Stalin Ate My Homework (10 page)

The
train then returned to a different platform at Calais Maritime and Joe climbed
aboard clutching three baguettes containing salami that smelt of abroad. We all
knew that the Paris boat train left the station and returned to a different
platform, but me and Molly always worried that this time might be the time
when it decided not to do that, that this time it would head straight for Paris
without stopping at Calais Maritime. Joe, on the other hand, always believed
that it would come back.

I had
inherited neither Molly’s nor Joe’s attitude to foreign travel. My father’s
approach was to expect that everything would turn out well in the end, and if
there was a problem he would rely on the affability of others to correct it. My
mother’s response was to go insane, often without provocation, and then in
between to exist in a state of unsettling serenity I inhabited an uneasy middle
ground between these two extremities, suspecting that at any moment people
might start either disappearing or screaming.

By now
I understood that the notion that the Sayle family was a family that went
abroad was very important to us. In some ways it defined who we were. We
thought of ourselves as not being like the rest of the population of Anfield,
ignorant and gullible people who believed what they were told by the TV news
and went on holiday for two weeks in a caravan in Morecambe. And now we were
going to Czechoslovakia, a place so foreign it had a ‘z’ in its name! I
understood all this and tried to embrace it, but I did feel sometimes that it
was hard enough to understand what was going on in Anfield — why was that boy
saying this? What reason did that girl have for showing me that? What did all
the teachers want? Why was everybody shouting? — without us travelling a
thousand miles to the east. It was dawning on me that life could be baffling
and scary even when most things were familiar and I spoke the language, but our
family persisted in going to places where just about everything was alien. The
smells were different — Gauloises cigarettes, coffee, sewers and onions. The
cars were different — in Britain most of the cars were modelled on the British
Museum (a large classical portico and a substantial building to the rear, with
wood panelling and leather seating) but these French cars were bizarre things
with flimsy doors, corrugated sides and seats of canvas. In France there seemed
to be about nine different kinds of policemen. When British police cars drove
along they rang a little bell as if everybody was being told dinner was ready
in a boarding house, whereas these French police cars had sirens that sounded
like a goat being slaughtered and you heard them all the time — ‘nee naw, nee naw,
nee naw!’ And abroad just about everybody seemed to be carrying a gun — not
just the police and
gendarmes,
but there were soldiers everywhere. And
of course all these armed men spoke a different language, so incomprehension
here, across the English Channel, was likely to get you shot.

We crawled across the flat
fields of the Pas de Calais until small silver suburban trains began to swarm
around us like pilot fish and we were suddenly on the edge of Paris. Around a
curve in the track I suddenly saw the Eiffel Tower. It was gigantic and looked
just like the photos of itself, but I didn’t know what to feel about the Eiffel
Tower — as far as I knew, the party didn’t have a line on it. At the Gare du
Nord we disembarked from the boat train, and as all the English speakers
scattered we were submerged in the evening crowds of hurrying French. The three
of us descended into the Métro, bought tickets of green cardboard at a reduced
price and rode a couple of stops on rattling wooden carriages with silvery
chromed door handles to the district of Montmartre. Montmartre itself, with its
steep streets flowing like frozen rivers of cobblestones away from the basilica
of the Sacré Coeur, shining white and lustrous in the summer night, was a
disappointment. It bore very little relation to the restaurant of the same name
on the Tottenham Court Road.

The night was spent in a
small hotel and the next morning we travelled on from the Gare de L’Est to
Germany. We arrived in Nuremberg in the late afternoon with a couple of hours
to kill. To pass the time the three of us tried to visit what was probably a
beer hall, but they wouldn’t let a child in. Fortunately there was a charity
for displaced persons in the station, and due to me and Molly’s woebegone
appearance they gave us a refugee’s meal of black tea and rye bread. Then we
caught a train ultimately bound for Belgrade in Yugoslavia.

I had
by now grown used to foreign border crossings. They weren’t quite as elaborate
as the ones you got at Channel ports — those between European countries were a
bit like a visit to a hospital for the results of some tests you probably didn’t
really need. Everybody sat in a row and a man came in with your documents, and
there was always a tense moment before he told you everything was all right and
one time out of a hundred it was bad news for somebody else. The frontier
between the Federal Republic of Germany and Czechoslovakia must have been more
tense than most, seeing as it was the border between two nuclear-armed,
competing ideologies which were constantly threatening to destroy each other.
But I don’t honestly remember it being different from any of the other
crossings we had made.

I do
recall that once we were inside Czechoslovakia the German Railways locomotive
was uncoupled and steamed away, heading westwards, returning to its homeland.
Our train without its locomotive seemed suddenly decapitated and lifeless, and
so in the quiet of a summer afternoon we climbed down on to the platform and
waited. The carriages we were in had begun their journey the day before in some
distant part of northern Germany as clean as you would expect from the railways
of that freshly scrubbed country, but, even by the time it reached Nuremberg,
like any transcontinental express it had turned into a clammy mess. Even if
nobody in your compartment was eating biscuits, after a few hours biscuit crumbs
would magically appear on your seat, crushed in little gritty piles on the
floor or somehow down the back of your jumper.

We were
happy to stretch our legs and get a breath of fresh air, strolling up and down
the low platform. On all British stations the platforms were high, making the
track itself a forbidden and dangerous thing, but abroad, particularly the
further east you got, they were often no higher than the kerb at the side of
the road, as if it was no big thing to step on to the silver rails.

