Stalin Ate My Homework (8 page)

Years later I learned that
at the core of the Laterna Magika was something called ‘black-light theatre’, a
technique of illusion that takes advantage of an imperfection of the human eye
which means it cannot distinguish black on black. It was actors dressed in
suits of black moving against a black background who had made the objects
appear to fly through the air. The audience had the impression that they
possessed free will, but in reality they were being manipulated by unseen hands.

We also
didn’t know it then, but most of the items in the Czech pavilion, such as the
shoes and the furniture and the coffee pots, were only prototypes that were
never actually produced.

Back home in Liverpool I
began to get the sense that there was something up with our doctor, a neatly
dressed man with black hair and a moustache by the name of Cyril Taylor. On the
one hand we would make these huge trips right across town, from Anfield in the
north end of the city to Sefton Park in the south, to see him when there were
plenty of perfectly competent doctors on our side of Liverpool. But as soon as
we got to his surgery there seemed to be some indefinable tension in the air.
Travelling this far to see somebody usually meant that they were in the party,
yet once we were seated in his consulting room he always behaved as if there
was something funny about us, as if me and Molly were a pair of droll
characters in a play And from the way Molly talked about him on the bus home I
got the clear impression that there was some sort of black mark against our
doctor’s character, some quality in him that didn’t quite measure up.

As I
grew a little older it became clearer what was going on. Up until the age of
five or six I had thought there were only two specific types of people in the
world, those who were ‘in the party’ and those who weren’t. But I now learned
that there was a third category Cyril Taylor was one of those people who my
parents dismissively referred to as having ‘left in ‘56’. These were members of
the British Communist Party who had resigned after the Soviet Union had
violently crushed an uprising of workers and students in Hungary in 1956. Even
though Stalin was dead, the Russians showed themselves to be intolerant of any
opposition within their empire — during the invasion nearly three thousand
Hungarians were killed and two hundred thousand fled as refugees. Mass arrests,
executions and denunciations continued for months afterwards. Disillusioned,
many like our doctor quit the party.

But others,
such as my parents, took the events in Hungary in their stride — indeed, in
some ways they welcomed them. Marxism-Leninism was, after all, a theory of
compulsion. What Communists longed for was equality, a society in which all
people would be the same, but they didn’t have any faith that equality would
just come about gradually by itself. Rather, they believed that people had to
be forced to be equal. For every proletarian who understood right away the
benefits of the worker state there were fifty who had to be cajoled or even
compelled to see what was being done for them. Then there were all the class
enemies, factory owners and policemen and the self-employed who couldn’t be
allowed to spread their poisonous opinions unchallenged. My parents welcomed
Hungary as a test of their faith: it allowed them to show that they would stand
steadfast with the party while others like Cyril Taylor, who didn’t understand
that the march towards liberty, peace and freedom couldn’t be held up by a load
of people demanding liberty, peace and freedom, joined the Labour Party and
became well-known city councillors.

One
thing that my parents didn’t seem to understand was that, though they were
sending a clear message to the world with their stance on Hungary, they were
giving confusing messages to their son by entrusting his precious health to a
class traitor. If those who left in ‘56 were renegades and weak-minded
back-stabbers, how could one of them look after me? How could somebody who was
a traitor be a good doctor? Surely a person who was an evil revanchist would be
useless at their job? Something here didn’t add up.

Fortunately
my teeth, unlike the rest of me, weren’t considered important enough to become
an ideological battleground in the class war. Our dentist, a man called Savitz
who had a surgery nearby in an old house next door to the Astoria cinema in
Walton Breck Road, wasn’t in the party or anything so he didn’t cause me any
confusion while painfully hacking my gums about.

There was, however, a war
of ideas which affected me on a more basic level than my parents’ attitude to
healthcare, and that was their peculiar stance on certain toys. Although Molly
and Joe were Communists dedicated to the dictatorship of the industrial
proletariat, my mother in particular held opinions on daily life that were
closer to those of the more avant-garde elements of the upper classes than to
those of our neighbours in Valley Road. My parents had to work for a living,
didn’t have any servants and didn’t know any archbishops or ambassadors, but a
lot of the ideas they harboured concerning food, travel and child-rearing would
have been familiar to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan or Lady
Ottoline Morrell. One of the ways in which Molly differed from the majority of
parents in our street, though Bertrand Russell would have heartily approved,
was in her attitude to toy guns.

There
was a theory, prevalent in liberal circles, that giving children war-like toys
could awaken in them aggressive, antisocial and overtly male tendencies which
were unsuited to the modern world. My parents subscribed to this idea, despite
the fact that, as Marxist-Leninists, they believed in the violent armed
overthrow of capitalism. If they had been consistent they would have purchased
a .22 rifle or a shotgun and booked me shooting lessons. Instead, they refused
to purchase any kind of replica firearm.

