Stalin Ate My Homework (31 page)

‘No,
but we do have Engels’
The Condition of the Working Class in England in
1844.’

‘Naww,
I’ve already got that.’

‘Make a
lovely Christmas present for a family member.’

‘Eh, I
suppose you’re right there. Give us two copies then, son.’

Molly was not the most
domestic of mothers. When attempting to clean the house she deployed a great
deal of violence but to very little effect, moving the dirt around rather than
actually picking it up. She used to store the vacuum cleaner at the top of the
flight of stairs that led down to the cellar, and when she had finished using
it, knocking the furniture about and frightening the dog she would just open
the cellar door and throw the vacuum cleaner in so that it inevitably tumbled
down the wooden stairs. Quite soon, due to this rough treatment the cleaner
would stop working. Then it would be abandoned where it had fallen in the dark
cellar and Molly would buy another, which she would throw down the cellar
stairs like its predecessor. In time that cleaner would join its fallen
comrades until after a few years there was a large pile of broken vacuum
cleaners in our cellar with the one working cleaner lying on top.

Molly’s
biggest cleaning or recycling problem, though, was connected not with the
accumulated dirt or rotting kitchen waste but with the
Soviet Weekly.
This
was a Russian state-subsidised tabloid paper published in full colour which
was crammed full of propaganda about the Communist workers’ paradise. Lies
about industrial production and the grain harvest would be accompanied by
photos of smiling agricultural workers and industrial labourers, there were
editorials and articles ranting against the West, and there was always a big
spread on the latest African dictator being feted by Moscow. At some point in
the distant past Molly and Joe had agreed to take six of these things each week
and so they arrived every seven days, month after month, year after year,
thumping on to the mat each Wednesday, a tightly rolled log of six
Soviet
Weeklys,
like a slow ticking clock marking out the decades. From time to
time the head office in Moscow would send us a bill, stating we owed them first
fifty pounds, then a hundred pounds, then five hundred pounds, but they never
attempted to collect the money and they never stopped sending the
Soviet
Weeklys.

It
would have been all right if Molly hadn’t felt that, though we had stopped
reading them or even unwrapping them years ago, she couldn’t bear to throw them
out — she felt in some incoherent way that to do so would be a betrayal of the
international struggle for freedom and justice. So instead of putting them in
the bin she began to store them all over the house. Next to the front door was
a coat rack mounted on the wall, and Molly would often pick up the roll of
Soviet
Weeklys
as they came though the door and stuff them in the pocket of the
nearest coat. If you left your coat hanging there for a few weeks you would
find when you returned to it that every single pocket was stuffed with rolled
up newspapers. People who came to visit would frequently go away with their
coat or jacket feeling oddly heavy and bulky.

Finally,
after years of this, Molly wound herself up to cancel our subscription. But on
the very week she was planning to do it Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia,
smashing Dubcek’s Prague Spring, and she felt that the Russian government would
take it as a criticism of their actions if she stopped taking their publication
now. So they continued to arrive through our letterbox for years to come,
bouncing on to the lino in the hall until the very day when the Soviet system
itself collapsed.

The
only daily newspaper we had ever taken at 5
Valley Road was the
Daily
Worker,
the official organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain. While
other households read papers which indulged in salacious tales of vicars and
their misdeeds or bloodthirsty accounts of murders or showbusiness gossip or
investigative journalism or humorous parliamentary sketches, everything we read
had to be contorted to fit in with a document called
The British Road to
Socialism,
which was the programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain
and of the Young Communist League.

Organisationally,
the Communist Party was a theocratic organisation very much like the Catholic
Church. As with the Church of Rome the mass of worshippers were actively
discouraged from studying the sacred texts, in our case the works of Marx,
Engels and Lenin, themselves. Instead the interpretations of the holy books
were handed down to the party members from on high, after the line had been
decided, first in Moscow and then in London by the party’s theologians. For
many years the leading ‘theorist’ had been an Anglo-Indian called Rajani Palme
Dutt, whose many dull books resided in our front room. But for the ordinary
member or sympathiser the main way in which the party line was received was via
the
Daily Worker,
which did not make for the most thrilling read over
the breakfast table.

Because
it was supposed to be a daily paper rather than a theoretical journal the
Daily
Worker
was required to have some of the features of a more mass-market
publication. Most famous of all was their racing tipster, ‘Cayton’. In
1959
he
had spectacularly tipped the winner of the Grand National, Russian Hero, at
66—1 and over the years he generally came out well ahead of all the other
tipsters on more capitalistic newspapers. My parents held this up in some
vague way as being a triumph of Marxist-Leninist thought, without going into
the specifics too deeply The
Daily Worker
also had its own comic strip
entitled ‘The Adventures of Pif’. This cartoon featured a patched,
ideologically correct dog called Pif and a black and white cat called Hercules.
‘Pif’ was actually reprinted from the French Communist Party newspaper
L’Humanité,
and though his words were translated into English the characters that he
met, policemen, shopkeepers and so on, were unmistakably French in their dress.
I don’t know if ‘Pif’ was funny in his native language, but he sure as hell
wasn’t funny in English and frequently didn’t even make any kind of sense. As I
became fascinated by existentialism I sometimes wondered whether leading French
Communist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre hadn’t taken a turn at doing ‘Pif’,
so arcane did his adventures seem.

