Stalin Ate My Homework (5 page)

As soon
as the General Strike collapsed Joe, who was already a member of the British
Labour Party, secretly joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Joe’s ‘dual membership’,
remaining in the Labour Party while keeping the fact that he was now a
Communist secret, was a policy that came to Liverpool all the way from the
Kremlin. In the 1920s the Comintern, the department of the Polituro of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union tasked with controlling foreign Communist
parties, had despaired of fomenting revolution in western Europe in the short
term. So they changed their plans and ordered Communists in the West to join or
maintain membership of other more powerful left-wing parties. In this way they
hoped to gain influence in the world of politics while at the same time, if
they could, sabotaging their rivals.

Members
of the Labour Party were supposedly not allowed to be active in any other
political group, but the rule was never enforced. Indeed the higher-ups in the
organisation were happy to make use of the energy and commitment of those, like
Joe, who came to be called ‘Entryists’. At the same time they made sure that
these Communists didn’t rise too high in the Labour Party without first clearly
renouncing their revolutionary beliefs. The same was true in the trade unions.
Members of the Communist Party were expected to work their way up in their
particular union, to fight their employer at every opportunity for higher wages
and better working conditions. But, oddly enough, the party also demanded that they
be exemplary employees, the logic behind this diktat being that the rank and
file wouldn’t respect somebody who didn’t pull their weight on the job. This
meant that Communists were often in the contradictory position of being the
best and most profitable employees of firms they were sworn to destroy.

The
rank and file too were delighted, up to a point, to have a Communist
representing them — they knew that he would fight harder and longer than some
less ideologically motivated shop steward. On the other hand, as soon as the
Communist tried to politicise any struggle — to take the fight beyond trying to
earn a few more pence a week or knock a few minutes off the working day and
instead attempted to point out the larger iniquities of the capitalist system —
the workers rapidly lost interest and became mulishly resistant to any
entreaties. According to Molly, Joe’s refusal to dilute his political beliefs
cost him dear. Less able men in the union were appointed over him to lucrative
and powerful full-time posts, while others in the Labour Party were elected as
city councillors and went on to become chairs of powerful committees or even
Lord Mayor.

My
mother told me this with indignation in her voice but what I saw for myself was
that, where another person might have become bitter or disillusioned, Joe
seemed to become cheerier and cheerier over the years. Bustling about, a little
man with his trilby hat permanently on his head, he always seemed to be
laughing. Though everybody understood that here was a man who was dedicated to
introducing a one-party state in which government terror was a central tool for
ensuring the dictatorship of the proletariat I would hear people say, ‘You
couldn’t meet a nicer bloke than Joe Sayle.’

Various
examples of Joe’s election literature were stored in the Secatrol. In 1938 he
had stood in the municipal elections as Labour candidate for the Kirkdale ward,
promising’… 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’. He also seemed to have developed a great
resentment of trains. Under a section headed ‘Transport’ my father promised’…
the gradual substitution of Motor or Trolley Buses on all routes, no further
expenditure on new tram cars or new tracks.’ Joe stood for the council twice
but neither time was he elected. When Molly informed me of this I dwelt on it
for a long time, turning this rejection over and over in my mind. It made me
wonder what was wrong with the people of Liverpool. What was up with them? Why
didn’t they vote for my dad?

When he
was home in the evening Joe would come to my bedroom, sit on the bed which
caused stuff to fall off the shelf, and tell me stories that he’d make up on
the spot, inventing characters like Freddie the Frog. Too often though, he was
out, either working or at a union meeting. And sometimes, even though he was
home, I would have to compete with the Communist Party for his attention.
Meetings were not held frequently at our house but there were times when from
my position on the floor of the front room I would look up, the air around me
wreathed in smoke, staring into a forest of political men’s trouser legs.

Though
I was only three or four the men who were at those meetings are clear in my
mind, not because I recall them directly but because when Molly and I were
together in the house or on a visit to Stanley Park, me in my little red pedal
car, Molly would provide a judgemental commentary on the meetings and particularly
on the members. When she spoke about Joe and his past she employed a
valedictory tone, as if making a speech at a meeting, but when she talked about
other people in the party I could never tell if Molly was even really speaking
to me or to herself. Yet, silent and watchful, I took it all in. In this way I
learned that this comrade was a terrible disappointment to his father who was a
leading figure in the party, that that comrade was a drunk, that this one spent
all his time working for the betterment of the working-class but left his own
children and wife cold and hungry, and that I should never let myself be left
alone in a room with that one.

