Stalin Ate My Homework (27 page)

Molly
was also particularly poor on the importance of plot development or story
structure in fiction. If I left one of the novels I was reading lying around —
Catch
22, L’Etranger
or
The Hound of the Baskervilles
— she would pick it
up and then start reading it backwards, beginning with the last page. Then she
would refuse to let me have it back, spending hours happily engrossed in a
story whose outcome she already knew, watching characters’ personalities
unevolve.

Through appearing in the
school play I at last became good friends with Cliff Cocker. Well, I say
friends, but in some ways Cliff treated me like a wild boy he had found living
in the woods. By then he was in the sixth form and intending to become an
actor. Cliff’s group had their own form room which as a fourth-year I
supposedly wasn’t allowed to enter, but he would sneak me in and encourage me
to sing, do impressions of the staff and swear for the other, older boys. I
used to sing the Foundations’ ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup’, which for some reason
killed every time.

Cliff
was always pointing out how handsome he was, just like his namesake Cliff
Richard, and certainly he had been a bit of a heart-throb with the girls from
our sister school during the run of
The Government Inspector.
I came to
think of myself as another member of the Cocker family and took to spending a
lot of time round at their house. They were an extraordinarily good-looking
family, which is why Cliff had to keep saying how handsome he was. Cliff’s
father, Len, was a strikingly tall, upright man who had been in the Palestine
police throughout the Second World War serving in the British Mandate, where he
had developed a great sympathy for the Arab cause. His mother, Maeve, was
remarkable too, elegant and dark-haired and unmistakably Irish in her looks.
Cliff also had a sister, Penny, and of course there was his older brother Glen,
who had lost his virginity on the Aldermaston march.

Now in
his early twenties, Glen had been at Liverpool Art School studying graphic
design at the same time as John Lennon and in many ways bore a strong
resemblance to the pop star. Glen had the same wiry looks, fervent opinions,
quick surreal wit and ironic manner. He was also short-sighted like Lennon,
though Glen’s glasses always seemed to be held together with sticky tape.
Unfortunately Glen couldn’t sing or write songs.

There
was also an autocratic granny who lived in the same neighbourhood with her
other son, Uncle Billy Cocker. Though Len and Maeve were both in the Communist
Party they owned their own business: they and Uncle Billy were printers.
Operating a press in those days was a true craft that required a great deal of
skill and a degree of artistry The local printer was a vital part of the life
of a community, and invoices, posters for church events, business cards and
stationery all flowed from their shops.

The
Cockers lived in a two-storey flat above their shop in Granby Street right in
the heart of Liverpool 8, Toxteth. Though Liverpool had the reputation of being
a racially mixed city the African and Afro-Caribbean population were in fact
very much confined to the Toxteth neighbourhood in the south end of the city,
known as ‘The 8’ or Tokky. Black Liverpudlians were often not even welcome in
pubs and clubs in the centre of town. Granby was a wide street of two- and
three-storey brick buildings, shops with flats above. A number of the shops
were run by Pakistanis, Somalis or Arabs. They stocked strange fruit and
vegetables unknown in Anfield (which pretty much meant anything apart from
potatoes) and peppers, aubergines, mangoes and melons tumbled on to the
pavement. These shops also stayed open well past five o’clock in the evening,
the time when all other shops gleefully closed whether anyone wanted to buy
something or not. Along Granby and down the side streets old Jamaican men sat
in open doorways noisily playing dominos.

The BBC
had a television drama strand called ‘The Wednesday Play’, featuring innovative
and challenging dramas that people had to watch because there was nothing else
on. One of these plays was a priapic fantasy about a Liverpool postman who won
a thousand pounds on the Premium Bonds and moved into a bedsit in Cliff’s
neighbourhood, Liverpool 8, where he had all kinds of bohemian adventures with
free-spirited girls, became an artist and hung out with black people (referred
to by him as ‘spades’, which they didn’t seem to mind at all in the play). I
would like to have been like that postman, but found all this vibrancy in real
life a bit intimidating and overwhelming. It was all right when it was
Communists abroad doing it and I was one of the privileged few who saw it, but
all this vigour seemed too free-form and out of control and it was happening
just a bus ride away from our house. So I would hurry past all the
colourfulness to get to the Cockers’ flat.

There
was another Wednesday Play written by a man who I’m sure was called Barry Blancmange,
shown, I think, in 1967 or 1968. It had only one set, a smart room in which a
group of people sat at a fashionable dinner party making polite chatter, while
in a corner, unwatched, a television played footage of the Vietnam War. From
time to time the camera would cut away from the guests to the TV, and when it
came back to the dinner party one of the diners would have burst into flames
and was now reduced to a smouldering, black stump. It went on like this for an
hour of prime-time broadcasting until there was nobody left at the dinner party
and probably nobody watching either who wasn’t a blackened stump themselves.

Though they lived in this
cosmopolitan quarter there was something quite austere about Maeve and Len’s
Communism. They, and Cliff too, were very staunch and uncritical members of the
party and completely unquestioning of the actions of the Soviet Union. Though
they attended to all the other rituals such as paying party dues, going to see
the Red Army Ensemble and shouting at the television, by this time Molly and
Joe had both stopped attending actual party meetings. I suspect that Len and
Maeve found something a little untrustworthy in my parents’ politics, which was
fine by me.

