by Alexei Sayle
It was a warm summer Sunday when we had our first day out on the boat. Getting there involved us taking two trains to Chester, then a bus to the mooring on the outskirts of the city Once we had arrived we stared at this thing we had bought and wondered what to do with it. Then after a pause we climbed gingerly aboard and I was given the job of steering. It took ages to start the engine, pumping a little rubber bladder to get fuel into the system and then pulling violently on a string to turn it over. Once the Evinrude was ticking smokily to itself we pushed off from the bank with a lot of screaming and shouting from Molly, ‘Lexi! Lexi! Lexi! Mind that fucking swan!’
At first things went well enough as we puttered slowly between canal barges with their gaily painted sides and flowers planted in enamel pots. With the propeller turning slowly we passed fishermen sitting contemplatively on the banks, their lines dangling in the water, children in kayaks laughing and splashing each other and fellow cabin cruisers meandering gently along, their brass fittings polished to a high shine and the husband and wife seated in the cockpit, eating sandwiches and drinking Pimms.
Then I tried to speed up just the tiniest bit. I shifted the accelerator lever a millimetre and immediately the throttle jammed open and the peaceful bucolic scene was shattered. The noise of the Evinrude climbed to a tortured scream and the bow of Ty Mawr rose steeply out of the water like a German motor torpedo boat reaching the open sea. Now completely out of control, our little cabin cruiser sped up the canal weaving in and out of the other boats with all three of us yelling and screaming until we crashed into the bank, driving so far up the soft grass and mud on this remote stretch of the canal that we nearly ended up in an adjacent field.
This was how our days out usually went. There was one particularly shaming experience when the lines of a large number of fishermen became entangled in our propeller and I wasn’t able to stop, so I ended up dragging them along the towpath, their faces red and sweating as they ran swearing and screaming at me at the top of their voices.
Its uncontrollable nature wasn’t the only problem with our gigantic outboard motor. Where the cabin cruiser had been tied up near Chester the boatyard was secure because access could only be gained via a large metal gate. Unfortunately after a while, maybe because it was a bit nearer, we decided to move Ty Mawr to a mooring just outside Maghull in Lancashire on a stretch of the Leeds—Liverpool Canal. This was just an open expanse of towpath and wasn’t at all secure, so we became afraid that somebody was going to steal the Evinrude and therefore we never left it on the boat. Since we didn’t own a car, every time we wanted to go for a sail we had to take the giant outboard motor with us on the bus. It’s hard to describe how stupid I felt sitting on a bus with a giant Evinrude outboard motor on the seat next to me. It was very heavy, too, and we had to carry it on and off two buses, a Ribble from Maghull to Scotland Road and then the number 27 to the stop in Oakfield Road near our house. Between visits to the Leeds—Liverpool Canal the Evinrude lived in our front sitting room.
During our last trip to Czechoslovakia, with the unfortunate Peter Pemberton, our delegation had attended a comedy football match. The referee made outrageous decisions and at one point two men in white coats and curly blonde wigs came on with a stretcher to take away a man who was playing really well and pretended he didn’t want to be taken off. I was unsettled by this blurring of genres — was it a football game or a comedy performance? On the other side of the field a man was painting a house and Alf said, ‘That bloke looks familiar.’ Later a party was held in our honour at the local community centre and the same man was there. Alf approached him, found he spoke good English, and after they had both racked their memories and drunk a lot of plum brandy they suddenly recalled that during the war they had shared a ham sandwich in Glasgow during an air raid.
That same night at the community centre we were entertained by a folk dance troupe wearing traditional dress. Several of the dancers were very pretty blonde girls who entranced me with their twirling, spinning and complicated hand movements. Joe and Molly, too, were very taken with this group and decided to try to bring them to Britain to show the human face of Communism. Once we returned to the UK they began planning a tour for the dance troupe, yet no matter how much hard work they put in it seemed to take ages for anything to happen. My early teenage years were overshadowed by the constant possibility that these girls might be coming, until finally the possibility turned into reality with the news that they would be arriving in a few months and appearances had been scheduled at Hope Hall in Liverpool and various other venues around the North-west.
