Stalin Ate My Homework (38 page)

Suddenly over the summer,
after being expelled from school, I was thrown into a scramble of applying for
college places long after everybody else had put in their bid. It turned out
that the London School of Economics wasn’t impressed by four poor 0-Level
results, but many nursing schools and teacher training colleges also didn’t
want me. A few months earlier I thought I had a dazzling number of options, but
now my future had narrowed to a tiny dot. My exam results told me university
wasn’t a choice open to me, despite my previous delusions I wasn’t a genius at
languages, and I knew I didn’t have what it took to go to drama school. I was
still convinced that I was a brilliant performer, but all the same couldn’t
imagine myself attending classes in fencing, ballet dancing and mime. In order
to brighten the empty summer months, while rejection letters fluttered daily on
to the doormat, I decided to repeat the wildly unsuccessful hitch-hiking
holiday experiment of the year before — except this time I planned to go to the
Netherlands since I was still technically banned from France.

My aim
was to go and stay with Cliff’s brother Glen, who had moved to London to work
in an advertising agency, then after a few days take a ferry to Ostend and from
there travel to Amsterdam. While I was in London my intention was also to pay a
visit to Julie, the cute girl from Ealing I had met in Bulgaria, I thought it
might be a good idea to have a girlfriend in London for when I went to college
there.

I
thought I’d really got my look together. Apart from the lesbians in
Touch of
Evil
I had also been very impressed by the Buñuel film
Belle de Jour,
in
which Catherine Deneuve plays a woman named Séverine who decides to spend her
days as a prostitute while her husband is at work. Séverine becomes involved
with a young gangster, Marcel, who ends up shooting her husband before being
shot himself. Throughout the film Marcel is dressed totally in black, wearing a
long leather overcoat that I thought looked totally ace and carrying a stick
that had a knife in it, which also was totally cool. While a whole generation
of pretentious teenage boys became obsessed with Catherine Deneuve, that’s what
I took from the film.

My
other influence was a guy called Zbigniew Cybulski, sometimes referred to as
the Polish James Dean. He had starred in Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 film
Ashes and
Diamonds,
completing the trilogy
A Generation
and
Kanal,
all
three of which I had seen either on the TV or at Unity Theatre. Cybulski wore
these really stylish tinted sunglasses all the time. I had read somewhere that
they were his own — he had to wear them because he had fought in the Warsaw
Uprising, the three-month-long insurrection against the Nazis, when the
resistance used the sewers to move about in (the subject of
Kanal)
so he
couldn’t now take bright light. Which, even if it wasn’t true, was a brilliant
excuse to wear shades after dark. In
Ashes and Diamonds
Cybulski not
only wore cool sunglasses but also got to carry a German 9mm MP 38 sub-machine
gun around all the time.

So this
was me on my way to London. Long black hair parted in the middle, beard with
the middle shaved out of it to make it look a bit different, dark glasses,
black leather biker’s jacket with lots of zips that my mum had bought me in a
shop in Southport, black leather gloves and black trousers. By tucking them
into my trousers I was able to disguise the different lengths of the legs and
the weird pouchy bits around the thighs tucked into sheepskin-lined black
motorcycle boots. It was a very hot summer, 1969.

When Julie opened the door
of their large semi-detached house she was more beautiful than I remembered,
with the air of being a proper grown-up rather than the pretend one that I was.
That she should look so lovely was not a good start to the evening, because
unfortunately not only did I dress like a man who had spent three months in the
Warsaw sewers but I had begun to act like one too. Julie and her mother treated
me with great kindness and had even invited over some other young people to
provide entertainment, but throughout dinner and afterwards I remained silent
for long periods, staring at the floor, then uttered a single harsh laugh or
said something weird like ‘Clown time is over, man.’ The truth was that I was
nervous and feeling terribly out of my depth. I wanted Julie to be my
girlfriend but she seemed in a such a different league — not just glamorous but
metropolitan too. For the whole night I behaved abominably I imagine that those
nice young teenagers cannot have had a more excruciating evening in all their
young lives.

As I
lay in my bed in their spare room I heard Julie and her mum talking about me on
the landing outside. ‘He’s awful,’ her mum said. ‘He’s got a chip on his
shoulder about something.’ I shrivelled like a punctured balloon, ashamed at
hearing the pain and confusion in their voices and realising the chaos I had
caused. Then I inflated with pride for exactly the same reason.

The next morning I slunk
away and, collecting my bedroll from Glen’s flat, caught the train down to
Folkestone and from there took the four-hour ferry trip to Ostend.

I can
remember hanging around at the Belgian seaside in the late summer sunshine,
which all seemed so familiar from my childhood holidays. The flags of all the
nations of Europe flapped in the breeze, pedal cars filled with laughing
families trundled up and down the esplanade and the outside terraces of bars
advertising their English beers teemed with holidaymakers. And I thought about
how much I hated being by myself and yet I seemed to find myself over and over
again in some remote foreign spot feeling awful.