At
first this wasn’t too much of a problem — during games of war or cowboys and indians,
all the boys in the street just ran around pointing their fingers at each other
and shouting, ‘Ack, ack, ack!’ or ‘Kerpow!’ But soon their parents began buying
them plastic or metal toy guns which usually fired a paper roll of percussion
caps, and this left me pretty badly outgunned with just my fingers. Yet no
matter how much I pleaded with her, Molly refused to buy me a toy gun. In the
end, out of desperation, tired of spending every evening lying dead on the
pavement, I started making my own imitation weapons out of bread. I would chew
an L-shape into a slice of Hovis, then smuggle it out of the house so I could
run around the streets shooting other kids with my wholemeal pistol. I brought
such conviction to my play-acting that the other kids were persuaded that my
bread gun possessed a degree of firepower, and as long as it didn’t rain I was
fine.

After a
while, though, my parents could see that I was being made to look a little bit
too eccentric shooting children with my edible pistol. So, in an echo of the UN
Disarmament Commission, which was formed under the Security Council and which
met intermittently from 1954 to 1957, we held our own arms limitation talks.
After furious bargaining the final outcome, which was agreed by all parties,
was this: I would be allowed toy firearms but they would be limited to non-automatic
weapons, a restriction which basically meant I could only own revolvers with a
Wild West flavour. No automatic pistols, rifles or sub-machine guns would be
allowed, though after a while I did get something called a Range Rifle which
was essentially a Colt .45 revolver with a stock and long barrel.

Though
I now possessed toy guns, an unbridgeable arms gap had opened up between me and
the other kids in our street. For instance, there was a gadget that several of
the local boys owned called a Johnny 7. This was less of a gun and more of an
integrated weapons system, combining multiple grenade tubes, an automatic rifle
and a rocket launcher, and my small stock of revolvers was never able to
compete with that. I consoled myself with the thought that in the jungles of
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos the lightly armed Communist Vietcong were at the
same time taking on and beating the United States army, Range Rifles versus
Johnny 7s, but on a larger and more lethal scale.

I also faced a weapons gap
in terms of toy soldiers, but the reasons for that are less clear — as far as I
can recall, my parents had no policy on little plastic men in uniform. The way
toy soldiers worked in our street was that you took all your soldiers round to
another boy’s house in a box or they came round to yours with their soldiers in
a box. Then you fought a battle, and if you lost the other kid technically
owned whatever room the battle was being fought in. This was a male-only thing,
of course. Boys had soldiers, girls had dolls, so the girls would take their
dolls round to each other’s houses and maybe they fought each other with them —
I don’t know For some reason my toy army seemed to have a large number of
non-combatants in its ranks — soldiers carrying minesweeping equipment, endless
columns of stretcher-bearers, bandsmen armed only with trombones and a complete
plastic ENSA troupe — while the other kid’s army usually comprised a massive
phalanx of machine gun crews, bazooka teams and infantry, equipped with rifles
and sub-machine guns all supported by aircraft, artillery and armoured
formations.

I think
the pacific make-up of my army might have had something to do with unarmed
soldiers, for some reason, being cheaper to buy in the local shop, so I had
purchased them without giving a thought to whether they would be useful in battle
or not. I also seemed to have in my army a whole mixed regiment of Red Indians
with bows and arrows and knights in armour who had become detached from their
horses. The outcome of all these childhood battles was that theoretically other
boys owned most of our house, though this was never tested under international
law.

Over the years my family
had evolved a number of rituals which took place every summer, on the morning
that we went on our holidays. Firstly there was the getting up far too early,
stumbling about in the darkness and bumping into the furniture. This was
followed by the ritual cooking of and then failure to eat six boiled eggs. It’s
unclear why it was felt that on days of travel we didn’t require a full
breakfast, when you would have thought it was then that we needed it most. But
for some reason every summer holiday began with six eggs being boiled, two each
for me, Joe and Molly These eggs would never be consumed because eating them
would inevitably be interrupted by the second ritual, which was the running
backwards and forwards to the taxi office.

The old
black Austin taxi that was going to take us to Lime Street Station had been
ordered weeks before from a family firm with an office a couple of streets
away, but perhaps because my parents were Communists and the taxi firm were
representatives of the petit bourgeoisie — that class which in Marxist terms ‘owned
their own means of production’ and whose political allegiance could therefore switch
between the ruling and the working-class depending on self-interest — we didn’t
trust them to turn up. Lord Harmsworth, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Cole Porter or the
Duke of Edinburgh might ring the taxi firm asking for a cab to take them to the
dog track, a cocktail bar or a grouse shoot, and they would inevitably bend to
the will of the aristocrat or the celebrity rather than an ordinary
working-class family such as ours. So I would be sent at ten-minute intervals
to remind them that a taxi had been ordered to take me and my family to Lime
Street Station, and in between my visits Molly would telephone them with a
slightly different version of the same message. From the other room I could
hear her begging them to swear that a taxi would be coming and reminding them
that our money was as good as the Duke of Edinburgh’s, alternating her
entreaties with screaming at me, ‘Eat your eggs, Lexi! For the love of God, eat
your boiled eggs!’ Then, as like as not, we would run across the road and get a
bus.