Stalin Ate My Homework (7 page)

Before
the age of five my memories of overseas travel are fragmentary, a collage of
alien smells and images and the sound of somebody yelling, possibly a
red-haired woman, but in the summer of 1958 we caught the ferry from Folkestone
not to Boulogne but the longer passage to Ostend in Belgium, an often rough
four-hour crossing. Once we were out of the harbour the waves were endless rows
of scallop shells, grey and flecked with foam, and the boat, though it was
bigger than the French ferries, still pitched and rolled in the swell.

Customs
and passport control at any Channel port was a lengthy process. After reading
from a card you had to answer convoluted questions asked by a man in a strange
uniform, there was the use of elaborate seals and stamps, and sometimes you had
to remove items of clothing. Going abroad was nearly as complicated as joining
the Freemasons. At Ostend we had the usual interrogation, got our passports
stamped and our luggage searched. We hated having to open our baggage, not because
we had anything to hide but because the Sayles were early experimenters with
the concept of wheeled luggage. Each of us had an L-shaped metal contraption
with big rubber wheels secured by numerous straps to a corner of our suitcase —
straps that had to be undone before the case could be opened. The idea behind this
was that you could wheel your luggage along using a handle attached to the
other end of the strap. In practice, no matter how tightly you secured them,
the case always seemed to work its way free from the straps and would fall off
its wheels generally while you were running for a train, either tripping you up
and sending you sprawling or, at the very least, stabbing you in the ankle and
drawing blood.

Once
through customs we needed to get further up the Belgian coast, so we hauled our
luggage on to a tram that ran through the sand dunes and the trim little towns
to the resort where we were staying. Though the voters of Kirkdale hadn’t
elected my father in 1938, his dislike of trams seemed to have been widely
shared and since the war there had been a steep rundown of the city’s network.
The year before our trip to Belgium Joe had taken me to see Liverpool’s last
tram outside St James Street Station. Decked out in strings of light bulbs it
had seemed lumbering and sad, like a sickly elephant in a down-at-heel circus.
By contrast these single-deck trams that raced up the Belgian coast appeared
swift and confident. The Liverpool ones had swayed from side to side on metal
grooves in the cobbled streets and, with so many different lines cut in the
street, often seemed confused as to where they were going. But here there was
only the one line going north, and once out in the countryside these Belgian
trams ran swift and sure.

The
reason we were staying in this particular small hotel in this particular town
was that the woman who owned it advertised in the
Daily Worker.
She wasn’t
a Communist herself — this was simply a smart piece of business. As Communists
were so used to being reviled, when somebody was nice to them party members could
often be absurdly grateful for even the tiniest bit of attention, and if
somebody was prepared to welcome them into their establishment or try to sell
them the products they made they could be ridiculously loyal. There were only
about three places that regularly advertised in the
Daily Worker.
One
was the hotel we were staying in, another was a shop that sold sub-standard
Soviet consumer goods in Shepherds Bush, and the third was a Greek restaurant
in Tottenham Court Road confusingly named ‘Au Montmartre’. When we were in
London we sometimes ate there. It seemed to be full of veterans of the Spanish
Civil War, grizzled men in berets and leather jackets despondently eating their
way through kleftiko, sheftalia or moussaka, served with chips, peas, sliced
bread and butter and a cup of tea.

We
checked into the hotel, with its long glassed-in sun terrace facing the beach.
After dinner we sat in wicker chairs and stared out to sea as the storm that
had been brewing during our crossing finally broke. For the first time I saw
forks of lightning explode like cracks in a window, spearing downwards in
jagged lines to the black water while a man swam towards the storm, seemingly
unconcerned in the electric sea, and my parents debated whether he was doing
the right thing. Was floating in the sea during a thunderstorm a bad idea or in
fact the safest place to be? They thought on balance it was probably the
latter, that swimming towards the tempest was a brilliant strategy to avoid
injury by lightning bolts.

The weather was sunny and
breezy, we sat on the beach, we ate all kinds of food you couldn’t get in
Britain and we rode about in four-seater pedal-karts. Molly and Joe didn’t just
stay at the seaside — here was another thing that was different about us and
our holidays. When those few working-class British people who did so travelled
abroad they stayed at some tourist hotel on the Italian Riviera or the Spanish
Costa Brava, and if they socialised they socialised only with other British holidaymakers.
But the Sayles were different — the Sayles knew people who lived abroad, real
foreign people!

In
1945, soon after the war ended, Joe had attended a Communist Party conference
in Paris at which he had met a couple of Dutch comrades called Ank and Ayli.
They were journalists who throughout the war had run an underground newspaper
for the resistance. In the aftermath of the conflict there was wide-scale
famine in Holland, since the majority of the Allies’ relief effort was,
ironically, going to feed the defeated Germans. Joe befriended the Dutch couple
and, seeing that they were poor and hungry, he helped them out. Now, thirteen
years later, they wanted to repay his kindness. We were going to spend the
weekend with them in Amsterdam.

Early
one morning the three of us took a tram back to Ostend and from there caught a
train that travelled inland from the Belgian coast, crossing the border into
Holland and terminating in Amsterdam where the once starving couple met us at
the Centraal Station. Perhaps reflecting the way our two countries were
diverging, or maybe just how their fortunes had improved, Ank and Ayli now
seemed to be doing much better than us. They even had that most extraordinary
of things, a car, a black Volkswagen Beetle with the oval rear window, and we
spent the day driving with them in the Dutch countryside. We took a long
straight road that was only for motor vehicles — I didn’t know it, but this was
my first trip on a motorway The needle on the VW’s speedometer touched 90
kilometres an hour and, not knowing there was a difference between kilometres
and miles, I thought we were going at an unbelievable speed.

