Stalin Ate My Homework (25 page)

Less
understandably, I also began to find Joe’s geniality embarrassing. Judgemental
little bastard that I had become, I would sometimes recoil when I saw him
telling terrible jokes at the centre of a crowd of railwaymen. I had this idea
that the best people were the ones who lounged in a corner sneering.

After
nearly a week I had become heartily sick of Southport. It was an odd town. The
main shopping street, Lord Street, was a long and elegant boulevard, full of expensive
shops and refined tea rooms, tree-lined and covered with a continuous glass
canopy supported on wrought iron pillars. But right behind were narrow streets
stuffed with shops and cafés that catered to the holidaying masses of
Merseyside and Lancashire, selling buckets and spades and lunches that came
with sliced bread and a cup of tea. This collision of styles, of refined spa
and northern seaside resort, made it seem as if Baden Baden had by some
gigantic feat of engineering been literally twinned with Skegness.

It was
at heart a rich town, rich and old, and had a very ambivalent attitude to the
working-class hordes that descended on it in the summer months. Every year on
12 July the Protestant Orange Lodges would travel from Liverpool to celebrate
the Battle of the Boyne by marching up and down to fife and drum bands. Pale
and undernourished-looking boys and girls from the streets, tower blocks and
tenements of Liverpool sat on huge carthorses, dressed as King Billy and Queen
Mary I saw a shop-girl in Woolworth’s bringing out the special price label that
they must have kept just for the 12th that doubled all the prices for the day.

By the
edge of my fourteenth birthday I could, at least in appearance, pass as an
adult. I had long black hair flowing over my collar and the beginning of a
beard, but though I didn’t wish to spend time with my parents I didn’t know how
to occupy myself as a grown-up would. So instead I wandered through the sand
dunes and pine woods that stretched from the edge of town to Ainsdale, I
meandered up and down the streets of Birkdale with its huge Edwardian villas, I
walked round and round the town centre till I was dizzy, and I strode up and
down the wide beach where on a very clear day you could see Anglesey and the
Welsh mountains in Snowdonia to the south and Blackpool Tower further up
Liverpool Bay to the north.

Having
said that what we did on Merseyside was comedy, there was one other related
thing which was music. Again, even before the Beatles and all the other
Merseybeat groups I was vaguely aware that we had had fifties’ heart-throb
crooner and Jewish Liverpudlian Frankie Vaughan, singer Michael Holliday and
rock and roller Billy Fury, but by and large the city’s music scene passed me
by According to those who were in the know, music was everywhere in Liverpool —
it leaked out of every basement and attic. But when they started showing films
on television about the Cavern Club I was astonished to learn that there were
such places in Liverpool city centre. As far as I was aware there were only the
big shops in Church Street, the Pier Head where you went for demonstrations and
to get the ferry, and Unity Theatre where you went to see black and white
Eisenstein films and plays written by Arnold Wesker about angry Jewish people.
The live music I had encountered on the left was either the humourless folk
ballads of Pete Seeger, all about mining disasters or sneering at people who
lived in the suburbs, self-pitying Irish rebel nonsense or trad jazz. No wonder
I wasn’t interested in live music.

But the
effect of the Beatles went far beyond music. John Lennon had just introduced
the world to ‘the John Lennon cap’, a jaunty item of seaman’s headgear that,
like National Health specs, he had made into an unlikely fashion object. I
desperately wanted one, but the closest I could get to it was a dark blue Wild
West-era US 7th Cavalry soldier’s cap that I bought in a souvenir shop off Lord
Street. This seemed close enough to me because at that point I had great
difficulty differentiating the nuances in things — for example, leather and
plastic, which, both being shiny and black, I couldn’t tell apart. I had a mac
which was clearly made of plastic, but I was never sure it wasn’t leather. It
was only when I leaned against a hot radiator and my mac burst into flames that
I began to see the difference. Similarly with this cap. It was round and had a
peak, so I thought it was identical to John Lennon’s. I took the plastic
crossed silver swords off the front of it and, regarding my reflection in shop
windows, considered myself really cool and trendy In fact I looked like an
angry man who was wandering around town wearing a kid’s toy hat.

I had
one very nice afternoon with Joe. He must have taken time off from the AGM
because we went to see
Von Ryan’s Express
at the big ABC cinema in Lord
Street. I loved this movie, in which a group of Allied prisoners, led by Frank
Sinatra as Colonel Ryan, who have been captured by the Germans in Italy manage
to seize control of the prison train they are on. Despite being caught in an
Allied air raid, negotiating uprooted tracks and enduring attacks by the
Luftwaffe, they succeed in steering the train to neutral Switzerland via
Florence and Milan —though Ryan is shot in the back and killed right at the
end. Shot in Panavision and using Ektachrome stock, giving it a pleasing cool
blue tone rather than the gaudier Technicolor, the film, with all the jumping
on and off and the confusion, reminded me and Joe of our rail holidays in
Europe. And all the shouting reminded us of Molly.

But the thing that came to
obsess me while I was in Southport was the idea that I was so close to home yet
I was sleeping in a narrow bed in a damp boarding house. All the things that
were familiar to me were just a few miles away, yet here I was bored out of my
mind. On the Friday I told my mother I was going for yet another walk, but in
fact went to the station and caught a train to Liverpool. From the moment the
train left the station I felt like I was on the most amazing adventure, because
I was heading for our empty house back in Anfield. It was almost like I had
found a new way to be on a journey — the complete pointlessness of it was
dizzying. At Exchange Station I took a bus, and within twenty minutes I was
unlocking the front door of our empty and silent house. It was the most
incredible experience. I sat in the armchair in the living room and wondered
what to do next. Nobody knew where I was and this was the last place they would
ever think to look for me. After all, what kind of an evil genius would leave
Southport just to sit in an armchair in an empty, cold house?

