Stalin Ate My Homework (9 page)

In
August 1959 there was a particular hysteria attached to our preparations
because this year was extra-special. Molly, Joe and Alexei were going to
Czechoslovakia — we were travelling eastwards beyond the Iron Curtain. Like
the man in the magic lantern show but in reverse, we were going to step into
the movie screen and the narrow streets of Prague.

The
beginning stages of the journey to the continent were by now familiar to me.
First of all you had to get to London — things didn’t really begin until you
reached the capital. The three of us would tumble through the ticket gates at
Lime Street, dishevelled, some of our clothes on backwards because we’d dressed
in the dark, dragging our suitcases on their unsteady and unreliable wheels
behind us. Sometimes we would get there before our train was even at the
platform, but generally the
Red Rose Express
with its red and cream
carriages stretching away up the platform would be waiting for us. At the head
of the train, wreathed in a cloud of steam and quietly hissing to itself, would
be a dark green Royal Scot-class locomotive, its smoke deflectors and
chimneystack picked out in black.

Once we
were on board, already hungry and tired even though we had only travelled two
miles, there appeared a second reason for hysteria. Joe would get Molly and me
seated in our compartment with all the luggage and here we would slump,
breathless and sweaty, recovering from the trauma of the trip to the station.
While my jumper would be askew and my shirt collar sticking up at an odd angle,
and Molly’s cotton summer dress would be wrinkled, her red hair in a mad tangle
and her glasses steamed up, Joe invariably looked dapper and cool. With his
thinning hair brushed back from his high, intelligent forehead, in his tweed
jacket, high-waisted, pleated-front trousers and shiny brown brogues, he
appeared calm and fresh as if he was a professor looking after a couple of
refugees who had recently had a tough time at the hands of fascist insurgents.
But Joe wouldn’t sit down. He would stand between the seats, then look
thoughtful for a second, turn and go out into the corridor with Molly shouting
after him, ‘Joe! Where are you going? Joe, where are you going? Lexi, where’s
Joe going?’

Making
vague mumbling noises, my father would walk up the corridor to the door at the
end of the carriage. From there he would step off the train and, once on the
platform, make for the locomotive to see if he knew the driver of our express.
Because he was a railway guard my father had a disturbingly casual attitude to
the business of getting on and off trains. After he had left us in the
compartment Joe would sometimes wait until the train was actually moving, the
guard having long blown his whistle and the last door having been slammed,
before nonchalantly swinging himself on board the final carriage at the last
possible second. We often didn’t know whether he had actually managed to get
aboard the train because he wouldn’t join us in our compartment until well
after we had left the station and were huffing through the sandstone tunnels
that ran under Crown Street. This gave rise to a good deal more screaming. ‘Joe!
Where’s Joe? Where’s your father? Joe! Joe! Lexi, your father’s been left
behind! He’s been left behind! Lexi, we’ve left your father behind!’ Sometimes,
as the train was moving out of the station, we would look through the window to
see Joe wandering along the platform back towards the ticket barrier as if he
had decided at the last minute to go home, taking our tickets, passports and
spending money with him. But he always managed to come smiling up the corridor
a few minutes later.

The journey to London took
four hours, and by the age of seven I took pride in the fact that I was
familiar with all the landmarks on the line to Euston. There wasn’t another kid
in school who knew this route like I did. Edge Lane Station, where a government
minister named William Huskisson, the first victim of a rail accident, had died
was where we came out into the daylight. Next we rushed up on to an embankment from
which we could see below us the terraced streets of South Liverpool, slate
roofs and red brick. These quickly gave way to suburban homes, semis with
curved metal windows and big back gardens. Soon after we would be thundering
over Runcorn bridge that spanned the Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal.

If the
crew on the train was a Liverpool one then we probably knew the dining car
staff, and if it was lunchtime, once we had left Runcorn behind we would rise
from our seats to go and get a free meal in the restaurant car. By this time
the three of us would be extremely hungry as we had been awake since 4.30 a.m.
and had only eaten a bit of a boiled egg. I learned to measure out the journey
by that meal. After Crewe there were lush green fields and soup. Roast beef,
peas and gravy were served at the same time as the Universal Grinding Wheel
Company at Stafford went by And you could eat a whole sherry trifle and still
be passing the sprawling GEC factory outside Rugby.

After
lunch we would return to the compartment while the south Midlands reeled past.
When the Arts and Crafts hen sheds of the Ovaltine Farm came into view you knew
it was time to start getting your stuff together because London was only half
an hour away These hen sheds, with their giant painted tableaux of rosy-cheeked
maidens clutching bundles of malt, had been constructed in fields outside Abbot’s
Langley in the 1930s. I always tried to see if there were any buxom maids
emerging with baskets of eggs, or indeed any sign of hen occupation in the
sheds, but eventually came to the conclusion that they were empty and had been
built there just to give Ovaltine the impression of rustic healthiness to
passing railway passengers. I decided the drink was probably manufactured in
some giant sprawling factory on a shabby industrial estate next to a disused
canal.

At
Euston Station we would say goodbye to the guard, the driver, the fireman and
the dining car crew, the last people who knew who we were. Then, passing
through the stone arch, we were alone in London. A red-haired woman, a smiling
man and a little olive-skinned boy.

