Stalin Ate My Homework (33 page)

In
nearby Kirkby, another 1960s’ new town, the Labour council had built at great
cost an artificial ski slope. This would have been a dubious asset for the
community even if it had been done right, but somebody blundered and they built
it the wrong way round so that the slope ended right at the edge of the
brand-new M62 motorway If any of the community had ever used the slope they
would have hurtled straight into six lanes of speeding traffic.

A young teacher gave me a
lift home from Huyton. She was part of the campaign and had a Renault 4 with
the broom-handle gear change. Very excited to be mixing on equal terms with a
teacher, I was expounding confidently on my career plans. ‘Obviously,’ I said, ‘I’ll
get eight or nine 0-Levels, then I’ll go on to do three A-Levels, then study
philosophy at a major Oxford college before a career as the editor of a leading
news magazine such as
Time, Newsweek
or
Paris Match
— or I might
be a car designer.’

He
said, ‘Well, it’s nice to see somebody who’s got their career all planned out.’
And then he laughed at me! Nobody had ever laughed at me before — not that I
could remember, anyway I didn’t like it. It was a taste of what I did to others
like Mr Johnson, and it turned out that it felt surprisingly unpleasant. I
resolved never to let anybody do it to me again. We finished the journey in
frosty silence.

The Catholic Bishop of
Liverpool was sympathetic to the cause of peace in Vietnam, and at the urging
of Molly’s committee helped organise a mass to protest against the war. During
the service Molly was unsure what was going on, so when everybody got up and
approached the front she went with them. Which was how this atheist, Communist
Jew ended up taking holy communion in one of Britain’s major Catholic
cathedrals. Once the priest’s back was turned she spat out the wafer, the
literal body of Christ, into her hankie.

Unique amongst provincial
British cities, Liverpool possessed a United States consulate. It was in fact
the world’s first US consulate, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of
The
Scarlet Letter,
had once been consul here. In the 1960s it made an excellent
destination for demonstrators who didn’t want to travel all the way to London
to throw stones at a piece of US government property Soon there were enormous
anti-war demonstrations taking place in Liverpool most weekends, and Molly was
frequently in the poor consul’s office shouting at him. Often there were
thousands at the Pier Head but, as with all open-air events, timing was
crucial. When the Merseyside Peace in Vietnam organised one march for what
turned out to be a rainy weekday afternoon, so few people turned up that my
mother and the other organisers had a debate about whether to march or not. In
the end it was decided that the twelve or fifteen of us who were there would
walk in the gutter down to the Pier Head, escorted by a phalanx of scornful
policemen, not quite demonstrating but not quite walking either. I found this
a particularly excruciating experience. I had grown up going on demonstrations,
and as far back as I could remember they had mostly felt ridiculous and stupid.
The chanting, the folksinging, the empty, sloganising speeches all made me
squirm inside, and I was certain that girls were not impressed by a boy walking
in the gutter with a placard on a stick.

In 1968
the Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group gave their support to the secessionist
Biafran movement in Nigeria. I remember on a hot summer day walking down
Princes Road in Liverpool 8, a shabby but once elegant tree-lined street. Feeling
like frauds, we were the only white people amongst several hundred Africans,
all of us chanting, ‘We are Biafrans … (clearly not true in our case)’…
fighting for our freedom. With Ojukwo leading, we will con-quer.’ (No, they
didn’t.) I think we then changed sides and gave our support to the Nigerian
government.

I was
on a Vietnam demonstration in ‘68 or ‘69 when I noticed the rainbow flag of the
Woodcraft Folk flying above the throng. The Woodcraft Folk had embodied so much
of the ramblin’, folk singin’, knitted jumper-wearin’ kind of social-isin, but
on going closer I saw that many of those marching under their banner were
wearing leather gimp masks, fluorescent leotards or rubber ballerina outfits
and were dancing about in a very sensuous way blowing whistles and shaking
maracas. Perhaps here was a sign that the socialist left was finally getting
more in touch with the spirit of the age. It seemed that the Woodcraft Folk had
loosened up quite a lot since my time and I regretted letting my membership
lapse until I realised what had happened. The gay movement had stolen the
Woodcraft Folk’s flag, the rainbow banner, and were now claiming it as their
own.

This
demonstration at the Pier Head ended with the traditional occupying of the US
consulate. Nigel Morley Preston Jones came up to me and said, ‘Man … you
should come with us on this Vietnam demo in London in May. We’ve got like paint
bombs and I’ve got marbles to roll under the police horses and there’s going to
be all kinds of trouble.’ Unfortunately Molly was standing next to me when he
told me this and she wouldn’t let me go despite all my pleading, and so I
missed out on the biggest riot in post-war Britain — the famous Grosvenor
Square demo of ‘68. Nigel told me afterwards that it had been brilliant,
though he hadn’t used his marbles because he found he didn’t want to hurt the
horses.

Molly
did finally let me go on the one in October 1968, which was very tame. Tariq
Ali, a student radical and former President of the Oxford Union, was accused by
many on the left of betraying the cause because he had agreed with the authorities
to avoid Grosvenor Square this time. So there wasn’t much violence but I did
manage to get caught up in a brief outbreak of fighting when I attached myself
to a breakaway group of anarchists who were attempting to storm the square,
throwing themselves against the police lines. Breathless, I found myself
exhilarated by the violence. The charging, then the running away, the shouting
and the drama, the thrill of seeing people being taken away in ambulances,
their heads dripping with blood, the self-righteousness you felt, were all
fantastic. Up until that point I hadn’t understood the Mod kids at school who
got caught up in football riots, but now I could totally see what they were
getting out of it. And you could tell that the police were having as good a
time as we were — after all, they were young men too and they wanted to have a
fight as much as we did.

