Stalin Ate My Homework (24 page)

After the botched surgery
on his foot Joe was on sick leave at home for several months. At first he
remained up in the bedroom sleeping all day It might have been unsettling
having this silent presence above your head, but it was possible to tell
yourself that the situation wasn’t any different from the time before the
operation, when Joe had been doing shifts as a guard. Then too he had been in
bed the whole day long while other men were at work.

When he
did return to the railways it was on light duties, part-time, as a ticket
collector at Liverpool Central Station. My parents decided that because he was
still recuperating Joe might not be up to travelling across eastern Europe, so
at the Boxing Day holiday meeting we chose for the summer of 1965 to take a
nice restful holiday on our boat.

I’m not
sure I had a vote at these meetings, because for me there was a long list of
things that were wrong with a holiday on the boat. I have no idea what Molly
and Joe thought they were going to get out of this vacation, but then again
Communists like us often seemed to make dubious life decisions. Perhaps if you
believe at the very core of your being that violent revolution, state
repression and forced eradication of unwanted classes of human beings is likely
to bring about peace amongst all mankind, then thinking that two weeks in a
cabin cruiser on the Shropshire Union Canal might be good for your health isn’t
such a stretch.

I hated
the whole idea from the start. For example, when we visited Czechoslovakia or
Hungary we were treated as if we were truly remarkable people: fleets of black
limousines usually waited for us on the forecourts of our luxury hotels, and
enormous dinners were held in our honour. In slightly creepy rituals, I was
made an honorary member of quasi-fascist organisations. And when I returned to
Liverpool I had all these stories to tell that nobody else at school could
match. Besides, I was beginning to get that teenage obsession with looking cool
at all costs and caring about how others saw me above everything else — and a
holiday on a canal with your parents was unlikely to be considered cool.
Kerouac’s drug-fuelled beat odyssey was not called ‘On the San Francisco to
Tijuana Grand Union Canal’. Tod and Buz had not chosen to travel the United
States being enigmatic on a narrowboat.

At this
time the cabin cruiser was still moored on the Chester branch of the Shropshire
Union Canal, so at least we didn’t have to carry our gigantic outboard motor
with us along with two weeks’ luggage and Bruno the dog. This canal had been
built to bring goods, especially salt, from the south Cheshire town of Nantwich
to Chester and then onwards to the sea via the Dee estuary We planned to travel
the other way, imagining perhaps that we would tie up each night beside rustic
pubs where we would buy eggs and milk from a friendly farmer’s wife. In all the
millions of words Karl Marx wrote about bringing the workers’ state into
existence — the
Communist Manifesto,
his
Eleven Theses on Feuerbach,
the
Critique of the Gotha Program
— when he tried to imagine the world as it
would be after the dawn of Communism, which was after all the point of all this
furious scribbling, he was only able to come up with a feeble bucolic fantasy
involving smocks and cowherds who played the flute in the evenings.

It was
the same with all the ‘progressives’ I had encountered: their vision of the
world to come was either a brutal, uncompromising futurism or camp pastoralism
such as that which inspired the garden city movement and its deformed child,
the new towns. Nowhere across the whole spectrum of the left did there seem to
be any appreciation of anything that was worn, anything that was industrial, in
fact anything that was working-class. So that summer we weren’t on a boating
holiday, we were searching for the shape of things to come on our cabin cruiser
Potemkin.

And I
have to admit that sometimes it could be tranquil. In the mornings I would sit
at the prow watching the fields slide past, listening to the purr of the engine
behaving itself as the bow cut through the shallow clouded water. But all too
soon disaster would strike, and Jewish hysteria is not suited to marine
emergencies — screaming and shouting do not help when you are heading backwards
towards a weir. The situation wasn’t assuaged by an angry and self-conscious
teenager and two adults being crammed into a space that, if it had been a gaol
cell, would have been condemned by the chief inspector of prisons. It’s hard to
express the claustrophobia I felt. Swept by the solar winds of puberty, the
last thing I needed was to be stuck on a boat with my parents.

At one
point we crashed into a bank in some remote spot where there were overhanging
trees, their tangled roots reaching into the water, and cows staring
sardonically at us from the other side of an old metal fence. The boat became
wedged in the mud — the Evinrude was great at getting you stuck into places,
but less cooperative when you wanted to get out again. I tried putting the
outboard into reverse until blue smoke began to pour from under its cover, but
nothing else happened. Since his operation, in moments of crisis Joe, rather
than taking charge as he once might — perhaps jumping off the boat and going to
look for helpful Communists — seemed to fold inside himself, just standing
passive and blank, while Molly thought the power of yelling might get us off
and the dog, unusually for him, joined in, barking furiously In the end I
jumped over the side fully clothed; the water only came up to my waist. ‘Lexi!
Lexi! What are you doing?’ Molly shouted. ‘My child! My child’s in the canal! There’s
probably rats! If you ruin those trousers I’ll fucking kill you!’ And then by
myself I pushed the boat until it came free. And perhaps the way our holiday
turned out was closer to the reality of Communism than Marx’s sylvan prophecy.

One of the better things
that came out of our vacation on the Shropshire Union Canal was that I won a
prize for a drawing of the view from our boat. I was a member of something
called the Little Woody Club, which was run by the Littlewood’s stores,
catalogues and football pools organisation. The Little Woody Club was a juniors’
club, an attempt to attract younger people to the company’s products. Little
Woody himself was a rather frightening figure with a grinning face set in the
centre of a jagged piece of wood that had sprouted arms and legs. The company
held an annual art competition and I sent in a biro drawing of a stone bridge
near where we moored, as seen from the roof of
Ty Mawr,
done one late
summer morning. I was awarded a badge of creepy Little Woody and a very
elaborate pencil set in its own case. I imagine the judges were impressed by
the unusual darkness and suffering expressed within a rendition of a bucolic
scene, in many ways reminiscent of the later works of Vincent Van Gogh.

