by Alexei Sayle
After attending Alsop for a couple of years the people I did end up bullying were the staff. Because he had never liked me I never missed a chance to annoy the Jewish Communist Mr Abrahams. I messed about in all science classes, seeing myself as more of an artistic type, and refused to pay any attention at all during religious education lessons, which in those days meant the Old and New Testaments, thus depriving myself of any understanding of the foundation of nearly all Western art and literature. However, it was a highly strung English teacher called Mr Johnson who I picked on the most. When discussing any work of literature I would argue with him vehemently for hours on end, using up entire lessons, taking as my viewpoint an unwavering but mostly misunderstood Marxism combined with an all-purpose half-baked radicalism. Just as academics were doing in all the new universities springing up across the country — cutting-edge institutions with concrete campuses, artificial lakes, meandering paths and clumps of vegetation ideal for lurking sex offenders to hide themselves in. Still, such behaviour was unusual in a thirteen-year-old schoolboy and a lot of the teachers didn’t know how to deal with it. I wasn’t being disruptive in a conventional sense, but on the other hand they could see I wasn’t trying to help either.
In some ways I was the prototype of a new-type school student who would be arriving in larger numbers in later years — vain, argumentative and nebulously anti-authoritarian. And if I was a new type of pupil, Molly was definitely a model of parent they had never encountered before. At junior school she had occasionally interfered, getting me moved up a class because she felt my academic abilities weren’t being recognised, but at Alsop my mother adopted the practice of coming down to the school unannounced if she felt I was being persecuted or my education was being adversely affected in some way There was also an incident at a parent-teacher meeting, round about my third year. The usual drill at these things was that parents moved from teacher to teacher, sitting at a desk in the hall. The teacher told the parents their child was either stupid and would most likely become a fireman or clever and should consider carpet retailing as a career, and the parents gratefully accepted this information. Not Molly One of the first teachers she approached told her they weren’t going to let me do physics and chemistry any more because I was so incompetent. Rather I would be taking some lame hybrid, supposedly so I could spend more time studying 0-Level art. This prompted my mother to stand and make a speech to the entire hall about how no false divisions should be made between the arts and the sciences, invoking the spirit of the Russian composer Shostakovich who she mistakenly thought had a science degree.
It was poor Mr Johnson who reacted most badly to being tag-teamed by the Sayles, mother and son. He was supposed to take our class for general studies as well as English, but after a while he refused to deal with two doses of me in a week and handed the class over to a more phlegmatic teacher, Mr Lucie, because he was afraid of what Molly would do to him if he taught me the wrong thing.
During my early grammar school years I hadn’t given up on my ambitions to be an athlete and still occasionally trained with the Walton Harriers. As soon as I arrived at Alsop I signed up for the school’s cross-country team. My thinking was that, despite my early success in the hundred yards dash, the sprint wasn’t my discipline so maybe a longer distance would suit me better. Alsop’s football and cricket squads did reasonably well in inter-city championships, but the cross-country team was not a premium outfit. In fact we were pretty useless, and I was far and away the worst member of the squad.
We would have training runs round Walton Hall Park, opposite the school, in the evenings. The teachers would be desperate to get the run over with so they could go to the pub, but they couldn’t leave until I came huffing up a good twenty minutes after all the other boys. Maybe they suspected me of subversion, but I really wasn’t trying to finish last. It was just that, despite putting all my effort into it, I would always come in way behind the rest. Even though I had cut the corners off a couple of fields, rowed across a boating lake and burrowed through a hedge in order to shorten my route.
The cross-country team generally competed on a Saturday morning. I would travel to unfamiliar parts of the city on the bus, then meet up with my team-mates to run through parks, fields and ancient woodland. What I liked most about being in an athletics squad was that after the race we often got given a very nice spread provided by the other boys’ mums, with homemade cakes, sandwiches containing unusual commercial fillings and unhealthy-looking drinks in a selection of vivid colours that I wouldn’t be allowed to drink at home.
The only success we ever achieved, beating another team and me coming in third from last rather than last, was when we competed against a team from a Catholic school in the south end of the city who were already, by the age of twelve, heavy smokers. I was filled with a transcendent sense of triumph as I stumbled, covered in mud, past one white-faced adolescent after another as they sat gasping on tree stumps clutching their sides or sprawled vomiting in the claggy grass.
In November 1957 J.B. Priestley wrote an article for the New Statesman entitled ‘Britain and the Nuclear Bombs’, which proposed the idea of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The magazine received a great many letters of support for Priestley’s article and it led to the founding of CND — the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The following Easter a march from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston was organised by a group called the Direct Action Committee, supported by CND after some initial reluctance. Thereafter, CND took over the organising of the annual Easter marches starting at Aldermaston and ending in London. Sixty thousand people participated in the 1959 march and a hundred and fifty thousand in the 1961 and 1962 marches.
The Communist Party had an ambivalent attitude to CND. They thought they should support it because it was popular and anti-government, and there were opportunities for recruitment to the party if they sent members on the marches. What they really wanted was for the West to give up its nuclear weapons while the USSR hung on to theirs, but they couldn’t really say that — they had to pretend they were in favour of everybody giving up their bombs.