As the date for their arrival came closer I thought more and more about these dancers. In my imaginings I was the sophisticated host showing them around my home city In fact it was only the pretty blonde female ones who were in my daydreams — the boys had mysteriously vanished. Unfortunately, that was the limit of my powers. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get the girls of my imagination out of their folk costumes and into something more attractive. Whatever I did they remained in their woven skirts, puffy white blouses and oddly shaped headdresses. After a while I formed a composite image of a single attractive girl dancer in my mind, and whatever I was doing or wherever I was I would show it to her. She was constantly in my head, a silent observer but somehow always fascinated by my amazing life. ‘This is what we call a steak and kidney pie,’ I would say to my lovely flaxen-haired dancer. ‘We eat it with chips.’ And her eyes would widen in astonishment. Or ‘That’s Mr Abrahams. He hates me.’ Or ‘Those two men are called Morecambe and Wise. Though they share a bed they are not homosexual lovers.’
It was only a few weeks before the tour was due to begin that we got a message from the authorities in Prague saying that the dance troupe would not after all be coming, though they offered no explanation. Perhaps it was an early sign of the internal upheavals within Czech society that they weren’t being allowed out — it’s impossible to say But though she never arrived in person I continued to carry this idealised blonde dancer in my mind and in my imagination I continually showed off to her — until, that is, I got to an age when I began doing stuff that I was too ashamed to let her see.
I sometimes wonder why it is that I remember what it is that I remember. Did the things that stayed with me form who I became? Or was I already fixed by then, as the kind of child for whom all the endless visits to galleries, castles and historic monuments blurred into a few vague impressions while what really stuck in my mind was two men’s memory of eating a ham sandwich and a folk dancer who never existed? I would have really liked to retain hundreds of clear and precise images of all the baroque ceilings and Renaissance architraves I stood in front of during our travels, but I had no matrix, no philosophical framework with which to retain them. So they became like pretty pictures hung on a wall with flimsy string that soon snapped.
During 1964, in my second year at Alsop, class 2B moved into the Rectory where we had our form room on the second floor. Some of the kids developed a fad for jumping out of the window, landing in the grassy land at the back and then running back into class. I didn’t join in.
I loved the Gothic feel of the Rectory, the worn elegance of the stairs and doors, the creepy, High Church romanticism of the mullioned windows and sandstone arches being forbidden fruit to the son of Communists. The civic centre of Liverpool, clustered around St George’s Hall and the Walker Art Gallery, favoured the classical style, supposedly radiating rationality and science, as if ancient Rome had somehow acquired double-decker buses and a railway station.
On the floor above 2B was a wood-panelled form room for the upper sixth Classics. In common with a lot of provincial grammars, Alsop attempted to ape British public schools. It did this, though, in an unconvincing fashion, like somebody who has learned a foreign language from a book. And fortunately, for whatever reason, it decided it could get along without the vicious bullying and the Byzantine cruelty of those supposedly superior establishments. The boys above us on the second f
loor attempted to give the impression, mainly to themselves, that they were at Winchester, Harrow or Eton. Through studying Latin and Greek A-Level they were hoping to go to Oxford or Cambridge where, if they got in, they planned to lie about where they came from. When they weren’t in class these boys would sit about in leather armchairs conjugating Virgil or editing the school magazine, while in the winter they actually went so far in their fake Billy Bunterism as to toast crumpets over an open fire.
That year we had a maths teacher called Mr Cornes who earned my respect by disdaining to teach us any maths at all, scuppering my already weak chances of ever understanding geometry For the entire lesson Mr Cornes would just stare out of the window. On one occasion the only thing he said to us was, ‘I’ve been watching those workmen out there for forty minutes and in all that time they’ve done nothing.’ He dressed smartly in tweed suits with a flamboyant handkerchief in the top pocket and looked a little like a young Alfred Hitchcock. The most interesting thing to me about Mr Cornes was that he would come to school every day in a different smart car which he would park outside the Rectory, alongside the other teachers’ much more shabby vehicles. One day it would be an MGB coupé, another day his transport might be an Aston Martin DB4 or a 4.2-litre Mark II Jaguar with wire wheels.
