Stalin Ate My Homework (28 page)

I was
astonished at how bad all this made me feel — I hated how out of my depth I
was, how alien and confusing those country lanes seemed and how much of a
failure I felt. There was a raging compulsion in me to succeed, to gain mastery
over the situation, and yet I couldn’t seem to go about it in the way that
anybody sensible would. And I didn’t like talking to people I didn’t know,
either. It was like being on the date with the girl on the boat. What did they
want? What did they think of me? Why weren’t they saying anything? Would they
like it if I sang ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup’?

I got
back to Anfield late in the evening, hot and dusty Giving vague replies to my
parents’ enquiries as to how it had gone, I went up to my bedroom and sat at
the little desk where I sometimes did my homework. After a few minutes of
staring at the questionnaire forms I began to write. I invented addresses, made
up names and of course faked entirely the answers to questions about chemical
fertiliser — just like Volunteer Marek in
The Good Soldier Schweik
writing
articles about imaginary animals for the natural history magazine he worked
for. I sent my survey off and in a few weeks received a cheque and another
assignment, this one about chocolate bars.

In the autumn, because
they were so pleased with my work I was getting sent many more opinion polls to
carry out and beginning to feel overwhelmed. When I returned to school after
half-term I got my fellow pupils involved. At first I just asked them to
pretend to be their parents and give the answers they thought their parents
might give, but after a while I simply handed out the forms and left them to
it. They in turn now started to get carried away and began inventing
identities, claiming to be a Dutch pilot who owned a string of racehorses or,
more worryingly, a female ballet dancer with a great liking for rugby players.
In many ways it was more creative than the English lessons we sat through.
During the lunch break the whole class would be quietly working away, compiling
false information which I sent off to headquarters and which was then used to
formulate government transport and housing policy, predict shopping trends and
analyse how the public felt about the politics of the day for articles in
newspapers and magazines.

At the age of fourteen
going on fifteen my dance card was as full as that of a debutante doing the
London season. I had good pals my own age at school; I had Cliff and his mates,
all older boys; I spent a great deal of time with Cliff’s family as well as my
own; and I had begun to get involved in organised revolutionary politics. In
1966 I joined the youth wing of the Communist Party — the Young Communist
League, generally referred to as the YCL. There was no pressure from my parents
to do so, it was just a natural and timely thing as if I was seamlessly moving
into the family business. I always thought that if we had had a van it would
have written on the side in big letters: ‘Joseph Henry Sayle and Son —
Revolutionaries. Estimates given. No Kalashnikovs left in this van overnight.’

The
first meeting of the YCL that I attended was at a small, early
nineteenth-century terraced house on the other side of Oakfield Road, one of
the poorest type of workers’ cottage with a front door that opened directly on
to the street. The house was owned by a man called Eric Savage who, though he
might have been a Communist, certainly wasn’t young. I learned at the meeting
that this was quite normal. Though the membership of the YCL consisted of boys
and girls between fifteen and twenty years of age, the leadership of the
Communist Party didn’t trust them to run their own affairs. So the secretaries
of the local groups were generally middle-aged men who had been vetted by the
CP hierarchy — though solely for doctrinal obedience. Eric Savage shared the
house with two young women who were both in the YCL: one was called Fizzy and
the other Sheila. He had been a member of one of the lesser Merseybeat bands in
the early 1960s and owned two giant Alsatian dogs who were eating the walls of
his home and finally broke through to the house next door.

My
first meeting involved rehearsing in the road for a piece of street theatre
that the group were planning to put on at a Vietnam demonstration at the Pier
Head. We stood around outside Eric’s house and somebody pretended to be an
American soldier stabbing a peasant woman with a bayonet. That was as far as we
got, because everybody appeared to run out of energy after that point. It
seemed extraordinarily lame.

Much as
another household might hold in high esteem a religious personage, a popular
singer or some local sports team, the Soviet double agents Philby, Burgess and
Maclean were much-revered figures in our home. We admired the way they had
managed to deceive the British security services for so many years while
working for the cause of Communism, we valued the damage they had caused to the
reputation of Britain and the hundreds of British agents they had effectively killed,
and we applauded the way they had evaded punishment, escaping from the West to
enjoy what we supposed were full and fulfilling lives in Moscow and going to
see the Red Army Ensemble whenever they felt like it. When Philby published his
autobiography,
My Silent War,
I was particularly taken with his
description of the moment when he first joined M16. So incompetent and chaotic
did those around him seem that he assumed he was working for some sort of sham
front organisation designed to deceive the enemy He imagined that at some
point, when he had been with them for a while, he would be shown the real,
hidden M16, all cool efficiency and sleek modernity Only slowly did it dawn on
him that the ramshackle organisation he was working for was all there was.
There was no better M16 — this was it.

I felt
the same about the YCL. This was the youth wing of an organisation that
occupied hundreds of Special Branch spies in the UK. Internationally, Communism
controlled something like a third of the world’s population — the Soviet Union,
China, great swathes of South-east Asia, Cuba, all of eastern Europe — and yet
these people couldn’t organise the fake stabbing of a peasant woman in the
street.