I had
recently read a Ray Bradbury short story in one of the American science fiction
magazines I bought for a shilling each from a second-hand bookstore. In this
story the
Twentieth Century Limited
stops at a desert town where the
train has never stopped before and a man gets off. The man intends to murder a
stranger at random, but there is another man in the desert town who has sat for
years watching the train and waiting for it to stop because he knows that one
day the
Twentieth Century Limited
will stop there and a man will get off
intending to murder a stranger at random. The two men then hunt each other
through the desert town. I thought to myself, ‘That’s me. I could show my
bottom to the woman in the pet shop and she wouldn’t believe it was me. She
would just say to the police, “It couldn’t have been Alexei Sayle even though
it looked just like him, because he’s in Southport with his parents.” And the
police would reply, “Well, yes, but Southport isn’t that far away” But she
would say, “Certainly that’s true. But he’s on holiday with his parents. Why
would he come back? The thought of him coming back here from Southport is
literally impossible.” And the police would be forced to agree.’

So I
thought of doing that, but then I looked at my watch and saw that if I didn’t
get back up the coast I would miss the annual dinner dance, so I took the train
back to Southport and never told anybody I had been at home for the afternoon.

The second holiday we took
in 1966 was a few months later, towards the end of the summer: two weeks in
Bulgaria. Though Bulgaria was a Communist country the trip didn’t resemble our
previous visits to the Soviet Bloc because for the first time in our lives we
were on a conventional package holiday Me, Molly and Joe would be spending two
weeks at a resort on the Black Sea called Golden Sands and, rather than taking
days on the train to get there, we flew from Gatwick to the airport at nearby
Varna in a four-engined turboprop Ilyushin IL 18 airliner of Balkan Airlines.

Molly
and Joe were completely relaxed about flying, but I was more anxious. The
interior of the IL 18 was fitted out with rows of seats that had frilly
antimacassars on the headrests, net curtains hung from a plastic-covered wire
at the porthole windows, there were open luggage racks above the passengers’
heads, and a line of round Art Deco-style light fittings set in the ceiling ran
the length of the passenger compartment. If I was going to travel through the
air at thirty thousand feet I wanted to be in something that looked like a futuristic
spaceship rather than an Edwardian saloon bar or a railway station buffet.

Our
refreshment room came in fast and low over a cornfield before bumping down on
to the tarmac, engines screaming in reverse as we hit the runway On arrival at
the tiny terminal building it felt odd that we weren’t met by a delegation from
the Bulgarian Communist Party but had to get on a coach with all the other
tourists. On the other hand, at least we didn’t have to visit any locomotive
factories or the sites of Nazi massacres.

Golden
Sands had been constructed as a resort solely for the use of foreign tourists.
The only way you could eat in the restaurants or drink in the bars was by
using Western currency to buy coupons, which you then exchanged for food and
drink. In effect it was a town built along the lines of the crappy shops at the
border between the Soviet Bloc and the West. Despite this, Golden Sands
provided a reasonable holiday for the Western visitor, if not for the
Bulgarians. Local people were free to come into the town and watch Westerners
enjoying themselves but couldn’t legally buy a single thing in this segregated
part of their own country.

The
hotels we stayed in were all low two-storey buildings, linked by paths lined
with highly manicured flower beds. These flower beds were sprayed every night
with insecticide to keep the mosquitos down. At night, once the insecticide
trucks had gone, in these patches of vegetation there lurked men who would hiss
at you, offering local currency in exchange for pounds, marks or francs at much
higher rates than were provided by the government. They didn’t get many takers
because there was nothing to buy, no matter how many zloty you had.

The
local teenagers who came into the town didn’t want money. What they longed for
was information about one thing — pop music. A group of boys sat next to me on
a bench asking if I had any Beatles music. I don’t know why they thought I
would be carrying records around, but before I could answer a policeman walked
past and they became very nervous, pretending they had nothing to do with me.
I realised that, in all the time we had spent in the East, up until then we had
only ever mixed with people who were part of the system, who were loyal to the
party and its allied organisations. This was the first time I had encountered
kids my own age who weren’t running their own railway Clearly there were
tensions, but you didn’t get to be a Communist without learning to ignore what
was in front of your face. I put the youths’ willingness to risk being seen
talking to a Westerner down to the unstoppable power of the Beatles. In that
year of 1966 it was impossible to overstate how big they were, and on their
backs how big Liverpool had become.

During
the day I hung around a wooden jetty that stretched out from the hot, silky
sands into the Black Sea. This was where the teenagers congregated, away from
the adults. These young people had come to Bulgaria from all over Europe, and
there were even a few from the United States. Sun-tanned girls in bikinis
floating in the cobalt water would ask me, ‘So are you, like, really from
Liverpool?’

‘Yes,’
I would reply.

Then,
wide-eyed and excited and looking at me in a way I didn’t quite understand,
they would say, ‘Wow! So do you know the Beatles, then?’

‘No,’ I
would reply.

There was one girl, a
couple of years older than me, called Julie who was on holiday with her mother.
She was from Ealing in London and she seemed absolutely lovely, droplets of
water glistening on her skin, the sun reflecting off her white bikini. The
closest I got to expressing my adoration was to suggest I swim along the bottom
of the sea, then come up between her legs so she would be sitting on my
shoulders, and then we would topple sideways as I had seen others do. But she
declined, perhaps fearing dreadful injury apart from anything else. I would try
and sit next to Julie in the evenings when we ate, looking devotedly at her.