Stalin Ate My Homework (4 page)

The telephone
with the almost empty phone book beside it sat on a sort of shelf in the front
sitting room balanced on a most enigmatic piece of furniture. It was a
substantial thing, a highly polished mahogany cabinet with glass cupboards at either
end, and in the top half of the centre section there was a fold-down writing
desk with a secret compartment where precious papers were stored. In the lower
half the flat front pulled out to reveal a drinks trolley on castors with holders
for your bottles of Cinzano, Advocaat and Crème de Menthe. It had castors so
you could take it round the room on the off-chance that the Lord Mayor or, in
our case, Nikita Khrushchev ever came round for cocktails. As far as I knew, it
was called a ‘Secatrol’. My mother would say, ‘Lexi, go and get some glasses
out of the Secatrol’, or ‘I think I left my copy of Maxim Gorky’s
My
Universities
on top of the Secatrol.’ I presumed that everybody had one. A
kid in the street would say, ‘I’ve lost my mittens’ and I’d suggest, ‘Perhaps
you left them in your Secatrol’ — I assumed this might be the case since ours
was always swallowing vital documents and never returning them. After being
met with complete incomprehension I was forced to ask my mother about our
mysterious cabinet. She told me that it had been bought from the Co-op in 1951
when furniture rationing was still in place. The make-do-and-mend mind-set of
the period meant that it was more or less illegal to sell domestic furniture
and people were expected to manage with what they had, but if an item could be
categorised as being of use in an office and thus part of the export drive
then it could be sold. So our cabinet was supposed to be an article of
furniture for the workplace — the ‘Sec’ bit was meant to refer to ‘secretary’
while the ‘trol’ came from ‘trolley’. In theory somebody’s secretary was meant
to work at our drinks cabinet, her knees banging against a trolley full of
Martini Rosso. As my mother told me about our drinks cabinet I thought that
even our furniture had a secret identity and was not what it pretended to be.
It remains a mystery as to why my parents felt the first item of furniture they
should buy was a gigantic multi-purpose cabinet rather than, say, some
comfortable chairs.

Our house had been built
in the late nineteenth century exactly for the type of man Joe was — skilled or
semi-skilled working class who kept the freight flowing to and from the docks.
It was one level up from the poorest style of terraced house meant for the most
impecunious type of family, the kind that faced directly on to the street and
had a door that opened straight into the front room.
5
Valley Road had a
low front wall behind which was the canted bay window of the front sitting room
and an unruly privet bush. A narrow corridor led from the front door to a back
living room with the kitchen off it. Below ground was a coal cellar, and on the
second floor three bedrooms. Most houses still had an outside toilet in the
back yard, but ours had been connected to the rest of the house by demolishing
the wall between it and the tiny bathroom that led off the living room. Our
stone-flagged back yard had a rockery with alpine flowers dating from the
previous owners that Joe tore up and then lost interest in, so it remained a
pile of rocks, and a wooden door that led to the narrow cobbled back entry. My
bedroom was the small rear room next to my parents, from which I could look out
on the back entry and the long back wall that ran the length of the street and
acted as a sort of Ho Chi Minh Trail for cats.

When I
was four years old I got my own adult-sized single bed, bought inevitably from
the Co-op. It had a conventional metal frame with springs, a mattress mounted
on these springs and a wooden headboard that, in a rare moment of innovation,
had had a little side shelf built into it. The headboard flexed with any
movement of the bed frame so that when you got into it or even turned over
everything on the shelf fell off on to the floor. I never fully accepted that
every time I put something on the shelf it would eventually fall off, so I
persisted in using the shelf for glasses of water, fragile toys, pens, pencils
and books, and so for years, indeed until I left home, my sleep was accompanied
by the gentle sound of things smashing on to the unforgiving linoleum.

Quite early on, when I was
a bit too young for it really, I got a toy train set — it seemed like an act of
solidarity with the railways that I should have one. It was a Hornby Dublo
three-rail set-up. At that time there was an ideological war going on between
supporters of two-rail and three-rail model railways. I don’t know why we opted
for three-rail, but I do know that the set I was given was a goods train with
an exact replica of my dad’s brake van at the end of it. Maybe the two-rail people
didn’t do goods trains, or they might have been considered fascists by my
parents, perhaps for some reason connected with their behaviour during the
Spanish Civil War. Maybe they had supplied toy trains to Franco’s forces.
Sometimes you never knew.

I played
with my Hornby Dublo happily enough but never expanded it much from the basic
layout. I never felt the need. To me the world outside our front door, the
world of
1950s’
Liverpool, embodied all those qualities that others
found in train sets — a sense of order, a sense of perfection, the feeling that
things would remain as they were for ever. In the mornings most of the men went
off to work. Joe worked shifts, so sometimes he would be sleeping or coming
home when the others were going out, but there were plenty like him and that
only added to the general sense of bustle and ordered endeavour. The fathers in
our street worked in the building trades, clerked in insurance offices or stood
behind the counter in banks, while others attended to the production lines of
the modern factories springing up on the edges of the city Buses and trams and
electric trains took them from our street to the workplace, or else they walked
or rode black bicycles with rod brakes and creaking leather saddles, and a very
few got rides in cars. After they had seen the men go off to work the mothers
did the housework and then took their children to the verdant parks dotted with
freshly painted shelters, palm houses, floral clocks, boating lakes and open
air theatres where there were concerts and Punch and Judy shows in the summer.
The city’s streets were lined with shops right into the city centre where they
were replaced by massive mercantile buildings. All along the river the docks
teemed with shipping — cargo boats and giant liners bound for the USA and South
America, West Africa and the Isle of Man, while green and cream ferries bobbed
back and forth across the river, and green and cream electric trains ran in
tunnels beneath it and sometimes me and Joe would lay out my small circle of
track in the front room and solemnly watch the train go round and round, a
faint, acrid smell of lightning coming from the transformer which brought power
from the mains. The front or ‘sitting rooms’ of most of the houses in the
street were reserved for sombre occasions such as this and therefore most of
the front rooms in the street went unused for the majority of the year, kept
only ‘for best’ — ‘best’ being a euphemism for a visit from somebody unpleasant
such as the vicar, the police, the doctor or relatives that you didn’t like
much.