Though he was unaware of my existence, I really liked Mr Cornes and tried to imitate his enigmatic manner. I saw that if you say nothing, people find it unsettling because they don’t know what to make of you. Another of our family hate figures was the Spanish fascist dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Also a fan of being inscrutable, Franco once said, ‘You are the slave of what you say and the master of what you don’t say’ He might have added that that approach isn’t always guaranteed to work. If you attempt, for example, to be sphinx-like, mysterious and enigmatic when you get to the front of a long queue at the chip shop, you do risk being punched quite hard in the back of the head.
Under the influence of Mr Cornes my artwork began to change. The futurist utopia of Saylovia, with its high-rise buildings, eight-lane highways and pedestrian walkways started to be of less interest to me. The new Britain that the architects’ blueprints and the articles in the newpapers had been preparing us for had begun to appear, and it didn’t look anything like they had told us it would. The optimistic line drawings in the magazines hadn’t found a way to render the rain-streaked concrete of the new Kingsway Tunnel that had been built between Liverpool and Wallasey, destroying huge swathes of Scotland Road, obliterating thousands of homes and hundreds of small businesses in the process. They had somehow failed to include the litter that skittered about at waist height in the new shopping precincts, whipped up by the storm-force winds that were permanently channelled between the flimsy buildings. The people who had once occupied these neighbourhoods had been moved out to estates on the edge of the city, the only real difference between Stalin’s forced migrations and those in Liverpool being that the Liverpudlians went willingly, believing the lie that they would have a better life in these purpose-built new towns, the promise of electric storage heaters and twin sinks taking the place of the bayonet and the forced march.
Instead of Saylovia I began to draw an elaborate and ever-changing fantasy in which a slightly older version of me drove to London in one of Mr Cornes’s cars, an open-topped MGTF with wire wheels, my luggage strapped to the chromed rack on the boot lid behind the driver’s seat. I was a bit vague about how you got to London by road as I had only ever travelled there by train, but I thought it might be somewhere up the Al and I had an idea that Bedford was on the way So I would often draw me in my MGTF in Bedford high street with a pretty girl giving me an admiring look as I stopped for her at a zebra crossing.
As an artist I was clearly part of no movement. I worked alone, unconnected to the cultural elite, like a teenage William Blake. Nevertheless the drawings I did, scribbled down the margins of my school books, filling lined foolscap pads and scrawled over the backs of envelopes, were expressing the spirit of the age. I wasn’t aware of it, but Jack Kerouac’s On the Road had been published eight years before and the idea that travel for its own sake could be a quasi-mystical experience was slowly crossing the Atlantic.
More influential for me than Kerouac’s beatnik ramblings was a US television series shown intermittently and at odd hours on the local ITV station, Granada. When people consider the artistic cauldron of the North-west in the 1960s Granada TV, based in Manchester but serving the entire region, innovative, liberal and creative but always populist, pioneering investigative documentaries, US comedies and ground-breaking dramas, often gets forgotten. But I grew up in an area that effectively had two BBCs. Though it was true that Granada, with their eccentric scheduling, could make you work hard for what you wanted to see. I did sometimes wonder whether I was hallucinating one particular show because it had so few viewers that when I asked other people they said they had never heard of it. Also, in form and content it seemed to have been made specifically for me.
Route 66 was probably the only TV drama series ever to be filmed entirely on the road with not one scene shot in a studio. It concerned two enigmatic young men named Tod and Buz who travelled around the USA in one of the greatest cars of all time — a Chevrolet Corvette convertible powered by the 327 cubic inch ‘Small Block’ V8, getting involved in existential adventures and speaking to each other in a hyped-up quasi-hipster English. The show clearly had a liberal, progressive agenda and dealt sympathetically with stories about mercy killing, the threat of nuclear annihilation and teenage runaways. Tod and Buz were also always running into isolated nihilistic loners living in tumbleweed-infested ghost towns.
