Stalin Ate My Homework (18 page)

There
must have been Russians around during our two trips to Czechoslovakia, but this
was the first time I had been amongst them as a distinct group and it was only
the slight apprehensiveness that followed them which drew my attention. In a
bar at the top of the stairs there was one Russian who seemed especially fond
of me. As my parents looked on, smiling, he sat me on his knee, and as the
smell of vodka and onions cascaded over his metal teeth he pressed gift after
gift on me. This Russian must have been in the Soviet air force, some sort of ‘adviser’
perhaps, because amongst the things he gave me were a pilot’s wings, first
class, and a huge golden cap badge with laurel leaves, a red star and a hammer
and sickle at the centre.

After
three trips to the East I now had a lot of stuff like this — stuff that I didn’t
really know what to do with. I did briefly wonder whether having pilot’s wings
might entitle me to take the controls of a Mig 17 fighter jet with no further
training. I told the kids at school that it did, but never put it to the test.

It was
hard to stop people in Communist countries giving you things. They were
particularly keen on badges, the usual images of Marx and Lenin but also little
metal sputniks and national flags. My parents already possessed Liverpool’s
largest collection of Bohemian glass, oddly shaped bowls in red glass shot
through with little air bubbles and decanters and wine glasses tinted in shades
of blue and yellow. What I seemed to have ended up with mostly were pennants.
The walls of my bedroom were already covered with these triangular pieces of shiny
silk celebrating youth conferences in East Germany that I hadn’t attended and
Brazilian football clubs I had previously been unaware of. Every day I was in
Hungary I acquired more souvenirs that I didn’t know what to do with. When I
got home I put my pennants on the wall and then thought, ‘Now what?’

By the
age of ten or eleven I had, either with other boys or on my own, taken part in
train-spotting, car-spotting, birdwatching and egg-gathering. In a rudimentary
fashion I had tried to collect comics, rocks, toy cars and butterflies. But
each time at some point I had been plagued with the twin thoughts ‘Now what?’
and ‘Is that it?’ At which point I always abandoned my latest hobby I kept
trying and trying, but perhaps I just didn’t have that collector’s impulse or
maybe it was simply that my hobby and my family’s hobby was the elimination of
private property via the violent expropriation of landowners, industrialists,
railroad magnates and shipowners, organisation of labour on publicly owned
land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being
abolished and centralisation of money and credit in the hands of the state
through a national bank and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
So writing down numbers in a book was likely to have a hard time competing with
that.

For a
while I tried to get into Airfix kits. With the occasional and sporadic help
of my dad, at the table in the living room, I put together, very badly, a model
of the battle cruiser
Warspite
and a Fairey Barracuda dive-bomber,
painted them, put on the appropriate insignia and sat back with the usual sense
of dissatisfaction. Then I had an idea: the next time I got my pocket money I
hurried down to the toy shop and bought not one but two kits. One was for a
Lancaster bomber and the other was of an SRN1 hovercraft. I then sat at the
dining table and proceeded to combine them, so what I ended up with was a gluey
lump which was basically a hovercraft with four Merlin engines, large wings and
a number of swivelling turrets equipped with machine guns. I thought to myself,
‘This is more like it.’ Rather than just accruing things, arranging them and
exulting in my possession of them I was making a new and original thing — a Bombercraft
or a Hovercaster. I played with my Hovercaster for a while, then tired of it
and set it alight in the back yard. Due to the massive amounts of glue employed
in its construction the mongrel model caught fire very quickly and burned with
great intensity.

We spent a week in
Budapest, then travelled sixty miles to Lake Balaton which we were proudly told
was the largest body of water in central Europe, as if the slow accumulation of
rainwater in a hole over thousands of years was in itself an achievement of
socialism. We were to spend the second half of our holiday in a union-owned
motel on the shores of the lake. The area round about had in the late 1950s
become a sort of Malibu for revolutionaries. Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Leonid
Brezhnev and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin all had villas on the south-east shore,
furnished in the latest 1950s’/1960s’ modernist style.

The
place where we were staying was a white, modern, single-storey building with
rooms clustered around a central courtyard and its own private beach. After the
troubles of the
1950s
Hungary had been given a degree of freedom not
allowed in other states of the Soviet Empire, so food at our motel was
plentiful, colourful and sumptuous. Back in Anfield we had thought with a
certain amount of pride that on Sundays we had been eating salad, but really
all we had been eating was lettuce and tomatoes in a bowl, sometimes with a hard-boiled
egg on the top and no dressing except perhaps the industrial solvent known as ‘salad
cream’. Now I saw what a salad really could be under socialism. There were red,
green and yellow peppers, corn on the cob, huge tomatoes stuffed with Russian
salad, artichokes, celery, lentils, okra and fresh herbs, all of them covered
in rich oils or mayonnaise.

Until
our holiday in Hungary all my summers had been spent in Northern countries, and
this was the first time I had encountered the true sensuous heat of the South.
My skin was toasted brown by the hot sun and occasionally my parents let me sip
the warm red Hungarian wine known as Bull’s Blood. Meals were always
accompanied by gypsies playing violins whether you wanted them to or not. In
Lake Balaton I learned to swim. It seemed that Communism could do amazing
things for a person, just as it could for salad. I had spent hours in the
swimming baths at junior school splashily drowning, but the waters of the lake
were so buoyant that I could float with only a finger holding me up and from
there I simply lifted my arm and drifted free. This gave me a great sense of
achievement. I had started to worry that I wasn’t the sort of kid who could
swim, that I was teetering on the edge of being some sort of pallid, inactive
mummy’s boy who stayed in the house and collected things and possibly played
with dolls — but here I was swimming. I would dive down beneath the surface and
cruise just above the sandy bottom of the lake, holding my breath for what
seemed like minutes on end. Then I would kick upwards to emerge like an arrow
into the bright sunlight, wondering if Mao Tse-tung wasn’t watching me from the
shore with frank admiration.