Ours
got more traffic, because apart from the phone and the Secatrol this was where
Joe’s books were kept. My father seemed to have given up buying books once he
had a family, as if this was something only bachelors did, because the hundred
or so volumes housed in two wooden bookcases in the front room all dated from
before the war and provided a vivid picture of the life of a working-class
radical of the 1930s. Though Joe never got to speak much about what he felt
even in the brief silences when Molly wasn’t shouting at the neighbours, these
books were like geological rock strata that revealed the evolving layers of
his personality There was a burning curiosity about the future, represented by
the collected works of H.G. Wells in a uniform edition. There was an interest
in the mind:

An
Outline
to
Psychology
and the works of Emile
Coué, the French psychologist and pharmacist who believed you could cure
yourself of illness and depression by saying every morning and evening, ‘Every
day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.’ There were hints of another
life in that many of the books seemed to be gifts from women, with inscriptions
like ‘Merry Christmas for 1946 from Betty’. And there was the closest thing we
had to a religious object, the book that had made Joe a Communist — Jack London’s
The Iron Heel.

When he
was still a teenager, Joe had taken part in the General Strike called by the
Trades Union Congress on 3 May 1926 ‘in defence of miners’ wages and hours’.
But though the railwaymen and the dockers brought the country to a total halt,
elements in their unions, the TUC and the Labour Party were always fearful of
revolution and so, nine days after it began, the TUC General Council visited 10
Downing Street to announce their decision to call off the strike. The miners
fought on alone for many months before going back to work on worse terms than
before. For just over a week it must have seemed like a revolution was indeed
possible. In Joe’s part of the world warships hovered in the Mersey, their guns
trained on the city, troops camped in the gardens outside St George’s Hall,
while a Council of Action, a sort of primitive People’s Soviet, controlled the
day-to-day activities of the strike. Over the other side of the river in
Birkenhead, a group of strikers attacked the trams and brought them to a halt.
Despite the odd fight with the police, by and large throughout those nine days
the strike remained solid on Merseyside. Then suddenly it was all over and
things went back to the way they were, only now poisoned by a brief glimpse of
what might have been.

I don’t
think I ever heard the story of Joe’s conversion to Communism from him but
rather it came from Molly, who would relate formative incidents from my father’s
life, when he wasn’t there, as if she was his official biographer. So Joe might
have remained simply a left-wing-inclined trade unionist if he hadn’t, at the
height of his anger and shame over the collapse of the General Strike,
encountered a book written twenty years before which seemed to predict exactly
how the dispute would collapse and the terrible fate which awaited the
working-class when it did.

Jack
London was an extremely popular writer known for his action-packed tales of the
wilderness, gold prospecting, wild animals and the high seas — novels such as
The
Call of the Wild, White Fang
and
The Sea Wolf.
But the futuristic
Iron
Heel
was something entirely different, and at first Joe was stunned simply
by the form it took. The book is supposedly written by an academic, Anthony
Meredith, in the year 419 BOM (Brotherhood of Man), which is around AD 2600 in
our time. Professor Meredith’s book is a commentary on the ‘Everhard Manuscript’,
‘ancient’ documents written by a woman called Avis Everhard and hidden by her
in the year 1933 only to be discovered centuries later. Avis is the leader of a
resistance movement fighting a giant capitalist oligarchy — the eponymous Iron
Heel which rules huge parts of the planet. The manuscript itself covers the
years from 1912 to 1932 and details the rise of the Iron Heel, the failed First
Revolt against it and preparations for the Second Revolt. The manuscript ends
with Avis certain that the revolution will succeed but with the reader being
aware that, from the historical perspective of the professor in 419 BOM, it
was in fact betrayed. In the Second Revolt the revolutionaries are crushed and
the capitalist tyranny endures for centuries more.

Joe was
spellbound by the sheer cleverness of it: to write a book that worked on so
many different levels, to comment on the real world of the present by writing
about an imaginary future, to evoke the poignancy of Avis’s hopes for the
revolution through the reader knowing things that she could not, such as that
the uprising fails and she is killed, all seemed astonishing to him. Joe was
particularly responsive to the way in which Jack London, a self-educated
working-class man like himself, mocked overly intellectual scholars such as
Professor Meredith by having the academic get details of life in the early
twentieth century completely wrong.

In the
world of
The Iron Heel
workers in certain essential industries such as
steel and the railways are bought off, allowed a sort of favoured status which
brings with it decent wages, adequate housing and reasonable education for
their children while the rest of the working masses are left to face centuries
of grinding poverty and exploitation simply because in a crisis the treacherous
and corrupt union leaders side with the authorities.