Stalin Ate My Homework (34 page)

My
parents may have felt reassured because I had told them I was going to take the
train to Paris — and why wouldn’t I seeing as it was fast and in my case
completely free? But I had told them a lie. Actually my plan was to hitch-hike.
There was an almost mystical significance to hitch-hiking. It was free, so that
appealed to hippy stinginess, and according to the mythology you were
guaranteed to meet all kinds of really ‘cool’ people and enjoy all kinds of
freaky adventures. As soon as Molly and Joe were on the train to Harwich to
join their cruise ship I took the bus to a roundabout at the beginning of the
East Lancashire Road, which I vaguely thought led to London. I stood on the
edge of the road and stuck out my thumb … and I waited on that roundabout for
the rest of the day and right throughout the whole of the following night. The
next morning I got the same bus back into town and took the train to London and
onward to Paris. As I ate a meal in the dining car on the train from the French
coast the ticket collector, seeing my free pass, saluted me, proletarian to
proletarian.

In all
the time over the next couple of years that I spent trying to hitch-hike I
think I only ever got about five lifts. Two of those drivers were drunk and one
thought he was Jesus. It was my appearance that was mostly to blame — my
clothes, my hair and the tortured expression of doubt and embarrassment that I
wore permanently on my face. The front cover of the album
Highway 61
Revisited
showed Bob Dylan dressed in a white T-shirt with a drawing of a
Triumph Bonneville motorcycle printed on it. The Triumph logo was placed above
the picture of the motorbike and the word ‘Motorcycles’ ran below. I
desperately wanted a T-shirt like that but, having no idea where to buy one, I
produced my own version drawn with a felt-tip pen on an old and yellowing
scoop-necked T-shirt from the Co-op. When attempting to create my own drawing I
hadn’t really been able to stretch the T-shirt flat on the living room table
and so the image came out all crazy-looking, as did the lettering. Rather than
saying ‘Triumph’ it looked more like ‘TrUmP’ and ‘Motorcycles’ had come out as
‘momoMymycles’. As I stood on the roundabout at the beginning of the East Lancs
Road I looked like a wild man who had been writing mad incoherent words on his
shirt, or possibly somebody who had tried to commit suicide by repeatedly
stabbing himself with a magic marker. And I was still wearing my toy hat.

And I wasn’t intending to
stay in small hotels or youth hostels as I had told my parents — I was planning
to sleep rough. After hitch-hiking, sleeping rough was another experience that
was supposed to give you all kinds of insights into the human condition. I had
bought myself an olive green sleeping bag from the Army and Navy stores in Lime
Street and I travelled with this rolled up, tied with straps and supported by
another strap that went over my shoulder. All the clothes I had with me were
inside the bedroll, and it was very inconvenient to get anything because you
had to undo all the straps. Typically, I was far more interested in looking
like Woody Guthrie than in having anything practical to carry my luggage in.

Along
with a few pairs of baggy underpants and some T-shirts with mad drawings on
them was an enormous, double-edged commando dagger in my bedroll. I don’t quite
know when the thing with me and knives started. Travelling through France when
I was quite young, I had seen in shop windows some wooden-handled penknives
called Opinel which had entranced me. These simply made objects exuded a
powerful kind of utilitarian beauty: they embodied the idea of peasants hacking
off a chunk of rough
saucisson sec
for their lunch or a philosopher
sharpening his pencils prior to composing a stinging diatribe against some
other philosopher. By contrast British penknives, with their clumps of
pathetic, tiny blades, were fussy things you associated with boy scouts. So on
one early trip through France I bought myself an Opinel, and then on a
subsequent holiday I bought myself a bigger one, then I bought one with a
locking ring so that it could be held open and wouldn’t close if you stuck it
in something, at which point I couldn’t deny to myself that, though I did like
the idea of cutting up sausage and sharpening pencils, I also very much liked
the idea of having a weapon tucked in my back pocket. Then somebody gave me the
commando dagger and I thought I might as well take that on my holidays too.

As I
walked from the Gare du Nord to the Left Bank, there were riot police
everywhere — the notorious and feared CRS. The city was hot and humid under the
afternoon sun. The buildings, like huge storage heaters, gusted wet air into
the cobbled streets. I felt lonely Down a side street carpeted with vegetable
peelings I came upon a row of Citroen vans full of men in padded suits, helmets
on and visors down. They looked at me with my long hair and my bedroll as a
hawk might look at a fieldmouse.

From its
high point in May the street protests and occupations had declined, partly due
to the connivance of the Communist Party and their trade union federation, the
CGT, with the right-wing government. The students, intellectuals and anarchists
who had rioted had been as opposed to the French CP and the conventional trade
unions as they had been to the de Gaulle government, seeing them all as part of
the same old-fashioned corrupt system. The
Morning Star,
taking its line
from the British party leadership, came out and condemned the ‘68 protests; and
Pif the dog, who after all was at the centre of things, had several strident
points to make about the intellectual narcissism of the protest’s leaders.

On the posters outside the
Gaumont cinema that advertised the coming attractions there would always be a
strapline designed to express the essence of the film. There was one movie
incongruously starring method actor Rod Steiger and blowsy, blonde,
Swindon-born bombshell Diana Dors, whose caption read, ‘You’re not afraid of
the jungle, so why are you afraid of me?’ Beneath the title of the movie of our
family’s life, which might be called ‘Von Sayle’s Express’, the legend would
read, ‘Holidays were overly important to them.’ Consequently when I tried to
devise my first independent holiday I over-reached myself catastrophically.

