Stalin Ate My Homework (16 page)

Considering we were
two-thirds Jewish atheist Communists, Christmas was a surprisingly important
occasion in our house. Molly would say that for her, as a child in an Orthodox
house, Christmas had been strictly forbidden, but her mother would still
secretly slip the children oranges and simple stuff so they wouldn’t feel left
out amongst the Christian kids. On British television, during the 1950s and
1960s, the holiday period was also a time when presentations from the Soviet
Union were prominently featured. It was as if there was considered to be something
seasonal about performances originating from a godless, authoritarian
dictatorship. The Moscow State Circus, with its spectacularly unfunny clowns,
disturbingly dangerous high-wire acts and animal cruelty, would be transmitted
live and at interminable length from a tent in Manchester. ‘Best horsemen in
the world,’ Molly would say with a tremble of pride in her voice, referring to
the Cossack horsemen who leapt on and off the backs of their stocky ponies as
they hurtled round and round the circus ring. Presumably these men were the
direct descendants of those Cossacks who had set fire to her grandmother’s
village. The Bolshoi Ballet, too, was a regular fixture of the holiday period,
and I can vividly recall sitting on the couch jammed in between Molly and Joe.
They fell asleep the moment the programme began, leaving me to watch three
hours of
Swan Lake
to the accompaniment of stentorian snoring.

My
parents were always remarkably keen to take me to see Santa in his grotto at
Lewis’s department store — I suppose they felt that Santa was a lot like
Stalin. Their names were sort of similar and they were both kindly-looking,
rotund gentlemen with facial hair and red uniforms whose headquarters were
located in the northern snowy wastes and were based upon a system of slave
labour. At first we would shop for my presents at something called ‘the
Daily
Worker
Bazaar’ which was held at the Communist Party bookshop. On long
trestle tables would be arrayed sickly pot plants, Marxist literature, Paul
Robeson records and crudely carved wooden toys from East Germany and dolls from
the Soviet Union, which when you unscrewed them sometimes contained scribbled
notes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn begging to be released from the gulag. After
a while I refused to put up with this stuff and demanded to be given what
everybody else was given. From then on Christmas was a happy event. I would
wake up early and dive into what was known as a selection box. Molly very
sensibly took an interest in healthy eating long before it was a general
concern, so the only time I got my hands on the sugary confectionery that was
beginning to swamp working-class areas was at Christmas. Then, after gorging on
Smarties and Kit-Kats, I would open my other presents.

In the
afternoon, after shouting at the Queen’s speech on the TV (‘Parasite! Liar!
What’s she got on her head? What about the Rosenbergs? Second front now!’) we
would have a lovely turkey dinner — just the three of us, just like everybody
else. And on Boxing Day we would eat turkey sandwiches and then the table would
be cleared and Molly and Joe would spread out their maps and Baedeker guides
and continental railway timetables and plan where we would be going next
summer.

One of my favourite
Christmas gifts was something called a ‘Give-a-show-projector’. This was a
battery-operated slide projector accompanied by a number of strips with simple
cartoon stories on them. You could throw these images on to the wall or the
ceiling, wherever you wanted. Discovering a flair for entrepreneurship, over
the holidays I held a series of shows in my bedroom, charging other kids for
the experience. Growing bored with the official storylines that came with the
cartoon strips, I started to make up my own.

This
gave me a taste for performance and I began giving little impromptu shows for
my parents, dressing up in clothes I had taken from the laundry cupboard. These
shows were generally based on stories that were in the news or events taking
place in the neighbourhood and were usually performed with a satirical bent,
thus predating the satire boom on television by a good few years. If a
neighbour or a visiting member of the Communist Party or the doctor was in our
house when I suddenly decided to put on a show then they were trapped and would
be forced to watch it too. Me and Molly couldn’t see why they wouldn’t want to
be present at an improvised performance by a child prodigy such as me.

Another staple that
appeared year in year out in my Christmas stocking along with the confectionery
was a box of coloured pencils, some pens and drawing paper. Being an only child
was a bit like taking an extraordinarily long train journey: you were always
trying to find something to do to pass the time. At first I just told myself
tales inside my head, but then I discovered that drawing was a great way to
give the stories in my brain an external life. Initially I had employed watercolours
and pencils along with the other children, but by the time of the first
delegation to Czechoslovakia I was working mainly in the relatively new medium
of the biro, illustrating, in a large series of drawings, the daily life of a
country known as Saylovia.

Saylovia
was a land where a number of visions of the present and the future came together.
Clearly Saylovia was in many ways influenced by the Socialist Republic of
Czechoslovakia. The flag of Saylovia was very similar to the Czech flag and all
the cars looked like Tatras, with bold aerodynamic shapes, prominent air scoops
and big fins.

