Stalin Ate My Homework (12 page)

The
following spring, in another railway town in the south of England, possibly
Swindon, there was another weekend conference and another sports day I felt
slightly queasy competing away from the north, my home ground. This place
seemed alien and different, but I was quietly confident of being able to defend
my title. After all, Marxist determinism seemed to state that it was inevitable
that I should win.

Shockingly,
I came last. Last by quite some way I can still see the other kids disappearing
into the distance, their shapes getting smaller and smaller, and I can still
recall the horror of my mind telling my legs to move faster but them refusing
to respond. After the race I was so clearly distressed at losing my title that
the organisers, perhaps at the prompting of my parents, scraped around until
they found a consolation prize for me — a toy gun with a broken handle.

This
was my first experience of losing and it felt really, really bad. The pity of
the organisers and the crappiness of my prize were hard to take, but more than
that I couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. Was the first win an illusion,
or was this loss some sort of abnormality? Either way, here was a new and
unsettling realisation, that the pain of failure, sharp and nagging, was much
greater than the warm but easily dissipated pleasure of winning. I thought
about it over and over. I had lost by quite a margin, but in the end found it
impossible to accept that Little Zátopek wasn’t a good runner.

My
parents’ faith that I was special remained unshaken, but perhaps this was also
a modern thing and not of their class. Most children in Anfield were brought up
to think of themselves as being profoundly ordinary — if you had called them ‘special’
they would have been insulted. In our neighbourhood you believed the same
things as everybody else, you wore the same clothes as everybody else and you
planned to go into the same job as your father. I loved the idea that my mum
and dad thought of me as some sort of Chosen One, but it also seemed like quite
hard work. It was decided that perhaps a lack of training and preparation had
led to me losing my title as the hundred yards dash champion, so when we got
back to Liverpool I joined a running club, as its only junior member. They were
called the Walton Harriers and they practised at a sports ground directly
opposite the long brick wall and lowering grey blocks of Walton Prison. Over
the next year or so I attended running practice at least once or twice a week.

My
memory is mostly of me slogging round the running track, alone and in the dark.
I refused to shower alongside all the big hairy men, so I went home on the bus
smelling like a Victorian urchin. What I remember most is my enjoyment of the
hot Ribena cordial you could buy from a little wooden shed after finishing
training and the amazing taste of the flavoured crisps which were just then
beginning to appear on the market. None of this told me or Molly that I wasn’t
destined to be a great athlete.

Having said that the most
exotic thing about Anfield was us, there was this one other entity which, while
it wasn’t exactly exotic, certainly made the area different from a thousand
other northern streetscapes of terraced houses. It was the stadium of Liverpool
FC. Indeed, our neighbourhood was like some holy city such as Karbala or
Lourdes because there were a number of holy shrines close to each other. Only
half a mile away on the other side of our local park was Goodison, the blue and
white home of Everton Football Club. Throughout my early childhood Liverpool
Football Club had been in the Second Division, overshadowed by Everton, their
richer and more successful neighbour. Yet despite playing in the lower division
and their ground being a ramshackle mess, the Reds still regularly attracted
crowds of forty-five thousand or more.

Liverpool’s
stadium was little more than half a mile from our house. As soon as you turned
into Oakfield Road you were aware of its bulk, the red roof of the Kemlyn Road
Stand rising high above the chimney pots of the surrounding houses. On match
days the extra double-decker buses required to take the crowds to and from
their homes were parked in our road. The front room would go dark as these
enormous things were lined up on the other side of the street, shuddering and jerking
forward with diesel smoke coughing from their exhausts. The more enterprising
families in our neighbourhood rented out their back yards so men could park
their bicycles for a shilling a go, while some of the local children would
approach the few drivers who parked their cars in Valley Road to ask, ‘Mind
your car, mister?’ in return for a tip of a few pennies. We eschewed such
kulak-like behaviour.

During
the match the roars from the crowd, jubilant for a goal, anguished for a near
miss, angry for a foul, would boom into our kitchen. Then once the game
finished thousands of men in fawn raincoats, with slouch hats or flat caps,
red and white scarves around their necks, would rush to get on the special
buses, squeezing on to the narrow platforms, elbowing and kicking each other
while miraculously continuing to smoke.

Somehow for me, supporting
one particular football team never took hold. Having both grounds so close
meant that there was no particular geographical imperative to choose one club
over another — no religious imperative either. Though it never truly resembled
sectarian Glasgow, in the 1950s and early 1960s Everton tended to be the
Catholic team and Liverpool attracted the Protestants, but neither side tried
to reach out to the atheist Communist Jew community I also came to associate
going to football matches with a certain kind of disappointment, betrayal even.
One Saturday I was walking through Stanley Park alongside Joe — there were a
crowd of us, men and boys streaming towards the Kemlyn Road, all going to see
Liverpool FC play Stoke City It was a big event that Joe was home and taking me
to a game, so I was terribly excited. Stoke’s most famous player, indeed the
most famous footballer in England at the time, was Stanley Matthews. In 1961 at
the age of forty-six he had rejoined his home town club and carried on playing
for them till he was fifty, but because he wasn’t always fit they kept quiet
until the last minute whether he was going to take part in the game or not.