On the matter of the Aldermaston marches I took a different attitude from the party’s. Glen Cocker, Cliff’s older brother, had been on the very first demonstration and one night, somewhere between Berkshire and London, he had lost his virginity on the floor of a village hall to a female demonstrator. When I watched footage of the protests on the TV news, I always got an erotic frisson from seeing grainy film of people in duffel coats trudging through spring rain, accompanied by the music of a trad jazz band.
You couldn’t say that the British left has produced many timeless classics of graphic design. In fact there is only one, the badge of the CND, a motif which has gone on to become the universal symbol of peace and the visual representation of a decade. It remains a masterpiece. Designed in 1958 by a man called Gerald Holtom, the badge is based on the semaphore symbols for N and D placed within a circle. Holtom later said that it also symbolised ‘an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad’. The CND badge quickly became a fashion item, particularly because for young people it was something of a breakthrough. Previously if you had wanted to advertise your radical credentials you had to invest in a whole new wardrobe or even actually do something radical, but now you could attain the same effect simply by wearing a shiny metal badge — except that these badges quickly became almost completely unavailable, at least in Liverpool. It was an odd experience — something connected with what we did had become the height of fashion and I suddenly became the centre of attention, with kids at school showing a previously undisclosed interest in coming on marches and joining CND.
I knew that what they really wanted were the rare badges and I sensed an opportunity Through my network of left-wing activists (Molly and Joe) I discovered that a woman called Pat Arrowsmith, a famous peace campaigner and founder member o
f CND who had once been force-fed while on hunger strike in prison, was living near us in a little house off Breck Road. One afternoon I walked round there and knocked on the door. It was answered by a woman with very short hair wearing a checked shirt of a very mannish cut. ‘Excuse me, Pat,’ I said, ‘I’m a young schoolboy very interested in the peace movement, planning to start my own branch of CND, and I was wondering whether you had any badges … you know, for the kids at school? To get us started, like.’
She sighed, but after a few seconds went into the hall and came back with about twenty-five brand-new, black and silver enamel CND badges, which she poured into my outstretched hands.
‘These aren’t toys, you know,’ she said to me.
‘Oh, I know, Pat,’ I replied. ‘The struggle for nuclear disarmament is a serious business. The younger generation such as myself are only too painfully aware that we’re only ever a few minutes away from nuclear extinction.’
The next day I took the badges into school and a crowd gathered round me wanting to see them. Several kids asked if they could have one. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but maybe you should make a little donation to … you know … the cause.’ So each of my schoolmates gave me a few shillings for a badge. At first I had thought I was taking a chance asking them for money, but to my amazement it was them who were grateful to me for having found this hard-to-get fashion item and they were also impressed that I had had the contacts to locate them. My fellow pupils started to see me in a new light — after all, none of them were mates with ex-jailbird lesbians.
The cash they gave me for the badges never found its way to CND, I don’t know whether I ever intended that it should, but my feeling was that I considered the money as a small stipend, a trifling amount of compensation for all the travelling, all the trade union meetings my father went to, all the work I had put into the struggle for peace and justice, and all the effort involved in being the only child of Communist Party members Joe and Molly Sayle.
It was only slowly that I became aware of the power of swear words. It was a gradual thing, a creeping realisation that blossomed into full comprehension round about my second or third year at grammar school. I heard bigger boys or ones from rough homes using these special, explosive, forbidden expressions, and once the realisation of their power dawned I knew that swearing was a thing I wanted to be intimately involved in.
Once I had got the most powerful obscenities straight in my head I came home from school determined to try out their effect on my mother. Full of excitement, I sat at the dining table in the living room. Molly put my evening meal in front of me, but instead of eating it I said, ‘I … I … I don’t want that. It’s … it’s … it’s fucking shit!’ Then I sat back, waiting to hear what kind of explosion it would prompt. After all, I conjectured, if the bathroom sponge going missing for a few seconds could prompt a screaming fit from my mother, a paroxysm of grief that might involve weeping and howling and crying out to the gods of justice, then me saying ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ was bound to provoke a tremendous reaction that would be heard at the back of the Spion Kop.
For a short while nothing happened as Molly considered what I had said in a calm and reflective manner. Then finally she said, ‘I don’t care if you eat it or not … but it’s not fucking shit and if you don’t fucking eat it I’m not going to fucking make you anything fucking else so you can fucking go and get your own fucking food in some other shit-fucking place you fucking little bastard shit fuck.’
After that day Molly rarely spoke a sentence without an obscenity in it, and I was often too embarrassed to bring school friends home because I was worried about them being offended by my mother’s foul language.
It was late in the afternoon. Joe must have been working nights and so had been upstairs sleeping. Suddenly I heard him calling out in a frightened voice, full of pain. ‘Molly!’ he called. ‘Molly, call an ambulance! Molly! Molly! Call an ambulance! It hurts, it hurts.’ An ambulance came quickly and took Joe to the big hospital in Stanley Road. Molly accompanied him while a neighbour looked after me.