A child in Liverpool grows
up understanding comedy in the same way that a young Mongolian nomad grows up
knowing his way around a horse. Apart from shipping and its attendant industries,
comedy was what we did. Many of the most successful comedians of the immediate
post-war era came from Liverpool: Arthur Askey, Ken Dodd, Tommy Handley, Ted
Ray and Robb Wilton, and we could claim at least a quarter share in such
Lancashire comics as George Formby, Jimmy Clitheroe and Frank Randall. After
lunch on Sunday every family in the city, along with the rest of the country,
would listen to popular radio comedy series such as
Round the Horne, Hancock’s
Half Hour
and
The Navy Lark.
But in Liverpool it was a good idea to
have a pad and a pencil handy to jot down notes, because the analysis next day
in the playground could get pretty competitive.

I found
from very early on that I was super-critical even by the exacting comedy
standards of my classmates. If they liked a show they tended to like everything
about it whereas my tendency was to pick it apart, to say, ‘Well, that bit
worked but that other bit didn’t.’ Which just seemed to confuse the other kids.
And if my classmates disliked a show or a performer they just ignored them,
barely acknowledging their existence, which was the sensible thing to do. But
for me it was the things I hated that drew my attention the most. I could get
furious over the oily charms of game show hosts like Hughie Greene and Michael
Miles and the bovine compliability of the participants, and comedy shows I
disapproved of could send me into a blind rage. At 6.30 every night Granada
would show imported American comedies such as
The Dick Van Dyke Show
or
Car
54 Where Are You?,
which I more or less enjoyed along with everybody else.
But there was one called
My Mother the Car
that drove me absolutely
nuts.

The
plot of
My Mother the Car
was that an attorney played by Jerry Van Dyke
(Dick’s talentless younger brother) ends up buying a vintage car that happens
to contain the soul of his dead mother, who talks, only to him, through the car’s
radio. My parents couldn’t understand why I would go on and on about this show.

‘But
don’t you understand?’ I would yell. ‘The car is his dead mother! It’s insane!
And that scene where he puts petrol into it with a hose is disturbing!’

‘Well,
if you don’t like it don’t watch it then.’

‘Oh,
you don’t get it, do you? That’s what they want me to do!’ And I would run out
of the house, slamming the door.

The
first radio series I tuned in to on my own, in my bedroom under the covers
using Joe’s blue and white transistor radio, was
I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That
Again.
I don’t know why I listened under the covers, since Joe and Molly
wouldn’t have been bothered. I assumed, since it was what everybody said they
did, that having a blanket on top of the radio improved reception.
I’m
Sorry, I’ll Read That Again
was the first TV or radio show which seemed
aimed at my generation and actively excluded older people with its noisy and
irreverent humour. It originated from the Cambridge University Footlights revue
and featured young talent such as John Cleese, Bill Oddie and Tim
Brooke-Taylor. One day towards the end of the spring term of 1966 I was in the
playground analysing the latest edition of
I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again.
I
was saying, ‘I find that Bill Oddie’s Angus Prune character can slip into the
bathetic if he doesn’t restrain his more sentimental tendencies …’ when I
sensed my audience’s attention slipping — it was the oddest experience. A
rumour was going around the playground, and you could actually see it travel
from group to group until it finally reached the little gang of boys of which I
was a part. The news had leaked that after the summer holidays Alsop Grammar
School would be ‘going comp’. This meant that our school was going to join the
comprehensive system and would amalgamate with the larger and more modern
Anfield Comprehensive School half a mile away on County Road.

The
crumpet-toasting fops in the Rectory were particularly worried about what this
news would mean, but all of us had our concerns. The kid who had the most to
worry about was the boy who was considered to be the best fighter at Alsop and
was therefore known as the Cock of the School. Our Cock was some tall blond lad
who played in the first footie eleven, was good at boxing and might have smoked
a pipe, while the ‘Cock’ of Anfield Comp was a squat gingery thug. The story
went that when he was eleven he was stopped by the police while at the wheel of
a huge articulated lorry When the coppers asked what a schoolboy was doing
driving a large commercial vehicle, his answer was: ‘Me mate give it me.’

As it
turned out, the amalgamation did not cause too many problems. In the first week
of the new academic year our Cock met their Cock after school in Walton Hall
Park on the other side of Queen’s Drive and was quickly battered into unconsciousness.
Thereafter we all knew where we stood and peace reigned. I liked the idea that
I was now attending some hardcase comp rather than a prissy grammar school,
but we weren’t inconvenienced by mixing too much with the more proletarian kids
from the other school.

That summer, as if to make
up for the previous year’s boating disaster we had two holidays. The NUR AGM
for 1966 was to be held in Southport, just fifteen miles north of Liverpool.
Even though it was only forty minutes away by electric train, we decided to
spend the week in a boarding house just behind the promenade. By the time we
got to Southport I was thirteen years old, nearly fourteen, and I was beginning
to seriously wonder about the advisability of going on holiday with my parents.
After all, the year before, following two weeks on a boat with them I had
literally thrown myself overboard. Some of this was the natural inclination of
the teenager to separate from his or her parents — it is a biological
imperative that you find your mother embarrassing from time to time, so that
you forge your own personality But mine, with her propensity for screaming in
public and loudly holding unconventional opinions (‘Lexi, why’s everybody
fucking standing still?’ ‘It’s Winston Churchill’s state funeral, Mother.’ ‘Churchill
— that drunken bastard!’), made you not just want to forge a personality but
take on a whole new identity and move to Norway.