Though I was unaware of it at the time, Route 66 gave work to emerging directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Hiller and featured guest stars of the calibre of Rod Steiger, Martin Sheen, Buster Keaton, Robert Redford and a young Robert Duvall playing a heroin addict. In the episode with Robert Duvall, Buz revealed that in the past he had had his own problems with the White Horse, the Brown Sugar, the old Yam Yam, which seemed like a really cool thing to me. Not that I ever wanted to take heroin, which frankly looked like it was a lot of hard work, appeared to be quite uncomfortable and meant you had to listen to jazz music. Rather, I wondered if it might somehow be possible to just jump straight to being the sort of world-weary, wise person who had once been a junkie without ever going to all the trouble and mess of actually being a junkie. When I drew myself in biro in my MGTF driving to London I was trying to capture the same restless spirit that informed Route 66 or On the Road. Me as the loner, the free spirit, a man with a complicated past, steering his sports car wherever the mood took him, to romantic places such as Runcorn, Bedford and Dunstable where he would have adventures that ended with a liberal conclusion.
After the botched surgery on his foot Joe was on sick leave at home for several months. At first he remained up in the bedroom sleeping all day It might have been unsettling having this silent presence above your head, but it was possible to tell yourself that the situation wasn’t any different from the time before the operation, when Joe had been doing shifts as a guard. Then too he had been in bed the whole day long while other men were at work.
When he did return to the railways it was on light duties, part-time, as a ticket collector at Liverpool Central Station. My parents decided that because he was still recuperating Joe might not be up to travelling across eastern Europe, so at the Boxing Day holiday meeting we chose for the summer of 1965 to take a nice restful holiday on our boat.
I’m not sure I had a vote at these meetings, because for me there was a long list of things that were wrong with a holiday on the boat. I have no idea what Molly and Joe thought they were going to get out of this vacation, but then again Communists like us often seemed to make dubious life decisions. Perhaps if you believe at the very core of your being that violent revolution, state repression and forced eradication of unwanted classes of human beings is likely to bring about peace amongst all mankind, then thinking
that two weeks in a cabin cruiser on the Shropshire Union Canal might be good for your health isn’t such a stretch.
I hated the whole idea from the start. For example, when we visited Czechoslovakia or Hungary we were treated as if we were truly remarkable people: fleets of black limousines usually waited for us on the forecourts of our luxury hotels, and enormous dinners were held in our honour. In slightly creepy rituals, I was made an honorary member of quasi-fascist organisations. And when I returned to Liverpool I had all these stories to tell that nobody else at school could match. Besides, I was beginning to get that teenage obsession with looking cool at all costs and caring about how others saw me above everything else — and a holiday on a canal with your parents was unlikely to be considered cool. Kerouac’s drug-fuelled beat odyssey was not called ‘On the San Francisco to Tijuana Grand Union Canal’. Tod and Buz had not chosen to travel the United States being enigmatic on a narrowboat.
At this time the cabin cruiser was still moored on the Chester branch of the Shropshire Union Canal, so at least we didn’t have to carry our gigantic outboard motor with us along with two weeks’ luggage and Bruno the dog. This canal had been built to bring goods, especially salt, from the south Cheshire town of Nantwich to Chester and then onwards to the sea via the Dee estuary We planned to travel the other way, imagining perhaps that we would tie up each night beside rustic pubs where we would buy eggs and milk from a friendly farmer’s wife. In all the millions of words Karl Marx wrote about bringing the workers’ state into existence — the Communist Manifesto, his Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, the Critique of the Gotha Program — when he tried to imagine the world as it would be after the dawn of Communism, which was after all the point of all this furious scribbling, he was only able to come up with a feeble bucolic fantasy involving smocks and cowherds who played the flute in the evenings.