Stalin Ate My Homework (13 page)

A few weeks before my
encounter with the vicar I had been inducted as an honorary Young Pioneer
during our second trip to Czechoslovakia. I never went to another meeting,
though I did from to time put on the uniform for a laugh. But if I had wanted
to I could have attended any gathering of the Young Pioneers right across eastern
Europe, in the Soviet Union and China too, just like Alcoholics Anonymous, an
organisation that has branches in every town and city in the Western world. The
role of the Young Pioneers in a Communist society was to take part in mass
rallies, to be indoctrinated as a good party cadre, to spy on your parents and
to undermine religion. In East Germany they used to schedule meetings to
overlap with Catholic church services. The uniform, in a perhaps not-so-unconscious
act of homage, was very close to that of the Hitler Youth, comprising a white
short-sleeved shirt, black short trousers and a small scarf worn round the
neck, the only difference between the Nazis and the Communists being that the
Communist kerchief was red rather than black. In Hungary the Young Pioneers ran
their own narrow-gauge railway, which travelled through the forest of the Buda
hills in the western part of Budapest.

In fact there was a
socialist youth group in the UK that I could have joined. They were called the
Woodcraft Folk, and they formed the paramilitary wing of the Co-operative
movement. But even at the age of eight I had an idea of how I wanted other kids
to see me, and that didn’t include being in something called the Woodcraft Folk.
In Manchester I met a kid who was one of them at a Communist Party ‘social’. A ‘social’
was what left-wingers called a party; everything had to be something else for
them — they couldn’t just hold a party, it had to have a higher purpose and a
different name. There was also something 1930s’ about the word ‘social’ — it
had the whiff of socialist cycling clubs and mass rambles. Anyway, this kid
talked about nothing but dolphins for half an hour in a weird voice. I found I
much preferred telling people I was the only UK member of the Czechoslovak
Young Pioneers to camping in the woods with the children of other lefties,
cooking tinned stew over an open fire and singing folk songs.

Between
our first and second trips to Czechoslovakia Joe had been extremely busy While
me and Molly were off being shown the sights Joe was having discussions with
Ladislav and Prukha, who were very keen to be invited to visit Britain. So my
father had, in a remarkably short time, organised for the Czechs to come to the
UK in the spring of 1960, a few months before our second visit.

In 1960
the cold war between the East and the West was two years away from its most
incendiary point, the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in fourteen months construction
would begin on the Berlin Wall and in a year US forces in Vietnam would be
tripled, dragging them further into that colonial war. Every interaction
between the Soviet Bloc and the capitalist sphere of influence seemed fraught
with tension, and there were constant attempts at espionage, infiltration and
subversion. A pair of Czechs coming to the UK must have had approval from the
highest level in Prague, if not Moscow, and yet it’s hard to see what the Czech
Security Service, the StB, got out of two of their nationals staying at the
Seaforth Ferry Hotel, with a nice view of the River Mersey, as guests of the
Merseyside Trades Council. There were no national secrets to be had in them
taking trips to the Lake District or visiting the NUR’s social club in Dean
Road, Liverpool. Not much advantage for Communism could be gained by them
sitting through interminable speeches, dinners and expressions of fraternity
between the workers of the East and the West. Somewhat suspiciously, Ladislav
did win first prize in the raffle at Dean Road Social Club, but it’s difficult
to understand what purpose a bottle of whisky served in this titanic clash of
ideologies.

In
return for all Joe’s work it was suggested that, if he could get a group of
railwaymen and their families together, then the Czech government would pay for
hotels and entertainment once they were in the country So Joe placed adverts in
the union paper, the
Railway Review,
asking people if they wanted to
take part that summer in something called a ‘delegation’ to the Socialist
Republic of Czechoslovakia. Again, everybody seemed very unselfconscious about
all this to-ing and fro-ing to the Soviet Bloc at almost the hottest point of
the cold war.

The
group for the first delegation comprised two married couples from Scotland and
two from Manchester, all more or less my parents’ age, plus two young men from
Lancashire, Alf and Reg, who, though both married with children, had left their
families behind. And finally there was a slightly older couple — a man called
Prendergast and the woman he lived with, named Molly like my mother. I took to
Alf right away In the world in which I had lived, up until that point, there
had only been kids my own age, grown-ups my parents’ age and Uncle Willy I had
known nobody in their early twenties, someone who was an adult yet close enough
to childhood to carry a little of that innocence and playfulness with them. Alf
was tall, dressed in smart suits of a slimmer, more American cut than the baggy
pre-war style of my parents’ generation, and wore his black hair styled in a
luxuriant quiff. He seemed funnier and more energetic than anybody I had met
before, and I took to following him around and staring at him in mute
admiration.

We all
came together in London like a gang in a western movie and spent the night
there, then the next morning we crossed the Channel and were in Paris by the
afternoon. Because all the males in our party were railwaymen the jumping on
and off the trains soon reached epidemic proportions — there were occasions on
our journey when the train would leave the platform and half the group would
still be in the street outside the station, buying melons.

