Stalin Ate My Homework Read Free

‘What will we eat? What will we eat?’
    Joe had
lived for many years in Tancred Road, Anfield, in a room at the very top of the
house, with his stepmother and his niece Sylvia. When she came in from school
Sylvia would often hear the sound of Joe tapping away on his typewriter. He had
ambitions to be a proper writer, but the work he was doing was more mundane —
reports for his trade union, the National Union of Railwaymen, or articles on
transport for the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker.
    Joe’s
father had been, like so many in Liverpool, a seaman. His mother, who came
originally from Jersey, died when he was five. He was left with few memories of
her — just a ghostly image of an unhappy woman in white gloves who refused to
do any housework. Later the father remarried and Joe, along with his two
brothers and three half-brothers, lived with their stepmother.
    Though
they moved a lot, the family mostly stayed within the Anfield area. Several of
Joe’s brothers had jobs on the railways, and when he left school at fourteen he
too went to work for the Cheshire Lines Company, which served Liverpool,
Manchester, Lancashire and Cheshire. To work on the railways in the 1920s and
1930s was to be relatively fortunate. Unlike the docks or the building trade,
where men were little more than slaves taken on from day to day, it was a
steady job — as a railwayman you were part of a uniformed workforce with a
solid sense of identity and represented by strong unions. At the top of the
hierarchy were the engine drivers. I was taught to regard engine drivers with
distrust, to see them as temperamental, arrogant men who took too much pride in
mastering their snorting steam engines. The drivers’ union, ASLEF, was often in
conflict with the NUR, which spoke for the rest of the workforce, the
signalmen, porters, cleaners and guards. Joe was a goods guard, in charge of
the cars that carried freight. He rode at the end of the train in his own
little wooden wagon known as the brake van. When we watched American cowboy
films on the TV they referred to this carriage, more excitingly, as the
caboose. The brake van looked like a small Swiss chalet on wheels, a creosoted
wooden shed made of planking with a narrow verandah at each end and a chimney
poking out of the curved roof. A few times I rode with my father to
mysterious-sounding destinations such as Stalybridge and Altrincham Junction.
Inside his van there was a coke-burning, black pot-bellied stove that warmed
the air with such ferocity that I would become sleepy and have to be taken out
on to the gently rocking verandah, to be jolted awake by the cold air rushing
by.
    Joe’s
main job was to keep a close eye on the freight wagons, either from his
verandah or from a little projecting side window in each wall through which he
could see the whole length of the train, and to apply the brakes manually in
the event of an imminent disaster. If the train stopped on the line for some
reason such as fog the guard had to walk back up the tracks placing explosive
detonators on the rails to alert following trains. It seemed heroic work. In
our family the guard was clearly the most important member of the train’s crew.
    But it
was the tools of Joe’s trade that really fascinated me. Each night he would
come home and give me his leather satchel, which held a battered and scratched
black paraffin lantern with red and green filters that could be placed over the
clear glass lens to warn of danger or give the all-clear, a red and a green
flag, squares of linen stitched to a thick wooden baton for the same purpose.
In his waistcoat he carried a metallic-tasting whistle and a big fob watch like
a miniature station clock.
    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