Stalin Ate My Homework – Alexi Sayle (2010)
I’ve just finished ‘Stalin Ate My Homework’ by Liverpudlian alternative stand-up Alexei Sayle. It’s a very funny and well-written memoir of his childhood and teenage years. The only son of two Atheist Jewish members of the Communist Party, it offers a fascinating glimpse of 1950s-1960s Left politics in England. Alex’s father worked on the railways so the family were able to avail of free travel and visited the “workers paradises” of Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Hungary during the late 1960s.
From a social history perspective, it is interesting to hear of the radical groups and pubs of 1960s Liverpool:
Fortunately via the Marxist-Leninists I had finally got know the world of Liverpool’s radicals pubs. All the bohemians, the artists, the poets and the left-wingers drank in three or four boozers on the edge of the town centre … We drank in the Philharmonic Hotel, a monument of Victorian exuberance with dark wood-panelled walls, copper reliefs, Art Deco lights, a mosaic-covered floor and a bar with a huge golden eagle watching over the drinkers. Alternatively we met up in the Crack, which was the pub favoured by the arts students and consisted of lots of little rooms each with weird paintings on the walls.
During this period, Alexi was a member of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) which upset his purist parents. Him and his mates pub of choice was Kavanagh’s while druggies favoured O’Connors:
O’Connors was the druggiest pub. A former chapel with doors at each end, it allowed dealers to run out one door when the police came through the other. And finally there was the one favoured by the Marxist-Leninists, named the Grapes but called Kavanagh’s by everyone. (We) drank in what was effectively a corridor, though there were two snugs, with old murals on the walls and unusual round tables supposedly taken from a sister ship of the Titanic and fire-places which blazed warmth in winter…
What caught my eye was this little anecdote of an Irish republican bank robber on the run:
All of these pubs, especially Kavanagh’s, were full of ‘characters’… There was one Irish guy who hung around with us. In Ireland this man had been a member of … Saor Eire and he was now on the run after being involved in several fund-raising bank raids. He was trying to keep his identity secret but everybody called him Irish John or alternatively ‘Irish John Who’s Been Involved In All Those Bank Raids In Ireland’. He tried to pay for his drinks with hundred pound Irish banknotes, then was quickly arrested and shipped back to Dublin. His real name was Simon.
