Stalin Ate My Homework (37 page)

My
efforts to find another girlfriend were hampered by Molly and Joe, having begun
drinking in the same pubs as me, they now started to go to the same parties. I
would climb the fetid stairs to some student flat in Liverpool 8 trying to act
all cool and hard when, looking across the room, I would see Molly telling a
group of pretty anarchist girls some anecdote about my potty training or how
as a child I used to think that I might be kidnapped by bananas. ‘That’s him
over there in the leather jacket,’ Molly would say, pointing in my direction,
and the pretty anarchists would look at me with an expression you never want to
see on the face of a good-looking girl.

I decided I didn’t just
need to go to college, that college needed to be in London. It wasn’t an
original idea — when I went round the pubs, especially the Crack, I would often
come across guys sitting at a table who had spent some time in the capital.
They would relate their experiences to a horrified crowd as if they were
telling tales of the Somme in 1916. ‘It’s terrible down there,’ they would say,
staring with faraway eyes at an un-nameable horror. ‘I paid three shillings for
a pint of bitter in a pub in Clapham’, or ‘You don’t get rice with your sweet
and sour pork’, or ‘You’re completely anonymous down there.’ Which seemed as
good a reason as any to emigrate right away.

But
even if you weren’t somebody who was known to many only as ‘Molly Sayle’s son’,
there were other reasons to leave. On the surface Liverpool was booming. The
pubs and clubs were packed and, though the Beatles had moved to London, there
was still a vital music scene. The
Mersey Sound
poetry anthology had
recently been published by Penguin, selling hundreds of thousands of copies,
Adrian Henry, Roger McGough and Brian Patten reigned like pashas over Liverpool
8 and the two football teams were winning everything in sight — yet if you
sniffed the wind you could smell a storm coming.

Towards
the mouth of the river at Seaforth work was almost completed on a massive
container terminal. When it opened, the numbers working in the docks would drop
from tens of thousands to a few hundred. A Marxist historian would say that
industries grew up and remained in an area because there was a plentiful supply
of a certain necessary item. The existence of coal and steel in the Midlands
led to the engineering industry being based there, a humid climate meant cotton
was woven in Lancashire, and finance was located in the City of London because
of a plentiful supply of hard-hearted and cruel individuals. But all the new
factories on the outskirts of Liverpool were founded with massive government
grants. Ford and Triumph at Halewood, English Electric and Otis Elevator on the
East Lancashire Road, were hundreds of miles from where they should have been.
When the orders dried up they were the first to close.

Liverpool’s
most iconic edifice, the Liver Building, had originally been planned as an
office block in Chicago and adapted to Liverpool by chopping off the top fifty
floors of the design. There was a similar chopped-off Chicago feel to Liverpool
civic politics — the same boss culture, the same dynastic corruption, the same
insularity The police patrolled in dark blue Land Rovers like an occupying army
rather than genial bobbies. As Marxist-Leninists we were constantly predicting
that chaos was on the way, but for once, we were right and the city’s rulers
were ill suited to cope with it.

In some
ways it was not just a Liverpool phenomenon. There was a notion that had been
growing in every section of British society, certainly since the Second World
War, that the provinces weren’t worth anything. All the things that had been
considered important about towns and cities outside the metropolis —
substantial Victorian buildings, homely regional cooking, shipbuilding and
making things in factories — were now deemed to be hopelessly naïve and old-fashioned.
A comedian could get a big laugh just by saying ‘Leicester’.

In early 1969, reflecting
the consolidation that was taking place in the automobile industry, banking and
retailing, the Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group ceased to be independent and
became the Liverpool Branch of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
. The CPB (ML) had been founded in 1968 by Reg Birch, an angry, grey-haired
little man in a suit, along with other leading members of the engineering
union, all of them disillusioned by the Soviet-aligned Communist Party of Great
Britain. At the time it had maybe three hundred members, which made it a giant
amongst left-wing groups.

In
China Jung Chang, the author of
Wild Swans,
a young student whose
parents had been accused of being ‘capitalist roaders’ and horribly tortured
during the Cultural Revolution, was being taught English at Beijing University
The only foreign publication available to the students was a newspaper from a
tiny Maoist group in Britain, and even this was kept under lock and key Jung
Chang was allowed to look at a single copy of this paper only once, and was
disappointed to discover how dull it was and how slavishly and tediously it
reproduced the Chinese Communist Party line. As she was staring at it a
lecturer walked past and said, ‘That paper is probably read only in China.’
Well, that paper was our paper! It was
The Worker,
the official journal
of the CPB (ML).

But
Jung Chang’s lecturer was wrong. How could he know that, even though Chinese
students hungry to read almost anything at all in the English language found it
too insipid to bother with, me and a couple of comrades could sell twenty or
thirty copies on a Saturday morning outside Central Station to people who had
access to the whole of Western literature? Admittedly some of those sales went
to elderly lefties who mistook
The Worker
for the old
Daily Worker
and
bought a copy for the racing tips, but there were a small number of men and
women, not members of any group or party but simply out shopping with their
wives or on their way to the football or buying clothes at Lewis’s, who would
on an impulse purchase a copy of our paper and then read it thoroughly,
occasionally coming back the next week to discuss some arcane point of Marxist
theory.

If
there was any criticism over the quality of the newspaper, Reg Birch would say
that it had fewer mistakes, mis-spellings and typos than the
Guardian.
What
he failed to point out was that the
Guardian
came out every day and had
seventy pages, while
The Worker
came out once a month and had four
pages. There was also a problem of subject matter in the party newspaper due to
an imbalance in the organisation’s make-up. The majority of the members of the
CPB (ML) were teachers, bank workers and students but the largest single group
were in the Engineering Union, while the next largest group, due to a couple
who were enthusiastic and persuasive recruiters, worked in a warehouse owned by
Penguin Books near Wembley. So the stories in
The Worker
often tended to
be about either the manoeuvrings for power in the Engineering Union or the problems
of working in a big book warehouse near Wembley.

