Read Online Stalin Ate My Homework by Alexei Sayle - Free Book Online

and
became well-known city councillors.
    One
thing that my parents didn’t seem to understand was that, though they were
sending a clear message to the world with their stance on Hungary, they were
giving confusing messages to their son by entrusting his precious health to a
class traitor. If those who left in ‘56 were renegades and weak-minded
back-stabbers, how could one of them look after me? How could somebody who was
a traitor be a good doctor? Surely a person who was an evil revanchist would be
useless at their job? Something here didn’t add up.
    Fortunately
my teeth, unlike the rest of me, weren’t considered important enough to become
an ideological battleground in the class war. Our dentist, a man called Savitz
who had a surgery nearby in an old house next door to the Astoria cinema in
Walton Breck Road, wasn’t in the party or anything so he didn’t cause me any
confusion while painfully hacking my gums about.
     
    There was, however, a war
of ideas which affected me on a more basic level than my parents’ attitude to
healthcare, and that was their peculiar stance on certain toys. Although Molly
and Joe were Communists dedicated to the dictatorship of the industrial
proletariat, my mother in particular held opinions on daily life that were
closer to those of the more avant-garde elements of the upper classes than to
those of our neighbours in Valley Road. My parents had to work for a living,
didn’t have any servants and didn’t know any archbishops or ambassadors, but a
lot of the ideas they harboured concerning food, travel and child-rearing would
have been familiar to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan or Lady
Ottoline Morrell. One of the ways in which Molly differed from the majority of
parents in our street, though Bertrand Russell would have heartily approved,
was in her attitude to toy guns.
    There
was a theory, prevalent in liberal circles, that giving children war-like toys
could awaken in them aggressive, antisocial and overtly male tendencies which
were unsuited to the modern world. My parents subscribed to this idea, despite
the fact that, as Marxist-Leninists, they believed in the violent armed
overthrow of capitalism. If they had been consistent they would have purchased
a .22 rifle or a shotgun and booked me shooting lessons. Instead, they refused
to purchase any kind of replica firearm.
    At
first this wasn’t too much of a problem — during games of war or cowboys and indians,
all the boys in the street just ran around pointing their fingers at each other
and shouting, ‘Ack, ack, ack!’ or ‘Kerpow!’ But soon their parents began buying
them plastic or metal toy guns which usually fired a paper roll of percussion
caps, and this left me pretty badly outgunned with just my fingers. Yet no
matter how much I pleaded with her, Molly refused to buy me a toy gun. In the
end, out of desperation, tired of spending every evening lying dead on the
pavement, I started making my own imitation weapons out of bread. I would chew
an L-shape into a slice of Hovis, then smuggle it out of the house so I could
run around the streets shooting other kids with my wholemeal pistol. I brought
such conviction to my play-acting that the other kids were persuaded that my
bread gun possessed a degree of firepower, and as long as it didn’t rain I was
fine.
    After a
while, though, my parents could see that I was being made to look a little bit
too eccentric shooting children with my edible pistol. So, in an echo of the UN
Disarmament Commission, which was formed under the Security Council and which
met intermittently from 1954 to 1957, we held our own arms limitation talks.
After furious bargaining the final outcome, which was agreed by all parties,
was this: I would be allowed toy firearms but they would be limited to non-automatic
weapons, a restriction which basically meant I could only own revolvers with a
Wild West flavour. No automatic pistols, rifles or sub-machine guns would be
allowed, though