Stalin Ate My Homework (2 page)

Before
the Second World War Molly had worked as a seamstress in the tailoring trade,
then during the war she had been employed sewing flags for the armed forces —
Union Jacks and Red Ensigns. But she left not long after VE Day following her
involvement in an industrial dispute. When she met my father Molly was working
at the Littlewood’s Pools company along with thousands of other women, combing
through the weekly football coupons looking for people who had suddenly become
rich. Molly was short-sighted and always wore glasses, had a head of luxuriant,
bright red hair and, in one of her few acts of conventionality, a temper to go
with it. She was capable of going from serene equanimity to incandescent rage
in a split second.

As a
small child, dressed in flannel shorts, socks, sandals and my best knitted
tank-top, my glossy black hair slicked down with water, I would visit the house
in Crown Street with my mother. I felt as if I too had been swept up by the
tsarist authorities and dumped a thousand miles from home, because though it
was only a bus ride away from our house, it seemed as if we had skipped
backwards in time by a century or two. The Mendelson family home was a big,
black building of three floors and a basement, up the road from the synagogue
and next to a yard where my grandfather had operated as a coal merchant. The
house appeared very bare, with large stretches of worn linoleum in the hall;
everybody seemed as pale as a ghost, and there was always the smell of poor
people’s soup. The only things that shone brightly were the oddly shaped
religious artefacts on the sideboard, their polished brass flanks decorated
with strange foreign writing that looked like it had come off the side of a
flying saucer. During these calls it felt like we were visiting the embassy of
a very poor and distant country — Molly and her five sisters always seemed to
treat each other with remarkable brusqueness, as if my mother was applying for
some sort of mining permit.

Like
Molly/Malka, each of the sisters had both a Hebrew and an anglicised name, so I
was always confused about exactly how many sisters there were and what they
were called. Who was Rosie? Who was Ester? Was Celia the same woman as Kranie?
She certainly looked the same, with identical waxy skin and a skittish manner,
but then why did she have a different name? At least the only brother was
simply called Uncle Monty.

During
the day Monty worked in the kosher section of the big slaughterhouse in
Smithdown Road, but in the evenings he was a cantor at the Fairfield Orthodox
Synagogue where cruel children in the congregation would laugh at him behind
his back because he gave his sermons, not in the normal MittelEuropean of the
old-world rabbi, but in the same flat, nasal Scouse/Jewish accent that all the
Mendelsons had. It was an accent that was at its best when expressing distress,
anger, anxiety or confusion. One dark autumn evening in Crown Street I wandered
out into the back yard to find Uncle Monty sitting in a rough, temporary shed
with a roof made out of palm leaves, eating two fried eggs with his hat on. I
thought my uncle had decided to live like a castaway on a desert island, like
you saw in cartoons — but in his own back yard, which seemed like a brilliant
idea to me. Disappointingly, Molly told me on the bus home he was celebrating
the feast of Sukkot, where just after Passover, extremely devout Jews recreate
the open-air shelters they’d built while wandering in the desert.

Perhaps that house on the
edge of the city centre possessed an odd atmosphere not simply due to the
Mendelsons’ religious exoticism but also because it sat at the direct epicentre
of a network of bizarre, complex and mysterious underground tunnels. These
subterranean passages form a labyrinth radiating out from Crown Street,
covering a vast area and built during the early part of the nineteenth century
under the direction of an eccentric businessman named Joseph Williamson.

Brick-arched,
they burrow beneath the entire neighbourhood with no clear plan, like the
meanderings of a gigantic, deranged worm. The passages vary in size as
frequently as they change direction, from the vast ‘banqueting hall’, about
twenty-one metres long, eight metres wide and six metres high, to the ‘ordinary’
tunnels which are only just big enough for a man to walk upright in. Nobody
knows for certain quite why Joseph Williamson built them. Some held that he was
a member of a religious sect, and that the tunnels were built to provide refuge
for himself and his fellows when the world ended. But the most likely
explanation is that it was an unhinged scheme to give unemployed men something
to do — an early attempt to alleviate the terrible suffering of the labouring
masses. And so, in a way, it was. The inhabitants of Crown Street, such as the
Mendelsons, would dig a hole in their back yard and tip all their rubbish in,
rather than going to the trouble of putting it in the bin — as if it was the
most natural thing in the world to have a network of secret passages underneath
your house.

Sometimes
I would be taken up to the attic where under the eaves lay a strange,
wraith-like figure whose connection to the Mendelsons was unclear. This man
with his long grey beard, thin bony arms and reedy voice was known as Uncle
Willy, and he never left the big brass bed that he rested in. Monty told me,
when I asked him what was wrong with Uncle Willy, that he had been attacked by
a tiger in India — but even at the time I didn’t think that seemed likely
Still, I thought Uncle Willy must be really important to be allowed to stay in
bed all day.

My
father never came with us on these trips, and when we returned to Anfield our
neighbourhood seemed extremely normal and dull. The most exotic thing about
Anfield was us.

Joe and Molly Sayle had
their only child on 7 August
1952,
the day that egg rationing finally
came to an end. Joe wanted to call his son Joe, but Molly insisted that he was
called Alexei — Alexei David Sayle. She named me partly because her father had
been called Alexander, and partly because while pregnant she had been reading
the works of Maxim Gorky But that didn’t mean she wanted to call her child
Maxim. That name was an alias used by the author to hide his true identity from
the tsarist secret police. He was really Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, and so that’s
what she called her only son — Alexei.