Later
in the day, this being Holland we went for a walk along a canal. As we strolled
along this strip of water lined with thin trees I noticed something lying on
the ground by the side of the towpath, half buried in the mud and masked by a
clump of scrawny grass. I picked it up and brushed the dirt away It was a
square of rusted and pitted metal, mostly flat but bent over along the top and
bottom edge, and about the size of a big box of Swan matches. The outer metal
was the colour of dried blood, but the middle, a raised crest in grey pewter,
remained unaffected by corrosion. It was an emblem, oval in shape, a motif of
laurel leaves and at the centre an eagle holding in its talons a swastika. I
had found the belt buckle of a German soldier.

‘I bet
he was shot!’ I said, ‘Or he was blown up by a hand grenade from a British
commando and his guts went everywhere…. Or he was knifed in the back by the
resistance and as he fell he tore off the….’ Later on Molly gave me a little
talk, telling me that the Dutch had been through a lot during the war and they
might not feel the same way as me about my find. I thought it was just plain rude
of them not to be impressed by my discovery.

Molly
wanted me to get rid of the horrible thing, but I put the Nazi buckle in my
pocket, brought it back to England and kept it in a shoebox under my bed.
During the autumn term I took it into school one day to show our teacher and
the class, but when my prized possession was passed around nobody showed any
sign of being particularly taken with it. I had been looking forward to a big
reaction, but there was only polite interest. I couldn’t figure it out — the
belt buckle had made people edgy and uncomfortable in Holland and here it was
doing no business at all. This seemed very odd. Molly had told me that that
little square of pitted metal was imbued with evil, yet none of my classmates
were able to see it. It appeared that the power of things wasn’t fixed: a belt
buckle could only make you feel unwell if you had been fighting the Nazis for
years, and if you hadn’t it was just a piece of tin.

In the second week of our
holiday, we took another train from the Belgian coast — this time to the
capital, Brussels. We were to become just three of the forty-two million people
who visited the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, otherwise known as Expo ‘58. The
central landmark of the Expo site was called the Atomium, a gigantic depiction
of a cell of iron crystal magnified 165 billion times. Rising high above the
exhibition site were nine shiny spheres, each representing an atom and each
connected to the next by silvery tubes with escalators in them, escalators that
you could travel up or down, from one sphere to the next. Eight of the spheres
contained displays of the wonders of the modern world and the ninth, the
topmost, provided a view over Brussels and the surrounding countryside.

The
atom, and particularly the destructive power of the atomic bomb, was
permanently at the back of everybody’s mind in 1958, so it probably made sense
to put a giant one in the middle of the first World’s Fair to be held since the
Second World War.

From
the top of the Atomium I could see the distant domes of the city, the green of
Heysel Park and, beneath us, hundreds of national pavilions. It was impossible
to visit all the exhibits, so we had to make a choice. Obviously we steered
well clear of the British and US pavilions, but, oddly, we avoided the Soviet
exhibition too. Maybe we thought all the wonders contained within it would be
too much to absorb in only a few hours, but from the second our family entered
the Czechoslovak pavilion I could see that Joe sensed he was in the presence of
something truly special. Others obviously felt the same way, since it had won
the best pavilion award and many other prizes for individual displays. Rather
than the weapons, heavy engineering, rockets, wheatfields and big science that
dominated the USSR’s presentation, at the heart of the Czech display there was
something that was still Communist but softer and more human. Apart from the
anticipated exhibitions connected with history and geography, the ancient
cities of Prague and Brno, the verdant forests and the wild Tatra mountains,
there were so many surprising things — friendly colourful films featuring
hilarious marionettes from the Puppet Theatre of Prague and case after case of
glass, china and textiles designed in a remarkably modern avant-garde style,
almost Italian but retaining a subtle socialist sensibility There was much use
of pastel colours, geometrical forms and modern materials — plastic, metal,
glass and concrete. At the heart of the pavilion was an entire living room
complete with the finest in Czech design, angular but comfy-looking chairs,
swirly-spouted coffee pots, bulbous coloured drinking glasses, a coffee table
and a sofa.

And
there was one more marvel we had to see. After queueing for half an hour or so
we shuffled into a small purpose-built theatre, within the exhibition hall, for
one of the first performances of the Laterna Magika or Magic Lantern Theatre.
If we had been awestruck by the coffee pots and the globular flower vases, then
the Magic Lantern Theatre was the final proof that Czechoslovakia was a country
like no other, one that seemed able to combine the humane rationalism of the
Soviet system with a lyrical, magical spirit all its own.

There
was little language used in the show, but most of it required no words as it
was a combination of film projection, dance, sound effects, modern music, light
and pantomime. In that dark room people from every land sat amazed, bemused and
astonished. We had come in footsore and tired, many of us bombarded with images
of nationalistic bluster, massive displays of jet engines and drilling
machines, but we were now united by an enchantment that was both more ancient
and more contemporary than anything at that vast, sprawling exposition. A man
in a crazy wig played jazz with filmed projections of himself while clowns
battled spiteful, inanimate objects —kettles, chairs and plates flew through
the air as if they were alive — and at the high point of the show a man, on
film, walked down a street in Prague towards the camera and then nonchalantly
stepped over the edge of the screen and suddenly he was there in front of us,
in person, on the stage in Brussels! Joe resolved right there that he wanted to
visit this incredible place where the Communist way of life could be presented
in such a colourful and friendly manner.