One
year one of the members told me he would make me a toy fort for Christmas. I
think it was just something said on the spur of the moment, and he might have
forgotten all about it if I hadn’t badgered him repeatedly over the next few
months. ‘How’s the fort coming along?’ I would ask him. ‘Will it have an
electric light bulb?’ and ‘Perhaps a working portcullis?’ and ‘Do you think a
proper drawbridge would be a good idea?’ It took a long time to arrive but
finally, wearily, right on Christmas Eve he deposited it at our house — and it
was magnificent. It had all the things I had specified: a drawbridge you could
wind up and a working portcullis and a little light bulb that worked off a
battery Then he stopped coming to the meetings and I never saw him again. That
was one problem with having a family that wasn’t based on blood ties — people
often inexplicably vanished and you weren’t supposed to miss them.

Joe and Molly had one
Communist Party friend who they were particularly close to. His name was George
Garrett, and he had been something of an inspiration for Joe. At the age of
fourteen Garrett had run away to sea, then jumped ship in Argentina. He
travelled north to the United States and became a hobo, riding the rails around
the USA. After a while he returned to seafaring and in 1914 his ship, the SS
Oswald,
was captured by the German navy, but the crew were rescued. In 1918 he
married, but remained unemployed for long periods due to his membership of the
Communist Party He returned to New York, where he became a member of the
Syndicalist trade union, the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as ‘The
Wobblies’. On his return to Britain he took part in the first hunger march and
the founding of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement. Garrett also became a founder
member of the Left Theatre, which in turn became the Unity Theatre. All the
time he wrote short stories about the sea, working-class life and the battles
that poor families had with the repressive institutions of church and state. He
was also a literary critic, and his essays on Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
and
Joseph Conrad’s novel
The Nigger of the Narcissus
were published in
literary journals. These brought him to the attention of George Orwell.

In 1936
Orwell was in the middle of writing
The Road to Wigan Pier
and so it was
natural that, being in the area, he came to Liverpool to stay with George
Garrett. Though he was again unemployed and had a large family to feed, Garrett
gave Orwell a place to stay and never asked him for any money The two men would
stay up all night drinking and talking about the novels of Dostoevsky, Melville
and Jack London, and the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg and Eugene O’Neill. The way
I heard the story from my parents, Garrett was happy to entertain his friend
for as long as he wished to stay, but they couldn’t understand why he allowed
this Old Etonian, this poverty tourist, to keep hanging around. They felt that
their George was the real thing, a working-class man who had been forced into
his life on the road by a desperate desire to escape a terrible life, not
because he thought it would make a good book.

The
Communists’ dislike of Orwell was confirmed when later that year he went off to
fight in the Spanish Civil War and on his return, in his book
Homage to
Catalonia,
accused Communist factions of waging internecine war on their
left-wing allies instead of fighting the true enemy — Franco’s fascists. Molly
also said that Orwell had promised to give George Garrett a big dedication in
The
Road to Wigan Pier
but had gone back on his word. The
Daily Worker,
the
Communist Party’s newspaper, gave
The Road to Wigan Pier
a really bad
review when it was published. Over the years, of all the many people my parents
despised — J. Edgar Hoover, Winston Churchill, Hitler and Walt Disney among
others — it was Orwell’s name that came up most frequently and was spoken with
the most venom. I thought he must be the most evil man in the world. On the
other hand, while my parents wanted the story to show their friend George
Garrett in a good and noble light, it actually gave me the impression that he
had been a bit of an idiot to allow himself to be taken advantage of in this
way.

Some Communists like
George Garrett tried to have as little as possible to do with consumer goods,
but around about 1957 we bought the flashiest thing you could possibly purchase
— a television set. It was the Co-op’s own brand, which was called a Regentone.
It had a brown walnut cabinet with a tiny murky grey screen, and a little metal
badge of a knight carrying a pennant mounted on a horse fixed to the cloth
covering of the speaker grille. The TV was our second big purchase. Molly had
made sure that she got a sewing machine first, a heavy black metal thing
bristling with wheels and needles that stabbed rapidly up and down, with a
stencil of flowers down its flanks to try and hide its murderous intent. It
took years before the sewing machine was paid for. Compared to the sewing
machine, our TV was a friendly thing.

We had
always thought that the families who bought televisions were consumerist
members of the working-class who had allowed themselves to get caught up in the
bourgeois notion of trying to impress the neighbours. But after the Regentone
came into the house that idea was quietly dropped and, like everyone else, we
soon made the TV the centre of our lives. Though, to be fair, in our house
watching the television was more of a two-way process than in other homes. It
seemed we had bought a television mostly so we could argue with it, a response
which became particularly violent when a news report came on. Right away one
or other of my parents would begin shouting, ‘Nonsense!’ ‘Lies!’ or ‘Capitalist
propaganda!’ at anything they disagreed with, which tended to be nearly
everything that was shown on the news.