Glen
was less political than Cliff, who shared his parents ‘beliefs, and a less
restrained character. I was very honoured to be invited to a small party in
their flat to celebrate Maeve and Len’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary Apart
from me there were only family members present, except their oldest son who was
nowhere to be seen. Then, just after 10.30 when the pubs closed, Glen turned up
drunk with three or four straggly-haired, whey-faced hippies. There were three
pubs in Liverpool where everybody drank, O’Connors, the Crack and the
Philharmonic Hotel, and when the barman started shouting last orders there at
10.15 somebody would always say, ‘Hey, man, does anyone know where there’s a
party, man?’ To which on that night Glen had replied, ‘Yes, man, I know where
there’s a party, man.’ The hippies brushed past Cliff’s granny and headed
straight for the drink and the cocktail sausages. In a very quiet voice Cliff
said to his brother, ‘Glen, could I have a word with you out on the landing?’

‘Sure,
man,’ said Glen.

He
followed Cliff out of the room, and the next sound we heard was the smack of
somebody being punched very hard followed by the sound of them falling down a
long flight of stairs. After a second Cliff came back into the room and said to
the grazing hippies, ‘Right, you lot, fuck off out of it!’ Which they did,
moaning to themselves about people being ‘downers, man’. Then the party carried
on as if nothing had happened, and after a while Glen came back into the room
rubbing his head.

During the long period of
recovery following Joe’s botched surgery, when he had been convalescing, then
working part-time on light duties, Molly had herself gone back to work
part-time. She spent three days a week at the Vernon’s Pools company, with
thousands of other women, combing through the coupons each week for a winner.
And when Joe returned to work as a foreman he was still not making the money he
would have made doing shifts as a guard, so she continued to go to work. She
enjoyed getting out of the house and valued the comradeship she found at Vernon’s.
Indeed, Molly enjoyed herself so much that in all the time she was at the pools
firm she never organised a strike.

Up
until that point the only employment my mother had had during her marriage was
doing what we called ‘the surveys’. Our family’s connection with opinion
polling had begun in the 1930s when Joe had carried out some research for the
left-wing newspaper the
News Chronicle,
performing surveys which
involved asking people in the street questions on political choices, shopping
patterns and reading habits. In time he began to do the same thing on a
part-time basis for the Gallup organisation, and after they were married Molly
took over this work. When I was young Molly and I once went to the Isle of Man
in very stormy seas to spend a couple of nights in budget boarding houses.
During the day we would stop people on the rain-lashed promenade to ask them
what they wanted out of a holiday on the Isle of Man, which was mostly for the
rain to stop.

When
Molly went to work for Vernon’s, she suggested I might want to earn a little
money during the long summer holiday doing the surveys myself. This was the
second time it had been suggested that I needed to find employment. I had
briefly, via a friend from school, done a little part-time work sweeping up in
the Grafton Bingo Hall in West Derby Road, but they had had to ask me to go and
hide in a back room after complaints that my bizarre manner and unusual
appearance were frightening the old lady customers.

I
imagine that, as well as getting a bit of pocket money, my parents thought that
doing the opinion polling would teach me the virtues of meticulousness,
responsibility and reliability, but it didn’t turn out that way One of the
requirements of doing surveys was that you were supposed to ask your questions
of people in every one of the socio-economic groups. Socio-economic grouping, a
system commonly used in market research, ran from A to E and classified a
household according to the job of its main wage-earner. A was a professional
person or somebody at director level; B was senior management; C1 was junior
management or clerical; C2 was skilled working class; D was unskilled working
class, manual labourers and so on; and E was those reliant on the state such as
pensioners or the unemployed. This was a problem. It was easy enough for me to
find C2s since that was everybody’s parents, and there were also plenty of Ds
and a few Es around our way But I’m not sure an A had ever been in Anfield, and
even if they had they had never hung around long enough for me to go up to them
and ask them for their views on detergents, soup or skiing holidays.

I’m
sure that somebody more suited to this type of work would have found a
legitimate way to locate members of every socio-economic group, but as soon as
I set out to do the surveys I discovered that I had several failings which
militated against me doing the job effectively At the outset there was my
inability to be systematic. My very first job was a survey on chemical
fertiliser. A more organised person might have contacted the farmers’ union,
got a list of members, phoned ahead and made appointments, then travelled to
their farms and conducted the survey.

What I
did was catch a ferry to Wallasey I was certain they had farms on the Wirral
because I was pretty sure they had countryside out there somewhere — I had seen
it from the train on the way to Chester. Then from the Wallasey landing stage I
walked up the ramp to the bus station and went from unfamiliar bus to
unfamiliar bus asking the conductors, ‘Do you go anywhere in the country where
they have farms?’ Finally I found one who said that they did go to the country
and that was where they kept the farms, so I caught his bus and got off where
he told me to, which was certainly in the middle of the countryside.

I stood
in a lane with cowslips dotting the hedgerows and watched the bus disappear
into the distance. Then silence descended, nothing moving in the warmth of a
spring day After a few moments of indecision I decided to carry on trudging up
the lane in the direction the bus had vanished in, until eventually I came to a
rough track that seemed like it might lead to a farmhouse. Following ten
minutes of walking I was attacked by a dog and had to run away I found a path,
stumbled through a wood and found another farmhouse, but the farmer’s wife was
extremely annoyed at being disturbed in her chores by a long-haired youth
mumbling about her preference in nitrates. Then I said to her, ‘Oh, before I
start I need to know, would you describe yourself as a C1? Or would you say you
were a B? You’re not a C2, are you?’ At which point I had to run away again. As
far as I could tell the most common animals in the countryside weren’t sheep or
chickens but angry dogs. Finally a farmer did speak to me. He pointed out that
I was in an area devoted entirely to dairy farming and they had no use for
chemical fertiliser.