Stalin Ate My Homework (32 page)

Even
more exciting than the pubs, but more intimidating too, were the shebeens, the
after-hours clubs that everybody decamped to at 10.30. All these clubs were run
by Liverpool’s various immigrant communities. We had among others the Chinese
Nationalist Seamen’s Club, the Niger Club, the Ghanaian Club and our favourite,
the Somali Club in Upper Parliament Street, which had a restaurant upstairs
that served a yellow curry that you could never get out of your clothes if you
spilt it. The club was downstairs in the basement; they played reggae music at
a time when it was unknown outside the ghetto and sold bottled beer from a
rickety bar.

Oddly,
if you were white you had no trouble getting into any of these shebeens, but if
you came from one of the other immigrant communities it was impossible. If you
were from Jamaica you couldn’t get into the Yoruba, if you were Somali they
wouldn’t let you into the Niger, and vice versa. And they weren’t that keen on
letting me into anywhere. It wasn’t that I was under-age — nobody ever
commented on that — but there was just something about me, some aura which
emanated from my personality that got on the nerves of door people. However,
early one evening I had a spot of luck. I had managed to get into the Somali
because it was almost empty, when suddenly the phone behind the bar rang. The
owner came out to announce that the call had been from the police, informing
them that there was going to be a raid in ten minutes. Some people left right
away, but for those of us who remained they dragged out a box covered in dust
and proceeded to give everybody membership cards which looked like they had
been printed in the nineteenth century and which we all signed.

The
next time I went to the Somali the man on the door stopped me, so I said, ‘But
you have to let me in. I’m a member.’

‘What
do you mean you’re a member?’ he asked incredulously.

I
pulled out my membership card and showed it to him. ‘I’ve never seen one of
those before,’ he said, and waved me in with a pained expression on his face.

One
other place was the Gladray Club, which charged a shilling whenever there was
a stripper on. It was always full of uniforms, postmen in uniform, busmen in
uniform, policemen in uniform and sixth-formers from the Liverpool Institute in
uniform — but they would never let me in, even for a shilling.

Apart from introducing me to
pubs and African shebeens the other great thing about the Marxist-Leninist
Group was the theory study classes which were held once or twice a week. Unlike
the policy of the old CP, members of the MMLG were encouraged to study the
sacred texts themselves rather than have them interpreted by a crotchety
Anglo-Indian and the gnomic statements of a French cartoon dog. Though, under
the influence of the Red Guards, the rest of the Chinese economy was collapsing
into chaos the country was still managing to produce huge numbers of the
Marxist classics which they then sold around the world at a subsidised price.
These books were rather elegant in a utilitarian way: a uniform edition with a
cream-coloured, thick paper cover and a slightly blurry old-fashioned typeface.
It was Ian who led these discussions, and they followed a pattern of study
which had existed since the first editions of Marx had appeared and working
people all over the industrialised world had seized them and tried to prise
open their meaning in rooms above pubs, front parlours and Mechanics’
Institutes. The group ploughed through
The Communist Manifesto, Wages,
Prices and Profits
and Stalin’s
History of the CPSU
at the speed of
the slowest and dimmest-witted member of the group, which was usually me.

For a
bit of light relief we would sometimes perform ‘The Great Money Trick’ from
Robert Tressell’s novel
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
This book,
first published in 1914, is widely regarded as a classic of British
working-class literature. It is based on Tressell’s experiences of the
building trade in which he worked and the poverty, exploitation and terror of
the workhouse he found there. Tressell died the year before the book was
published and was buried in Walton churchyard next to our school.

In the
chapter entitled ‘The Great Money Trick’ the hero, Frank Owen, organises a
mock-up of capitalism with his work-mates, using slices of bread as raw
materials and knives as machinery Owen ‘employs’ his workmates to cut up the
bread to illustrate that the employer — who does not work — generates personal
wealth while the workers effectively remain no better off than when they began,
forever swapping coins back and forth for food and wages. This is Tressell’s
practical way of illustrating the Marxist theory of surplus value, which in the
capitalist system is generated by labour. We would endlessly cut up bits of
bread and then pretend that we understood the theory of surplus value, though
really it was no clearer now than it had been before. But it did make a change
from Marx’s argumentative, dense and grumpy writing.

After
attending those study groups for something like a year a remarkable thing
happened. The way in which we were taught history at school presented the past
in one of two ways. Either it was rendered as an endless list of anglocentric
facts about seed drills, Bessemer converters, steam-driven lathes and the
Treaty of Potsdam, or we were fed the idea that the world changed, moved from
stage to stage simply because various powerful or visionary personalities such
as Abraham Lincoln, Henry VIII or Julius Caesar decided to do things and everybody
went along with it because they made really convincing speeches. That and the
notion that groups of people fought each other simply because they didn’t get
on. So the English Civil War was just an argument between two groups of people
with different opinions about whether frilly shirts looked good, and the
industrial revolution happened first in Britain because we were cleverer than
everybody else and had a lot of coal. I had always struggled with this
interpretation that the past was random and incoherent, that after Britain
enthusiastically pursued slavery for a couple of hundred years Wilberforce
came along and pointed out that it wasn’t nice and everybody went, ‘Oh, blimey
you’re right!’ and stopped it except in the Southern States of the USA where
they were confused because the sun was hot and they talked funny.

