by Alexei Sayle
It was the same with all the ‘progressives’ I had encountered: their vision of the world to come was either a brutal, uncompromising futurism or camp pastoralism such as that which inspired the garden city movement and its deformed child, the new towns. Nowhere across the whole spectrum of the left did there seem to be any appreciation of anything that was worn, anything that was industrial, in fact anything that was working-class. So that summer we weren’t on a boating holiday, we were searching for the shape of things to come on our cabin cruiser Potemkin.
And I have to admit that sometimes it could be tranquil. In the mornings I would sit at the prow watching the fields slide past, listening to the purr of the engine behaving itself as the bow cut through the shallow clouded water. But all too soon disaster would strike, and Jewish hysteria is not suited to marine emergencies — screaming and shouting do not help when you are heading backwards towards a weir. The situation wasn’t assuaged by an angry and self-conscious teenager and two adults being crammed into a space that, if it had been a gaol cell, would have been condemned by the chief inspector of prisons. It’s hard to express the claustrophobia I felt. Swept by the solar winds of puberty, the last thing I needed was to be stuck on a boat with my parents.
At one point we crashed into a bank in some remote spot where there were overhanging trees, their tangled roots reaching into the water, and cows staring sardonically at us from the other side of an old metal fence. The boat became wedged in the mud — the Evinrude was great at getting you stuck into places, but less cooperative when you wanted to get out again. I tried putting the outboard into reverse until blue smoke began to pour from under its cover, but nothing else happened. Since his operation, in moments of crisis Joe, rather than taking charge as he once might — perhaps jumping off the boat and going to look for helpful Communists — seemed to fold inside himself, just standing passive and blank, while Molly thought the power of yelling might get us off and the dog, unusually for him, joined in, barking furiously In the end I jumped over the side fully clothed; the water only came up to my waist. ‘Lexi! Lexi! What are you doing?’ Molly shouted. ‘My child! My child’s in the canal! There’s probably rats! If you ruin those trousers I’ll fucking kill you!’ And then by myself I pushed the boat until it came free. And perhaps the way our holiday turned out was closer to the reality of Communism than Marx’s sylvan prophecy.
One of the better things that came out of our vacation on the Shropshire Union Canal was that I won a prize for a drawing of the view from our boat. I was a member of something called the Little Woody Club, which was run by the Littlewood’s stores, catalogues and football pools organisation. The Little Woody Club was a juniors’ club, an attempt to attract younger people to the company’s products. Little Woody himself was a rather frightening figure with a grinning face set in the centre of a jagged piece of wood that had sprouted arms and legs. The company held an annual art competition and I sent in a biro drawing of a stone bridge near where we moored, as seen from the roof of Ty Mawr, done one late summer morning. I was awarded a badge of creepy Little Woody and a very elaborate pencil set in its own case. I imagine the judges were impressed by the unusual darkness and suffering expressed within a rendition of a bucolic scene, in many ways reminiscent of the later works of Vincent Van Gogh.
A child in Liverpool grows up understanding comedy in the same way that a young Mongolian nomad grows up knowing his way around a horse. Apart from shipping and its attendant industries, comedy was what we did. Many of the most successful comedians of the immediate post-war era came from Liverpool: Arthur Askey, Ken Dodd, Tommy Handley, Ted Ray and Robb Wilton, and we could claim at least a quarter share in such Lancashire comics as George Formby, Jimmy Clitheroe and Frank Randall. After lunch on Sunday every family in the city, along with the rest of the country, would listen to popular radio comedy series such as Round the Horne, Hancock’s Half Hour and The Navy Lark. But in Liverpool it was a good idea to have a pad and a pencil handy to jot down notes, because the analysis next day in the playground could get pretty competitive.
I found from very early on that I was super-critical even by the exacting comedy standards of my classmates. If they liked a show they tended to like everything about it whereas my tendency was to pick it apart, to say, ‘Well, that bit worked but that other bit didn’t.’ Which just seemed to confuse the other kids. And if my classmates disliked a show or a performer they just ignored them, barely acknowledging their existence, which was the sensible thing to do. But for me it was the things I hated that drew my attention the most. I could get furious over the oily charms of game show hosts like Hughie Greene and Michael Miles and the bovine compliability of the participants, and comedy shows I disapproved of could send me into a blind rage. At 6.30 every night Granada would show imported American comedies such as The Dick Van Dyke Show or Car 54 Where Are You?, which I more or less enjoyed along with everybody else. But there was one called My Mother the Car that drove me absolutely nuts.
The plot of My Mother the Car was that an attorney played by Jerry Van Dyke (Dick’s talentless younger brother) ends up buying a vintage car that happens to contain the soul of his dead mother, who talks, only to him, through the car’s radio. My parents couldn’t understand why I would go on and on about this show.
‘But don’t you understand?’ I would yell. ‘The car is his dead mother! It’s insane! And that scene where he puts petrol into it with a hose is disturbing!’
‘Well, if you don’t like it don’t watch it then.’
‘Oh, you don’t get it, do you? That’s what they want me to do!’ And I would run out of the house, slamming the door.