For many people 1968 was a
year of upheavals, highs and lows, tremendous excitement and catastrophic
disillusionment. For me one of the most shocking things was to find out that I
had only passed four O-Levels: a low Grade Three in English lit and art and a
lousy Grade Four in history and English language. More than anything else, I
was astounded to get only a Grade Eight, a calamitous fail, in French.

It had
always been a core belief in our family that the Sayles were really good at
foreign languages. So confident was I in my natural linguistic ability that for
five years I had paid hardly any attention in French classes — I refused to
hand in any homework and as the exam grew nearer did no revision, instead
relying on my genetic inheritance to see me through. It was only when I was met
with complete incomprehension during the oral part of the exam that I began to
suspect that things were not going to go well.
‘Quoi?’
the examiners
kept asking me with puzzled expressions on their faces and
‘Je ne comprends
pas.’
I, on the other hand, thought I was eloquently and fluently conveying
complex ideas of political philosophy in perfect, slightly Marseilles-accented
French.

When
the results came through the door they confirmed that this idea of our
polyglotism had been a collective delusion. After that shock, when I thought
back to our overseas holidays there arose several uncomfortable and
long-suppressed memories of foreigners staring in stunned bafflement at one or
both of my parents as they talked at them. Now those incidents began to make
sense. The more I reflected on it the more memories surfaced of perplexing
incidents that had happened abroad which were now understandable — why, for
example, we were served boiled cod in Stuttgart when we thought we were getting
an ice cream. I began to suspect that Joe, rather than being fluent in any
foreign language, got others to understand him and do what he wanted simply out
of sheer niceness, while people did what my mother wished because they were
frightened of her.

It was during the 1967 NUR
AGM which was held in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands that I resolved never
to go on holiday with my parents ever again. Me, Molly, Joe and Bruno had been
due to stay in a caravan in the surrounding hills for two weeks. After about
five days I had demanded to be allowed to go home. The caravan was like our
boat except that at least on a canal cruise the landscape changed, whereas
outside the steamed-up window of the caravan there remained day after day the
same glowering, alien and unsettling pine forest. The city of Inverness was on a
broad flat river and surrounded by a huge amount of more wooded nothingness. It
was disconcerting to be in a place that was musty, cold and wet but where you
still were continually bitten by insects. We were given the usual privilege
passes for entry to all council-run facilities, but as far as I can remember
there was nothing that I wanted in Inverness even at half price. One memory I
have is that up in the wooded secret hills we visited some people who were
painting hundreds of plaster figures of Mickey Mouse by hand in a long shed.
That was it for me, I said, ‘I can’t take any more of this.’

The
journey from the Highlands took the whole evening and night and it was just
before dawn the next day when we crawled into Lime Street Station. The buses
hadn’t yet begun running, so I walked all the way from town to Anfield through
early morning streets slick with rain.

To have
a whole house to myself brought a tremendous sense of liberation. For seven
days I lived on small tins of chicken in jelly, Fray Bentos pies where you cut
the top off the tin and then cooked it in the oven so the crust rose and
packets of Vesta Chop Suey where you fried a curly little crispy thing to put
on top of your meal. In my mind I watched myself doing these things and thought
I saw a sophisticated and independent young man.

One
night some friends of mine and Cliff’s from the sixth form came back to my
empty house with some girls. While they were upstairs I found myself sitting in
the living room frustrated that I didn’t have a girlfriend. Turning on the TV,
I came in about a third of the way through the most extraordinary film I had
ever seen. The movie was shot in jagged black and white, and in the first scene
I saw there were girls in black leather biker jackets who had boys’ haircuts
and they were menacing a more feminine woman who was tied up to a bed in a
motel and the biker women were smoking marijuana, in the fifties! The tale was
of a big fat corrupt sweaty policeman in a neon-lit city that looked like
Venice but without any canals. Dennis Weaver from the cowboy series
Gunsmoke
kept running into the seedy motel where the boyish girls were tormenting
the woman and smoking the joints, shouting, ‘It stinks in hayah!’ Charlton
Heston was pretending to be a Mexican and Marlene Dietrich played a fortune
teller. Even when it finished I didn’t know what it was I had seen, and it was
years before I realised that I had watched two-thirds of Orson Welles’
A
Touch of Evil.
All I knew right there and then was that I wanted a leather
jacket like those bad girls and I wanted to smoke marijuana.

In ‘68 Molly and Joe had
booked themselves a cruise on a Russian ship named after Lenin’s wife, the
Krupskaya.
The Soviet Union possessed a whole fleet of these boats, enormous white
vessels that cruised the Baltic and the Black Sea calling in at various ports
of the Eastern Bloc, from where Western tourists would be shown the wonders of
the Soviet world. Then they were whisked back to their ship for running buffets
that always featured a huge glazed salmon as their centrepiece and displays of
folk dancing in the evening. While I, on the eve of my sixteenth birthday,
planned to travel to a city that only three months before had been rocked by
some of the most violent riots in its history during which several people had
been killed, where there had been massive factory occupations, the seizure of
universities by students and an unofficial general strike involving eleven
million workers which had succeeded in bringing down the government. You could
never tell with my parents what they would object to — especially Molly Though
Molly wouldn’t let me go on the May Vietnam demo she did, without any argument,
allow me to travel to Paris, abroad alone for the first time in my life. She
didn’t even express mild concern about me travelling to a city where the riot
police were still attacking people months after the main event, whereas a few
weeks before when she found out I had been eating chips from the chip shop up
the road from school rather than a nutritious lunch she started screaming that
I was going to give myself stomach cancer and tearfully begged me to stop.