Stalin Ate My Homework (36 page)

One of
the artists Molly became friendly with was a sculptor called Arthur Dooley It’s
hard to imagine that Arthur could have become a celebrity in any other age than
the 1960s. This was an era when churches had forgotten what their purpose was
so when new ones were occasionally built they resembled tortured collisions of
blockhouse and circus tent or Wimpy Bar and airport control tower. Arthur
specialised in figures of Christ, Joseph or Mary that were commissioned to
stick on the outside. A pudding-faced, garrulous man with a thick Scouse accent
he was a former apprentice at Cammel Lairds shipyard who managed to somehow
combine being both a devout Catholic and a committed Communist. Unlike the
deformed structures in which his work was displayed Arthur’s sculptures —
tortured, skeletal figures rendered in fibreglass, rags and scrap metal — were
eloquent and powerful works of art. Bizarrely Arthur was also a fixture on the
TV chat show circuit, a regular guest on ‘Parkinson’ and celebrities, most
notably the drag artist Danny La Rue, were collectors of his work, though its
hard to know what Danny La Rue did with a seven foot high scrap metal Jesus.

That’s
who Molly was mixing with now, members of the Vietcong and people off the telly
Arthur Dooley’s studio was in a former pub in the village of Woolton on the
edge of Liverpool. Together he and Molly organised an art exhibition in support
of Medical Aid for Vietnam. I sold one of my pictures for ten shillings and
immediately lost the cheque.

Everybody was in a state
of high excitement when the United States landed a man on the surface of the
moon. The next day I told my class-mates that though they might have stayed up
all night to watch the TV coverage I’d gone to bed early I said that everyone I
knew agreed with Gil Scott Heron of the Last Poets. As far as heroin-addicted
black men from the ghetto like me and Gil were concerned, the lunar landings
were just ‘Whitey on the Moon’. Today the staff would have had a big case
conference about me and afterwards I would have been booked twice weekly
sessions with the school psychologist and proscribed heavy doses of some
stultifying drug but then they conspired against me, which only served to
increase the messianic sense of my own significance. Of all the pupils in the
sixth form I was the only one who wasn’t made a school prefect. Then a few
weeks after the beginning of term the headmaster announced at assembly that
the school was going to have a student council with a representative drawn from
each year. Clearly this institution would have as much power as the North
Korean parliament, but still my classmates chose me as their representative.
There was a pause of a day or two while the votes were counted; then the word
came back that our class had to hold the election again. Again they voted and
again they picked me. When their choice was rejected once more my classmates
got the idea and elected somebody else. I think if the school had only reached
out to me at that crucial point, then like a trade union firebrand given a life
peerage or a troublesome journalist awarded a well-paid seat on the board of
an arts organisation they might have been able to buy me off and make me their
most enthusiastic advocate out of gratitude. Instead they drove me further into
the arms of rebellion.

Yet
despite, or perhaps because of, the persecution by the school I considered this
a very happy time. Me and my mates would play football every lunchtime in
Walton Hall Park over the road from school, and sometimes we would go to one of
the pubs on Rice Lane in Walton and get mildly sozzled. I would spend all my
lunch money on drink, then go to the cloakroom where the little kids ate their
packed lunches and extort them into giving me one of their sandwiches. There
seemed no greater taste in the world than somebody else’s sandwich when
slightly drunk.

In
spite of getting a lot of detentions I loved being in the sixth form. We sat
not at desks like schoolchildren but in chairs with little swivel tables like
students probably had.

The
subject I was particularly drawn to was English. This was because, like a
paranoid schizophrenic who thinks that the TV newsreaders are addressing him
directly, the syllabus seemed to have been devised by the Oxford and Cambridge
examination board with the sole purpose of highlighting crucial aspects of my
life. The Dickens novel we were studying was
Hard Times,
set in a
fictionalised version of nearby Preston, it concerned the terrible working
conditions of industrial towns — conditions that had given rise to the
theories of Marx and Engels. The Shakespeare play was
Coriolanus,
at the
heart of which is the relationship between an overpowering mother and her son,
allied to a debate over whether ‘the plebeians’, have the right to govern
themselves or if they can only be ruled by a stern and cruel leader.

But it
was
Animal Farm
that affected me the most. I felt like I had a personal
relationship with George Orwell; over the years he had been condemned in our
house with great bitterness, as if he was some errant relative who had stolen
the family silver and run off to Australia. Now I was being forced to read one
of his books, and this book really, truly was all about me and my family and
the thing that we believed in.

While
my classmates struggled, I was aware of exactly who all the characters
represented. The pig Napoleon represents Stalin, and Snowball, Napoleon’s rival
and original leader after the farmer is thrown out, was clearly Trotsky The
horses Boxer and Clover are the honest proletariat. The vicious puppies are the
KGB. Moses the raven, with his tales of a place in the sky called Sugarcandy
Mountain, symbolises the Russian Orthodox Church and so on. I half expected a
delegation of trade union mice to come trooping through at some point with a
little mouse translator, to be given presents and made honorary pigs at lavish
banquets.