In 1966 the
Daily
Worker
was relaunched as the
Morning Star
in a supposedly more
accessible tabloid format, but the problems with content continued. ‘Pif’ was
still there, as was ‘Cayton’. One improvement that did occur, though it didn’t
appeal much to the old Stalinists, was that, because there were a number of
talented young people writing for the paper who were tuned in to the emerging
progressive music scene, the
Morning Star’s
coverage of gigs and albums
by groups such as the Incredible String Band, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis and
Soft Machine was often much better than that of the dedicated music papers.
This could sometimes lead to some incongruous juxtapositions, for instance the
review of a gig by Emerson, Lake and Palmer at the St Martin’s Lane Arts Lab,
describing their ‘freaky light show’, might appear next to Soviet Premier
Leonid Brezhnev’s latest pronouncement on the best grain harvest in the Urals
ever.

Another feature that
carried over from the
Daily Worker
was the ‘Fighting Fund’. Both papers
were always continually in financial difficulties. The
Morning Star,
like
its predecessor, carried little commercial advertising apart from Au Montmartre
and that boarding house where we used to stay in Belgium. Car makers and
manufacturers of expensive watches were not interested in the Communist market,
and the cover price did not even meet print and distribution costs. So every
day the paper ran its Star Fund appeal. The prominence of the Star Fund appeal
waxed and waned depending on how much trouble the paper was in. It told the
readers how much money they needed not to go under that month and how short
they were from achieving their goal. This always lent a slightly hysterical
tone to the front page, as if it was some dumped girlfriend who was constantly
threatening suicide.

All
those who were regular subscribers to the paper also knew that these threats
contained a large element of pretence, since we were certain that the
Morning
Star
would always, in the end, be rescued by the Soviet Union. Everyone was
convinced that the paper was massively supported by Moscow in that the
authorities there took bulk orders for which they had no conceivable use. I
imagined that somewhere in the vast expanse of the Ukraine there was a house
which in my mind’s eye had a front door just like ours, and that every week
twenty-four copies of the
Morning Star
would flop on to their doormat
and every week the mother would pick them up and stick them straight into the
pocket of a nearby overcoat.

Being old-school Communist
Party Cliff Cocker really disliked Ian Williams and my new Maoist mates, but
for me the more places I had to go, the more people I knew, the better. I found
that if I had time to myself, especially in the evenings, if I wasn’t drinking
with Sid and my classmates or at a meeting or seeing Cliff a terrible chasm of
panic opened up in my mind and I had to run around town until I found somebody
to talk to, somebody to distract me. Fortunately via the Marxist-Leninists I
had finally got to know the world of Liverpool’s radical pubs.

All the
bohemians, the artists, the poets and the left-wingers drank in three or four
boozers on the edge of the town centre. At night, the town itself was the
province of people who didn’t know who Friedrich Engels was and had never heard
of the Foreign Minister of China, Chou En-lai — clerks, Mods, rich Jewish kids,
businessmen, secretaries, nurses. After the pubs closed at 10.30 these people
went on to clubs such as the Mardi Gras where Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding
performed before they were stars — the Blue Angel, the Odd Spot and the Cavern.
But the people I mixed with stayed out of town at night. We drank in the
Philharmonic Hotel, a monument of Victorian exuberance with dark wood-panelled
walls, copper reliefs, Art Deco lights, a mosaic-covered floor and a bar with a
huge golden eagle watching over the drinkers. Alternatively we met up in the
Crack, which was the pub favoured by the art students and consisted of lots of
little rooms each with weird paintings on the walls.

O’Connor’s
was the druggiest pub. A former chapel with doors at each end, it allowed the
dealers to run out of one door when the police came through the other. And
finally there was the one favoured by the Marxist-Leninists, named the Grapes but
called Kavanagh’s by everyone. Wally, Dave, Ian and the rest drank in what was
effectively a corridor, though there were two snugs, with old murals on the
walls and unusual round tables supposedly taken from a sister ship of the
Titanic
and fireplaces which blazed with warmth in the winter. I would get the bus
into town and then walk up Renshaw Street to O’Connor’s. If there was nobody I
knew in O’Connor’s I would go to the Crack and then to the Philharmonic until I
found somebody I knew, and perhaps somebody who might buy me a drink if my
pocket money had run out.

All
these pubs, especially Kavanagh’s, were full of ‘characters’ — men with strange
quirks of behaviour which a lot of people found enchanting and bohemian but
whose manner I thought was contrived or self-conscious or just plain stupid.
There was one Irish guy who hung around with us. In Ireland this man had been a
member of a Communist/Nationalist group called Saor Eire and he was now on the
run after being involved in several fund-raising bank raids. He was trying to
keep his identity secret but everybody called him Irish John or alternatively ‘Irish
John Who’s Been Involved in All Those Bank Raids in Ireland’. He tried to pay
for his drinks with hundred-pound Irish banknotes, then was quickly arrested
and shipped back to Dublin. His real name was Simon.