In Liverpool the
membership had changed. Nigel Morley Preston Jones, the city’s first Maoist,
had left the group to join the Anarchists, but he let us keep our bookstall in
the Simon Community Hostel. Nigel had never quite seemed to have the right dour
spirit for a Marxist-Leninist anyway Once we had been on a demonstration about
housing in Birkenhead and, handing me the megaphone, he suggested I chant, ‘Build
bombs not houses!’ Without thinking I yelled the slogan into the mouthpiece and
then wondered why everybody suddenly turned round and started staring and
making angry faces. Once I had realised from Nigel’s sniggering what he had
made me do, the thing that really surprised me was that anybody actually
listened to these chants. I certainly didn’t, even when I was shouting them
into a megaphone. It was a shock to be reminded that most of the people on the
left wholeheartedly believed this stuff, that they thought shouting these
slogans and going on these demonstrations might actually make a difference to
something. Whereas I generally looked on it as, at best, a nice day out with
friends with the possibility of a fight at the end of it.

The
Merseyside Marxist-Leninist Group voting to become a branch of the CPB (ML)
caused the first split in our little band of revolutionaries. You were nobody
in left-wing politics until you had been involved in a split, so I felt that
the huge and acrimonious argument over joining the larger party in London was some
sort of initiation ceremony or rite of passage. There was a Syndicalist group
based in Birkenhead, who we would occasionally see at meetings and demos; the
creed they followed stated that social justice and equality would only be
attained when every worker in the world belonged to a single gigantic trade
union. They had four members. This group, who were not wealthy, saved up for
ages to go to a Syndicalist conference in London but unfortunately they had a
split over some fine point of doctrine on the way there and attended the
conference as two separate groups, one with three members and the other with
one.

Barry
and Ingrid, the couple from Yorkshire, were the main members who left us to
join a completely different organisation called the Communist Federation of
Britain (Marxist-Leninist) . The CFB (ML) soon became our deadliest enemies.
The difference between the party and the Federation was that according to
Marxist ideology you were only supposed to form a party once the revolution was
imminent and the capitalist system on the verge of collapse. This did present
our party, the CPB (ML), with a problem in that we had to see the embers of
insurrection and the seeds of destruction in every minor glitch of the
economic or social order. Any late train or the sacking of a woman from a cake
shop was pointed to as a sign that we would all be at the barricades by the end
of the week.

In
those days everything in Britain seemed to be grey apart from the cars. Tiny,
simple things coloured bright red, yellow, green and blue like children’s
building blocks they tick-tocked around the streets running people over with
great jollity Chris Walker had bought a pea soup-coloured Minivan with bare metal
all round and toggles on a string to open the doors. In it, in a time before
the Ml and the M6 were joined up, we would travel down to London for
introductory meetings at party headquarters.

Those
journeys were like a joke about how many Marxist-Leninists you could fit into
a Mini. Chris and Ian sat in the front while there would be another four of us
folded up in the back, in a space no bigger than a bathtub. Bouncing around in
the fetid dark, we would only be allowed to emerge into the light, feeling like
hostages in Beirut, once the Minivan was parked outside the CPB (ML)’s base of
operations. The Bellman Bookshop was a dark and forbidding former bank on
Fortess Road in Tufnell Park, north-west London, a depressive Irish
neighbourhood of gloomy pubs, grey rooming houses and cash butchers. There were
at least two other Maoist bookshops in the area owned by competing sects —
one, in Camden High Street, was nearly as big as a Woolworth’s. These other
places had proper Marxist-Leninist names such as the London Workers’ Bookshop,
but bizarrely the Bellman was named after a character in Lewis Carroll’s
nonsense poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ who says, ‘What I tell you three times
must be true’ and possesses a map of the ocean which is a blank piece of paper.
What sort of message was that sending?

I
thought to myself that this huge, undulating city was the place that I would soon
be living and the London members would, before too long, be my new comrades,
except they all seemed crazy.

The
party bookshop was overseen by Reg’s wife, Dorothy The daughter of a vicar who
looked like the daughter of a vicar in a play, she smoked constantly and would
tap the ash from her fag into the pocket of the long grey cardigan she inevitably
wore. Occasionally she would begin smouldering, wisps of grey smoke curling
from her hips. Comrades were frequently too frightened of Dorothy to tell her she
was on fire. Mrs Birch was always spectacularly rude to anybody who ever came
into the shop — partly it was because of her abrasive character, but also
perhaps she knew the stock to be so dreary that anybody browsing must be a
member of the Special Branch or a rival group.

Around
the corner from the Bellman Bookshop was the only colourful spot in the entire
district, a London-Italian café called the Spaghetti House. If they weren’t in
the pub this was where all the members would go in the few breaks allowed in
the day-long meetings. The Spaghetti House was the first eating place of its
type I had encountered as there wasn’t anything like it in Liverpool — an
ebullient collision of Italian and British cooking mixing bacon sandwiches,
spaghetti bolognese and jam roly-poly with custard. Though the party hierarchy
were obsessed with security and were continually excommunicating innocent
people for being suspected police spies, the staff in the Spaghetti House
always seemed to know a lot more about the affairs of the CPB (ML) than the
actual members. They would say as they served you, ‘Hokay, here’s your mixed
grill, extra toast no tomatoes and I hear that the executive committee is
planning to discipline the Brighton Branch for incorrect thought on Comrade Birch’s
Crumbs of Imperialism Theory.’