Stalin Ate My Homework (39 page)

Nearer
to home, along Oakfield Road the Gaumont cinema had closed down, Peter Pemberton’s
house had been bulldozed, Eric Savage’s house was scheduled to go the same way,
the Co-op store had gone, a lot of the little shops were derelict, boarded up
or burned out, and the two Dickies had long ago abandoned their delicatessen. On
the other side of the city Liverpool University had bought up all of Crown
Street and then flattened the entire neighbourhood. This was what Joe had
promised in his election literature in 1938: ‘… the demolition of slums and
every insanitary house, large-scale replanning of built-up areas with provision
of open spaces, children’s playgrounds and school development’. There had
certainly been demolition and there were now open spaces, but there was nothing
in them except mud.

Coming
towards me, bright against the gloom, was a shock of blond hair. It was Sid, my
former drinking buddy — Sid, who had been on probation and got drunk and been
chased round and round the Everyman Theatre. He hadn’t gone into the sixth form
with the rest of us but had left school the year before at fifteen. I was
enormously relieved to see a familiar face in this wasteland and waved the
startled young man down with an extravagant smile on my face. He reluctantly
stopped and, once he recognised who it was, told me how he was getting on. He
was now, he said proudly, an office junior at an insurance company in town. But
as we talked Sid kept glancing uneasily about him, and after a few minutes of
strained conversation he said a quick goodbye and scuttled off, leaving me
standing alone on that long and bleak escarpment.

I knew
that Sid had been nervous in case somebody from his neighbourhood saw us
talking together. He lived in one of those bleak tower blocks down the hill
whose populations were intolerant of anybody who acted, thought or dressed in
even the tiniest way different from the norm. So for him to be seen chatting to
a man resembling a Cossack who had become detached from his regiment meant he
was at the very least risking having his sexuality questioned and being
mercilessly mocked for months about having weirdy friends. Still, I found it
sad that somebody who had once been so wild had been that easily tamed by a
weekly wage and a shiny suit.

On the
other hand, at least he was getting on with things. What was I going to do with
my life? The only offer I had got, even of an interview, was at Southport
College of Art for a place on a two-year foundation course. If I impressed at
the interview and got on the course, then passed A-Level art, it would mean I
could eventually apply for a place at a London art school. It had come down to
this — only my skill at drawing was likely to save me.

Unfortunately,
when the letter came informing me of the date of my interview it coincided with
my planned journey to Holland. So sacrosanct were holidays that nobody contemplated
for a second the idea that I should delay or cancel my intended trip. Instead,
we decided that Molly would attend the most important interview of my life for
me. On 11 September 1969, while I was still coming down from the dope I had
smoked the night before, my mother took the portfolio of work I had done at
school with her on the train to Southport. Fearing she might be late for my
interview she took a taxi from the station to the art school, which was maybe
four hundred yards away.

Molly
must have done well in the interview, because a few days after my return from
Amsterdam they offered me a place. I had the feeling when I turned up for
classes on my first day that they were expecting a Jewish lady with red hair
and glasses.

What
might have swung Molly’s interview was that she’d actually once been in the
same room as Picasso and had watched him create a work of art. On a cold and blowy
Monday in November 1950 fleets of coaches departed from every major city and
town in Britain heading to Yorkshire for ‘the Sheffield World Peace Congress’.
My parents, recently married, were on one of the many coaches that left from
Liverpool. They were in the massive crowd who cheered and cheered as Pablo
Picasso, speaking from a stage decorated with yellow banners proclaiming ‘Ban
All War Propaganda’ in big red letters, related how he and his father used to
paint doves together and how he was allowed to paint the legs. Then he
declared. ‘I stand for life against death. I stand for peace against war!’
Picasso sat down to thunderous applause.

Oddly
enough my mother was as excited at hearing Hewlett Johnson, a Christian
Marxist, the so-called ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury Cathedral speak, as she was at
seeing the world’s greatest living artist in the flesh. Perhaps that is why my
parents failed to make a bid for a sketch of a dove that they watched Picasso
draw, a sketch which he then signed and later in the evening was auctioned to
raise funds. Instead it was bought by an American businessman for twenty
guineas.

The term at Southport Art
College began a week later than that at Alsop, so one lunchtime I decided to go
back to see my old school mates, who I knew would be playing football over the
road in Walton Hall Park, just as we had done the year before. Somehow I hadn’t
managed to see any of them during the summer holidays. After spending all
morning choosing my outfit, in the end the only change I made was that in place
of the ragged denim jacket lined with rabbit fur I was wearing when I met Sid I
put on my black leather biker jacket. I suppose when you have a look that works
you should stick with it, though when I wore my black leather boots on the bus,
sarcastic people kept asking me where my motorbike or occasionally where my
horse was.

One of
the television programmes that the entire Sayle family was happy to watch
together was
The Saint,
starring Roger Moore and broadcast on Granada TV
Molly felt it was ideologically safe because a lot of the writers and cast
were Unity Theatre alumni and therefore socialists. Alfie Bass and David Kossoff
regularly turned up in supporting roles, as did Warren Mitchell who would
always be cast as the swarthy Moroccan.

What I
liked most about
The Saint
was that when the hero, Simon Templar,
visited somewhere impossibly exotic on a case (distant locations such as
Marseilles, Salzburg or Tangier, faraway places whose streets, even to a
teenager, looked suspiciously like the back end of Elstree Studios) whatever
he needed for his mission — guns, plans of the main post office, a hot air balloon
— was always available via some old pal who lived there. All kinds of helpful
and exotic folk in towns and cities all over the world — jittery safe-crackers,
sexy dancing girls and world-weary police inspectors — were happy to help Simon
out without giving it a second’s thought. In the world of the Saint, friendship
was a fixed and simple thing that lasted for ever. None of these people ever
told Simon that they didn’t want to help him solve a murder, rob a bank or let
him play a game of football with them.

The day
was hot and cloudy as I walked across Stanley Park, then on through Anfield
Cemetery past rows of collapsing tombs and tilting angels. It suddenly struck
me that this was the last time I would do this familiar walk — I wasn’t a
schoolboy any more. Arriving at the park opposite Alsop just after the lunch
break had begun, I saw my former classmates in their school uniforms kicking a
ball about across the grass. Crossing the worn turf towards them I thought they
looked like children, shouting, swinging at the ball and rushing around. As I
got closer they stopped one by one, turned and looked at me, as if they didn’t
know what I was doing there. And I for my part, sensing their hostile attitude,
may then have laid it on a bit thick about where I would be going next week —
telling them that at art school you could come in at any time of the day that
you wanted and there would be sexy girls and drugs and you called the lecturers
by their first names and went to parties at their flats and they gave you lifts
home in their sports cars and they treated you as an equal. Unlike at school
where they were.

Nobody
invited me to stay and have a kick-about with them, so I turned and strode away
like I had somewhere else to be. It seemed to me that they would have liked to
be different and I would have liked to be different but there was a script that
we were following, a script that we didn’t have the wit to rewrite. Or maybe I
was just being a git.