Stalin Ate My Homework (26 page)

Many of
the restaurants in Sunny Beach were open-air —tables arranged around a dance
floor, with a band in dinner jackets playing on a small stage and a bar under a
canopy strung with coloured lights. The night was scented by the nearby pine
forests and the lush flower beds, cicadas chirped in the grass and insects
fluttered on the warm breeze until the insecticide lorry came along and killed
them all. One night we were sitting with a group of other British tourists when
Joe offered to go to the bar to buy a round of drinks. He collected everybody’s
coupons and headed off into the crowd of dancers. He didn’t return for nearly
an hour, and when he did, smiling to himself, he didn’t have any drinks with
him. On his way to the bar Joe had got chatting with the band leader and had
ended up giving the musicians everybody’s coupons in exchange for them playing
the Gerry and the Pacemakers’ song and Liverpool FC anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk
Alone’. The other tourists were very annoyed that they didn’t have any drinks
but their anger just seemed to confuse Joe, who couldn’t really offer any
proper explanation as to why he had given everybody’s vouchers away After that,
wherever we went in the resort any nearby band would strike up Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s show tune, so that it followed us around for the rest of our
holiday as if we were trapped in some two-week-long, Balkan-tinged production
of
Carousel.

It’s hard to say now what
exactly was wrong with Joe. His problems with memory loss and personality
change were more gradual and spread over a much longer period than is common
with Alzheimer’s. Another explanation might be a series of small but
undetectable strokes. Whatever the cause, the fact that he was ill was never
discussed in our house. I know there were concerned visits to Cyril Taylor, our
doctor, but the reason for them and the diagnosis, if any, were never revealed,
at least not to me. I suppose there was no answer in any of the places we would
normally look. The party couldn’t offer a solution. If you looked in the
Daily
Worker
there wouldn’t be an answer. The National Executive of the NUR didn’t
have any helpful ideas. So as a family we took an unspoken decision to look the
other way, which worked for a while — but it’s when you’re looking the other
way that you get hit by a bus.

I was
just left with a fragmentary sense of something wrong and some unsettling
memories. One Sunday evening, soon after our return from Bulgaria, we were
having egg and tomato sandwiches for our tea and then planning to watch the TV
show
Perry Mason.
Before the programme began we would play board games,
and on this particular evening me and Joe were having a game of draughts. Until
then he had always won, but this time it was as if my father had forgotten the
rules of the game because the moves he made on the board made very little
sense. As the contest went on I found Joe’s behaviour increasingly
disconcerting, so somehow, by making stupid moves of my own, I contrived to let
him win. Afterwards I could tell that Joe knew I had let him beat me. It was an
uneasy sensation, to feel pity for a parent when you’re fourteen years old.

After
he had been on light duties as a ticket collector for a few months, Joe was
finally considered fit enough to go back to work full-time. But the injury to
his foot meant he couldn’t perform the duties of a guard any more, so instead
he was promoted and appointed senior foreman at a railway goods yard at Bids
ton over on the Wirral. At least as he was no longer a guard Joe didn’t have to
work shifts, but he would still come home exhausted. And when he did he would
often tell us stories of a train that had been sent down the wrong route or an
important shipment that had somehow been mislaid. But between them the men at
the depot always seemed to save the situation, or at least conceal the identity
of who was responsible. I went to visit him there one weekend and found it an
eerily remote sort of place. The depot had been built on marshland and tall,
slender grasses grew between the tracks, nodding slowly in the salty breeze that
blew in from Liverpool Bay This depot at Bids ton was slowly being run down:
grey rail lines unused for many years curled this way and that like whip marks
across the soil, while on the oxidising tracks rested row after row of
battered, old-fashioned, wooden coal wagons that would never move again.

‘Who’s
that?’ I heard one of the junior railwaymen, a longhaired youth who had been
throwing stones at an old window frame and shattering the glass, ask one of the
others, referring to me.

‘That’s
the boss’s son,’ he replied.

It felt
weird that Joe was somebody’s boss.

Another realisation which
slowly dawned on me as I began to go out and about in the world was that there
was something odd going on with men’s toilets. If you wanted to use a public
lavatory and were walking towards it from a fair distance you wouldn’t see
anybody going in or out, yet when you got down the steps the subterranean space
would be full of men standing silently at the urinals, with only one gap left
for the bona fide customer. I wondered whether when you got to the age of
twenty or something, like these men were, it took three-quarters of an hour to
have a piss, which I wasn’t looking forward to. What’s more, as you went up the
stairs and out into the night you would hear a sudden scuffling back down in
the lavatory. What was that all about?

Also,
one evening when I was about fourteen and was walking back from the local
library along Walton Breck Road with an armful of Sherlock Holmes novels a man
stopped me. He said he was a long-distance lorry driver who had parked up for
the night and asked if I knew where the best chip shop in the neighbourhood
was. I thought for a second, then told him about several chippies in the area,
first noting their opening hours and then listing their various merits and
demerits, explaining differing prices and comparing cooking techniques. He,
however, appeared distracted and not really listening, until suddenly in the
middle of a long discourse about batter he blurted out, ‘Do you want a kiss?’ I
told him that no, on balance I didn’t want a kiss, and he went on his way
leaving me feeling confused. I didn’t realise that he was homosexual —I just
thought he was a lorry driver who was sexually excited by people comparing chip
shop prices. Afterwards, when I did figure out what he was, I was sorry I hadn’t
known he was gay It annoyed me that I had missed an opportunity to be liberal-minded
towards somebody who was still at that point part of a legally persecuted
minority If I had known he was homosexual I would have been able to express my
cloying tolerance towards him (though I still don’t think I would have given
him the kiss he wanted because he wasn’t very good-looking) .