At Eric’s
house I met a tall red-head, a couple of years older than me, Ian Williams.
From time to time I would see him on the political scene at mass meetings or
demonstrations, as we shopped around deciding who we would give our
revolutionary business to. Ian took the idea of revolution so seriously that he
invested in his own crash helmet to wear on demonstrations. It was a
cylindrical leather-covered thing with long flaps like the ears of a bloodhound
that buckled under the chin, and was of a type that was generally worn by human
cannonballs at the circus.

He
never came to another meeting of the YCL, and you could see why The thing that
finally did for me was when they organised a nationwide campaign called
Bicycles for Vietnam, an operation orchestrated by the leadership in London.
Two trusted members, who were both rather handsome twenty-five-year-old guys,
were to drive an ancient removal van round the country collecting unwanted
bicycles which they would then take down to Marseilles for transshipment by
Cuban freighter to the North Vietnamese port of Haiphong. When the bicycles
arrived in South-east Asia they would be employed in the war against US
imperialism. We were already aware that for the Vietnamese the bicycle was a
mighty weapon — the Vietcong would reputedly transport up to a ton of munitions
along the Ho Chi Minh Trail on a single machine. For me, though, this confirmed
that the YCL didn’t know what they were doing. This scheme was just a piece of
make-work nonsense, designed solely to distract fractious members like me who
were becoming disenchanted with the group and their elderly, rubber mac-wearing
leadership. My guess was that the Vietcong had their own bicycles, sturdy
Chinese-style machines, and had no need for bikes designed with the European
market in mind, models that folded in the middle or pink ladies’ bikes with
shopping baskets attached to the front handlebars.

When
the guys turned up at Eric’s house they acted all Southern, arrogant and snotty
in their leather jackets and stubble. Then they both got drunk on cheap red
wine and I think they slept with both Fizzy and Sheila, which I would like to
have done, but worst of all I saw them casting covetous glances at my brand-new
second-hand Raleigh Equipe racing bike with five Campagnolo Grand Sport gears
and Brookes leather racing saddle. The last I heard of these two men and their
truck full of bicycles was that, after careering all over the UK causing chaos
and sleeping with members’ girlfriends, they had crashed into a ditch outside
Boulogne and abandoned the van. It didn’t seem a very effective way to fight
the forces of US imperialism.

Despite being a noisy
show-off, up until my fifteenth year I had never been in any disciplinary
trouble at school. But all that quickly began to change. Apart from anything
else I felt free to challenge the staff and their rules because I was certain
that I wasn’t going to get punished in any significant way Another child might
have resented his mother turning up at the school complaining or fighting his
battles for him, but early on I had realised there was no way I could deflect
Molly from interfering in my life and so I might as well use it to my
advantage. One of the favourite stories from my childhood that Molly would tell
about herself concerned a kid from another street who had been pushing me
around outside our house. Hearing the commotion, Molly and our dog Bruno had
come roaring out of the front door and chased the kid away, pursuing him to the
corner. The next time I saw the bully, he was full of admiration. ‘Your mum
should be in the Olympics,’ he said. Molly loved that story.

So fear
of Molly was probably why, despite all the things I did, I was not once caned.
Corporal punishment wasn’t that common at our school but it was used on
occasion and though, particularly later on, I committed several offences that
would have earned another boy six strokes on the hand I never got them.

I
started to argue more fiercely with the teachers in class and I began to take
liberties with the school uniform. Rather than the regulation striped tie, I
wore a thin black knitted one. I wore high cuban-heeled boots rather than the
official sensible brogues, and after my plastic mac caught fire I bought
another one, bronze-coloured, which drove the staff into paroxysms of anger
with its gaudy iridescence.

They
tried to discipline me. I got a lot of lines, I had to write out various
scientific laws hundreds of times so that I could recite them without knowing
what they meant, and I was given tons of detentions. From time to time I was
also required to do my homework while sitting outside the headmaster’s office.
But I never got the cane. And the fact that the other kids saw me getting away
with stuff that they were getting beaten for only served to increase the idea
that there was something special and mysterious about me — at least that’s what
I thought. ‘Why didn’t Sambo get the cane?’ kids would say in aggrieved tones,
rubbing their stinging palms. ‘He was there when it caught fire. In fact it was
his idea to set it alight.’ But Sambo said nothing. He let the impression grow
that he was the headmaster’s illegitimate son or that his Communism gave him
magical powers. He certainly wasn’t going to let on that he only got away with
stuff because the staff were frightened of his mum.

After
the betraying of Peter Pemberton it had taken me quite a long time before I
made another best friend my own age, but after a while I became close to
another boy at Alsop. His name was Leo Scher and one or both of his parents
were Swiss. For a couple of years we were very good friends. He lived in the
Wavertree district of the city where I would visit him on a Saturday We would
go to the swimming baths or take his dog for a walk in the park; then I would
be home by five-thirty or six and I’d be in from then on. Then one day, I think
it was a Saturday, it was as if I thought to myself, ‘Sod this!’ I never spent
another night in, and I didn’t spend any more time with Leo Scher.