by Alexei Sayle
The most important thing that came with my father’s job was free rail travel. Every railway worker and his family could go absolutely anywhere in Europe for twenty-five per cent of the normal fare, and they were in addition entitled to six free passes a year, which meant you could travel right up to the borders of the Soviet Union for nothing. All ferries — to Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Scottish Isles, across the Baltic and over the English Channel — were also included in the deal. A lot of those who worked on the trains didn’t seem to have the imagination or the desire to do more than make the odd free trip to Blackpool, but Joe enthusiastically took advantage of these concessions to roam across Europe. Sometimes he would do Communist Party work, attending labour conferences or helping volunteers for the International Brigades travel from neutral Ireland to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, occasionally he would write articles on foreign affairs for the Communist Daily Worker, but often he would go abroad on his own, simply travelling and falling in with strangers.
As soon as they met, Joe invited Molly to join him on his travels — he loved showing her the world that she had never seen before. In 1947 they joined a group of my father’s friends, mostly couples, some married, some unmarried, all members of the same left-wing drama group — Unity Theatre. They had rented a villa together on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy This was extremely bohemian behaviour, associated more with groups of artists like the Bloomsburys than with railway workers. Working-class society remained extremely conservative, and unmarried couples did not go away to stay together in Italian villas — in many homes a girl risked social exclusion if she even talked to the postman without a chaperone. But then to outrage convention was part of the purpose of the holiday Joe and Molly and their friends revelled in their difference, their love of foreign food and foreign wine and foreign ideas, and had little concern for what society thought.
Unconventionally for working-class people at that time, and very unusually for left-wingers, once they were married my parents bought their own house. Just before I was born they acquired 5 Valley Road, Anfield, Liverpool 4 for the price of one thousand pounds. Molly borrowed two hundred pounds from bedridden Uncle Willy to make up the deposit — a sum which she never paid back. The terraced house in Anfield was not, however, the home she wanted. There had been another in the more sylvan setting of West Derby Village, but at the last minute she and Joe had been gazumped. So Valley Road was Molly’s second choice, and there persisted a sense that she regarded our little house with a degree of disappointment.
There was also something of a problem with the next-door neighbours at number 7, a family by the name of Blundell. According to Molly these quiet and self-effacing people had wanted our house for their own daughter to live in, but for some reason, perhaps due to the buying power of Uncle Willy’s two hundred pounds, we got it. Molly always felt that because of this they bitterly resented us. This might not have mattered if the two houses hadn’t shared a water pipe, so that the Blundells were able, if they so wished, to interfere with the flow to our home. My mother was convinced that they would turn off our supply from time to time — in fact she was certain that they somehow knew when she was preparing a bottle of baby formula and would choose that exact moment to strike. One of my first memories is of my mother at the kitchen window screaming over the back yard wall at the neighbours that her child was dying of hunger because they had cut off our water supply.
We lived two miles from the docks in one of the world’s greatest ports, ‘Liverpool that terrible city whose main street is the ocean’, as the novelist Malcolm Lowry described it. A sense of the sea and of infinite horizons was pervasive, though I don’t remember anybody actually remarking on it — no one ever said, ‘Don’t you find a sense of the sea and of infinite horizons is always pervasive?’ There always seemed to be a parrot or a terrified monkey which had escaped from some seafarer’s house that needed to be chased up and down the back entries by a gaggle of over-excited kids, and sometimes you might see a Cunard Yank’, a seaman who worked on the North Atlantic run, operating the great liners that ploughed the grey seas between Liverpool and the United States. He would be easy to spot, dressed as he was in the bright blue, yellow or red beebop, zoot suit with hand-painted tie that he had bought in a clothes shop in Harlem, Galveston or one of the Mexican barrios of Los Angeles.
Oakfield Road was the main shopping thoroughfare of our neighbourhood and Valley Road, the street we lived on, ran off it at a right-angle. While you could go from one day to the next without a motor vehicle going down our street my parents, particularly my mother, were convinced that Oakfield Road was a continuous stream of thundering traffic that would mow a delicate child like me down as soon as he stepped off the pavement, so I was forbidden to cross it on my own. There was certainly some traffic. Highly polished steam lorries in the blue and gold livery of the Tate and Lyle company chuffed up and down, travelling from the refinery near the docks to the toffee factory where Uncle Joe’s Mintballs were made, white clouds of smoke streaming from their chimneys. There were freighters in the dark green of British Road Services pulled by their own strange three-wheeled Scammell tractor units. Buses too, of course: the numbers 26 and 27 in smart green and cream Corporation livery, their destination boards both showing ‘Sheil Road Circular’, ran in a loop in and out of the town centre. Apart from that, though, you could set up a fruit stall in the middle of Oakfield Road and only have to move it a couple of times an hour. This was another reason why I had wanted to go and see Bambi with a gang of kids from the street — it would have been the first time I had crossed over to the other side of Oakfield Road without my mum or dad.
Over Oakfield Road, everything seemed better and more enticing. There was a toy shop called Fleming’s with all kinds of colourful stuff stacked up to the ceiling — footballs, puppets, dolls, toy guns and teddy bears. There was a delicatessen run by two men both of whom appeared to be called Dickie, equipped with a giant chromed meat slicer whose spinning, razor-sharp wheel reduced stocky salamis and burly hams to tame, paper-thin slices. Further along the parade there was a cave-like general store which seemed like it had been transported from the American Wild West and sold paraffin, sacks of seeds and slabs of pet food in jelly that you purchased wrapped in newspaper that became damp and evil-smelling by the time you got it home. A large branch of the Co-operative store, three storeys high, dominated the smaller shops. Inside there were separate meat and dairy counters, and people’s change went zinging around in brass cylinders suspended on wires above the shoppers’ heads as if their money was travelling about by cable car at a ski resort. And next to the Co-op stood my objective, the Art Deco Gaumont cinema, part Egyptian, part Aztec, part brick blockhouse, the current film displayed on a neon-lit awning above the doors, coming attractions advertised by lurid posters along the face of the building and the crowds managed by a uniformed commissionaire dressed like he was a soldier in a very neat war.
