The Book

Years ago i decided i would write a book. For some reason i decided that i'd only start the book after my Dad died. He does feature a lot in it, and it's sort of centred around him, but i don't think he would have disapproved. Anyway, that was my marker and recently he passed away and as i'd made this personal promise to myself i duly set about writing it.

Chapter One starts something like this...

When I grow up I want to be a Trotskyist. Said no kid ever.

By the age of 13, in 1979, I had become quite aware that dad was a bit different. Yes, there was the music, guitars all over the house, impromptu parties with banjos (once with Ricky Tomlinson!) and singing. Of course, there was the constant unemployment, or sudden working away in Germany when the work came. And there was the constant change that could turn the back garden from playground to mass market self-sufficient vegetable patch or a building site front room where window frames had to be built from scratch and plastic sheeting acted as windows for a whole summer.

But it was the Revolutionary Communism which set our family firmly outside the generally accepted norm for a working-class family in the North West of England. Even in Liverpool, traditionally recognized as a left-wing City, we would come to be considered far left of even lunatics like Militant or the Socialist Workers Party (the splitters!).

I don't remember if it was my brother walking to London, a meeting in the back room chaired by an enigmatic Sri Lankan refugee (as it turned out from his father’s large farmland) or a Free Mandela rally we had been taken to, but all life that a normal kid should know changed for me, and pretty much set me on a course outside normal politics that has endured for all my life.

One of my earliest memories of political awakening came in May that year. And as if the above was not enough of a memory, that sort of crept up nonchalantly, it was a certain woman becoming Prime Minister that I remember most. Life had seemed quite fun till then, with power cuts and three day weeks and fiddling the 'lecky which it seemed everyone did, as well as making sure nobody saw dad going to work because for some reason the work he had was different to others in that 'snoops' and 'snitches' might catch him and send him to prison or something just for wanting to save money to get us Christmas presents.

Later that year I was up later than my parents on Christmas Eve watching tv and a news flash came in, it may have just been 'the news at ten' or something. The USSR were invading a country called Afghanistan. I had never even heard of Afghanistan! I remember wondering about how much I didn't know about the world, and whilst I didn't really understand the USSR either, I already had a healthy scepticism of the British and US governments. Indeed, as history has shown the lead up to that war, and of the Middle East in general, had grubby hands from all sides all over it and has since had long reaching consequences all the way to today.