Behind our motel in the
pine woods there was a campsite, with tents scattered under the trees on the
spongy ground. The people who stayed in these tents were only allowed access to
a scrubby bit of public sand and were forbidden from using our stretch of
perfect beach. Our family’s only experience of campsites had been those
unfortunate first days in Czechoslovakia, so we didn’t consider it a practice
that anybody would actually choose to indulge in. But one day while walking
through the woods I came upon a brand-new, dark red Vauxhall Victor, bearing
British number plates, parked next to a large tent. A Western automobile was a
very rare sight on the roads of a Communist country, where even Soviet Bloc
cars such as Skodas and Trabants were extremely scarce. As I passed there was a
small crowd of young Hungarian men trying to see into the interior of the car.

A
little while later my parents met the people who owned this Vauxhall — they
were a family from London, husband, wife and their two sons who were about the
same age as me. I knew right away that these people were what I had heard my parents
frequently refer to as ‘progressives’ . Calling them ‘progressives’ meant that,
while definitely not Communists, they were people who were generally
sympathetic to ideas of social progress and liberalism. In the world of my
parents there was a whole taxonomy, with ‘party member’ at its centre and
radiating outwards, classifying the political allegiance of people you met or
saw on the television. Closest to party member was ‘fellow traveller’,
indicating people who, without being party members, had distinct Communist
sympathies — they came to big meetings, read the
Daily Worker,
and you
could trust them to mind the shop while you were out. Next came ‘fellow
revolutionaries’ — all manner of anarchists, nationalists and socialists who
you might make a temporary alliance with and then when they ceased to be useful
you would try to kill them and they would try to kill you. After fellow
revolutionaries came ‘reformists’, which in Britain meant members of the Labour
Party, people who thought you could round off the corners of capitalism without
doing away with it. Then came ‘progressives’. Lenin was said to have another
term for those progressives of a liberal bent who came and wrote admiringly
about the Soviet Union: he called them ‘useful idiots’. Then there was a list
of people and organisations who were completely unacceptable to us. These
included fascists, Trotskyists, Conservatives, the Blundells at number 7 and
the British Transport Police.

There
didn’t seem anything the least bit odd to me in classifying people according
to their usefulness, sometimes just from their footwear. ‘Ah, yes,’ you’d say
to yourself. ‘Desert boots. This person is clearly a progressive with pacifist
tendencies.’

The Vauxhall Victors were,
with their brand-new car and nice accents, clearly a lot better off than us but
also they appeared to be a lot more naive. Our enthusiasm for the East, for
Communism, was the zeal of the professional whereas they just seemed to be
terribly enthusiastic, in a middle-class kind of a way, about everything they
had seen in Hungary What I couldn’t understand was why they were staying in a
tent and swimming from the public beach. Didn’t they know anybody in the party?

That
autumn, on a cold and misty November day we went to visit the Vauxhall Victors.
They lived in a suburb of south-east London called Forest Hill. Because of the
freedom of travel conferred by our passes me, Molly and Joe would sometimes
decide to drop in on people who lived hundreds of miles away Occasionally I
suspected that these people were a little discomfited that we had come so far
to see them at such short notice. On this trip I became conscious for the first
time of the terrible vastness of London. As our local train stopped at yet
another station, passed through yet another neighbourhood, ran alongside
another park, overtook another town hall I thought what a daunting city it must
be to live in and I imagined you would have to be a very confident person just
to go down to the shops.

Mr
Vauxhall Victor picked us up in the car from the nearest Southern Region
station, then we drove past even more parades of shops and down more streets of
suburban villas and large semis until finally, after about a week, we came to
their enormous double-fronted Victorian house. This was the first middle-class
property I had ever been in and it was a very different place from the austere
homes of Valley Road. We were shown into a large living room with French
windows leading to a garden that seemed as unending as the suburbs in the
gathering twilight. There were paintings on the walls, books stuffed
higgledy-piggledy on the shelves and brass music stands with sheet music on
them in the middle of the floor.

My
parents were chatting inconsequentially to the couple when I, who never thought
that my interventions might be unwelcome, remarked on what a lot of coloured
people we had passed on the way to their house. Immediately a look of panic
passed over the faces of the couple. I reckon they knew as few of the
proletariat as we did of the petit-bourgeois and they secretly suspected, as a
lot of the liberal middle classes did, that all working-class people harboured
racist views. Now, right here in their home, one of them was openly expressing
these opinions. I took their silence to mean that they hadn’t understood what
I was saying, so I attempted to make it clearer. ‘You know,’ I said. ‘Blacks, negroes,
you’ve got loads of them round here.’

Then
they gave us tea, and afterwards the two sons played classical music for us. I
think one of them played the flute rocking backwards and forwards, eyes
closed, lost to the world. It was late evening when the father gave us a lift
back to the local station. As we waited on the foggy platform, without needing
to say it out loud me, Molly and Joe agreed never to do that again.