Stalin Ate My Homework (17 page)

The
epicentre of the AGM would be the biggest ballroom in town. For seven days the
grand Wurlitzer organ would cower in its oubliette beneath the stage while
above it, in the dustmote-spangled air, fat men dressed universally in
scratchy grey droned on about ‘resolutions back to congress’, ‘incremental
payscale differentials’ and ‘clause nine arbitration agreements’. In its own
way it was exciting. To be at the congress of a large trade union in the 1960s
was a little like attending a rock festival where the stars up on the stage
were balding alcoholics in ill-fitting suits talking gibberish. Trade union
men like Vic Feather, Sid Weighell and Len Murray were constantly in the
newspapers, on the TV and the radio during that era, in their ponderous,
evasive and oxygen-sapping English uttering phrases like ‘at this moment in
time’ and ‘in the interests of the working man’ and ‘I’ll have to refer that
question back to my executive committee’. This language they had invented to
hide their intentions and to repel the uninitiated.

Then in
the evening a transformation would take place —the folding chairs were cleared
away and there would be music and dancing. On the stage there appeared a dance
band wearing matching outfits, their weary enthusiasm switching on as they
stood to play The most surprising delegates would reveal themselves to be
proficient at the jitter-bug and the waltz, straight-faced, spinning and
kicking their heels with their wives or women who they said were their wives,
while others conspired against them in alcoves.

I
remember at the age of five or six being forced to take a nap in a boarding
house in the seaside town of Exmouth — I was supposed to get some sleep in the
afternoon so that I could stay up late and attend the union’s annual dinner dance.
A window was open and the lace curtain fluttered in the breeze and in the
distance a train whistle blew and I couldn’t sleep because I was too excited.
Though there were other dances throughout the week the main social event, this
annual dinner dance, was held on the Friday night after all work at the
congress had been completed, wrapped up in resolutions and plans for strikes,
and it was the climax of a week-long parade of functions. Before then, on the
Monday after we were settled into our boarding houses and caravans, the mayor
would host a reception at the town hall to welcome us to his seaside resort and
there would be speeches of greeting and pork pies cut into four under an ornate
crystal chandelier.

At the
annual dinner dance the menu never varied — it would probably have taken a
resolution back to congress to alter it. So there was brown Windsor soup, roast
chicken, roast potatoes and peas, followed by ice cream. The only hint of
exoticism would be supplied by fraternal delegates from foreign unions, men of
the Deutsche Bundesbahn and the Italian Railways and French railway workers
from the SNCF staring in horror at their brown Windsor soup and wondering if it
wasn’t in fact made out of the brown bits of Windsor.

While the men sat in
sub-committees and steering groups ignoring the summer sun that streamed
through the windows, the women and children had to be entertained. So during
the day there were coach trips, visits to stately homes and castles and
activities for the kids, especially sports days during which they had their
hopes raised and then shattered. By and large me and Molly turned our noses up
at these trips. We didn’t like organised fun with people we didn’t know and
particularly didn’t wish to marvel at stately homes and castles, which we
viewed as the oppression of our class rendered in stone and plaster. Why would
we want to look at a Vanbrugh façade, a ceiling by Rubens or a Palladian
portico when we knew that what had paid for it was slavery, exploitation and
genocide? When we looked at this beauty my family saw only ideology.

Me and
Molly preferred exploring the resorts on our own, ill-informed and pure in our
class hatred, and in this we were aided by a wonderful device. The AGMs of the
big unions lasted for weeks each summer and there was great competition amongst
resorts to be the host for hundreds of big-spending trade unionists, their
mistresses and their families. As a token of gratitude the town council of
whatever seaside town had been chosen gave each family this magical piece of
cardboard — a pass. As the relative of a delegate, having a pass meant that for
a week you were entitled to enjoy all council facilities either free or at
half price. Bus rides, swimming pools, palm houses, model villages — we flashed
that pass and were ushered around like royalty There was a little narrow-gauge
train that ran along the front at Scarborough and me, Molly and Bruno our dog
would, since it was free to us, ride it up and down rather than walking. It was
a terrible trauma to come to the end of the week and to realise that your pass
didn’t work any more, that you were cast back down with the ordinary passless
people. In Scarborough one of the events we got into at half price was a
re-enactment of the Second World War sinking of the pocket battleship
Graf Spee,
held three times a week on the boating lake of Peasholin Park, which for
the afternoon became the Rio Plato. On our trips to Czechoslovakia and the rest
of eastern Europe we were constantly being shown round the sites of
concentration camps or the exact spots where hundreds of partisans had been
machine-gunned by German storm troopers, and this was the British equivalent:
model Spitfires on wires coming in over the laurel bushes, machine guns
blazing, and quite small explosions going off in the water.

In the summer of 1961,
rather than return to Czechoslovakia we had decided on the previous Boxing Day
to go to Hungary We would not take a delegation, but while we were there it was
arranged that we would meet senior members of the Communist Party and the trade
unions with a view to bringing a group of railwaymen over the following year.

With
the usual panic we had got to the Gare du Nord and were racing down the
platform. Maybe because me, Molly and Joe were travelling further east than we
had done before I was experiencing a particularly heightened sense of
awareness. I remember dragging my suitcase along when on an adjoining track I
caught sight of a train that presented such an image of glamour and speed that
it scarcely seemed real. It was scarlet and silver with a cockpit for the
driver like a bomber plane’s, high above its long, aerodynamic nose and
porthole windows down the flanks. In slanted metal letters along the side of
the locomotive were written these magical words: ‘TEE — Trans Europe Express’.
This was the train I wished we were going to be riding on, racing swiftly
across Europe in air-conditioned luxury, rather than the train that we were
taking. I was afraid of the train we were taking.