The shops on our side of Oakfield Road, shops that I was free to visit on my own, seemed dull and tawdry by comparison. There were only two that I was even mildly interested in: the newsagent’s where I went to get my comics and the women’s clothing shop on the corner of our street. Behind the dusty plate glass of this emporium there were arranged the strange items of underwear women wore beneath their dresses — flesh-coloured foundation garments adorned with hooks, clasps and straps like the uniforms of some sort of bizarre paratrooper regiment. These items of intimate apparel were displayed on female torsos made of pink plaster, torsos that had truncated stumps where their arms, legs and heads should have been, as if they had been modelled on the victims of a pre-war railway trunk murder. When I got a bit older this window provoked some very complicated feelings in me.
In Valley Road, even a kid like me with an overly anxious mother was free to run semi-wild. All the children played out in the street during daylight hours, swinging from the gaslamps that stood like watchtowers every twenty yards along the pav
ement. The children of the street — the Noakeses, the Haggarty girls — came to our house to play with toys and I went to theirs, even if we were having a feud with their family We ran in and out of the identical yellow brick terraced houses, jumped on and off the low front walls and played the same street games that children had played for hundreds of years.
One of the differences between me and the other kids, which I was highly appreciative of, was that as an indulged only child I was not required to do much around the house. I heard horror stories from my friends about being asked to wash the dishes, tidy up their bedroom or polish their own shoes. Sometimes even I would be sent to the dairy at the opposite end of Valley Road to ‘get the messages’. Resentfully I had to walk right to the other end of the street, a journey of over three hundred yards, then hand over money and a note and return with milk or butter from the white-tiled shop. Occupying an awkward triangular site the dairy, unlike the terraced houses, was built of red brick and through its frosted glass windows you could dimly see the hindquarters of the cows shifting uneasily, lined up facing away from you as if they were watching a football match.
We got a telephone quite early on. I can still remember the number: ANF (for Anfield) 7874. But unfortunately, due to a shortage of lines we were at first forced to accept something called a party line, which meant you were essentially sharing with another subscriber. There were several disadvantages to this arrangement: true, the joint subscribers were charged less for the line rental, but if the other ‘party’ was using the phone then you couldn’t make a call, and while it meant you could listen in to their conversations they could also listen to yours. You would lift up the telephone only to find your neighbour was already on it talking at great length about their hernia operation, and then you would have to wait and keep lifting the phone until it was free. Of course, in our case the other party were the long-suffering people at number 7. We weren’t that bothered about them listening in to our conversations since we believed as a matter of course that our phone was tapped by the security services. I was taught from an early age to maintain rigorous telephone security, never to use real names or give specific times, locations or details of meetings. This sometimes meant that me, Molly and Joe went to places where we thought we had arranged to meet people, only to find that they weren’t there.
But just as with the shared water supply, Molly was convinced that the neighbours somehow knew when we wanted to make a call and would choose that exact moment to ring their aunty in Shrewsbury This time, however, she didn’t have to shout over the back yard wall to make her feelings clear — she could do it right in next door’s ear, at high volume. So we were supplied with our own private line remarkably quickly, at a time when you could often wait years for one.
It still wasn’t easy to make a call, though, because in our house vital phone numbers were stored in an arbitrary number of locations. At the same time as the phone arrived we had bought a device, an arrangement of alphabeticised pages inside a spring-loaded plastic box, where by sliding a toggle to, say, the letter C you would get all the people you knew whose name began with the letter C. Provided, of course, that you had written their name and phone number down on that page in the first place. Unfortunately, if they were in there at all most numbers were written on pages that bore no relation to the surname of the person they were attached to, so the Smiths would be under N and the Noakeses under XYZ. More than that, though, Molly tended to store the majority of vital numbers in any location other than our spring-loaded phone book. The most popular places, apart from random scraps of paper that blew around the living room, were the pages of defunct NUR diaries. If you urgently wanted to find the number of Anfield Road Junior School, Auntie Dorothy or the doctor, for instance, you had to know to look under 27 April 1954 (Anzac Day Holiday, Australia).
Apart from the odd overheard phone call we had no clear idea what the neighbours thought, but this didn’t stop us making a number of assumptions. One area where we were convinced our life was superior to anybody else’s in the street was in the food we ate. The tastebuds of most British people had been destroyed by six years of war and another eight years of rationing, so to the neighbours food had become fuel, plain and simple, to be shovelled down the gullet without ever being tasted.
In our house we basked in the fact that we enjoyed our meals — our dinners were healthy and delicious, not the boiled stodge that everybody else ate. Molly cooked chicken soup and matzo balls, gefilte fish, salmon cutlets and roast lamb. One year we had a goose for Christmas, though it wasn’t really a success. At lunchtime on a hot summer Sunday in Anfield Molly would say proudly, ‘Look! Everybody else in the street’s eating roast beef, roast potatoes and horrible gravy But We’re Having a Salad.’
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 Trai
l 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.