The first radio series I tuned in to on my own, in my bedroom under the covers using Joe’s blue and white transistor radio, was I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again. I don’t know why I listened under the covers, since Joe and Molly wouldn’t have been bothered. I assumed, since it was what everybody said they did, that having a blanket on top of the radio improved reception. I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again was the first TV or radio show which seemed aimed at my generation and actively excluded older people with its noisy and irreverent humour. It originated from the Cambridge University Footlights revue and featured young talent such as John Cleese, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor. One day towards the end of the spring term of 1966 I was in the playground analysing the latest edition of I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again. I was saying, ‘I find that Bill Oddie’s Angus Prune character can slip into the bathetic if he doesn’t restrain his more sentimental tendencies …’ when I sensed my audience’s attention slipping — it was the oddest experience. A rumour was going around the playground, and you could actually see it travel from group to group until it finally reached the little gang of boys of which I was a part. The news had leaked that after the summer holidays Alsop Grammar School would be ‘going comp’. This meant that our school was going to join the comprehensive system and would amalgamate with the larger and more modern Anfield Comprehensive School half a mile away on County Road.
The crumpet-toasting fops in the Rectory were particularly worried about what this news would mean, but all of us had our concerns. The kid who had the most to worry about was the boy who was considered to be the best fighter at Alsop and was therefore known as the Cock of the School. Our Cock was some tall blond lad who played in the first footie eleven, was good at boxing and might have smoked a pipe, while the ‘Cock’ of Anfield Comp was a squat gingery thug. The story went that when he was eleven he was stopped by the police while at the wheel of a huge articulated lorry When the coppers asked what a schoolboy was doing driving a large commercial vehicle, his answer was: ‘Me mate give it me.’
As it turned out, the amalgamation did not cause too many problems. In the first week of the new academic year our Cock met their Cock after school in Walton Hall Park on the other side of Queen’s Drive and was quickly battered into unconsciousness. Thereafter we all knew where we stood and peace reigned. I liked the idea that I was now a
ttending some hardcase comp rather than a prissy grammar school, but we weren’t inconvenienced by mixing too much with the more proletarian kids from the other school.
That summer, as if to make up for the previous year’s boating disaster we had two holidays. The NUR AGM for 1966 was to be held in Southport, just fifteen miles north of Liverpool. Even though it was only forty minutes away by electric train, we decided to spend the week in a boarding house just behind the promenade. By the time we got to Southport I was thirteen years old, nearly fourteen, and I was beginning to seriously wonder about the advisability of going on holiday with my parents. After all, the year before, following two weeks on a boat with them I had literally thrown myself overboard. Some of this was the natural inclination of the teenager to separate from his or her parents — it is a biological imperative that you find your mother embarrassing from time to time, so that you forge your own personality But mine, with her propensity for screaming in public and loudly holding unconventional opinions (‘Lexi, why’s everybody fucking standing still?’ ‘It’s Winston Churchill’s state funeral, Mother.’ ‘Churchill — that drunken bastard!’), made you not just want to forge a personality but take on a whole new identity and move to Norway.
Less understandably, I also began to find Joe’s geniality embarrassing. Judgemental little bastard that I had become, I would sometimes recoil when I saw him telling terrible jokes at the centre of a crowd of railwaymen. I had this idea that the best people were the ones who lounged in a corner sneering.
After nearly a week I had become heartily sick of Southport. It was an odd town. The main shopping street, Lord Street, was a long and elegant boulevard, full of expensive shops and refined tea rooms, tree-lined and covered with a continuous glass canopy supported on wrought iron pillars. But right behind were narrow streets stuffed with shops and cafés that catered to the holidaying masses of Merseyside and Lancashire, selling buckets and spades and lunches that came with sliced bread and a cup of tea. This collision of styles, of refined spa and northern seaside resort, made it seem as if Baden Baden had by some gigantic feat of engineering been literally twinned with Skegness.
It was at heart a rich town, rich and old, and had a very ambivalent attitude to the working-class hordes that descended on it in the summer months. Every year on 12 July the Protestant Orange Lodges would travel from Liverpool to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne by marching up and down to fife and drum bands. Pale and undernourished-looking boys and girls from the streets, tower blocks and tenements of Liverpool sat on huge carthorses, dressed as King Billy and Queen Mary I saw a shop-girl in Woolworth’s bringing out the special price label that they must have kept just for the 12th that doubled all the prices for the day.
By the edge of my fourteenth birthday I could, at least in appearance, pass as an adult. I had long black hair flowing over my collar and the beginning of a beard, but though I didn’t wish to spend time with my parents I didn’t know how to occupy myself as a grown-up would. So instead I wandered through the sand dunes and pine woods that stretched from the edge of town to Ainsdale, I meandered up and down the streets of Birkdale with its huge Edwardian villas, I walked round and round the town centre till I was dizzy, and I strode up and down the wide beach where on a very clear day you could see Anglesey and the Welsh mountains in Snowdonia to the south and Blackpool Tower further up Liverpool Bay to the north.