Still,
it was terribly hard to take in this fairytale allegory of the corruption and
cruelty that descended on Russia in the two decades after the Bolshevik
revolution.

If it
had been written as a conventional novel I might have been able to dismiss it,
but written like this it seemed undeniably true. It was both disturbing and
moving. I thrilled to the revolution when the animals overthrow the cruel
farmer, and I was upset as I had never been before when towards the end the
brave horse Boxer tries at the last minute to break out of the van taking him
to the knacker’s yard.

Animal
Farm
had such an effect on me that I had to
construct a way of coping. I scoured the book to find a character I could
identify with, a figure who would represent some kind of personal salvation for
me, the animal I would be in that situation — and I found it in the cat. The
cat represents what Marx called the
Lumpenproletariat,
by which he
meant, generally speaking, the criminal classes. The criminal classes broadly
share with the working-class their social attitudes, their accents and of
course their neighbourhoods, but they differ in their motivation. While the
worker slaves to earn an honest living, the
Lumpenproletariat
merely
cares about itself. It is only at the last minute that the cat joins in the
revolution, sinking her claws into Mr Jones the farmer. Later on she is seen
telling the birds that they are all comrades now and it’s perfectly safe for
them to land on her paw. I understood that in
Animal Farm
she
personifies those who insincerely adhere to ideology for personal gain, but I
hoped that perhaps I could be a slightly better version of the cat. I was
telling myself that whatever happened I would make sure I looked after me
first, that I would always hold some secret part of myself back from politics.

But
there was another lesson I took from the novel and its author. When I mentioned
to Molly how I felt it was a great book and I was really grateful we were doing
it for ‘A’ Level she just kept shouting ‘Orwell’s a bastard! Orwell’s a
bastard!’ which typified not just her opinion but how most on the left regarded
any art form. Like fundamentalist Christians who have to believe that every
word of the Bible is true and those holy words were written by people who had
no human foibles, so it was with Marxists like my mother. They only wanted to
listen to messages that confirmed the things they already believed in written
by authors who were ideologically pure. From then on I was eager to listen to
all the competing voices I could get my hands on, even though such liberality
was disapproved of in our house. While I could leave pornography or alcohol
lying around my bedroom I was forced to hide my copy of
Brideshead Revisited
in a secret compartment at the back of the wardrobe.

This
happy year at school began to come crashing down thanks to my nemesis ‘the Abe’,
Bill Abrahams, the Jewish, cricket-loving, Everton-supporting, Communist maths
teacher. He had not taken us for maths since the first year, but he continued
to dislike me and took every opportunity to put me in detention if I was caught
misbehaving. I quite liked having a nemesis: it played into my sense of me
being an especially dangerous person whose ideas, style of dress and manner
were more than the straight world could take.

Then it
all went a bit too far. At Alsop, in another imitation of a public school, we had
a ‘tuck shop’ — a little cupboard-sized place where pupils could buy chocolate,
drinks and biscuits at break-time. I was in the queue one day when the Abe came
in and started yelling, accusing me of being rowdy I was particularly agitated
by this because for once he was wrong and I was just standing there quietly So
we argued, and at some point he shoved me, so I punched him and we ended up
having a bit of a tussle — nothing too much, but as soon as I got away from him
I legged it home without waiting to be sent and told my parents what had
happened. It was Joe who went down to Alsop that same day to talk to Bill Abrahams,
seeing as they’d known each other since the 1930s. I was worried that he wouldn’t
be up to it but between them a perfectly sensible deal was worked out, indeed
considering I’d hit a teacher what Joe achieved was pretty remarkable. The only
condition was that I wasn’t allowed back until I’d written a letter of apology
to Mr Abrahams. I did it grudgingly but I never accepted that I’d done anything
wrong and I never really appreciated how much my dad had done for me and how
much the negotiation had taken out of him.

I got
into more and more trouble with the teachers and at the end of the school year
the headmaster called me into his office which always smelled of furniture
polish and sitting behind his desk in the dusty gown that made him look like a
third rate wizard, he told me not to bother coming back in September. I couldn’t
believe it, I’d got away with so much for so long but now my smart arse ways
had got me expelled from school! I realised with a thumping heart that without
some kind of academic qualifications I couldn’t get to college and if I didn’t
get to college I could imagine myself at the age of sixty, still living with
Molly and staying in on a Saturday night to do her hair.

Then my girlfriend left me
for an anarchist. I didn’t really blame her — I was a useless boyfriend. In
theory the idea of me having a girlfriend held tremendous appeal — someone who
by law had to keep me company whenever loneliness and panic crept over me.
After that, though, I was pretty much out of ideas.

My
problems over what you were actually supposed do (did you always give flowers
after sex?) were merely a much more complicated version of the difficulties I
had had over the years with best friends such as Tubby Dowling and Peter
Pemberton. At least in Mao’s China young people were too busy destroying
factories, stopping the traffic and beating their teachers to death to concern
themselves with the bewildering complexity of human sexual relations.