The
three of us were running to the Gare de l’Est, right next door, to ride the
Orient Express from Paris to Vienna. This was as far as the famous express ran
at that time, and from there we would be taking another train onward to
Budapest. One of the films Unity Theatre endlessly showed was
The Red
Balloon,
a 1956 short in which a young boy chases a red balloon, which
seems as if it has a life of its own, all over Paris. I felt sometimes that boy
was our family, though we were continually chasing trains rather than red
balloons that symbolised an idealistic notion of hope.

When we got to the Orient
Express we were reluctant to board. The passengers seemed very seedy and
frightening, hanging out of the windows or snogging girls on the steps and
refusing to move. Once aboard it was hard to get to our seats because the
aisles were blocked by gypsies and their luggage — luggage which seemed to
consist of large hessian sacks that appeared to be moving. Molly had been going
on for months about how dangerous the Orient Express had become, hence my
nervousness. Finally we settled into the ancient, dirty carriage, and a few
minutes later the train jerked into life and slowly ground through the same
Paris suburbs that we had come through a few hours before. However, somewhere
between Strasbourg and Munich, in keeping with the train’s reputation for
mystery and intrigue, I did find ten Swiss francs in the toilet. The dining car
of the Orient Express still hung on to a little of the glamour of the pre-war
years. Lacy curtains fluttered in the breeze from the open windows and the
staff’s uniforms, stained with half a century of soup, even now evoked the
bygone glory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with their gold epaulettes and
ornate silver buttons. They served these little tins of orange juice as a sort of
hors d’oeuvre, and I will still occasionally taste orange juice from a can and
be projected back like a time traveller to some foreign dining car, sunshine
streaming through the window with consommé slopping from a bowl as the train
rocks gently from side to side.

At
least if we were in the dining car we were safe and moving in the right
direction, but Joe had developed this terrifying new practice of making us all
get off the train with him to eat in the station buffet, leaving all our
belongings behind. He would force us to leave the security of the carriage,
walk along the platform to a tiled, echoing underpass and cross under the
tracks to emerge on the busy station concourse. It was an extraordinary
sensation, terrifying but in its way also thrilling. We would traverse the
marble floor of some German terminus, garish neon signs in blues, reds and
yellows advertising hotel rooms by the hour and Teutonic singing reverberating
from the station beer hall, with Joe insisting we had plenty of time because
the train would leave from one platform in a few minutes but it would certainly
return half an hour later to another. All the same, it took a great deal of
confidence to sit still and eat a bratwurst while watching everything you owned
clanking off up the line.

It was late evening when
we got to Vienna, where we would spend the night in a small hotel near the
station. The place where the three of us were staying didn’t have a restaurant,
so we went out into the streets to find a café. Eventually we located a large
restaurant unlike anywhere I had been before. It had warped ancient wooden
floorboards and in the centre of the room a huge ornate black iron stove with a
fat pipe reaching up to the ceiling — waiters in long aprons pirouetted around
this stove with massive trays of food held high above their shoulders. I
ordered a Wiener Schnitzel, which came with a fried egg on top. It seemed such
a brilliant idea to be eating something named after a city in the city it was
named after.

On the
way back from the café, in the window of an electrical shop I saw a radio in
bright red plastic with four silvery antennae shaped like the Sputnik
satellite. Here was another amazing thing. In Britain radios were shaped like
radios and were dull and sober wooden boxes. It seemed like an act of
extraordinary genius to conceive of manufacturing one that looked like
something else, and in such vibrant materials. It seemed somehow very German,
too. In the years to come, as German cars, machine tools and consumer products
drove British goods from the shops I thought of that radio and wasn’t
surprised.

On the
way back to the hotel we came across something else very German or Austrian — a
group of young men on the other side of the road pushing people off the
pavement, punching them and slapping them in the face. They passed us by, but
it was an unsettling incident.

The next morning as the
Hungarian Railways train headed east from Austria the weather gradually became
hotter and the landscape outside the windows slowly changed. I noticed grain
that was stacked in unfamiliar ways, I saw fields of sunflowers and peppers for
the first time, whitewashed houses with reed roofs and storks nesting in the
chimney pots, horse-drawn carts on dirt tracks. At the border between Austria
and Hungary we spotted a group of British miners who were so overcome to be
leaving Hungary that they were in tears.

Once in
Budapest we were put up in a grand baroque hotel, reserved solely for the use
of foreigners, on the banks of the Danube. The imposing public rooms swarmed
with citizens from all across the Soviet Empire mixed with people like us,
Westerners who had come to marvel at a real-life workers’ state. Though I was a
child I was good on atmospheres: having no older brother or sister to ask what
they thought might be going on meant I quickly became attuned to changes in the
psychic weather in a room. I suppose I got a lot of practice, since having
Molly for a mother was like living in the emotional equivalent of Darwin in
northern Australia where there are fifteen lightning storms a day So in that
big hotel by the Danube with its sweeping staircase I began to notice that
there was one group of comrades who, though they went un-noticed by the
Westerners, seemed to send an uneasy
frisson
through the hotel’s staff
and some of the other guests from the East. These people were the Russians.