Stalin Ate My Homework (6 page)

I was
surprised at what could be considered capitalist propaganda. Obviously
anything criticising the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China fell
into that category, but any item that was congratulatory about the British
army’s performance during the Second World War inevitably brought shouts of ‘Don’t
forget Stalingrad!’ or ‘What about the second front?’

‘Don’t
forget Stalingrad!’ was a reference to the notion my parents had that the whole
turning point of the war was the Battle for Stalingrad in which the Soviet
armies under Zhukov defeated Paulus’s 6th Army, sending the German invaders
fleeing west. As far as they were concerned, such supposedly pivotal moments as
the Battle of Britain, El Alamein or the sinking of the
Bismarck
had
been completely insignificant and pointless little skirmishes. I don’t know if
my parents ever mentioned these feelings to our neighbours, people who had
fought in or lost relatives during several of these encounters. I expect Molly
did, but the Regentone certainly got to hear about them.

‘What
about the second front?’ harked back to the behaviour of Communists before the
war and in its early years. Throughout the 1930s the party had been a beacon of
resistance to Nazism both at home and abroad, when many others had ignored or
tried to accommodate the growing threat. CP members had confronted the British
Union of Fascists in street battles up and down the country More importantly,
while all the major powers had been intent on appeasing German and Italian
fascism the CP had consistently campaigned against it, going so far as to
forego their instincts and join in a broad front with other leftwing parties.
In 1939, with war imminent, any party member such as Joe could console themselves
with the thought that they had done all they could to warn of the dangers of
fascism. Then in August of that year the Soviet Union suddenly signed a nonaggression
pact with Nazi Germany The order came down from party headquarters that the
conflict was now an ‘Imperialist War’, and for nearly two years the Communist
Party of Great Britain actually tried to sabotage the war effort by encouraging
strikes and denouncing the government for its pursuit of the conflict. In the
Soviet Union, along with many other measures the anti-German film
Alexander
Nevsky
was banned. After Germany invaded the USSR in 1941 the party flipped
again and its members spent the next two years being rabidly pro-war and
demanding ‘Open the second front now!’ By this they meant that the Allies
should invade continental Europe right away, without any preparation or
planning, simply to take the heat off the Russians in the East.

Another
phrase that would often be shouted at our TV when there was any mention of
espionage or a court case was ‘Remember the Rosenbergs!’ Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg were Jewish American Communists who were vindictively executed in
1953 after having been found guilty of passing information about the atomic
bomb to the Soviet Union. My mother frequently got terribly upset about the
execution of the Rosenbergs, with tears rolling down her cheeks at the very
mention of their names, so that I thought for a long time they were people we
knew Once I understood they had lived in the United States rather than Anfield
the idea grew in me that the authorities in America were likely to whip you off
the streets and send you to the electric chair for no reason at all, and that
likelihood increased more or less to a certainty if you were black, Jewish or
Communist. This gave me a funny attitude towards the United States. I was
already aware that there were many amazing things that came from this country —
animated films, brightly coloured clothes, comic books — but obviously if you
went to the place there was clearly a good chance that you would be
electrocuted.

There was, however, a
surprisingly long list of programmes, by no means all of them on the BBC
(higher-toned than its new rival, ITV), that we felt an obligation to watch.
Molly and Joe were both involved with the Unity Theatre. Afterwards Molly
joined too and made costumes for some of their productions. Though it was
essentially an amateur group Unity pioneered a lot of the techniques which
would become standard in fringe theatre, and introduced a number of writers who
were subsequently staples of the professional theatre. Even before the war
they were improvising agitprop plays from events in that week’s newspapers, and
the London branch put on the first production of a Brecht play in Britain as
well as promoting the work of Clifford Odets, Sean O’Casey, Jean-Paul Sartre
and Maxim Gorky.

Over
the years many successful actors had graduated from Unity, so when they appeared
on the TV we felt it was our socialist duty to watch them. In this way I got to
see some of the early work of Lionel Bart, David Kossoff and Warren Mitchell.
Alfie Bass, another Unity graduate, was in a hit ITV comedy all about
mismatched conscripts called
The Army Game,
and since he was left-wing
and Jewish and had been in Unity I was able to enjoy this sitcom of army life
with my parents laughing at it rather than them shouting ‘Remember Stalingrad!’
or ‘Open the second front now!’ every five minutes. We were also very keen to
watch what might have been regarded as populist trash on ITV — historical
adventure shows such as
Robin Hood
and
Ivanhoe.
My parents had
the idea (partly true) that these shows were written almost entirely by
American refugees from Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist purges, and thought
they might contain subliminal or subtle messages of an anti-capitalist nature
(also partly true).

We also
felt it was our duty to watch the Harlem Globetrotters whenever they were on.
This was partly because they were black, so we were identifying with and
supporting their struggle for equal rights, and partly because we read some
sort of anti-establishment message into a man using a stepladder in a comedy
basketball game.

