Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle (Bloomsbury 2016)

 

One of the unexpected ways in which my upbringing as the son of Communists had helped prepare me for the challenges of celebrity, an advantage that my fellow comedians didn’t have, was in the matter of staying true to yourself. The idea of the traitor, the sell-out, the apostate was central to Joe and Molly’s state of mind. Even when I was quite small we would be out shopping in town and  my mother or father would gesticulate towards some harmless-looking individual and say in a whisper, ‘See him over there trying on gloves, he left the Party over Hungary in 1956 and now he’s . . .’ Here they’d pause before revealing the full horror. ‘A Labour councillor!’ Or, ‘Don’t look, but that woman by the bacon counter, she used to be in CND but now she’s . . . joined the Air Force!’ At first I couldn’t see anything different about the people my parents pointed out but over time it did seem to me that they possessed a certain haunted quality, an air of sadness, and though their mood probably wasn’t helped by being whispered about in shops by a red-haired woman and a man in a trilby hat accompanied by a silent watchful boy I sensed that the main critical voice was within their heads, that they themselves were aware on some level of the abandonment of their younger more idealistic self and it corroded them from the inside.

I did not want to end up like that. The trick it  seemed to me was to not be blind to the many faults of the left while at the same time to try and stay true to those core values of workers’ rights, social justice and equality.

Me doing fund-raising benefits for left-wing organisations was an attempt to stay connected with those ideals.

As a left-wing entertainer it was accepted that you would inevitably perform unpaid at concerts in aid of various radical causes – doing benefits had become a sort of national service for alternative comedians. There was very little pleasure in appearing at them though. I did a bit about benefit concerts in my act: how you told a joke, then there was a pause while the audience vetted the joke for its political content, possible sexism, any hints of neo-colonialism, adherence to the theory of dialectical and historical materialism, and only once it was cleared would they laugh – it was like doing your material over a faulty phone line.

I went up to Sheffield to appear in a show at the Crucible Theatre in support of Nicaragua’s revolutionary, anti-American, pro-moustache Sandinista government. Following the show the cast and their friends were introduced to the guest of honour – David Blunkett the radical left-wing leader of Sheffield City Council. After the line-up Linda said, ‘I don’t like that man, there’s something funny about his eyes.'

In The Thirties by Edward Upward (Heinemann 1962)

Most of the others, when all of the group had arrived here, sat on the tree-trunks, but Alan and Elsie chose the grass, which was warm and thistle free and had been grazed by rabbits till it was as short as the grass of a lawn. Alan had been carrying his and her lunch in a small rucksack that he now removed from his back and handed to Elsie, who had prepared the food and knew which of the greaseproof-paper-covered packets contained what. She grinned as she gave him the three hard-boiled eggs that he had told her he would want when she had asked him in the flat how many. And he did want them. The walking he had done gave relish to his eating, made it a pleasure so keen that it was like an aesthetic experience. With the eggs there were brown bread-and-butter sandwiches and afterwards he ate a banana and an apple, and he drank hot coffee which she poured out for him from a vacuum flask into a plastic cup. And the pleasure did not end when his appetite was satisfied: it changed, evolved, became a happiness deriving not just from food but also from the presence of the comrades eating and talking around him.