To me
history as taught at school was like all those memories of galleries, castles
and historic monuments that I didn’t have. There was the same sense that if
there was only some matrix, some philosophical framework to which I could
attach all these facts then they would all make sense and they would all stay
with me. And then halfway through Marx’s
Wages, Prices and Profits
I
suddenly thought to myself, ‘Fuck me! This shit is actually true.’

Nobody
was more surprised than me at this unexpected turn of events. Up until those
study groups I had been like some Ulster Protestant born and brought up on the
Shankhill Road whose faith is a matter of geography and tribalism. Then one day
God appears to him and tells him that actually, yes, as it happens the Pope is
the Anti-christ, Glasgow Rangers are the greatest football team in the world and
the best way to worship Him, God, is to march about the streets wearing a
bowler hat, holding a rolled-up umbrella and riding a white horse up and down
the front at Southport on 12 July.

Though
I hadn’t seen it clearly until that moment, the truth was that like the
Orangeman or the Sunni Muslim or the Southern Baptist I had been born into my
faith. I had been brought up knowing nothing else, and the people I responded
to broadly believed the same things that I did. The only difference was that
what I believed, what my parents believed, appeared to be demonstrably correct.
Once you understood Marx all the apparent chaos of human existence resolved
itself into a coherent and comprehensive pattern. People fought not because
they differed about how to wear a shirt but because they represented economic
classes whose interests conflicted. The Cavaliers were landed aristocrats and
their allies who wanted to hang on to a way of life being superseded by
Cromwell’s merchant class. Slavery was abolished not out of some idea of ‘niceness’
in the Northern states but because the industrial factory owners of Chicago and
Detroit wanted the blacks to work in their factories, to be ‘wage slaves’
rather than actual slaves, though often the improvement in their physical
conditions was marginal. The British Empire wasn’t some project designed to
bring enlightenment to ignorant savages, but rather a brutal and rapacious
exploitation of peoples who were often more humane than us.

You can
imagine, armed with this philosophy, how full of myself I now became. Even when
I hadn’t had the secret of human history in my grasp I had been a mouthy little
bastard in class. Now I was unstoppable.

When Joe was issued with
his new British Rail, white-heat-of-technology-style uniform he put it on at
home for us to see. Gone were the serviceable, dark blue serge trousers, peaked
cap of timeless design, waistcoat and jacket with brass buttons. In their place
he was now going to be forced to wear a short bumfreezer jacket made of some
sort of polyester that was more commonly used to line the engine compartments
of sports cars, with red piping down the sides and a chunky orange zipper up
the front. On his head was perched a cylindrical cap with a short peak and ear
flaps, also edged in red piping, that could be folded down in cold weather, and
for his sixty-one-year-old legs they had given him bell-bottomed trousers. He
looked like a very sad and tired Thunderbird puppet.

Since
Joe had also been provided with a short cape to replace his long black BR
overcoat with shiny brass buttons down the front I took the coat and began
wearing it when I went out. It had the look of an old RAF overcoat, which was
almost a uniform for hippies, but I gave it my own twist by tying the waist
with string. I got a lot of admiring glances from the other hippies in O’Connor’s
for that coat. At work Joe continued to make mistakes, to confuse or forget
things, but the men at Bids ton always managed to cover these mistakes up or
blame somebody else. In fact, if you didn’t know, you couldn’t spot that there
was anything wrong with my father. Those who did know, me and Molly, were in a
permanent state of manic watchfulness and inclined to see examples of memory
loss and confusion where there was only normal hesitation and then become
hysterical. Fearing a return of that terrifying thing, emotion, I’d go running
out of the house looking for any kind of distraction, while my mother’s
response was to become a thorn in the side of US imperialism.

The
Vietnam War, a war we weren’t actually fighting in, was to us in the
hermetically sealed world of the British left the defining cause of the period,
prompting the first large-scale riots on the British mainland since the war and
inspiring the plays of Barry Blancmange. Everybody considered it a more or less
black and white example of a mighty imperial power (the United States)
attempting to crush with brutal military force the aspirations of a small
nation (Vietnam) . Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister, had managed
despite enormous pressure from the United States to keep Britain out of the
conflict but that didn’t earn him many points from the left.

In 1966
Molly had gone down to London to attend a Women’s Day ‘Peace’ conference. While
there she became interested in the Vietnamese struggle for independence and on
her return joined a group called Merseyside Peace in Vietnam. That ‘Peace’ word
is there again because the Communist Party line at the time was to call for
peace, rather than victory for the insurgent Vietcong and the North Vietnamese
which is what everybody else wanted. Eventually Molly became secretary of
Merseyside Medical Aid for Vietnam, a group that wasn’t closely tied to the
party One of the first big campaigns Molly and her group organised, and which I
reluctantly helped out with, was a giant petition-signing campaign. With a
crowd of others I went from door to door in Huyton, collecting signatures from
Harold Wilson’s Liverpool constituents urging him to do a lot more to bring the
Vietnam War to an end.

It was
the first time I had been anywhere like Huyton, one of the new towns where the
working classes of inner city Liverpool were meant to find fulfilment under the
flat, sarcastic Lancashire skies. The rows and rows of raw new tenement
buildings reminded me of the hen sheds at the Ovaltine Farm outside Abbot’s
Langley that I used to see from the window of the London train. They were
buildings that represented an idea, a false dream, an illusion, rather than
something that anybody or anything was truly supposed to live in.