Having said that what we did on Merseyside was comedy, there was one other related thing which was music. Again, even before the Beatles and all the other Merseybeat groups I was vaguely aware that we had had fifties’ heart-throb crooner and Jewish Liverpudlian Frankie Vaughan, singer Michael Holliday and rock and roller Billy Fury, but by and large the city’s music scene passed me by According to those who were in the know, music was everywhere in Liverpool — it leaked out of every basement and attic. But when they started showing films on television about the Cavern Club I was astonished to learn that there were such places in Liverpool city centre. As far as I was aware there were only the big shops in Church Street, the Pier Head where you went for demonstrations and to get the ferry, and Unity Theatre where you went to see black and white Eisenstein films and plays written by Arnold Wesker about angry Jewish people. The live music I had encountered on the left was either the humourless folk ballads of Pete Seeger, all about mining disasters or sneering at people who lived in the suburbs, self-pitying Irish rebel nonsense or trad jazz. No wonder I wasn’t interested in live music.
But the effect of the Beatles went far beyond music. John Lennon had just introduced the world to ‘the John Lennon cap’, a jaunty item of seaman’s headgear that, like National Health specs, he had made into an unlikely fashion object. I desperately wanted one, but the closest I could get to it was a dark blue Wild West-era US 7th Cavalry soldier’s cap that I bought in a souvenir shop off Lord Street. This seemed close enough to me because at that point I had great difficulty differentiating the nuances in things — for example, leather and plastic, which, both being shiny and black, I couldn’t tell apart. I had a mac which was clearly made of plastic, but I was never sure it wasn’t leather. It was only when I leaned against a hot radiator and my mac burst into flames that I began to see the difference. Similarly with this cap. It was round and had a peak, so I thought it was identical to John Lennon’s. I took the plastic crossed silver swords off the front of it and, regarding my reflection in shop windows, considered myself really cool and trendy In fact I looked like an angry man who was wandering around town wearing a kid’s toy hat.
I had one very nice afternoon with Joe. He must have taken time off from the AGM because we went to see Von Ryan’s Express at the big ABC cinema in Lord Street. I loved this movie, in which a group of Allied prisoners, led by Frank Sinatra as Colonel Ryan, who have been captured by the Germans in Italy manage to seize control of the prison train they are on. Despite being caught in an Allied air raid, negotiating uprooted tracks and enduring attacks by the Luftwaffe, they succeed in steering the train to neutral Switzerland via Florence and Milan —though Ryan is shot in the back and killed right at the end. Shot in Panavision and using Ektachrome stock, giving it a pleasing cool blue tone rather than the gaudier Technicolor, the film, with all the jumping on and off and the confusion, reminded me and Joe of our rail holidays in Europe. And all the shouting reminded us of Molly.
But the thing that came to obsess me while I was in Southport was the idea that I was so close to home yet I was sleeping in a narrow bed in a damp boarding house. All the things that were familiar to me were just a few miles away, yet here I was bored out of my mind. On the Friday I told my mother I was going for yet another walk, but in fact went to the station and caught a train to Liverpool. From the moment the train left the station I felt like I was on the most amazing adventure, because I was heading for our empty house back in Anfield. It was almost like I had found a new way to be on a journey — the complete pointlessness of it was dizzying. At Exchange Station I took a bus, and within twenty minutes I was unlocking the front door of our empty and silent house. It was the most incredible experience. I sat in the armchair in the living room and wondered what to do next. Nobody knew where I was and this was the last place they would ever think to look for me. After all, what kind of an evil genius would leave Southport just to sit in an armchair in an empty, cold house?
I had recently read a Ray Bradbury short story in one of the American science fiction magazines I bought for a shilling each from a second-hand bookstore. In this story the Twentieth Century Limited stops at a desert town where the train has never stopped before and a man gets off. The man intends to murder a stranger at random, but there is another man in the desert town who has sat for years watching the train and waiting for it to stop because he knows that one day the Twentieth Century Limited will stop there and a man will get off intending to murder a stranger at random. The two men then hunt each other through the desert town. I thought to myself, ‘That’s me. I could show my bottom to the woman in the pet
shop and she wouldn’t believe it was me. She would just say to the police, “It couldn’t have been Alexei Sayle even though it looked just like him, because he’s in Southport with his parents.” And the police would reply, “Well, yes, but Southport isn’t that far away” But she would say, “Certainly that’s true. But he’s on holiday with his parents. Why would he come back? The thought of him coming back here from Southport is literally impossible.” And the police would be forced to agree.’
So I thought of doing that, but then I looked at my watch and saw that if I didn’t get back up the coast I would miss the annual dinner dance, so I took the train back to Southport and never told anybody I had been at home for the afternoon.
The second holiday we took in 1966 was a few months later, towards the end of the summer: two weeks in Bulgaria. Though Bulgaria was a Communist country the trip didn’t resemble our previous visits to the Soviet Bloc because for the first time in our lives we were on a conventional package holiday Me, Molly and Joe would be spending two weeks at a resort on the Black Sea called Golden Sands and, rather than taking days on the train to get there, we flew from Gatwick to the airport at nearby Varna in a four-engined turboprop Ilyushin IL 18 airliner of Balkan Airlines.