‘How fine they are,’ he thought. ‘How devoted and honest, how different from what anti-Communists say that Communists are, how much better as human beings than their traducers.’ He looked at Lamont, conqueror of dreadful disabilities, and at Lamont’s wife, whose self-sacrifice for her husband had made possible his outstanding work for the cause; at Len Whiscop, born in a slum, mainly self-educated, who was among the Party’s most effective economics tutors and who once, when trespassing on principle, had led a group of ramblers including Alan and Elsie past a gamekeeper holding a shotgun; at Sammy Pentire and his Polish wife Rosa, both of them nearer seventy than sixty but slim and fit, who were vegetarians and had been active for socialism since their twenties; at George Farmer, an Old Etonian who could have made a bourgeois career for himself if he hadn’t chosen the Party; at Enid and Bertha, teachers, who had remained loyal to the working class into which they had been born and whose scrupulous intellectual honesty would allow them to accept nothing on faith, not even from the Party leaders. He thought of other comrades who were not here on this ramble: of Wally first of all, and of Eddie Freans, and of Jimmy Anders. Then he thought of people opposed to the Party: of Mrs Greensedge, who cheated at whist drives and who had once said that her husband would be furious if he thought she was getting mixed up with Communists; of a university don who had alluded to Marx and Engels with complacent contempt and in words revealing that he had not bothered to study their writings; of Christian imperialists paying lip-service to the Sermon on the Mount and expressing horror at the Marxist view that the use of force was in certain temporary revolutionary circumstances justifiable; of young careerists despising the working class they had risen from and abhorring Communism because it contradicted the only principle that made sense to them – their own advancement. Such people were of the class which Alan himself had belonged to, but which he had broken with. ‘I have cleansed myself of their customs,’ he thought, remembering Dante’s line: ‘da’ lor costumi fa che tu ti forbi.’ He belonged at last, without reservation, among these comrades he was sitting with here. They accepted him as one of them, and he knew that in spite of, or perhaps partly because of, his diffidence, they liked him. He loved them, and he would never again allow himself to repine because of the amount of work the Party expected from him, or to hanker back after what he had been fond of in his bourgeois days.

Stalin Ate My Homework by Alexei Sayle (Sceptre 2010)

It was only slowly that I became aware of the power of swear words. It was a gradual thing, a creeping realisation that blossomed into full comprehension round about my second or third year at grammar school. I heard bigger boys or ones from rough homes using these special, explosive, forbidden expressions, and once the realisation of their power dawned I knew that swearing was a thing I wanted to be intimately involved in.

Once I had got the most powerful obscenities straight in my head I came home from school determined to try out their effect on my mother. Full of excitement, I sat at the dining table in the living room. Molly put my evening meal in front of me, but instead of eating it I said, ‘I … I … I don’t want that. It’s … it’s … it’s fucking shit!’ Then I sat back, waiting to hear what kind of explosion it would prompt. After all, I conjectured, if the bathroom sponge going missing for a few seconds could prompt a screaming fit from my mother, a paroxysm of grief that might involve weeping and howling and crying out to the gods of justice, then me saying ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ was bound to provoke a tremendous reaction that would be heard at the back of the Spion Kop.

For a short while nothing happened as Molly considered what I had said in a calm and reflective manner. Then finally she said, ‘I don’t care if you eat it or not … but it’s not fucking shit and if you don’t fucking eat it I’m not going to fucking make you anything fucking else so you can fucking go and get your own fucking food in some other shit-fucking place you fucking little bastard shit fuck.’

After that day Molly rarely spoke a sentence without an obscenity in it, and I was often too embarrassed to bring school friends home because I was worried about them being offended by my mother’s foul language. 

(page 110)

And once they had finished buying old overcoats and worn out socks the Lascars could come to our stall and purchase copies of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy or Stalin’s History of the CPSU.

The stall itself had been made from an oak door that somebody had salvaged from a building site and was incredibly heavy — it took four of us to carry it the half-mile from the Simon Community hostel where it was stored. We didn’t know anybody who had a car. However, once we had put it up, Liverpool being the sort of place it was the stall did a reasonable amount of trade — better than some of the others that only seemed to sell twisted wire, broken fish tanks and rusted-up fuel pumps. There would always be some little old bloke in a flat cap coming up to us and saying, ‘Ere, son, do you have Friedrich Engels’ The Holy Family, the critique of the Young Hegelians he wrote with Marx in Paris in November 1844?’

‘No, but we do have Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.’

‘Naww, I’ve already got that.’

‘Make a lovely Christmas present for a family member.’

‘Eh, I suppose you’re right there. Give us two copies then, son.’ 

(page 156)

Another Country (1984)