Although
eggs might now be freely available, names remained firmly on the ration. In
Liverpool in 1952 there were plenty of sturdy and serviceable British Stanleys
and Colins and Davids and Freds and Jims and Philips being born, but there was
only one Alexei David Sayle. And if being called Alexei didn’t make me feel
special, as a back-up David, of course, was King of the Jews.

After
going out together for three years my parents had got married in
1950,
which
came as a surprise to many Nobody had ever expected Joe to marry, and when his
family found out that his bride, who would be coming to live with them and
taking over one of the downstairs living rooms, was Jewish they asked each
other, ‘What will we eat? What will we eat?’

Joe had
lived for many years in Tancred Road, Anfield, in a room at the very top of the
house, with his stepmother and his niece Sylvia. When she came in from school
Sylvia would often hear the sound of Joe tapping away on his typewriter. He had
ambitions to be a proper writer, but the work he was doing was more mundane —
reports for his trade union, the National Union of Railwaymen, or articles on
transport for the Communist Party newspaper, the
Daily Worker.

Joe’s
father had been, like so many in Liverpool, a seaman. His mother, who came
originally from Jersey, died when he was five. He was left with few memories of
her — just a ghostly image of an unhappy woman in white gloves who refused to
do any housework. Later the father remarried and Joe, along with his two
brothers and three half-brothers, lived with their stepmother.

Though
they moved a lot, the family mostly stayed within the Anfield area. Several of
Joe’s brothers had jobs on the railways, and when he left school at fourteen he
too went to work for the Cheshire Lines Company, which served Liverpool,
Manchester, Lancashire and Cheshire. To work on the railways in the 1920s and
1930s was to be relatively fortunate. Unlike the docks or the building trade,
where men were little more than slaves taken on from day to day, it was a
steady job — as a railwayman you were part of a uniformed workforce with a
solid sense of identity and represented by strong unions. At the top of the
hierarchy were the engine drivers. I was taught to regard engine drivers with
distrust, to see them as temperamental, arrogant men who took too much pride in
mastering their snorting steam engines. The drivers’ union, ASLEF, was often in
conflict with the NUR, which spoke for the rest of the workforce, the
signalmen, porters, cleaners and guards. Joe was a goods guard, in charge of
the cars that carried freight. He rode at the end of the train in his own
little wooden wagon known as the brake van. When we watched American cowboy
films on the TV they referred to this carriage, more excitingly, as the
caboose. The brake van looked like a small Swiss chalet on wheels, a creosoted
wooden shed made of planking with a narrow verandah at each end and a chimney
poking out of the curved roof. A few times I rode with my father to
mysterious-sounding destinations such as Stalybridge and Altrincham Junction.
Inside his van there was a coke-burning, black pot-bellied stove that warmed
the air with such ferocity that I would become sleepy and have to be taken out
on to the gently rocking verandah, to be jolted awake by the cold air rushing
by.

Joe’s
main job was to keep a close eye on the freight wagons, either from his
verandah or from a little projecting side window in each wall through which he
could see the whole length of the train, and to apply the brakes manually in
the event of an imminent disaster. If the train stopped on the line for some
reason such as fog the guard had to walk back up the tracks placing explosive
detonators on the rails to alert following trains. It seemed heroic work. In
our family the guard was clearly the most important member of the train’s crew.

But it
was the tools of Joe’s trade that really fascinated me. Each night he would
come home and give me his leather satchel, which held a battered and scratched
black paraffin lantern with red and green filters that could be placed over the
clear glass lens to warn of danger or give the all-clear, a red and a green
flag, squares of linen stitched to a thick wooden baton for the same purpose.
In his waistcoat he carried a metallic-tasting whistle and a big fob watch like
a miniature station clock.

The
most important thing that came with my father’s job was free rail travel. Every
railway worker and his family could go absolutely anywhere in Europe for
twenty-five per cent of the normal fare, and they were in addition entitled to
six free passes a year, which meant you could travel right up to the borders of
the Soviet Union for nothing. All ferries — to Ireland, the Isle of Man, the
Scottish Isles, across the Baltic and over the English Channel — were also
included in the deal. A lot of those who worked on the trains didn’t seem to
have the imagination or the desire to do more than make the odd free trip to
Blackpool, but Joe enthusiastically took advantage of these concessions to roam
across Europe. Sometimes he would do Communist Party work, attending labour
conferences or helping volunteers for the International Brigades travel from
neutral Ireland to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War,
occasionally he would write articles on foreign affairs for the Communist
Daily
Worker,
but often he would go abroad on his own, simply travelling and
falling in with strangers.

As soon
as they met, Joe invited Molly to join him on his travels — he loved showing
her the world that she had never seen before. In 1947 they joined a group of my
father’s friends, mostly couples, some married, some unmarried, all members of
the same left-wing drama group — Unity Theatre. They had rented a villa together
on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy This was extremely bohemian
behaviour, associated more with groups of artists like the Bloomsburys than
with railway workers. Working-class society remained extremely conservative,
and unmarried couples did not go away to stay together in Italian villas — in
many homes a girl risked social exclusion if she even talked to the postman
without a chaperone. But then to outrage convention was part of the purpose of
the holiday Joe and Molly and their friends revelled in their difference,
their love of foreign food and foreign wine and foreign ideas, and had little
concern for what society thought.