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

they would inevitably bend to
the will of the aristocrat or the celebrity rather than an ordinary
working-class family such as ours. So I would be sent at ten-minute intervals
to remind them that a taxi had been ordered to take me and my family to Lime
Street Station, and in between my visits Molly would telephone them with a
slightly different version of the same message. From the other room I could
hear her begging them to swear that a taxi would be coming and reminding them
that our money was as good as the Duke of Edinburgh’s, alternating her
entreaties with screaming at me, ‘Eat your eggs, Lexi! For the love of God, eat
your boiled eggs!’ Then, as like as not, we would run across the road and get a
bus.
    In
August 1959 there was a particular hysteria attached to our preparations
because this year was extra-special. Molly, Joe and Alexei were going to
Czechoslovakia — we were travelling eastwards beyond the Iron Curtain. Like
the man in the magic lantern show but in reverse, we were going to step into
the movie screen and the narrow streets of Prague.
    The
beginning stages of the journey to the continent were by now familiar to me.
First of all you had to get to London — things didn’t really begin until you
reached the capital. The three of us would tumble through the ticket gates at
Lime Street, dishevelled, some of our clothes on backwards because we’d dressed
in the dark, dragging our suitcases on their unsteady and unreliable wheels
behind us. Sometimes we would get there before our train was even at the
platform, but generally the Red Rose Express with its red and cream
carriages stretching away up the platform would be waiting for us. At the head
of the train, wreathed in a cloud of steam and quietly hissing to itself, would
be a dark green Royal Scot-class locomotive, its smoke deflectors and
chimneystack picked out in black.
    Once we
were on board, already hungry and tired even though we had only travelled two
miles, there appeared a second reason for hysteria. Joe would get Molly and me
seated in our compartment with all the luggage and here we would slump,
breathless and sweaty, recovering from the trauma of the trip to the station.
While my jumper would be askew and my shirt collar sticking up at an odd angle,
and Molly’s cotton summer dress would be wrinkled, her red hair in a mad tangle
and her glasses steamed up, Joe invariably looked dapper and cool. With his
thinning hair brushed back from his high, intelligent forehead, in his tweed
jacket, high-waisted, pleated-front trousers and shiny brown brogues, he
appeared calm and fresh as if he was a professor looking after a couple of
refugees who had recently had a tough time at the hands of fascist insurgents.
But Joe wouldn’t sit down. He would stand between the seats, then look
thoughtful for a second, turn and go out into the corridor with Molly shouting
after him, ‘Joe! Where are you going? Joe, where are you going? Lexi, where’s
Joe going?’
    Making
vague mumbling noises, my father would walk up the corridor to the door at the
end of the carriage. From there he would step off the train and, once on the
platform, make for the locomotive to see if he knew the driver of our express.
Because he was a railway guard my father had a disturbingly casual attitude to
the business of getting on and off trains. After he had left us in the
compartment Joe would sometimes wait until the train was actually moving, the
guard having long blown his whistle and the last door having been slammed,
before nonchalantly swinging himself on board the final carriage at the last
possible second. We often didn’t know whether he had actually managed to get
aboard the train because he wouldn’t join us in our compartment until well
after we had left the station and were huffing through the sandstone tunnels
that ran under Crown Street. This gave rise to a good deal more screaming. ‘Joe!
Where’s Joe? Where’s your father? Joe! Joe! Lexi, your father’s