With
this thought in mind I caught the train to Amsterdam — I don’t think I even
bothered going through the masquerade of hitching, so despondent did I feel. My
parents had dug out the address of their old friends Ank and Ayli, and once in
the city I walked to where I thought they lived. Except that I didn’t do
anything as sensible as buy a street map or ask anybody if this was the right
place and I don’t think we’d actually told them I was coming either. The result
was that late at night I found myself, a man with long hair and a beard dressed
entirely in black with a bedroll over his shoulder, hammering on a beautifully
polished wooden door set with bevelled glass windows in an Amsterdam suburb.
Through the glass, inside the house, I could see shapes moving about and heard
high-pitched frightened voices whispering to each other as I banged over and
over on what was almost certainly the wrong door.

After a
while I gave up and went back into the centre of town. Somehow I found my way
to Club Paradiso, a famous hippy counter-culture place inside an old church.
Typically for Holland, Paradiso had been opened by the city authorities, was
publicly subsidised, and the sale and consumption of dope and acid were
allowed. Outside, the building was dark and creepy, and in some ways was even
worse inside. The only thing I found more unpleasant than being on my own was
being with hippies and listening to their endless talk, yet this too was
something which I seemed to find myself doing all the time. The self-pity and
sense of entitlement of these people repelled me — all their tales were either
about how they had taken advantage of somebody else or how they had been done
out of something that they felt was rightfully theirs. In a balcony overlooking
the stage area, with three large illuminated church windows behind me, I
bought some dope so strong that it left me drooling, shivering and sweating,
propped up against a wall throughout the night. In the morning I decided, even
quicker than the previous year, to cut my holiday short and go home.

Just
before I left I saw a shop selling flick-knives, which were illegal in the UK,
so with the last of my Dutch money I bought one and hid it inside my jacket. I
thought it one of the most lovely things I had ever seen. Its handle was inlaid
with bone and the blade, chromed stainless steel, sprang out from the side at
the click of a button. Suddenly there was a knife in your hand where there had
been nothing a split second before. Because of my knife I was very nervous as
the ferry approached the south coast of England, so I got chatting with some
random guy until we were through customs. I realised right there that I didn’t
have the nerve to be a criminal, so there was another career opportunity gone.

One unique contribution
Liverpool had made to the counterculture was a character I never encountered
anywhere else, and that was the Hard Hippy The Hard Hippy was somebody who had
the same qualities of self-pity and narcissism as the normal hippy but was also
capable of kicking your head in. During that long summer I sometimes used to
hang around a ramshackle art gallery in the centre of Liverpool where a Hard
Hippy used to hold court. He had long blond hair and his muscular torso was
only ever covered by faded denim dungarees as worn by US hillbilly farmers,
except that in his case he wore them with the legs cut off high up on his
bulging hairy thighs. Dotted around the gallery were various house plants that
ranged from fairly well through sickly to dead. One day the Hard Hippy was
discoursing to a group of us about how he was planning to name the child he was
having with his chick Fluoride when a mild-mannered guy in glasses who had been
wandering around looking at the terrible art on the walls inadvertently
interrupted the Hard Hippy’s monologue.

‘Er …
does anybody mind if I take a cutting from one of these plants?’

The
whole room fell into a nervous silence as the muscular blond stopped talking
and, sensing the change, the mild-mannered guy began to shift nervously from
foot to foot realising that he had made a bad mistake.

After
an uncomfortable thirty seconds during which we all fidgeted anxiously the Hard
Hippy finally said in a calm but icy voice, ‘I dunno, man. Why don’t you ask
the plant?’

‘What?’
said the visitor.

‘I
said, “Why don’t you like get on your knees and ask the plant if you can take a
cutting?” After all, it’s like you’re taking like one of its babies or
something, man.’

‘Erm …
OK, yes,’ said the mild-mannered man, and bending down to the ill-looking
spider plant he said to it, ‘Erm … hi. Erm, do you mind if I take a cutting
from one of your shoots?’

Nothing
happened.

‘What
did it say?’ asked the Hard Hippy.

‘It
doesn’t seem to mind.’

‘Well,
go ahead, then.’

With
trembling hands the visitor took a tiny sprig of the plant and quickly left.

‘Fucking
straights, man,’ the Hard Hippy said.

That summer really did
seem to go on for ever. Even Maoism had been suspended for the months of July
and August and on into early September, so there weren’t even any dull meetings
or screenings of
The East Is Red
to go to. Either side of my trip to
Holland I reverted to what I used to do, which was to wander about aimlessly
One day towards evening, just before my trip to Amsterdam, I was standing on
Everton Brow, a high ridge running north—south above a slope that curved down
to the Mersey a mile and a half away and which in the early nineteenth century
had been lined with substantial villas. In the late afternoon between where I
stood and the languid water there was virtually nothing but rubble, as if
farmers were being paid to cultivate fields and fields of broken bricks between
the occasional fifteen-storey slabs of vertical housing. The old
neighbourhoods, the narrow cobbled streets of terraced housing, the corner
shops, the wide boulevards of stores, the cinemas and pubs had been obliterated
as thoroughly as a Czech village that had resisted the Nazis. Here and there
the isolated stump of a building remained — a library with Arts and Crafts
detailing or a High Victorian pub — but these only served to emphasise the
desolation. From my vantage point the city was like somebody with a beautiful
smile who had had their teeth kicked in. All the buses had lost their
conductors and no longer carried the city’s coat of arms on the sides, but
rather an unattractive logo that appeared to have been designed as a class
project in a school for troubled children, and were now run by something called
‘Merseytravel’. It was as if an instruction had gone out from some centralised
office saying, ‘Make everything ugly’.