But its
primary model was more local in inspiration. At the beginning of the 1960s the
reshaping of Britain had begun to gather pace. Those in charge of it,
government officials, local councillors, town planners and architects, were
determined that the rebuilding of the country would go far beyond a limited and
sympathetic restoration of war damage and instead produce an entirely modern
country in which inequality and social divisions would be designed out by the
lavish use of ferro-concrete and central heating. The feeling amongst all these
visionaries was that here was an opportunity for the wholesale reformation of
society Through road traffic management, hygienic plumbing, massive programmes
of demolition, flyovers, underpasses and town planning the war-like and
aggressive nature of human beings would be tamed. Never again would the
ignorant masses want to take up arms against other nations, or indulge in
racism or xenophobia, because instead they had a nice flat with a balcony and
underfloor heating.

The
public were not to be consulted on whether they wished to have their cities and
towns torn down and rebuilt in an entirely original and untested style with no
connection to what had gone before. But it was considered helpful if they could
be convinced that this giant social experiment was what they had wanted all
along. So articles began to appear in newspapers and magazines, accompanied by
architects’ drawings showing how fabulous Coventry or Cumbernauld was going to
look once all the rotten old stuff had been swept away and the tower blocks,
ring roads, tree-lined boulevards and shopping precincts replaced them. There
was also a ‘traffic expert’ by the name of Professor Sir Colin Buchanan who
proposed driving giant, multi-lane highways through the middle of every one of
Britain’s cities. His predictions, too, were accompanied by elaborate
drawings. I was very taken with these images of utopia; the streetscape seemed
so clean and uncomplicated compared with the cluttered and chaotic Liverpool
town centre with its untidy jumble of buildings spanning the centuries.
Everything would be so much better when the city was all pedestrian bridges and
urban throughways.

So the
capital of the People’s Republic of Saylovia, Sayleville, came to possess a
Palace of Congress built in the modernist style of Brasilia, with a bicameral
legislature located in upper and lower houses. In truth, however, it remained,
like Brazil and many of the newer states of Africa and the Middle East, a
dictatorship, dominated by a capricious and vain despot who was capable of
destroying whole neighbourhoods with a sweep of his biro.

Saylovia kept me going for
years until in my early teens the drawings began to change. As a parting gift
following the first delegation of comrades to Czechoslovakia, Ladislav had
given me personally a lavishly illustrated book all about the assassination of
Reinhard Heydrich, complete with a series of schematic drawings which showed
from above, employing arrows and broken lines, how the shooting had unfolded. Here
was the tram stop, here was the Mercedes limousine, here were Gucik and Kubis
with their guns and bombs. In my drawings, in biro, I endlessly repeated these
events, seen from a high vantage point so that the figures were tiny The tram
stop, the open car, the little men running and firing and falling down dead.
Sometimes I would draw a parallel street where people were going about their
normal business unaware that an assassination was taking place only metres away.

Every Friday when he came
home from work Joe would bring Molly a bunch of flowers, carnations or tulips
wrapped in coloured paper. He did this every week of his working life and
beyond. At the same time he would hand over his wages and from it Molly would
manage to pay the mortgage, buy food and put a little money into a post office
account for when I went to Oxford or the Sorbonne. Perhaps Joe would have liked
to stay home but, after working such long hours as a guard, he would then go
off to do union work. In order to spend time with him, me and Molly would often
go along to union functions too.

In the
early 1960s he became Liverpool and North Wales District Secretary of the NUR,
which required a huge amount of time but paid very little money At the weekend
my father would often go for meetings at the edge of his empire, getting up
early and leaving before I was awake. Later in the day my mother and I would
travel to distant places such as Chester to meet him. We got the bus to James
Street Station, then took an electric train under the River Mersey to Rock
Ferry where we changed to one of the new diesels that carried us onward to
Chester.

In some
ways the rural landscape that surrounded Liverpool and the rolling farmland on
the Wirral seemed more exotic and foreign to me than Karlovy Vary, Montmartre
or Brussels. At least to get to those foreign places it took a lot of effort,
days of travel and the constant handing over of your passport to men in strange
uniforms — and when you got there everybody talked a different language and
dressed differently and smoked cigarettes that smelt like an abattoir on fire.

Sometimes
if the train driver at Rock Ferry knew my dad he would let me sit in the cab of
the diesel with him, and so I was able to watch as neat farms with cows in the
fields, woods and little villages made of sandstone came rattling towards us. I
wondered how many of the people in those farms and villages were Communists or
Jews. Was it like Liverpool, where it seemed that about one in ten of the
population was a Communist or a Jew or both, or were an even higher proportion
of these farmers on the Wirral members of the party?

As a District Secretary,
Joe would often be a delegate to the union’s annual general meeting which would
be held at a different seaside resort every year. Other men might have seen it
as an opportunity to get away from their families, but me and Molly always went
with my father. After all, everything was paid for by the union, and it was a
chance for us to get a little something back for all the time he was away.