By the
time we reached Paris it had become clear that Prendergast was the comedy drunk
in our western. He first went missing near the Game du Nord, and by the time he
was found we had missed our lunch. With a fractious and hungry group on his
hands Joe immediately did what he always did in an emergency, which was to go
looking for Communists. It only took a few minutes of searching before we were
sitting down to eat a late lunch in the railway workers’ canteen of the very
station where we had arrived from the coast. All of us were astonished at the
quality of the cooking and the simple stylishness of the surroundings. In
British factories and workplaces the canteens were often vile places serving
disgusting food, but here there were long wooden tables set with paper
tablecloths. On the tables were Duralex glasses, sturdy and elegant, carafes of
water and a rough but drinkable
yin de table.
The food, simple
cuisine
de terroir
— fresh bread, coq au yin, fragrant salad — was of a quality you
couldn’t even approach in a top hotel in Liverpool.

From Paris to Prague we
were travelling by night train, using a type of sleeping car called a
couchette. I have no memory of the many hotel rooms I must have stayed in
during those early years, but the couchettes are clear and distinct. If you
were rich you slept in a wagon-lit, snug in your own compartment with a jug of
water and two glasses on a tray and an attached bathroom; and if you were poor
you slept upright in your seat jammed against the person next to you. If you
were in the middle, like us, you slept in a couchette. ‘Couchette’ was a word
like ‘Secatrol’ that seemed to crop up in conversation between me, my mother
and father with great frequency and was used by nobody else in Anfield. I would
say to some other kid, ‘It’s like a couchette in here!’ and be met with
complete incomprehension.

During
the daytime the couchette compartment had a normal configuration of six seats facing
each other in two rows of three, but some time in the late evening it underwent
a transformation into something that resembled a Libyan prison cell. The
attendant, who travelled in a cosy little compartment of his own at the end of
the carriage, came around with a sheet, a pillow and a rough, scratchy blanket,
each with the SNCF or Deutsche Bundesbahn logo on them, one per passenger.
Then, wielding a special key, he converted the compartment into its night-time
configuration, with three bunks on each side of the compartment. The seat you
sat on became the lowest bunk, the back of the seat flipped up and became the
middle bunk, and a padded panel above your head turned into the top bunk. You had
to stand in the corridor while the attendant transformed the compartment and
made up the beds, which always felt a bit like when you stood about all dozy
while your mum changed the sheets in your bed because you had had an accident.
A ladder also appeared from somewhere. I never knew where it was during the day
— it just magically materialised at night so you could use it to climb into the
top two bunks.

It was
possible to join these long-distance overnight trains at many places — Calais,
Boulogne, Ostend or the Hook of Holland after crossing by ferry, or somewhere
on the continent, Paris or Vienna, and if you wished they would take you as
far as Budapest, Sofia, Moscow, Istanbul or Tehran in great discomfort. Over
the years we took night trains from all these departure points — to amuse my
classmates I could say ‘Do not lean out of the window’ in* three foreign
languages with appropriate accents:
‘Ne pas se pencher dehors!’
I would
shout.
‘Nicht hinauslehnen!’
and
‘Pericoloso sporgersi!’

To me
there was always something unsettling about travelling by couchette.
Superficially you were tucked up safe in your bed, but what was outside the
bedroom window kept changing as if one were sleeping in a haunted house. You
would drift off amongst fields and farms and wake in the middle of the night,
lift the blinds of the condensation-streaked windows and, clearing a gap with
your hand, see snow-covered mountains looming towards you at great speed — or
you might fall asleep in a marshalling yard and wake hours later still in the
same marshalling yard. Foreign railway coaches seemed foreign and unfriendly —
they were much more streamlined, all steel and hard plastic, than the Edwardian
club-on-wheels of British Railways. The windows on a British train were tiny,
fussy little glass panels with complicated catches that you could just about
get your hand through, whereas continental ones dropped in two so you could
stick half your body out of the carriage, if you wanted, in a way that required
warning notices in four different languages. And instead of heraldic imagery —
the British Railways emblem was a lion rampant on a wheel — they just had
letters for their emblems, like SNCF or DBB.

In the
morning the attendant brought you coffee and a continental breakfast. In western
Europe this official would also take charge of passengers’ tickets and
passports at the start of the journey, returning them before arrival at the
destination, to ensure that we were not disturbed by ticket and passport
inspections. In the Eastern Bloc countries this was not done, and it was a part
of night travel in the East to be woken before and after every border by each
country’s frontier police and rail inspectors.

Unlike
in sleeping cars, couchette compartments were not segregated by sex, so you
slept in your grubby clothes and often found yourself sharing your sleep with
strangers. It was a lottery who was going to be in your compartment at
nightfall. I would find myself frantically wishing, ‘Please make the fat man
with the breath that smells of garlic get off the train at Frankfurt during the
evening.’ For some, fellow travellers who shared your compartment for a few
hours were a source of mystery and adventure, conversation and fleeting
intimacy, but for me strangers were just somebody who was likely to wake you in
the middle of the night with their screaming.

We arrived at Prague
Central Station late at night two days after leaving Liverpool, but still
Ladislav and a whole fleet of Tatras were waiting for us, their engines
clattering into life, their triple headlights flaring as we emerged tired and
grimy dragging our suitcases on to the cobbled forecourt. Ordinary Czechs must
have wondered who these foreign guests were —perhaps relations of the president
of some foreign country that the Eastern Bloc was courting for its minerals. I
think we must all have been excited to reach our destination, but some were
elated even before we got to Prague. A little while after crossing the border
from Germany the train had stopped at a station and I was dozing when
Prendergast came into the compartment. He raised the blind and, pointing out
of the window, said in a reverential, trembling voice, ‘Look … look. That’s
where the beer comes from!’ I blearily roused myself and, looking through the
smeared glass, saw that the station sign read ‘Pilsen’ .