Free Stalin Ate My Homework by Alexei Sayle

been left
behind! He’s been left behind! Lexi, we’ve left your father behind!’ Sometimes,
as the train was moving out of the station, we would look through the window to
see Joe wandering along the platform back towards the ticket barrier as if he
had decided at the last minute to go home, taking our tickets, passports and
spending money with him. But he always managed to come smiling up the corridor
a few minutes later.
     
    The journey to London took
four hours, and by the age of seven I took pride in the fact that I was
familiar with all the landmarks on the line to Euston. There wasn’t another kid
in school who knew this route like I did. Edge Lane Station, where a government
minister named William Huskisson, the first victim of a rail accident, had died
was where we came out into the daylight. Next we rushed up on to an embankment from
which we could see below us the terraced streets of South Liverpool, slate
roofs and red brick. These quickly gave way to suburban homes, semis with
curved metal windows and big back gardens. Soon after we would be thundering
over Runcorn bridge that spanned the Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal.
    If the
crew on the train was a Liverpool one then we probably knew the dining car
staff, and if it was lunchtime, once we had left Runcorn behind we would rise
from our seats to go and get a free meal in the restaurant car. By this time
the three of us would be extremely hungry as we had been awake since 4.30 a.m.
and had only eaten a bit of a boiled egg. I learned to measure out the journey
by that meal. After Crewe there were lush green fields and soup. Roast beef,
peas and gravy were served at the same time as the Universal Grinding Wheel
Company at Stafford went by And you could eat a whole sherry trifle and still
be passing the sprawling GEC factory outside Rugby.
    After
lunch we would return to the compartment while the south Midlands reeled past.
When the Arts and Crafts hen sheds of the Ovaltine Farm came into view you knew
it was time to start getting your stuff together because London was only half
an hour away These hen sheds, with their giant painted tableaux of rosy-cheeked
maidens clutching bundles of malt, had been constructed in fields outside Abbot’s
Langley in the 1930s. I always tried to see if there were any buxom maids
emerging with baskets of eggs, or indeed any sign of hen occupation in the
sheds, but eventually came to the conclusion that they were empty and had been
built there just to give Ovaltine the impression of rustic healthiness to
passing railway passengers. I decided the drink was probably manufactured in
some giant sprawling factory on a shabby industrial estate next to a disused
canal.
    At
Euston Station we would say goodbye to the guard, the driver, the fireman and
the dining car crew, the last people who knew who we were. Then, passing
through the stone arch, we were alone in London. A red-haired woman, a smiling
man and a little olive-skinned boy.
     
    From time to time,
depending on the connections we needed to make with ferries or trains, we might
spend the night in London, staying in a small hotel in Pimlico that sometimes
advertised in the Daily Worker. But this time we were trying to get to
Paris by nightfall as we had to catch a train early the next morning.
Consequently we took another taxi from Euston, racing across London to Victoria
Station. Molly had no sense of direction but that never stopped her from having
vehement opinions on what route a cab should take, so our cross-town journeys
could often be made more fraught by my mother having a violent row with the
driver. On this occasion we didn’t have much time to make the boat train to Dover
so she kept uncharacteristically quiet.
    The
taxi took us down a long tree-lined avenue of deep red tarmac at the end of
which there was a huge, squat, stone-faced building, hiding its ugliness behind
gilded railings. ‘That’s Buckingham Palace, that is!’ the driver said with
pride in his