A few
months later, when I was almost fifteen, the lorry driver might not have found
me that good-looking either, since within less than six months my appearance
had changed radically The olive-skinned, brown-eyed boy had vanished
completely, to be replaced by this hulking youth with long hair and a wispy beard
which I would occasionally augment with black biro, and spots. My mother
suggested that the best treatment for pimples was to put calamine lotion on
them, so instead of little red spots my face was adorned with huge pink
patches.

And
along with this change in appearance came a much more focused interest in girls
— though this interest wasn’t accompanied by any insight into how you might
get them to let you do the things you wanted to do with them. I envied the gay
lorry drivers of Britain who just seemed to wander the streets asking boys if
they wanted a kiss. Somehow that didn’t seem possible with a girl, and as far
as I knew girls didn’t hang around in underground urinals either, conveniently
letting you fumble with them in the dark.

Before
I was fifteen I had had only a single experience that might have been called a
date when I had invited some poor girl, the daughter of an NUR official I had
met at a union function, to come and visit our boat with me. Once I had got
her there I was completely unsure what to do next — the urge to reproduce is
supposed to be irresistible, but in me the urge not to be rejected was even
stronger — so I just sat staring at her for an hour and then took her home on
the bus. But while I had no idea how to get an individual girl to do what I
wanted I discovered that I did have the ability to make a crowd bend to my
will.

One evening on the stage
of the NUR social club in Dean Road Joe was presented with a cheque for the
union’s Orphan Fund by the Liverpool players Ian St John and Ron Yeats. It was
the first time I had been around celebrities, and I liked the way they seemed
to drive other people crazy for their attention. Drinkers tore up cigarette
packets that they pleaded with these big, noble, polite men to autograph. So I
got myself cast in the school play Our nervy English teacher Mr Johnson was
directing a production of Nikolai Gogol’s satire of corruption set in late
nineteenth-century tsarist Russia,
The Government Inspector.
There may
have been something a little pointed in my being given the one-line part of ‘A
Jewish Merchant’, but I didn’t care — it was showbusiness, baby! The corrupt
mayor of the town was played by Cliff Cocker and the part of Khlestakov, the
foppish civil servant with the wild imagination, by a guy called Russ Stamp from
the year above me. There was much excitement because some girls were being
imported from our sister school, Queen Mary, to play the female roles, and one
of them actually had to kiss Russ Stamp.

My one
scene involved a deputation of Jewish merchants approaching the fake government
inspector, complaining about the mayor’s behaviour and attempting to bribe the
fraudulent official with gifts handed over on a silver tray My single line was ‘Please
accept the tray with it’, a piece of nothing business with which I managed to
get a huge laugh on every one of the three nights the play ran by employing
instinctive timing, some physical comedy and a huge helping of unacceptable
racial stereotyping.

Getting
that laugh was confirmation of what I had always suspected: I knew how to make
a crowd laugh, and I would do pretty much anything to get that laugh. Though my
classmates were more analytical in the way they looked at comedy than they
would have been if they had lived in any other part of the country, they still
came at it from the direction of well-informed punters, in other words as
amateurs. When I looked at the performance of a comedian on the TV or the radio
it was as if I could see inside it, know what the comic was attempting, what
would be coming next; also I would sometimes hear or see something that got a
laugh and yet I would feel that the response was undeserved, on account of it
being obtained through some trick or because the audience were too cooperative,
too willing to laugh uncritically Not that I loved humour or anything. I didn’t
start collecting George Formby records or going to see comics in working men’s
clubs, I didn’t even particularly try and watch comedy shows when they came on
the TV It was just that I knew with absolute certainty that I was fluent in the
language of that country and I might go and live there one day.

It was
odd for me to have such a complex relationship with humour at such an early
age, since neither of my parents were at all sophisticated in that department.
Joe liked terrible puns and being jolly and everybody getting along, which I
didn’t value at all, while Molly’s concept of comedy was wholly Jewish,
straight out of the nineteenth-century shtetl; and they both liked awful,
sentimental, bloody Charlie Chaplin. In 1963 a famous tour had come to the
Empire Theatre in Lime Street, featuring Roy Orbison, the Beatles and Gerry and
the Pacemakers. We hadn’t gone to see that or even been aware of its existence,
but we had that same year been in the audience for something called the Red
Army Ensemble — the official choir of the Russian armed forces. This group of
folk dancers, musicians and singers toured the world improving the image of the
Soviet Union by having fat men in jodhpurs sing ‘The Volga Boatmen’s Song’, ‘Ave
Maria’ and ‘Kalinka’. The Empire was completely packed for the show with an
audience as excited and expectant as that which had greeted the Beatles, but a
lot older and with many more of those Russian-style astrakhan hats. There was a
lot of heavy-handed humour in the show, such as when these gimlet-eyed killers
sang as an encore a comical version of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. This cracked my
parents and the rest of the audience up, except me. The two of them loved these
ponderous agitprop jokes that Communists told each other, whose punch-line was
usually something to do with the President of the United States being a
bastard. That and people falling over.