After a
few minutes of waiting an apparition steamed into view Over the coming years I
was to become familiar with the steam engines of the East in all their forms,
whether it was sticking my head out of the window into the cold snowy air and
seeing the squat engine curving away around the track as it pulled us up into
the High Tatra mountains and smoke blew into my face, or watching them huffing
past the window of hotel rooms, or being conducted around the plants where they
were made. But this was my first sight of a locomotive from the Soviet Bloc,
and it was magnificent and alien. Sticky and black like a hot summer night,
with massive air deflectors attached to the side of the boiler, an enormous
single headlight just below the chimney and a large red star in the centre of
the smokebox. I think it might even have been flying red flags from the front
bogie as it snorted towards us, inky smoke pouring into the sky, seeming to
embody all the industrial might and threat of rampant socialism. From the
border we travelled through countryside not much different from that which we
had seen outside the windows in Germany — the same onion dome churches, the
same ornate villas and the same haystacks. And finally, as evening descended,
we reached journey’s end: the town of Karlovy Vary, known to English
travellers, for whom it had been a popular destination in the nineteenth
century, as Carlsbad.

Though
we were travelling independently Joe had had to make all the bookings for our
trip, instigate the various permits, accommodation requests and visa
applications, via an organisation called Progressive Tours, a travel agency set
up and staffed by the British Communist Party in London. Maybe somebody at
Progressive Tours was annoyed that an upstart railwayman from Liverpool,
certainly not a person who was high up in the CP hierarchy, was trying to see
the Soviet Bloc without taking one of their highly regulated official tours. Or
maybe some bureaucrat in Czechoslovakia didn’t understand why a minor trade
union official and his family from an obscure town in the north of England
wanted to come to his country Whatever the reason, it became clear to us over
the next few hours that, rather than a holiday spent wandering around the
medieval town of Bratislava, marvelling at the baroque splendour of Prague or
hiking in the forests and mountains of Bohemia, perhaps spending our nights in
ancient castles and smart hotels, we had instead been given permission to spend
two weeks in an out-of-season spa town, sleeping in a tent.

It was
very late by the time we had walked to the place where we were supposed to be
staying, and it was only then that it dawned on us that it was a deserted
campsite. When we finally managed to rouse somebody from a nearby
administrative block, the people who ran the place said they had received no
notification of our arrival and had no idea what to do with us. Indeed, they
were a bit nervous as to how to cope with these foreign people who had suddenly
landed on them. Molly’s response was to start screaming and crying.

The tent they eventually
showed us to was in a row of identical structures. It was semi-permanent, with
dull red canvas stretched over a metal frame, and inside there were six bunk
beds with thin sheets and emaciated mattresses. We were not the sort of family
that was emotionally suited to sleeping in a tent at the best of times, so we
passed an unhappy night.

The
next morning, maybe looking for something better, perhaps just trying to get
away from our misery, Joe went for a walk. After a short while, he noticed on
the other side of a meadow a large square building with the look of a clinic.
Above the portico of this establishment were three large letters emblazoned in
red: ROH. Joe knew that the ROH was the Czechoslovak trades union organisation,
similar to the British TUC but controlled entirely by the government and the
Czechoslovak Communist Party In fact, back in England he had written several
letters to their headquarters saying he was a British trade unionist eager to
see their country, but had received no reply Joe strode into the ROH building
and began being genial. Almost immediately he encountered a man who had spent
the Second World War as a fighter pilot, stationed in Oldham in Lancashire.
Throughout our time in Czechoslovakia we constantly came across people eager to
reminisce about the happy war years they had spent in Warrington, Stockport and
St Helens — half the Czech population seemed to have been based in Lancashire
during the conflict. When Joe told this man where we were staying he was so
appalled that he went and found a woman who had been garrisoned in Burnley from
1939 to 1945, and she too couldn’t understand what we were doing at the
campsite. In the end they arranged for us to spend the weekend at a trade
union-owned miners’ sanatorium nearby.

Possibly
because we were all in a heightened state of emotion, our first weekend in
Karlovy Vary seemed extremely vivid. The sanatorium rooms were fairly austere,
but the beds were soft and laid with snowy white sheets and at least the walls
didn’t flap. We walked into town along a river path. Karlovy Vary is a spa
famous for its hot springs, and in a spirit of delirium brought on by our
escape from the campsite I was persuaded to drink some of the waters, which
tasted like a frying pan cordial.

The
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival had just ended, marking the end of the
season. Though all the filmgoers had departed, international flags and banners
still flew and posters for films in ten different languages were gently peeling
from the walls. Right in the centre of town stood the epitome of the European
grand hotel de luxe, built in a florid, high-baroque style unseen in Liverpool.
It was named the Grandhotel Moskva, and I probably remember it
so
clearly
because I wished we were staying there.

Sadly,
on the Monday, because the sanatorium was expecting an intake of tubercular
Slovakian strip miners we had to return to our tent. When we got through the
flap there was an odd stale odour, which soon revealed itself as the smell of
the mice which had been eating our clothes. Extremely depressed, we went to a
café to get some breakfast. Communism was turning out to be not all puppets and
pastel-coloured, geometrically shaped coffee pots. While we were picking at our
breakfast of bread and jam one of the officials from the campsite, who up to
that point had been quite rude and dismissive, came running up and made it
clear that we had to come back with him immediately to the office.