I had
the idea that Paris ‘68 would be my Aldermaston march, that like Glen Cocker I
would encounter a girl who was so aroused by the political upheaval, so excited
by the throwing off of all bourgeois morality, that she would have sex with me,
even if she didn’t want to, as part of her revolutionary duty.

Going
to Paris alone was a huge mistake. I should have known that if the prospect of
spending an evening in Liverpool by myself brought on feelings of existential
dread so severe I had to go running around town until I met somebody to talk
to, then travelling to an alien city where I knew no-one and where the streets
were full of out-of-control riot police was likely to open up a pit of desolation
in me so terrible that each second was an agony that seemed to go on for hours.
Especially since I was truly awful at striking up the superficial friendships
you needed if you were going to go on a holiday like this. I would hear other
hitchers say to each other, ‘Man, I got talking to this guy outside Athens,
man, and he just like invited me to his sister’s wedding on this Greek island
and I ended up playing the bouzouki all night for all these chicks, man, and
then….’ Whereas my story would go, ‘This bloke started talking to me in
Victoria Station but he seemed to be saying how sealions were tapping his
phone, so I ran away’ I would have liked to ask somebody to come with me but,
fearing rejection, I lacked the confidence to do so.

As I
lay in my sleeping bag under the Pont Neuf, whimpering with loneliness and
occasionally, as I turned over, getting stabbed in the back by my commando
dagger, all around me pretty girls were humping groovy, handsome-looking guys
who played Beatles songs on the guitar. Thus I learned the lesson that, even
after the revolution, cool, handsome and confident is always going to beat
weird-looking and needy.

After a few days in Paris
I was running short of money I had only brought thirteen pounds’ worth of
travellers’ cheques, which really was a tiny amount — but then I had no idea
how much holidays cost. On previous trips my parents or the Czech government
had paid for everything. Travellers’ cheques were what Molly and Joe had
carried with them when they journeyed abroad, and back in Liverpool I had been
very excited to be buying my own. Emptying my post office account I went to the
Thomas Cook office in the centre of Liverpool. ‘How would you like your
cheques?’ the girl behind the counter asked. Being aware that travellers’
cheques came in denominations that were sometimes different from conventional
currency and trying to act like the world-weary globetrotter I said to her, ‘Oh,
I dunno … just give me two threes and a seven.’

I was
down to my last few Francs but I’d hatched a plan to get by Though I was
constantly finding myself in confusing situations through my own stupidity I
also possessed an eccentric survival instinct. In times of distress, just as
Joe would go look for communists when there was a problem, I would turn to
politics, politics and drawing, for my salvation.

Though
the May uprising had not reformed society or even made sex with lonely boys
compulsory, there had been a significant improvement in the quality of
political graffiti. Up until that point activists has simply scrawled
straightforward slogans on walls: ‘Smash the state’, ‘End the war in Vietnam’ —
that sort of thing. In London I had a particular favourite on a wall at Hyde
Park Corner which I passed regularly on the way to shout at the US embassy It
read, ‘Free all political pris~~~~~’, the words trailing off in a long jagged
line of red paint. Obviously whoever had been writing it had been grabbed by
the police before they had the chance to finish.

The
reason the graffiti in Paris was so much better than anywhere else was because
it had been strongly influenced by the thinking of one particular group known
as the Situationists. The Situationists were inspired by both Marxism and
Surrealism, and the most obvious results of their theories were the puzzling
and thought-provoking slogans which remained on the walls of the Sorbonne and
surrounding area after the riots had ended. ‘Be realistic, demand the
impossible,’ read one. ‘If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him,’
read another, and ‘Live without dead time.’ The most famous of all was ‘Under
the paving stones, the beach.’

Eager
to try and make some money I bought a box of chalks from an art shop and,
securing a little strip of pavement on the Boulevard St Michel where there were
many incompetent buskers, I began sketching. I drew the likeness of a
revolutionary hero such as Che or Mao with a speech bubble emerging from their
mouth saying something I thought was Situationist and cryptic like ‘The
revolution is for fish’ or ‘Underneath the pavement, more pavement’. This
might not sound like much but the standard of street art in those days, before
the invention of the silver robot statue was terribly low. So, in a couple of
days passing tourists were throwing a decent amount of money into my toy cap,
certainly enough to pay for bread and rough red wine. Though I still didn’t
really have anybody to talk to, I was at least drunk in the evenings.

Towards
the end of the week I was in a park, a little triangular patch of trees and grass
just off the Boulevard Montparnasse where I was thinking of sleeping that
night, when somebody got in a dispute with a park official (I think it might
have been me) . The man blew a whistle and immediately the park was full of
riot police who scooped up all the backpackers and took us to a police station
near the Sorbonne, where we were locked in a cage for a few hours while
gendarmes glared at us in a threatening fashion. Luckily they didn’t search me
or my bedroll, but they did get my parents’ phone number out of me with a minimum
of threats. A sergeant tried to call Valley Road, but of course the phone just
rang and rang because while I was in this French police station Molly and Joe
were halfway up the Kiel Canal.

In the
early morning the gendarmes let us out of the cage and herded us down a
corridor and into the back of a van. Not knowing what was going to happen next,
the whole smelly group were taken to the outskirts of the city where the police
let us out on to the side of a busy ring road. They informed us that we were
all barred from Paris — we had an hour to leave town and never return. Then the
van drove off.