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

after a while I did get something called a Range Rifle which
was essentially a Colt .45 revolver with a stock and long barrel.
    Though
I now possessed toy guns, an unbridgeable arms gap had opened up between me and
the other kids in our street. For instance, there was a gadget that several of
the local boys owned called a Johnny 7. This was less of a gun and more of an
integrated weapons system, combining multiple grenade tubes, an automatic rifle
and a rocket launcher, and my small stock of revolvers was never able to
compete with that. I consoled myself with the thought that in the jungles of
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos the lightly armed Communist Vietcong were at the
same time taking on and beating the United States army, Range Rifles versus
Johnny 7s, but on a larger and more lethal scale.
     
    I also faced a weapons gap
in terms of toy soldiers, but the reasons for that are less clear — as far as I
can recall, my parents had no policy on little plastic men in uniform. The way
toy soldiers worked in our street was that you took all your soldiers round to
another boy’s house in a box or they came round to yours with their soldiers in
a box. Then you fought a battle, and if you lost the other kid technically
owned whatever room the battle was being fought in. This was a male-only thing,
of course. Boys had soldiers, girls had dolls, so the girls would take their
dolls round to each other’s houses and maybe they fought each other with them —
I don’t know For some reason my toy army seemed to have a large number of
non-combatants in its ranks — soldiers carrying minesweeping equipment, endless
columns of stretcher-bearers, bandsmen armed only with trombones and a complete
plastic ENSA troupe — while the other kid’s army usually comprised a massive
phalanx of machine gun crews, bazooka teams and infantry, equipped with rifles
and sub-machine guns all supported by aircraft, artillery and armoured
formations.
    I think
the pacific make-up of my army might have had something to do with unarmed
soldiers, for some reason, being cheaper to buy in the local shop, so I had
purchased them without giving a thought to whether they would be useful in battle
or not. I also seemed to have in my army a whole mixed regiment of Red Indians
with bows and arrows and knights in armour who had become detached from their
horses. The outcome of all these childhood battles was that theoretically other
boys owned most of our house, though this was never tested under international
law.
     
     

     
    Over the years my family
had evolved a number of rituals which took place every summer, on the morning
that we went on our holidays. Firstly there was the getting up far too early,
stumbling about in the darkness and bumping into the furniture. This was
followed by the ritual cooking of and then failure to eat six boiled eggs. It’s
unclear why it was felt that on days of travel we didn’t require a full
breakfast, when you would have thought it was then that we needed it most. But
for some reason every summer holiday began with six eggs being boiled, two each
for me, Joe and Molly These eggs would never be consumed because eating them
would inevitably be interrupted by the second ritual, which was the running
backwards and forwards to the taxi office.
    The old
black Austin taxi that was going to take us to Lime Street Station had been
ordered weeks before from a family firm with an office a couple of streets
away, but perhaps because my parents were Communists and the taxi firm were
representatives of the petit bourgeoisie — that class which in Marxist terms ‘owned
their own means of production’ and whose political allegiance could therefore switch
between the ruling and the working-class depending on self-interest — we didn’t
trust them to turn up. Lord Harmsworth, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Cole Porter or the
Duke of Edinburgh might ring the taxi firm asking for a cab to take them to the
dog track, a cocktail bar or a grouse shoot, and