just
off Scotland Road where it was generally impossible to tell the difference
between the clients and the staff.

I found
myself in an odd position within the Marxist-Leninist group because, although
all these people were older than me in conventional years, I was much older
than them in Communist years. I had been around revolutionary politics since I
was a baby and so sometimes had the strange sensation of being able to know
exactly what they were going to say minutes before they had said it.

Other
members were a young couple of social workers from Yorkshire called Barry and
Ingrid and a New Zealand woman whose name was Judith Wareham. I don’t recall
Judith’s particular motives for becoming a Marxist-Leninist, but for some
reason the sterility and asceticism of Maoism and its Balkan offshoot, Enver
Hoxha’s hard-line Communist Albania, seemed to hold a particular attraction for
Kiwis. Sometimes at night I would tune the little blue and white plastic radio
to Radio Albania whose English-language service, judging by the accents, seemed
to be staffed entirely by New Zealanders. In reciting their long screeds of
Marxist theory they would always refer to the Premier of China, the Great
Helmsman, as ‘Chairman May-ow’, as if he was somebody’s pet cat. ‘Today in
Beijing Chairman May-ow congratulated the Albanian State Metalworks on
increasing washer production by two hundred and twelve per cent thanks to the
rigorous political analysis of vice president Mehmet Shehu.’

I used
to wonder how they lived, these freckly redheads whose words floated to me over
the short wave band — young men and women whose romantic obsession with a
distant people and a violent ideology had landed them in a Balkan city that
regularly ran out of soap. Did the Albanians secretly spy on them and keep them
from mixing with the ordinary populace, or were they forced to take Albanian
wives and husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends of impeccable revolutionary
character? Were they allowed to go home if they changed their minds about
Marxism-Leninism, and did they manage to get the latest rugby scores?

The
weekly meetings of the Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group were held at Ian and
Ruth’s place in Huskisson Street in Liverpool 8, where they lived in a
high-ceilinged first-floor flat above a Jamaican drug dealer named Beaver. In
becoming a Maoist I felt I finally belonged to something that was truly mine;
for that brief period it was the height of fashion to be in a revolutionary
group. I was also mixing on equal terms with people who were much older than I
was — at fifteen I was by far the youngest member, quite a few of them were in
their twenties. I thought myself very sophisticated and worldly to be hanging
out with people such as these. There was a very nice girl called Chris Walker
doing postgraduate work in psychology at Liverpool University, who joined the
group a little while after me. Chris would walk me to the bus stop every week
after the meetings and wait with me until the bus came. I thought she must live
nearby or fancied me or found what I had to say about armoured fighting vehicles
so fascinating that she wanted to spend every available minute with me, while
in fact she was just making sure I got safely home to my mum.

My only
real problem with being a Marxist-Leninist was that I didn’t believe a word of it,
or rather I both totally believed it and totally didn’t believe it, all at the
same time. The trouble with any kind of fundamentalist organisation is that it
cannot be big on subtlety or nuance. The Nazis did not say, ‘Well, some people
don’t like Jews, but live and let live is pretty much our attitude.’ So it was
a requirement that you switched off the critical part of your brain for
meetings and pretended that China acted only in the interests of international
socialism, or that the oppressed peoples of the world were inevitably virtuous
and decent and generally good at singing. I suppose I should have said some of
this, at least to myself, but apart from a couple of exceptions my comrades
seemed like nice people, were genuinely disturbed by injustice and bought me
drinks, so I kept quiet.

Unfortunately
your mind will not allow you to get away with the kind of split-brain thinking
I tried to stick to. Psychological tensions rise to the surface and tend to
find an outlet in erratic behaviour. In this I was no different from the seemingly
pious . Jew who secretly gorges on bacon sandwiches, the devout Muslim who
drinks or the Evangelical preacher who dresses up as a cowgirl at weekends.

I
sometimes thought that my feelings about being a Communist were so ambivalent
that I would have made an excellent double agent, a Special Branch spy, like
the several hundred who were at that time infiltrating themselves into the top
echelons of major trade unions such as the National Union of Mineworkers as
well as many of the left-wing groups and parties. I thought of myself as
someone who could pretend to be left-wing but in fact was working for the
government, motivated by bitterness, ambition or extreme reactionary faith
brought on by resentment of their parents. But then I thought I wouldn’t really
have made a good spy because the government agents always presented themselves
as humour-less ideologues who slithered their way to the top of the union or
the party They didn’t suddenly run away from demonstrations like I did,
throwing their placard in the gutter or sit at the back at meetings absent-mindedly
making strange hooting noises.

The
main activity of the group was running a bookstall every Saturday morning in
Great Homer Street Market, better known as Paddy’s Market, which was maybe three-quarters
of a mile from Valley Road. The neighbourhood had until recently been a network
of terraced streets radiating from a mile-long road on which there had been an
astounding variety of shops — butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers, bakers,
household equipment, clothing, confectionery, tobacco and sweet shops, a
number of bicycle shops, a herbalist, a local department store called Sturlas,
a Woolworth’s and a cinema. All this had been demolished a few years before,
and the former shops and houses replaced with a number of bleak tower blocks
and a shopping precinct of extraordinary tawdriness and such flimsy construction
that it looked as if it had been made out of the paper the architects had done
their optimistic drawings on.

The
weekend open-air market was held behind this precinct and, though all trace of
the old area had been expunged, the former shoppers still came. In the Sherlock
Holmes mysteries I read, if there was an indeterminate brown-skinned character
he would inevitably be referred to as a ‘Lascar’. Paddy’s Market was full of
Lascars, seamen from boats moored in the river who had been coming to the
market for over a century to buy second-hand woollen clothes that they would
unravel and take back home with them, presumably to make into new garments.

‘Five shilly,
Johnny,’ the old women who ran the stalls would say to them as they haggled
over some moth-eaten jumper. ‘Five shilly, Johnny.’

‘Two shilly?’

‘Four shilly,
Johnny.’

‘Three shilly.’

And
once they had finished buying old overcoats and worn out socks the Lascars
could come to our stall and purchase copies of Lenin’s
What Is to Be Done?,
Karl
Marx’s
Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
or
Stalin’s
History of the CPSU.

The
stall itself had been made from an oak door that somebody had salvaged from a
building site and was incredibly heavy — it took four of us to carry it the
half-mile from the Simon Community hostel where it was stored. We didn’t know
anybody who had a car. However, once we had put it up, Liverpool being the sort
of place it was the stall did a reasonable amount of trade — better than some
of the others that only seemed to sell twisted wire, broken fish tanks and
rusted-up fuel pumps. There would always be some little old bloke in a flat cap
coming up to us and saying, ‘Ere, son, do you have Friedrich Engels’
The
Holy Family,
the critique of the Young Hegelians he wrote with Marx in
Paris in November 1844?’