From time to time,
depending on the connections we needed to make with ferries or trains, we might
spend the night in London, staying in a small hotel in Pimlico that sometimes
advertised in the
Daily Worker.
But this time we were trying to get to
Paris by nightfall as we had to catch a train early the next morning.
Consequently we took another taxi from Euston, racing across London to Victoria
Station. Molly had no sense of direction but that never stopped her from having
vehement opinions on what route a cab should take, so our cross-town journeys
could often be made more fraught by my mother having a violent row with the
driver. On this occasion we didn’t have much time to make the boat train to Dover
so she kept uncharacteristically quiet.

The
taxi took us down a long tree-lined avenue of deep red tarmac at the end of
which there was a huge, squat, stone-faced building, hiding its ugliness behind
gilded railings. ‘That’s Buckingham Palace, that is!’ the driver said with
pride in his voice. He seemed shocked when, rather than the expressions of
delight or interest that he was used to from out-of-towners, there were
scowls, a look of pure hatred and mutterings of ‘Parasites’ and ‘Thieves’
directed towards the home of the royal family from the trio in the back of his
taxi. Soon we were back in busy, traffic-choked streets and edging our way
under the fretwork canopy of Victoria Station.

The
terminus had two distinct sides, possessing wildly different characteristics.
One part dealt with the dull, suburban halts of the home counties — Maidstone,
Brockley, Whitstable and Sevenoaks. It was neat and subdued, thronged with
bowler-hatted city clerks and demure female typists. The other half had
platforms dedicated solely to trains that connected with the Channel ferries
and thus with the continent of Europe. On these platforms, segregated from the
rest, the English Channel seemed an almost tangible presence, as if there was a
tang of the sea in the air and seagulls weaving amongst the iron rafters of the
high station roof. There were money changing booths and a feeling of decadence.
Men wearing raincoats of an alien cut lurked in the entrance of the news
cinema, as did women with bright red lips, brittle blonde hair and tight skirts
who seemed far too friendly.

In the
raffish half of Victoria Station, towards evening I would always see waiting on
Platform 2 the blue and gold carriages of the Night Ferry Service run by the
Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Looking impossibly luxurious, this
sumptuous train travelled overnight to Paris Gare du Nord, the carriages being
loaded and unloaded on to a special ferry while the passengers slept in their
own private compartments on crisp cotton sheets. No other train was allowed to
use Platform 2, so during the day it remained empty, but on others there slid
in and out the brown and cream Pullman coaches of the Golden Arrow, a luxury
first-class service complete with its own special bar car called Le Trianon that
ran to Dover Marine, where it connected with a first-class-only ferry.

Our
free passes did not allow us to take any of these fabulous trains. We had to
haul our suitcases past them, skulking like displaced persons to platforms so
distant and insignificant that they had letters attached to their numbers.
There we would cram ourselves on to the ordinary boat trains that rattled
through the South London suburbs and into the green fields of Kent, passing hop
poles and oast houses before pulling first into Dover Town, then backing out
again to rattle and sway into Dover Marine right alongside the ferry that was
going to take us to France.

Although
it was happening on the edge of England, this going into a station one way and
then reversing out seemed to be the beginning of continental Europe. In plain
old Britain you always entered a station and then left it in the same
direction. But abroad, in mysterious and mystifying Europe, your direction of
travel and who you travelled with were a much more complicated and
ever-changing affair. On a foreign train you would often enter a station one
way, then exit it from the direction in which you had come, travelling
backwards as if you were being sent back home having failed some test or, more
worryingly, as if you were now, without leaving your seat, somehow on the wrong
train. Even when you were going in a straight line there would be long,
mysterious waits accompanied by enigmatic clankings, violent shuntings and
inexplicable bangings.

Sometimes
you would walk down the train to find that the carriages that had been there
were now gone. Looking for food, you might discover that the buffet coach had
vanished, to be replaced by two wagons crammed full of soldiers in battledress
carrying rifles who said nasty, confusing things to you in strange languages
and then laughed in an unfriendly manner. Or, wandering towards the front of
the train, you might encounter a car in which all the blinds to the compartments
were drawn, suggesting that every kind of unfathomable depravity or cruelty was
taking place within. Once in a while you realised that, at some point during
the journey, the entire rest of the train had been removed and we were now in
what had become the last coach of a considerably shorter train. If you walked
down the corridor you were able to see through a long narrow rear window,
beside the shuttered connecting door, the track receding and home reeling away
into the falling night.

The crossing to France
took an hour and a half. When the boat docked at Calais, porters dressed in
overalls of a particular shade of blue that you never ever saw in Britain, a
blue that the French had even given a special class-war name to —
bleu de
travail
or worker’s blue — swarmed aboard yelling,
‘Porteur! Porteur!’
Each
wore a peaked cap adorned with a brass badge with a number engraved on it. They
took your luggage and gave you a matching brass tag which you exchanged for a
fee once you were through customs and passport control. The next time you saw
your luggage it was in your train compartment with the chalk cross of the
customs inscribed on it, like the home of a plague victim.

We had
no sooner settled on to the deep green seats of the SNCF train to Paris than
Joe said he was going to get off to find us a snack, as we hadn’t eaten since
lunch on the
Red Rose Express.
This time the train did actually leave
the station, accompanied by much screaming from my mother, with Joe still
clearly chatting away to the man in the platform kiosk. We steamed a few metres
up the line and waited for a minute or two next to a white-painted concrete
fence on the other side of which was France: a cobbled street lined with bars
and tiny shops and vans driving up and down, vans that looked like little
Nissen huts bouncing up and down on their soft springs.