On our first-ever day of
school our mothers walked us to Anfield Road Primary Though it was built in a
firmly rationalist, red-brick style Anfield Road School possessed a big
ventilation spire, mostly for show. It was a striking landmark that, oddly,
bore a very strong resemblance to the Soyuz rockets that the year before had
blasted the Soviet Sputnik satellite into space, stunning the West and causing
much celebration in our house.

At the
school gate, my mother gave me a Corgi model of a Le Mans D-Type Jaguar. This
is my first clear and unclouded memory — getting that car with its single seat
for the driver and huge stabilising fin in British racing green. This might
have been the moment when I became obsessed with cars. Most days the only
vehicle going up and down Valley Road was the little red pedal car I owned. So
the automobiles I saw seemed miraculous, rare and beautiful. It also occurred
to me at an early age that they were not all different, but were in fact
classifiable. There were models from one company and models from another
company, there were new models and old models that they didn’t make any more
but were still driving around, so it became for me a way to impose a form of
order on the world by tabulating them all.

I was
certain there was absolutely no chance that we were ever going to own one. Both
my parents were pretty unmechanical, and I had also heard that cars cost a huge
amount of money —hundreds of pounds, other children told me — and in any case
the free rail travel we got made the prospect of owning a motor vehicle
economically pointless. From this the idea grew in me that driving was probably
about as complicated as making a steam engine go along, that it would require
constant attention to all kinds of gauges and dials, the endless manipulation of
levers and pedals and probably a large amount of coal. Perhaps my parents ‘dislike
of cars was ideological, too. After all, in the Soviet Bloc the authorities
weren’t at all keen on their citizens having their own vehicles, going about
and seeing things they weren’t supposed to see.

My
mother needn’t have worried about me not liking school, I thought it was great.
There were a sandpit and a wigwam, and
as
an only child it was a
pleasant novelty for me to be spending so much more time with kids my own age.
It also meant I was able to bring my ideas to a larger audience. At break-time
in the first week our teacher, Miss Wilson, said to the assembled class, ‘All
right, class, now let’s bow our heads in prayer and thank God for this milk we’re
drinking.’ At which point I stood up and said, ‘No, Miss Wilson, I think you’ll
find that the milk comes to us via the Milk Marketing Board, a public body set
up in 1933 to control the production, pricing and distribution of milk and
other dairy products within the UK. It has nothing to do with the intervention
of some questionable divine entity’ I think Miss Wilson must have had a word
with the rest of the class about me, telling them I was ‘special’ or something,
because I don’t remember ever getting picked on. Which you could see as a
religious miracle, really.

After they were married,
had a child and bought a home Joe and Molly had not, as many couples might have
done, stopped their travelling. In this post-war period there was one very
powerful incentive for anybody, no matter what their political views were, to
take part in foreign travel. The Labour government that had been elected in
1945 in a landslide of post-war utopian longing possessed a certain
puritanical instinct. The austerity of the life they imposed on 1940s’ and
1950s’ Britain was to some extent forced on the country by the United States
maliciously calling in all their war loans the moment the fighting ceased, but
there still seemed to be something dreary, life-denying and over-zealous about
food, drink and clothes being so severely rationed up to a decade after the
conflict ended.

By
contrast, countries such as France and Italy that had been over-run, looted and
pillaged by the Nazis were quickly awash with cheap food and wine, rabbits,
chickens, fish and wonderful fresh vegetables which overflowed from shops and
street markets. And because the Republic of Ireland, just across the Irish Sea
from Liverpool, had remained neutral throughout the war it had never
experienced any shortage of bacon, butter, cheese or eggs. So while the people
back home were being forced to eat omelettes made out of powdered eggs and pies
of turnip tops and whale blubber my parents, at least for a few weeks a year,
were dining on
schiacciata alla fiorentina
and
langoustine au cognac
avec sauce beurre blanc
washed down with a decent Pouilly Fuissé or just
having a nice chicken sandwich.

By the age of five I must
have been the most travelled child in Anfield. I had been to Normandy twice,
Paris, Holland, Belgium, Ireland and the Swiss Alps as well as on numerous
trips to London, the Lake District, Devon and Cornwall. Because of all our
foreign travel, our exotic backgrounds and our internationalist outlook my
parents were convinced that the three of us were really fluent in foreign
languages. Joe was thought to have an excellent command of French and something
called Esperanto, a language invented by a man called L.L. Zamenhof in the
1920s which was intended to foster peace and international understanding by
everybody being able to talk to each other in the same tongue. At home Molly
had conversed in Yiddish with her family, so she insisted that she spoke German
like a native, and I was supposed to have inherited Joe’s fluency in French.
Molly certainly did speak some German. I remember my mother screaming,
‘Mein
Kinder! Mein Kinder!’
at a man on a train just outside Stuttgart who had
tried to open the window of our compartment on a hot summer night and in so
doing was threatening the health of her child by creating a bit of a draught.