‘Will
he play, Dad?’ I kept asking. ‘Will he play?’

‘I don’t
know, son.

‘I bet
he will play.’

‘I’m
not sure, son. Maybe he’ll play.’

‘I’m
sure he’ll play.’

When we
got to the game and were sitting in the stands, it was only after I had asked
Joe if every member of the Stoke team, then every member of the Liverpool team,
then the referee, the two linesmen and the newspaper photographers behind each
goal were Stanley Matthews, that I realised with a sinking feeling that he wasn’t
going to show — I wasn’t going to see this famous man. An act of bad faith so
early on gave me the idea that football clubs could, at times, be heartless and
calculating and weren’t to be relied on, unless you wanted your heart broken.

None
the less I continued to go to football matches, hoping to discover what others
found in the game. Later on I used to go with some of the other kids from the
neighbourhood to stand in the Boys’ Pen, a special section for under-twelves,
at Everton. There was a woman there who came round before the game dressed as a
seventeenth-century milkmaid and throwing toffees into the crowd, but I never
managed to catch one. Another disappointment.

My main
problem was that I had great difficulty sinking my personality into that of the
crowd, of submerging myself into a mass of people who all felt exactly the same
thing, the same joy, the same anguish, the same rage, the same uncritical
belief in the rightness of their cause. I, by contrast, couldn’t remain partisan
for more than a few minutes. If the opposition team were losing I would begin
to feel sorry for them and start wanting Liverpool or Everton to concede a
goal, or for one of our players to get injured or sent off. But even at the age
of six or seven I had the sense to keep these Corinthian ideals very much to
myself. When I was ten Everton won the league championship and the crowd all ran
on to the pitch and I ran with them. But once there, on that springy turf where
I wasn’t supposed to be, I felt foolish and didn’t know what to do next. All
these people were jumping about and shouting and I just thought, ‘Why do you
care about this? Why are you so worked up?’ I knew that I was acting, that my
feelings and my actions were fake, and I wondered how many others were acting
too, how many others’ joy wasn’t real — that it was just something they felt
they should do to fit in with the mob.

What I
did take to was the theatricality of it all. At Liverpool there was something
called ‘three-quarter time’ where they threw back the red-painted gates fifteen
minutes before the game ended, presumably so people could leave early But it
also meant you could sneak in and watch the last bit of the match for free.
Since I didn’t care about the result and wasn’t capable of appreciating the
skill and artistry of the players, fifteen minutes was enough for me to take in
the extraordinarily pure colours of the teams’ uniforms, the vibrant unnatural
green of the pitch and the attention of the crowd fixated to a fanatical degree
on those twenty-two tiny men in shorts, scuttling about in the distance.

In my
heart, though, I knew that watching a sixth of the game and liking the bright
colours wasn’t enough — I urgently required a more profound connection with
football if I was going to be a proper Liverpool boy In the end, living so
close to Anfield, the notion subtly grew in me that I was involved in some
nebulous and unfocused way in the operations of Liverpool FC itself. It was as
if we lived backstage at the club, that our street and our house were an
extension of the stadium and Bill Shankly might come round at any minute to
borrow our front room, so that he could talk tactics with his forward line
while serving them drinks from a giant mahogany cabinet. Thus with my help in
the 1961—2 season the Reds won the Second Division championship and gained
promotion to the top flight, while in 1964, again with me working quietly
behind the scenes, they became First Division champions.

In the late summer of 1960
the new season had yet to start and, though it was a Saturday, Valley Road was
quiet. I was sitting on the low wall that divided our house from next door,
playing with a new Dinky toy I’d got — a Chevrolet Impala. Out of the corner of
my eye I saw a young vicar approaching. He had an eager manner and was sweating
gently in his heavy black serge suit.

‘Hello,
young man,’ he said.

‘Hello,’
I replied. Religious officials were used to deference back then.

‘Can I
ask you,’ he enquired, ‘if you are in any sort of youth organisation?’

‘Yes, I
am,’ I said, smiling at him, seemingly eager to please. ‘I am in a youth group.
Yes, I am.’

‘Is it
the Scouts?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I
replied. Then there was a pause while we stared at each other.

‘Are
you in the Boys’ Brigade?’ he finally queried.

‘No.’
Then another pause.

‘The
Sea Scouts?’

‘No.’

‘The
Orange Lodge Marching Band?’

‘No.’

‘The
Army Cadets?’

‘Err…
hang on… no.’

Perhaps
noticing my olive skin and my black hair he enquired, ‘The Jewish Lads’
Brigade?’

‘No.’

‘The
Catholic Boys’ Brigade?’

‘No.’

‘Well,
what is it, then?’ he shouted, peevish at being held up on his recruiting drive
by an enigmatic eight-year-old.

‘I am,’
I said, standing and saluting with a clenched right fist held to the side of my
temple, ‘a Comrade Cadet, Grade One, Young Pioneers, fourth battalion, based at
Locomotive Factory Number One, town of Trutnov, People’s Republic of Czechoslovakia!’

I was,
too. I wasn’t lying. Certainly I’d said it to annoy and confuse the vicar, but
I hadn’t made it up. Exasperated, he went off in search of less smart-arse
young boys.