There was a period of a few hours when there was no news from the hospital and in that time I experienced an enormous level of anxiety I desperately wanted someone to tell me what was going on. My always active imagination was spinning endless scenarios of catastrophe. While I looked like I was watching telly, internally I was overwhelmed by fear.
By the time Molly returned from hospital where it turned out, after some confusion, that Joe had gallstones, the removal of which would require him to have an operation, I concluded that emotions were so painful that it might be a good idea, in the future, not to feel them.
While waiting for a consultation with the surgeon Joe got into conversation with a woman, the wife of another patient, who mentioned that she had had her varicose veins removed at the same time as she had been in for other surgery and what a relief it had been. Joe too suffered from varicose veins, so he asked the doctors if he could have them removed at the same time as he was anaesthetised for the gallstones operation.
It was on Guy Fawkes night, with rockets scrawling into the sky, bangers exploding in the street and a bonfire burning at the top of the road, when the hospital called to say something had gone wrong with the operation on Joe’s leg. Instead of cutting a vein the surgeon had inadvertently severed a nerve in my father’s right foot. The prognosis was that he would have no feeling in that foot and might have difficulty walking on it in the future.
When we went to see him for the first time Joe lay in a large ward of shrivelled men in new pyjamas whose steel-framed beds seemed to go on and on to the horizon, as surgeons in white coats stood over him trying to evade responsibility Tall men, kindly and infinitely superior in their attitude, spent a few minutes trying to patronise Molly before they realised that they couldn’t get away with it and, after a little bit of stalling, early in 1965 we were awarded the almost unheard of sum of one thousand pounds by the hospital in compensation.
Joe was in Stanley Road for quite some time recuperating, so Molly bought him a little transistor radio to listen to in bed on a single earpiece. Transistor radios were quite a new thing at that time — it seemed amazing that you didn’t need to listen to the BBC via a set the size of a gas oven that employed giant valves. The radio, made by Pye, was in blue and white plastic with a carrying handle that slid out in an arc from a recess in the top. After he got back from Stanley Road I took that radio for myself.
From then on Joe had to have a bar put in all his shoes which gave some support to the arch of his dead foot, but for the rest of his life he would walk with a limp. Soon after he got out of hospital we were at the top of the street and Joe tried to race with me like we had done so many times in the past, but all he could manage was an unsteady stumble as I easily outdistanced him.
Still, we were in possession of one thousand pounds which was a great deal of money It could have bought us all kinds of things: a luxury car, a cottage in North Wales, a small business importing dried fruit. Instead we bought a boat.
What a family of spectacularly unmechanical, two-thirds Jewish Communists thought they were doing buying a cabin cruiser moored on a canal bank just outside Chester is anybody’s guess. Molly always blamed me for this unwise purchase. The guy who sold it to us was some kind of super-second-hand-car-salesman. Joe was keen but Molly equivocated and so the salesman turned his oily charm on me, saying, ‘What do you think of it, son? Isn’t she a lovely craft? A beautiful craft. All the girls love a boy with a craft such as this.’ I was so unused to having my opinion solicited that I responded with enthusiasm, saying, ‘Yes, a boat. Let’s get a boat. This boat. I want this boat.’ My parents folded and purchased a second-hand cabin cruiser for far too much money No matter how much I pointed out, later on, that I was twelve and what were they doing anyway letting themselves be influenced by a child in such a crucial decision, Molly was implacable that what followed was all my fault.
Once again our distrust of the spiv, the self-emplo
yed, the smooth-talking, fur coat-wearing petit-bourgeois had been vindicated. This was a familiar story I knew from listening in to the tales my parents’ political comrades told that all of them were constantly being taken advantage of by plumbers, builders, hoteliers, driving instructors and every other kind of sole trader. There was some naïve quality in Communists which meant that they simply couldn’t understand the mind of the self-employed, could never haggle for a bargain, do a deal or ensure their roof was repaired properly Perhaps some of the motivation for them being Communists was the desire one day to have all the self-employed who had robbed them over the years either collectivised or shot.
There were many things wrong with our boat. In the best of circumstances a cabin cruiser is just a pointy caravan that floats and leaks, but ours was much, much less than that. Apart from anything else, our boat was quite small. There was a tiny cramped cabin at the front with thin foam seats which could be folded out into a double bed, while at the rear of the cabin on a cupboard was a little cooker and opposite it a cabinet the size of a coffin with a chemical toilet inside. At the stern part, where you steered the boat from, there was an open space with more seats. This area could be shielded from the weather with a folding canvas cover a bit like a giant pram’s or a huge sports car’s. At the prow it had a name in Welsh, Ty Mawr, inscribed in gold stick-on letters which we never bothered to have translated but probably meant ‘Big Mistake’.
But it was at the very stern of the boat that the source of a lot of our problems resided. Although in most ways Ty Mawr was a quite substandard craft she had for some reason been fitted with a gigantic outboard motor, an American-made 75hp Evinrude which would have been more suited to a speedboat hurtling between the Florida Keys than to a cabin cruiser on the Chester Canal. Right from our first day of ownership we had great difficulty controlling the power of this enormous machine, particularly given the very imprecise, and, once we owned it, badly maintained throttle linkage that ran to the stern from a lever beside the steering wheel.